Photo credit: Ainslie Coghill

Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning author and critic: her short fiction has won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards, while her poetry has won the Rhysling award three times. She is the author of THE HONEY MONTH, a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey, and writes the OTHERWORLDLY column for the New York Times Book Review. She’s the co-author, with Max Gladstone, of THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR, an epistolary time-travelling spy vs spy novella. Find her online at amalelmohtar.com, or on Twitter @tithenai.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Thank you so much for doing this interview with the Hive Amal!

To start, can you say a little bit more about the story, especially the main characters of your new book?

Yeah of course! So, the story is a retelling of a 17th century-ish ballad type, that gets called “The Cruel Sister,” but you hear a lot of different names of it, it’s like “The Bonny Swans” as Loreena McKennitt did it, “Two Sisters” and so on. The general gist is that there are two sisters in the ballad, who are being courted by the same man who is never the villain of the song, mysteriously, but he prefers the younger sister, this older sister gets jealous, kills the younger sister, and then in being murdered the younger sister goes through this series of transformations, that usually ends up in her being an instrument at the end that sings the song of her murder.

I love ballads, I love this particular ballad, I have for a long time, but it’s always sort of itched at me as an elder sister, as the eldest of four, to be like, “But what if sisters loved each other the way my sister and I love each other?” and “What if the villainy was located in the correct person in this scenario?” So, the story in question is about two sisters who love each other very much, and whose sort of job is to sing to these willows that stand at the borders of faerie land and their mundane English village. And […] one of them, the older sister Esther, is being courted by two people. One of them is a dreadful man from the town who wants to join their lands together, the other suitor is an Arcadian from basically faerie land. And Esther prefers that person, but complications ensue, so Esther and Ysabel, her younger sister, get drawn into some these tensions between Arcadia and Thistleford, the town that they live near.

I noticed throughout the book you put in these little nods to ballads of saying things like, “If this were a ballad,” and the ballad of “Tam Lin” is referenced a couple times, so was that kind of fun to incorporate?

Oh absolutely, I mean, like I say live and breathe this, I have loved ballads and folklore and fairy tales and stuff for my whole life. And there’s so much sort of like autobio stuff just in the sense that my sister and I sing together a lot, we both play instruments, we both play music, we’ve done this together for basically our whole lives. I definitely have been, I think more into folklore than she has, but she is also the person who is actually a classically trained musician, she is by far the better musician, I am just a dilettante where music is concerned. So putting ballads in is just sort of like breathing, essentially. Even in something like, you know, This Is How You Lose the Time War that I wrote with Max Gladstone, music is sort of a part of that as well, whenever Red or Blue in that book says, “As the prophets say,” it’s always referencing a line of music, a sort of nod to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure as well. But just including little references to music as something that is sort of a backbone of world-building, is something that feels very natural to me.

Something I was going to ask later but I should bring up now is — I always think that writing lyrics to songs in books must be kind of complicated — did you research certain songs for the basis of the ballads that they’re actually singing in the book?

I did actually yeah! So, research is interesting here because what I found myself, […] I have a lot of books of British ballad geography if that makes sense, like which songs were seen to originate in what places. There are so many, especially in a British tradition, breaking down into English or Scottish or Welsh, that there can be such hyper locality to some ballads that I wanted to make sure if that was the case in some of the songs, that I had a rationale for it in my head. One song that comes up is “The Light Dragoon,” which I first heard, and I think really the only version I really know well is by a Scottish band called Malinky. And so, I wanted to think to myself, “Like alright, well it’s a Scottish song, I know it literally being sung in a Scottish accent, is that something that I can imagine in this village of beings?” and I could. There are things where I was like, “This is something that I feel I want to draw in there, I want to draw my connection to that into here.” “Tam Lin” also is a Scottish one, but it’s got such wide cultural permeation. And also I’m married to a Scottish man, there’s definitely a lot of Scottishness that just kind of creeps into stuff when I’m trying to write about England as well.

One thing that I really liked about the sisters’ relationship was that the text very explicitly highlights their differences and them being opposites in some ways, and I loved that the story shows them preserving their bond while going after the different things that they want. So was that something that was very natural for you to write too?

