Chana Porter is a playwright, teacher, MacDowell Colony fellow, and co-founder of The Octavia Project, a STEM and fiction-writing program for girls and gender non-conforming youth from underserved communities. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.The Seep is Porter's debut novel.
From her interview with Amy Brady at the Chicago Review of Books:
Amy Brady: Let’s start at the beginning. Where did the idea of an alien race called the Seep—and its radical effects on humanity—come from?Visit Chana Porter's website.
Chana Porter: I was excited by the idea of encountering a race that is incredibly alien to the way we think of personhood—no mouths to speak to us, no separate bodies to name and develop a distinct relationship with. The Seep does not experience emotions like we do, and likewise, doesn’t experience time linearly. I wanted to conceive an invasion story that doesn’t include our limited ideas about forced labor, breeding, war — all of those well-tread tropes. What if they wanted something very different?
Right now I’m feeling mired in the muck of our problems, as I’m sure you do too. The Seep is a thought experiment—what if everyone on the planet woke up to recognize the insanity we’ve wrought on each other, on our beautiful planet? In that way, The Seep is a metaphor for consciousness. I do believe we are interconnected, poetically and literally. I believe if we drop bombs on Iran, we will blow up our own foot, sooner or later. The violence we inflict on other people (even in a misplaced attempt for peace) finds its way back to us. There are no truly compartmentalized actions. You cannot be a good parent and sign an order to keep another person’s child in a cage. It is impossible. The Seep is in part...[read on]
My Book, The Movie: The Seep.
--Marshal Zeringue