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 is “On the Water Its Crystal Teeth,” a poignant tale of familial relationships, the vast potential of youth, and a boy with a turtle-shell back.
Uncanny Magazine: This is a quiet but powerful story about found family, set in the wilderness after a world-changing crisis has happened. What was the spark or inspiration for the story?
Marissa Lingen: My godkids grew up.
Of course that’s a vastly simplified version of how this kind of story happens. But I was having big feelings about helping them to fly free—they’re seventeen and twenty-two, so I’m going to be having those feelings pretty consistently for the next decade, I expect. They’re exploring the world and their own minds, souls, personalities. They’re supposed to, and they’re wonderful; they’re doing a great job of it. But oh gosh I sometimes miss the specific feel of them in my lap when they were three, four, five, the way they used to look when exploring the world meant tromping off to peer at the lake near my house.
I also thought that of all the fairy tale tropes I’ve seen re-explored, the childless woman who gets a fairy child is one that I haven’t, at least not in a way that resonated with me as someone who didn’t get to have bio-kids. The world keeps spitting out crises, faster than we can process them. But it also gives us opportunities for absolutely beautiful and completely unexpected shapes of love and family, if we keep our hearts open.
Uncanny Magazine: “On the Water Its Crystal Teeth” is infused with elements of the autumn season, including various harvest-time foods. What are some of your favorite fall recipes?
Marissa Lingen: My protagonist is eating like me! I love apples and squash and wild rice. I love them all year round, but in fall particularly. I love to stuff half a roasted squash with wild rice, sage butter, roasted hazelnuts, and dried sour cherries. I love to core an apple and stuff it with whatever dried fruit and nuts seems good to me that day and bake it for thirty–forty minutes in a moderate oven (with a little bit of water or apple juice in the bottom of the dish). I love squash chili or wild rice mushroom chili. Early fall was tomato soup and tomato sauce every week, and epic tomato-based salads. But fall is starting to turn as I write this, so we’re into apple season. Yay.
Uncanny Magazine: What was the easiest part of writing this story? What was the most challenging thing?
Marissa Lingen: The easiest part is the land. You’ve described it in the first question as a wilderness, but it’s my wilderness, my land, it’s what northern Minnesota would be like after these changes, and all the things about the lake and the wildlife and what the seasons do are very natural to me. (Incidentally, this is the second story Uncanny and I have shared with readers in this setting. They’re not directly related in any way, but “The Thing, With Feathers” in Issue 26 shares this setting—sort of. “The Thing, With Feathers” is set on the shores of Lake Superior. This one is very, very inland.)
The hardest part was the middle of the story. Where Micah is gone and she doesn’t know whether he’ll come back. I had given the boy traits of my godson as a toddler, and I ran into a wall of woe that I had to write myself out of.
Uncanny Magazine: If you were caught in the crisis and blended with some type of animal, what animal would you want it to be and why?
Marissa Lingen: Otter for sure. Otters are dexterous, playful, and friendly—unless you put them in a situation where you’re not letting them be friendly, and then watch out.
Uncanny Magazine: In a previous interview, you told us about some of your literary influences…What are some of your influences from other forms of media? What’s something you loved recently?
Marissa Lingen: I’m not a writer who listens to music while writing, but I’m definitely a writer who listens to music while thinking about writing. If I’d heard Antje Duvekot’s new-ish (new to me!) song “Open Waters” from her album New Wild West before I wrote this, it would have been perfect inspiration music—it fits so well. It starts, “Little old soul, keep rockin’ that boat, don’t you listen to a word that they say.” I actually can’t sing it without crying because it reminds me not only of what I want to pass on to my godkids but what I got from my own godmother, Mary Lingen, who is a painter who lives in the north woods (https://marylingen.wordpress.com/). She has definitely been an influence on me, both in the way that her work thinks carefully about nature and in having someone in my own family I can talk to about being a working artist.
Something else new I have loved: the TV show Reservation Dogs. I had one conversation with a writer friend that was literally an hour and a half of us saying things we liked about Res Dogs. It’s funny, it’s heartbreaking, it’s magical, it’s down-to-earth, it’s young, it’s intergenerational. It is so many things, and I love it so.
Uncanny Magazine: What are you working on next?
Marissa Lingen: New short stories always, and the one I’ve just started is too new to talk about. I’ve just finished up a couple of longer-form projects, and I’m in the early stages of a science fiction novel that is also a communities-post-disaster story, although since it’s a novel there’s room for communities-during-disaster stuff in it as well. This book is what happens when someone who watched Star Trek II and III as a young child reads Rebecca Solnit. Oh, there’s another answer for media influences! Honestly it’s kind of a hilarious comparison because it is about as far from Star Trek as genre SF gets. But that’s what we do, right, we put all the pieces in and they ping off each other and go flying in different directions, and we just see what comes out. I’m really enjoying seeing what’s coming out on this one. (Have I also given myself the kind of intense emotional processing task I did for this story, but at novel length: I sure have done that. Welp. But writers have a strange idea of fun sometimes; that can be part of the fun.)
Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!
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