Yeah, there’s a thing that I’ve often sort of observed that happens when you have siblings in general; so I’m the eldest of four, it’s me, my sister is two years younger, then there’s four years between my sister and my middle brother and then just about two years between him and my youngest brother. So we’re sort of like pairs in that sense, and there is something that happens in both cases […] where you kind of define yourselves against each other. I remember when I was a kid there were things that I thought, “Okay, this is my sister’s thing,” and I don’t need to be interested in doing the same thing cause it’s her thing, she was always like drawing and artistic and stuff and I was like, “I am a writer, I am doing the writing thing,” you know. I could watch it happening and remember that feeling with my sister of just sort of bifurcating along certain things that seem totally silly in the moment but just kind of become pillars of your identity. One of those things, my favourite colour is blue and hers is green and so our whole lives we’ve just sort of like — I think I have not worn green because I think of it as her colour and, it’s literally only in the last — I want to say like five to eight years that we’ve kind of both observed this […]. But when some of those things just set in early and they’re not, crucially to me they’re not antagonistic things. They’re just like understanding that here is a really close person in your life who does a thing this way and that it’s almost an opportunity for you to explore something in a different way.

Pivoting to some of the supporting characters, there is a lot of modern fiction with faeries in it, but did you want to write Rin a little bit differently?

So, sort of yes and no. I feel like there’s a lot of modern fiction with faeries in it, and the faeries are very different from each other, and there are some things where you can tell that someone is following a tradition of representing faeries in contemporary fantasy, and others who are interested in representing faeries with reference to older materials and stuff like that, that aren’t necessarily part of, a more, I don’t know, contemporary enterprise. […] but I did study faeries in the sense of, I was doing doctoral work on representations of faeries and other supernatural creatures in Romantic era British writing. And so I was really interested literary representations of faeries from basically the late 17th century to the Victorian period, roughly. And I did a lot of reading there and did a lot of sort of interrogating — what I was interested in was where those representations intersected with ideas of nationhood and national identity. And so something that I’ve always been interested in is thinking of faerie land in sort of two modes, both in terms of its relationship to, you know, “our world,” because whenever there’s a border with a place I feel like that invites a certain set of questions and protocols, like if you have a border, what is immigration like? If you have a border, how easy or hard is it to cross it? The very contemporary bureaucracy around borders is something that I feel very deeply and despise, so I’m just always interested in what frictions and tensions can come out of the fact that there is a place with a border that you can’t easily cross, or if you do it changes you, or if you do you could be lost, you know, things like that. 

So, from that I find myself always thinking of faerie lands as places that I want to have geopolitics with, I want there to be a sense of faerie land as affected by our world and having a sort of interrelation between them. And this is something that again, people do in fiction a lot and they do in a lot of different ways. For me in this instance, the core thing that I found curious to think about, and it’s part of the world-building that sort of didn’t make it into this book because this is a small story focused on sisters, but I did so much more world-building than I usually do for witing a story for this. But one of the kind of core questions there that I had was like, “What if we were more dangerous to faeries than they were to us?” basically, and what if we didn’t know that. Like what if there was — so it sort of comes up a little bit in how vulnerable the faeries are here to songs and singing, there’s a lot of folkloric tradition that’s about people being led away into faerie land by the beguiling songs and enchantments of the fae and stuff like that. And I just really liked the idea, that singing is a thing that humans do, that is rooted in our experience of mortality and, it’s just like a strange thing that singing is, singing literally — this a real thing, when we sing, we use a different part of our brain than when we speak. And I’ve always found that really interesting and generative and so I found myself going like, “What if literally faeries cannot sing?” They cannot do that so when they encounter it, it’s the same thing as when we encounter magic, it’s something that is sort of world-breaking, deeply affecting, turns them inside out in a sort of way emotionally. So that kind of has been a kernel for me of interest in how to approach this story, but there’s very little of it, in the story. The kind of geopolitical implications of that sort of thing is something that I would, if I were going to explore, I think would need a novel and stuff to do.

Well maybe you can do that eventually. But there’s one more main [main-supporting] character, and it seems like Agnes Crow is kind of playing out her own story that’s happening tangential to the sisters, so how are the themes of those two stories important to each other?

