Lee Mandelo

Lee Mandelo (he/they) is a writer, critic, and occasional editor whose fields of interest include speculative and queer fiction, especially when the two coincide. His debut novel Summer Sons, which has been featured in publications ranging from NPR to the Chicago Review of Books, is a contemporary southern gothic dealing with queer masculinity, fast cars, and ugly inheritances. Mandelo has been a nominee for awards including the Nebula, Lambda, and Hugo. Aside from a stint overseas learning to speak Scouse, he has spent his life ranging across Kentucky, currently living in Louisville and pursuing a PhD at the University of Kentucky.

Mandelo's new novella is Feed Them Silence.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

As a title, Feed Them Silence serves to set the story's tone first and foremost. There's an unsettling effect, a bleakness, created by juxtaposing "feed"—with its implications of nourishment, consumption, and hunger—with "silence," a word at the least partly associated with death, isolation, and absence. Plus, silence is an inedible thing! Then, lastly, "them" calls to the readers' mind an outsider: someone whose needs for survival, perhaps, are being left unsatisfied.

Between the title and the cover design, my goal is for the overall discomfiting vibe of the novella to come across.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novella?

Honestly, probably no real surprise for my teenage self.

Feed Them Silence wrangles together several themes, or concepts, that have always been compelling for me. Humans projecting their feelings onto animals; queer relationships with a realistic amount of grown adult mess; speculation on cognition and technological interventions; and the general experience of being upset by art sometimes—all the prickly stuff I'd have appreciated gnawing on, even back then.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Can I thread the needle here, and say middles?

Between those two, though, I'd choose beginnings. Not because getting started is necessarily the hardest for me, but because once a draft is finished… it's almost always necessary to revise the beginning sections to better match the rest of the book. The endings themselves tend to turn out (at least roughly!) the same as I'd intended when I started dratfing, so it's definitely the beginnings that change the most during those revisions.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Depending on the angle of approach, there's a couple of answers I could give, really! On the one hand, art always arises from the perspectives, experiences, and life-worlds of its creator; no matter how separate, or disconnected, a character might be… the disconnection itself still has a deep relationship to "me," as the person who's doing the creating.

On the other hand, as compared to, say, my last book Summer Sons—which drew deeply in some places from "real life"—Feed Them Silence's characters are further away from me. Our protagonist Sean is honestly pretty troubling, especially in the ethics of her relationships to others. So, her relationship to me derives more from the thematic and social critiques it's possible, and interesting, for me to make through her and the story overall.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

While I'm a huge fan of the visual arts, and also film and television media, for this particular project the biggest inspiration was the academic research that led me to write it! Closer to the release of the novella, Tor.com will have an essay from me exploring that research in depth, but to summarize… Feed Them Silence was drafted during the early pandemic lockdown, when I was in a doctoral seminar co-taught by a multidisciplinary faculty team on "animals." In the process, I read a lot of what anthropologists call multispecies ethnography, combined with the theoretical works of Donna J. Haraway, Christine Marran, and other philosophers of science/culture.

We were wrestling with questions about ethical research practices, and also what it means to say we're "in kinship" with nonhuman animals. Like, are we, really? What does consent look like, and what does power look like, in our relationships with other creatures… and with one another? So, the novella grew from that soil.

Visit Lee Mandelo's website.

The Page 69 Test: Summer Sons.

--Marshal Zeringue