Marissa Lingen is among the top science fiction and fantasy writers in the world who were named after fruit. She has many opinions on Moomintrolls. She has been known to cross international borders in search of rare tisanes. Her personal relationships with bodies of water are intense though eccentric. She lives atop the oldest bedrock in the US with her family, where she writes, if not daily, frequently. She has appeared numerous times in Uncanny for fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Her latest, “A Piece of the Continent,” is a beautifully crafted road trip story, with two friends who are taking their grandpas’ ashes cross-country to Alaska.

Uncanny Magazine: This is a story of friendship and family, a road trip that hits a definite snag, and magic both protective and vengeful. What was your starting point or inspiration for the story?

Marissa Lingen: On a retreat, a friend suggested that I should write a memoir, and I laughed and said, “I’m a fiction writer, I only want to write memoirs of the things I didn’t do.” And then I went back in the cabin and wrote this story.

My grandpa and I went to forty-nine of the fifty US states together, and Alaska is the only one we didn’t get to. When it was taking us some time to figure out where we wanted to scatter his ashes, I used to joke that I was going to kidnap him and run off to Alaska. So…that’s the story I wrote.

Uncanny Magazine: I love the characters in this story—Lucy and Ollie and their respective grandpas. How do you come up with your characters? Do they ever do anything you don’t expect?

Marissa Lingen: I’m not Lucy, but I’m not not Lucy. The other characters…I have a lot of friends whose families are, in general, less loving than mine is, in general. But families don’t exist in general, they exist in specific, person by person, and I got to thinking about how having someone who loves you well in your life as a kid matters deeply even when other people who are supposed to be raising you are not doing the job they should be doing. I have friends whose parents are absolute horrors, but they had a grandparent, an aunt or uncle, a teacher, a neighbor, and that made all the difference in the world. That person was their heart’s shield. That person was their foundation.

I also thought a lot about Ollie and their mother and how there are other ways to be a horrible parent than to be a transphobe. Don’t get me wrong, transphobia is a horror many people I care about have had to endure in their families. But I felt like trans people can tell that story for themselves, and the story of the harmless-looking parent who says the right words but just won’t stop trying to get at your friend and twist their life into a more acceptable shape…yeah, that one was more mine to tell.

Uncanny Magazine: One focus of “A Piece of the Continent” is the friendship between Lucy and Ollie, which felt like an update on the classic “buddy movie” subgenre. Do you like buddy movies, and if so do you have a favorite?

Marissa Lingen: I do! I think my favorite is Long Kiss Goodnight. That non-traditional buddy pairing delights me, the way its banter plays out and the way they check each other on serious things too.

I think I interact with a lot of movies and TV as “buddy movies/shows” when I am not intended to—that’s my focus even when it’s not the writers’ focus. Veronica Mars is a great example: there’s mystery, there’s love story, but in some pretty fundamental ways I was happiest with VM when it functioned as a buddy story with Wallace, Weevil, or Mac. I’ve gotten disillusioned with cop dramas, but what I miss about them is that they are almost always stories of friendship. More adult stories should be stories of friendship. Friends are the best.

Uncanny Magazine: What’s the longest road trip you’ve ever taken?

Marissa Lingen: That’s actually really hard to answer because my family took driving vacations for my entire childhood. Like many people from the middle of the continent, my grandparents and parents took the opportunity to just load up the car and go. So we went from Minnesota to New Orleans one year or Los Angeles another or Maine the next, just…big loops all over. We read a lot of historical placards. (We have never met a placard we could resist.) As an adult—that is, as one of the people in charge, probably the trip to California and back, with all my worldly goods on my back is the longest.

Since 2020, I’ve been driving by myself to writing retreats, which is a one-day drive and then stop, but it’s really nice to have just the day to myself to drive and sing songs and eat apples in rest stops and think about whatever it is I’m writing.

Uncanny Magazine: Who are some of your literary influences? What is something you’ve read recently and loved?

Marissa Lingen: I read a lot. A lot. Really really a lot, all genres and categories. I started with Astrid Lindgren and Tove Jansson and Selma Lagerlöf and the D’Aulaires and just went from there, all over the map. Recently? I finally got to Emma Goldman’s Living My Life in the last few months—I don’t know why I put that off, I think I had no idea how brisk and exciting it would be. Juhani Karila’s Fishing for the Little Pike is just out in English, and that was a kind of Finnish Weird I really value having translated. Sarah Pinsker’s Lost Places is a really good collection. I reread C.L. Polk’s Kingston trilogy and enjoyed it, if anything, more on the second go. Alice Winn’s In Memoriam made me weep in the best way. I’m pretty excited about my TBR pile too.

Uncanny Magazine: What are you working on next?

Marissa Lingen: Right now I’m writing a disability-focused novella that’s a gender-bent retelling of Richard III set on a generation ship approaching its target planet. I have several other flaming torches in the air, but that’s the one I’m focused on at the moment.

Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!

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