[…] So Agnes, I love witches so much and I just love that, like to me kind of conceptually, one of the sort of definitive traits of a witch for me, in my own personal cosmology, is someone who is doing her own thing athwart the main narrative. […] She’s doing her own thing, other people’s stories dovetail sometimes with hers, there is path diversion to hers and then away again. I’ve often thought of witches as just occupying a sort of stationary place, being rooted in a place and then people pass by, but it’s a very folkloric impression of them. So I really liked the idea of Agnes being encountered on the move, on her way to go to establish such a place. I also liked the idea that this is not a story — this is a story in which grammar is the word for magic and there are ways of using and manipulating magic that are programmatic, and studied like a science in universities by grammarians and I wanted there to be, for this particular book that is more about ballads and sisters and people who are not in a place of institutional power, to have a different representation of magic. So whenever Agnes is sort of on screen there’s like having a low opinion of grammarians, there’s like magic is a different thing, is something more tapped into, drawn on in ways that are reciprocal, when I think of that I think of like working with the land or something like that, instead of something more extractive, that is more of the province of the universities that are mentioned in the book […]. 

I mean the kind of gist of this book, ultimately, is that grammar can mean a lot of different things, that there are lots of different kinds of grammar. And I am a person who — I have multiple English degrees, have been in universities a long time, and have found in the last several years that I have a kind of personal enmity towards the university as an institution. I think I’ve described it literally in an article as a sort of anglerfish, that just kind of dangles allure of like knowledge and learning and the life of the mind and books and stuff to impressionable young people, who it then devours and exploits and hollows out and steals their youth for its own purposes and stuff like that. I think it’s very sinister institution in a lot of ways that has been abusing its power and been abusing its students as has been, you know, extremely demonstrated over the course of the last year with student protests on campuses and various places. So all this to say for this book, it’s not dark academia, it’s not set in universities, they exist and they’re elsewhere and they’re full of crappy people, so that is broadly what I was doing here with it. So I love having Agnes Crowe as just someone who is wandering away from there, and when I say I was in university, I mean I was also teaching and I have quite decisively turned away from teaching in universities for — I think I quit in 2022 after having taught for many years and having taught creative writing specifically, and I had to quit because I love teaching. So it’s like loving teaching and working in a university that you know values administration and the kind of governance of knowledge in a really transactional, commercial way to the detriment of the students it’s supposed to be teaching and the staff who are doing that teaching is just something I was like, “I am longer interested in this, I will find other ways to teach that are fulfilling and lovely” and don’t involve putting grades on creative work, and being beholden, to…small minded cowards, ultimately. […] in the book, Agnes Crow is a person who’s not beholden to those institutions, her path is wandering into this story and kind of creating a place for transformation to take place, in a way that is ultimately hopefully generative and positive.

Yeah, makes sense. So, this is an entirely different theme in this book: There’s this one phrase, which was the first paragraph of the pre-release excerpt, which compares the sisters’ family’s relationship to the willow trees to beekeeping, which instantly made me start to draw comparisons between this book and your older anthology The Honey Month because I read that relatively recently —

Oh gosh, thank you!

Yeah I really liked it, it was amazing — between writing that book and this one, do you feel like you’ve come to something new to say about the importance of this harmonious relationship between humans and the world around them?

You know in some ways it’s not a new thing, it’s a very old thing. So I’m from Canada and there’s so much that it has taken settlers in Canada hundreds of years to arrive at the same conclusions about land use that Indigenous people have been engaged in for like millennia. And I think that the idea of having relationships with the land and with flora and fauna that are reciprocal and nourishing as opposed to transactional and extractive are, these are really old ideas, ultimately. […] I think that there is a lot that, regardless of like the ethos that you that you bring to it or like the philosophy that results in it, I think that an understanding that people are affected by the land and the land are affected by the people on it, is something very very old and very very obvious that kind of gets obfuscated the more distance that we find ways to place between us and those experiences […].

What I find, in terms of bees, in terms of honey, part of what was constantly running through The Honey Month is that what bees do is very similar to what writers do in the — you know they go, they forage, they touch all of these different flowers they take some things, they take pollen from one flower and it mixes with the pollen of another flower and then all of this mixing and gathering is happening and then they bring all of this nectar back to the hive where then the cure and concentrate it […]. But that’s what writing is you know, like what is writing if not going out into the world, gaining perspectives and experience and contact and stuff and bringing it back to a kind of home where you digest and like cure the experience into something that you then offer up to others too share and potentially take nourishment from. So to me, if anything, what has deepened and changed with time is my kind of understanding that that’s what writing is […] I got really into foraging during the pandemic and stuff like that, becoming more and more aware of your environment and drawing on it, and what flowers grow in what season, that you can eat or turn into syrup and stuff like that feels like participating in a similar process of translating — this brings it back to The River Has Roots, this idea of translation and conjugation as being what magic is, the shifting of one thing into another thing that somehow expresses properties that that thing has that might not have been apparent at the outset, also feels very much like what writing is. 

