Fantastic fiction writer Kij Johnson can go home again

LAWRENCE — After decades of acclaimed writing about exotic realms, Kij Johnson returns in her new short story collection to her Iowa childhood — though it ranges over such wild territory as the inner thoughts of a living sphinx, a horde of tiny velociraptors and a giant squirrel phantasm.

“Until the last three or four years, I would have said I don't want to ever write about Iowa because it was boring. And yet here I am starting to write about Iowa. I can't help it,” said the Nebula, Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning author and University of Kansas professor of English, who will be a guest of honor at the World Fantasy Convention Oct. 26-29 in Kansas City, Missouri.

“It was a long process for me,” Johnson said. “I was tending to write stories that are set in places like medieval Japan or Russia or Washington state. Always places that seemed more interesting and glamorous than Iowa.”

Johnson said attentive readers have noticed certain motifs – particularly the use of animal characters — in her speculative fiction that spring from her largely rural upbringing. They continue in her new collection, “The Privilege of The Happy Ending” (Small Beer Press).

“I was so interested in animals, and they seemed more comprehensible to me than people,” Johnson said. “I always felt that if you could just read an animal well enough, you could understand how it was thinking. And that's sort of what I was thinking about people, too: If I could just read people well enough! But people were way harder.

“Then I would pretend to be animals because I didn't like being the kid I was, and it's obviously much cooler to be a horse or a dog. I did a lot of thinking about what it'd be like to be a dog or cat. ... So that's why animals.”

In the titular story, Johnson gives her protagonist, 6-year-old Ada, a telepathic chicken as her companion in a Dark Ages wasteland overrun by flesh-eating creatures.

“It was actually a scary story to write,” Johnson said. “It was a response to the Syrian diaspora across Europe starting in 2016, during which more than 3,000 children went missing ... because their parents got sick or died or were arrested. And some of those children vanished.

“It was so hard to think about these unaccompanied children, without family, and the story came from me thinking about that. I found I couldn't leave her unaccompanied, because a 6-year-old just has no chance. That’s heartbreaking to think about, so I gave her a talking chicken sidekick. But that, in itself, is kind of heartbreaking — that she would have had no chance if I had not made up a talking chicken to help. She's one of the many people in that situation who would have died.”

Johnson said there are parts of herself in young Ada, the mother hen and the narrator of the story whose preoccupation is: "What is going on? What else is happening? What is not described? And so the story ends up being called ‘The Privilege of the Happy Ending’ because while I was writing it, I realized that most of the time writers treat our characters very badly. We talk about ‘murder your darlings,’ and we joke about how that means our protagonist boyfriend has to die and things like that.

“The narrator explicitly states at one point that we kill to make a point and we move on. We injure people as though they are not real, because of course they're not. But you, the reader, don't know that for sure; reading a story is the same action as reading a news item. When we perpetrate these acts of violence in our stories, you are taking it on faith that we are not describing real suffering. And after all, it's talking chickens. Chances are excellent that there is not actually a 6-year-old girl named Ada threatened by velociraptors in the 13th century. But it does make you say, ‘What about all the other scared little girls? What about all the refugee children? What about the children who were exposed on hillsides, the children who were abandoned like Hansel and Gretel?’”

Meditations on history and myth – and the murky difference between them – also feature in Johnson’s writing and recur in the “Happy Ending” collection. In “Ratatoskr,” for instance, the titular squirrel of Norse legend comes to Iowa. Johnson said that story sprung from thinking about the notion of cultural appropriation and its propriety in fiction.

“What are the parameters?” she said. “What are my new guidelines for how I engage with things that are not my own experience? I started thinking about, ‘What rights do I have to stories? Does it give me the right to tell this story if I'm the only person who will tell this story?’

“And while I was thinking about that, all of a sudden, I started to think about my own experiences. And, say, maybe I do have things that I can say about my own experiences ... about being Norwegian American ... about growing up in Iowa; that I can say about being all the things I was when I was 6 and 8 and 10. I didn't expect that, and I found it really interesting. It got me moving in directions I never would have anticipated.”

Image: Kij Johnson on the KU campus. Credit: Rick Hellman / KU News Service