An Interview w/ Maureen McHugh (Author of After the Apocalypse)
You can check out my review of After the Apocalypse here. Now for the interview: First things first: What initially drew you to writing, and why genre fiction in particular? I was drawn to writing because I loved to read, and when I was reading a story I really really loved, I hated for it to end. So to find the stuff I really really loved to read, I started thinking about writing it myself. It turned out that writing didn’t necessarily lead to making the stuff that I loved to read, because my best writing seems to be about the things I am most uncertain about. I write to find out what I think. It turns out that a lot of what I love to read and a lot of what I think about falls best into genre. A question I often ask myself, and others, is what drives people towards post-apocalyptic (or apocalyptic) fiction. Your collection is perhaps on the cusp between “a world crumbling” and “a world crumbled.” What do you think accounts for our fascination with catastrophe in its various forms? What about your fascination? I think there are a lot of reasons to be drawn to the apocalyptic. We are all headed towards a personal apocalypse in that we are all going to die. That’s a terrible thing to truly comprehend, and apocalyptic fiction is a way to rehearse our existential dread, so to speak. There’s the playground fun of destroying everything. There’s also the idea that if all the clutter was swept away us (insert ideology here) could rebuild it right. There is often something Utopian about the catastrophic. For me, there were a couple of stories, particularly “Useless Things” that were ways to explore my own fears. What if the infrastructure is buckling under the pressures of climate change? What if the poor are getting poorer? I have a strong sense that I may not behave well under that kind of stress. I don’t think of myself as very noble. Did you always have a sense that these stories, which were published in multiple magazines between 2007 and 2010, were going to revolve around the same theme, or did each story come into existence out of its own individual context? In other words, were you thinking these stories would deal with a semi-shared world when you wrote them, or was it an accident? No, not at all. I realized at some point that there was this metaphorical connection, and then I wrote a story (the title story, “After the Apocalypse”) to reflect that. But of course, many of the stories are not apocalyptic in the general sense at all. I don’t really believe in the sudden end of things. Not that it couldn’t happen. One big asteroid and there we are. But at an emotional level I am so much more familiar with the decline of things, the gradual slide into some different state. So even though I know that the world could end with a bang, my feeling is that most endings are like old age, the gradual loss of options, abilities, and choices. In an interview/conversation with David Moles at Small Beer Press, you said that “all of my apocalyptic stories are not of the people who become Mad Max, but they’re of the rest of us, you know.” It might be fair to say that the characters found in so much apocalyptic fiction are larger-than-life heroes, villains, or anti-heroes — people who exceed the realities of their situation in ways that almost seem unrealistic or too-perfectly-designed-for-the-screen. But you are, as you say, concerned with “the rest of us.” Who are “the rest of us?” Why write about them and not, say, the other kinds (Mad Max, etc.)? I guess because I have never felt that I was going to be able to hold my own in a battle between heroes. I have always been the person picked second-to-last for the team. I’m near-sighted. I like to read. None of my salient characteristics exactly suggest that I will be great at converting cars into stripped down dune buggies, building stills, lethally defending myself. I am really well adapted to be what I am—a middle class woman who sits at a desk. So what happens to me when the apocalypse comes? There’s a good chance, based on my life experience, that I’ll end up washing the dishes or something. Right before something eats me. Another aspect of that conversation I found illuminating was your acknowledgment of your weakness in the field of plot. Particularly, you mention that many of your stories which have plots are about things getting worse, rather than better. Do you think your admitted faults as a writer influenced how you approached the stories in this collection? Or did it evolve organically as you developed your characters? Most plots involve things getting worse, when you strip them to their barest essence. Each solution to a problem leads to a worse problem. I work best when I have a character and I think of an unstable situation—they react, I have a story. There are writers who are better at situations and the intricate construction of a series of interlocking events that move the characters through ever more complex situations. Me, I have to resist the impulse to have my characters just think about how bad things might get. One of the compelling aspects of your collection is the honest exploration of the indifference human beings sometimes show to one another, or to the situations surrounding them. In the case of After the Apocalypse, each story shows people surviving in a world where civilization has already unraveled, though without the absolute end-of-the-world-ness typified by the genre. An example of this indifference would be the protagonist of “The Naturalist,” who traps his fellow inmates in a kind of makeshift scientific experiment to do with the zombies who inhabit the city-prison. Could you talk about why you decided to approach this theme,