So in the case of the bees comparison with the willows, like what the willows do in the book is they filter raw magic coming from Arcadia into something that can be used by humans, into something that won’t like damage and break them against their will, but that offers them medium of transformation that is more settled and more, I say in the book, tame. And this too, to me is kind of our relationship with reading. Like when you read something, you have this hallucinatory experience right? You are suddenly dwelling with characters in a place that didn’t exist before you opened the book and they will linger with you afterwards hopefully, perhaps, depending on how well the author did their job, you know, leaving impressions and changing you in some way, but changing you in a way that you have opted into, that you have allowed and that isn’t hopefully — it certainly is not the same thing as if those things in the book had actually happened to you, right? So the idea that when you read something you have a magical experience that isn’t damaging, is sort of what is happening with the magic that the willows filter. You can have, you can use this magic in ways that will not turn you into, you know a rabbit with human eyes, it won’t turn you into a clump of nettles, but it will allow you to make, it will allow change, to enter your life through certain channels that you consent to.

[…] I’m always thinking about reading and writing and what those things actually are and mean in our like bodies and lives in our experience. It’s something that is so definitional of my life and I just can’t take for granted any more than I can take singing for granted. This is extraordinary to me when I think about what a book is and what it does when it goes out into the world. Like Coleridge had this this line that he wrote in his diaries at one point, where he said, “Why write a book? Because my arms only extend this far from my body,” basically, but a book is something that can reach so many more people […].

On a different note, you’ve talked before about following a kind of Tolkienian path with your career of doing poems and then short stories and then books, in your case co-writing a book before doing your solo debut. Did that help you once you’d gotten to this point with writing this novella, and I think working on some other books, that it’s come more naturally to you and then an easier task?

Um, no. The thing that I always think of is, everything that I have written lately is slightly longer than the thing before. This Is How You Lose the Time War is about 36,000 words, and I wrote about half of those, maybe even slightly less than half of it because there is a part of the book where the character that I’m writing, Blue is kind of absent from the text and Red’s perspective takes over a little bit. This book, The River Has Roots is almost exactly 20,000 words, so it’s like a little longer, and the physical book also includes a short story from my upcoming short story collection. So, you know I still haven’t by word count cracked the ceiling of what I think of as a novel, to me a novel has got to be over 40,000 words and I just have not done that yet, and I have to cause I am under contract for two novels with Tor. And I’m gonna, but it doesn’t feel easier. If anything actually this book, which began life as a much shorter story, it was initially commissioned to be an audio original and they wanted a story that was going to be like 13, 14 thousand words. And I did that, and then that project basically fell through, and so when I showed it to my editor at Tor, she was like, “Would you consider making this longer?” And I had been like independently, as I was writing it going, “This could probably be longer,” like I’m doing so much world building for it, I could probably write something longer than this, […] and it was hands down the hardest revision I’ve ever had to do because it’s not just a matter of making it longer. For it to be a longer work it needs to have more depth and stuff. 

So I really liked the short story that I had written and the task of trying to preserve what I liked about the short story while also trying to fundamentally transform it into a different length of things is like — this is thematically appropriate considering all the transformations that happen inside the book, but I — one way that I’ve described it to my editor, was to say that I feel like I’ve made a scarf and I need to turn it into a sweater but all I know how to do is knit more scarf. It’s just so trying to figure out how to not just make it longer but make it deeper and have dimension and have a sort of richer pallet, if that makes sense. It was really hard to keep the tone consistent, it was really hard to not just feel like I was making a mess of a thing that was good and not making it into a better version of something else. But the thing that finally got me there was actually my husband saying, “Why don’t you just do the thing that you always tell your students to do? […] You always tell them to read things out loud.” And I was like, I’m not gonna read this whole thing out loud, and then I did and then it fixed it. Because I give actually really good advice to my students and it’s just really hard to take. But it really helped me understand what needed to change and what needed to grow and that ultimately like cracked it, but it was so hard, like it was emotionally really hard. 

