Interview with Katie McIvor
For quite some time, I’ve been a fan of Katie McIvor’s vivid, gripping speculative stories. Her stories can be found in The Dark, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Interzone, among many other venues.
Here’s her bio:
Katie McIvor grew up in the Scottish Borders and studied medieval languages at the University of Cambridge. She writes dark speculative fiction that usually falls somewhere between horror, sci-fi, and literary, and has appeared in over 30 magazines and anthologies.
To learn more about Katie, bogs, old languages, water, death, and so forth, do read on!
You’ve already compiled an impressive body of work that often returns to certain themes and landscapes, which is something I love to see. I get a fuller sense of this world and its stakes every time I enter one of your stories. You’re obsessed with water as a source of mystery and danger and beauty and birth and death, and you often return to the inexplicable horror of the deaths of children. Do you feel like you’re searching for understanding as you explore these subjects, or or are you finding new ways to tell us something you already know?
Wow thank you, it’s very cool to see my stories and themes analysed like this! I think I’m usually trying to understand things rather than explain. I’m definitely fascinated by watery environments, particularly bogs. It’s something to do with the liminality of those places, the way they’re neither one thing nor the other, and the transformative potential that offers in fiction. I’m also Scottish, so I spent a lot of time wandering around bogs as a child. I tend to write mostly about things that scare me, and loss is one of my biggest scaries, so that comes up a lot. I’ve found it really difficult in the past to process grief, particularly when it’s unexpected, and writing about it has helped me. Hopefully reading about it might be helpful to others, although I do sometimes worry that my stories are too depressing!
Can you talk about the landscapes you love most and how they inspire you?
Yay, another opportunity to talk about bogs! They’re a huge inspiration for me, in their vastness and their ecological importance and their vulnerability. The Moine Mhòr in Scotland is a must-see for bog fans. I also fell in love with the peat bog on the top of Musheramore when I lived in County Cork, Ireland – it was the setting for my story ‘The Colour of the Ninth Wave’, recently published in Gamut Magazine. I find it so mind-blowing that a bog can exist at the top of a mountain. I’d also love to see the Flow Country in northern Scotland, which is thought to be the biggest blanket bog in the world and was recently granted Unesco World Heritage status.
You recently had a baby, Marnie! How has this experience affected your writing?
Thank you for asking this! She’s my world! Looking after a baby changes your whole life so drastically, and even causes changes in your brain, and I now have all these recurrent thoughts about death and dying that I can’t switch off ever (fun!). But, weirdly, I don’t feel like it has altered my approach to writing all that much. The main differences are that I can no longer read stories where bad things happen to children (obviously this is very hypocritical of me) and of course I have much less time to write now, which can be frustrating. I’m trying to see the lack of time in a positive way, though, as I think it’s given me more focus. I am a terrible procrastinator normally, and having maybe 15 minutes in a day to actually sit down and get some work done really forces me to prioritize and make the most of those minutes. By the time Marnie starts school, I expect to be so focussed I will be able to churn out a novel per week.
Could you point us to some of your stories online that you especially love?
My Interzone story, ‘O Sole Mio’, was recently reprinted online in SF Caledonia. I wrote that one before becoming a parent so it’s fascinating to look back on it now! Another parenthood-themed story, ‘Jacob’s Mother’ (from the Bram Stoker Award-nominated anthology Mother: Tales of Love and Terror), is available to read on the Weird Little Worlds website. I also still really love ‘Vatican’ in Scrawl Place. It’s a short CNF piece about the time I had an anxiety attack in the Sistine Chapel.
What writers have influenced your writing the most?
This is such a hard question to answer! I feel like a lot of my hugest influences are things that don’t come through in any obvious way in my work, like the Alien series and Torchwood and Eminem and everything by Philip Pullman. Part of the fun of short fiction is that it gives you the space to experiment with different voices and styles, so I’m sort of consciously trying to mess around and not latch on too much to any particular influences at the moment. Having said that, there are of course writers whose work has stuck particularly in my head over the years, like Hilary Mantel, Iain (M.) Banks, travel writer Sara Wheeler, Danish novelist Peter Høeg, and the brilliant Scottish writer Andrew Greig, who are all continuing influences.
Can you tell us a bit about your study of medieval languages and what that’s contributed to your art life?
I studied Old Irish, Medieval Welsh, and Old English at university, back when I used to have a brain. There are so many great stories from that period, and they’re told so vividly. When you read them in the original languages, it really gives you a sense of being part of this human tradition of storytelling that goes back as far as we’ve been capable of writing things down. It’s definitely not as dry as people might imagine. In ‘The Colour of the Ninth Wave’, I was trying to capture the tone of Old Irish prose, which is often very funny and lends itself to black humour. And there’s some pretty filthy stuff as well, like the Old English riddles and the Welsh poem ‘Cywydd Y Gal’ (‘Ode to the Penis’). My Interzone Digital story, ‘Pongo’, was partly inspired by philology’s colonial history within academia and has a bonus Old Irish treasure hunt.
What other questions would you like to be asked?
“What have you read lately that’s made you cry?” I feel like this is often a good metric for quality storytelling (although there’s been a lot going on with my hormones lately and I cry at all sorts of stupid things, like my baby falling asleep on me, or the mere thought of how Benjamin Button dies). Here are a few recent ones: ‘On Planetary Palliative Care’ by Thomas Ha in Interzone Digital, ‘Plague Dream’ by Seán Padraic Birnie in Interzone #295, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, ‘A Dog, a Heart, a Box of Ashes, or Whom Rhodope Shed Tears For’ by Maria Haskins in The Deadlands #24, and ‘Seven Recipes for the Crossing’ by Diana Dima in khōréō Magazine #3.4.
A bonus question from previous interviewee Matthew Stott, who has published some of your stories:
When are you releasing your damp collection,‘Short Stories to Bog-le the Mind’? (Amazing pun, yes, thank you)
I have no idea but I’m stealing this title if it ever happens!
Thanks so much, Katie!