It was also emotionally really hard because I was trying to revise this, during an Israeli genocide of Palestine, that my family is very very close to, and just like literally every day seeing in the news that people who look and sound like my family are being massacred and starved and trying to stay focused on this book that is, you know, set in a little English village and full of fairies and stuff while these truly horrific things were happening. It was very difficult and ultimately those things seeped in. The fact that the song that the sisters sing to the willow trees is a song that sounds like Arabic but isn’t quite is a reference to a Palestinian song called “The Lovers Hymn” that uses a technique called lmlolaah, where you basically introduce a lot of L sounds into words to kind of break them up and make them difficult for a non-native speaker to understand, and they would do this to encode messages into songs, to tell imprisoned family members that they were coming, they were coming to save them and stuff like that, in ways that couldn’t be understood by the people around. I believe this is like the general record of this, I don’t know the extent to which this is historically true, some people will put this happening during the Ottoman Empire, others will say it’s like during the British mandate or various things, but these songs exist, and so I wanted to reference that in the text. 

And then I feel really really grateful for the fact that the audio folks at Macmillan were very keen to let my sister and me actually sing those songs, and so they are on the audio book as well. There is a record of us singing this song from a Palestinian tradition in the book that is there, and it felt like you know the very least I could do to have some thread of that experience woven into even a story that seems like it should have nothing to do with that, it’s set in England in the 18th century-ish, it’s got magic in it. But the way that people talk about the Middle East, the way that they talk about Lebanon in particular, which also, while I was in a later stage of revising this book […] Israel invaded Lebanon and was bombarding it, and there’s such an autobiographical core to this book that is about my sister and me being little kids in Lebanon that I couldn’t get away from the fact that little girls, the age that we were are being driven from their homes, are being bombed are being, you know, living through horrors. And at the same time that that’s happening there are people in the news who are like, “Lebanon’s not a real country. Lebanon doesn’t have sovereignty. Lebanon is just a staging ground for militants” or whatever, and that refusal to see a place of people who live and are human as real also feels like sort of imposing a kind of faerie land on them and so I couldn’t not have that be a thing. It’s like well, if you’re going to talk about real places as if they are ephemeral and unreal then every faerie land in my books is just going to have the Middle East in it, it’s just going to be there.

That’s really incredible how that’s all kind of baked into this story that’s at least on the surface about something different. My last question was, which you kind of intermittently touched upon, just what can you say about what you are working on now, and you have the short story collection, and a couple novels coming up with Tor I think?

Yes, yes, so the next year, I’ll have a short story coming out that is — I’m trying to remember, is the working title just Seasons? I think it might just be Seasons of, its, you know, “Seasons of Glass and Iron” will be in there. It’s going to be like a collection, I’m thinking of it as a kind of best of myself, I’ve been writing short fiction for the last 15 years and stuff, so having that just kind of collected together is something I’m really looking forward to. In this moment I’ve been engaged in like sequencing the stories, in a way that is one of my favourite things to do. I used to edit a poetry journal with my friend Jessica Wick and later on with my friend Caitlyn Paxson, and my favourite thing was always, after we’d gotten all of these poems to create an order for them that feels like it is making the collection more than the sum of its parts, because there is —  it’s like sequencing tumblers in a lock, you know — something is going to break open from it. So that’s the place that we’re at right now in terms of organising these stories together. So I’m really excited about that coming out to the world; I think that the same people are going to be involved who made The River Has Roots’ cover be so stunning and stuff, so I’m excited about that. 

In terms of other projects and stuff, one of the things that I’m most excited about this coming out in March that isn’t this is book is that I contributed a poem to this band clipping. They’re Johnathan Snipes, William Houston and Daveed Digs, it’s like an experimental hip hop trio situation, and they asked me to write them a poem for a specific thing, and they wanted to do all sorts of weird stuff to it, like encode it in the audio in ways that you could maybe only find if you were a real audio nerd. And it all sounded delightful to me, so I wrote them a poem which is super weird, it’s like a very weird sestina basically that — it’s got the Fibonacci sequence in it — it’s like, there are a bunch of weird things that I’m going to have a hard time describing, but it is part of the album artwork and it is like a little bit quoted in some of the like three songs on the album, and that album comes out March 14th, so I’m really really excited about that it was such a delight to get to work with them and such an honour to be asked and invited to do so. So that’s going to be a thing that’s out in the world. Beyond that I’m working on a few other short stories that I expect to know more about — they’re still kind of just in the conceptual phase concurrently — and then yeah the novels, they’re still like a ways out, and so there isn’t really enough there to really talk about yet. I think it’s more like a watch this space thing, but yeah that’s mostly the thing, there’s so much travel this year for the tour for The River Has Roots as well […]

Congrats on all of that, sounds amazing!

The River Has Roots is available now – you can order your copy HERE