Su Chang

Su Chang is a Chinese-Canadian writer. Born and raised in Shanghai, she is the daughter of a former (reluctant) Red Guard leader. Her fiction has been recognized in Prairie Fire’s Short Fiction Contest, the Canadian Authors’ Association (Toronto) National Writing Contest, the ILS/Fence Fiction Contest, the Masters Review’s Novel Excerpt Contest, the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival Fiction Contest, among others.

The Immortal Woman is Chang's debut novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Ah, titles! It’s the bane of my existence as a writer. My book title was the last thing I decided on, long after the book was written and self-edited multiple rounds. I had quite a few contenders. At one point, it was called “Erasure”. Later, it became “The Trouble with Leaving.” I was very serious about the latter title, and it almost made it to the end, if my editor hadn’t put a stop to it. I still think it was a decent one as it illuminated the main theme of the book, but I can also see some issues with it, the most important one being that it suggests the book is all about the daughter character, while in reality the mother character is equally important (with large sections of the book devoted to her). Another issue may be that the old title doesn’t have any “cultural marker.” A reader wouldn’t know from the title that half of the book is set in China and it’s a book about Chinese modern history and Chinese immigrants.

The current title, The Immortal Woman, is a good one and certainly solves the cultural marker problem. At the most literal level, the Immortal Woman is the patron saint of the mother and daughter’s ancestral village. She embodies tradition and hence a threat the Maoist China desperately sought to eradicate, as well as something the heartbroken Lemei, during her early motherhood, resolved to expunge from her daughter’s life. At the same time, the Immortal Woman also serves as a symbolic stand-in for both mother and daughter, who, despite decades of trauma, ultimately re-emerge into the light, resilient and enduring.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

My teenage self would be surprised. She was a sheltered girl, living in a cocoon of her own culture and having no idea that she’d end up living in the West and learning all sorts of tabooed facts about her birth country and its history. She’d never have expected the kind of bone-chilling isolation and loneliness she’d one day experience as an adult immigrant - so much so that she had to channel her pain into artistic expression.

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

I love writing beginnings, and I loathe writing endings. That’s not to say beginnings are easy – they are not. Whether I can hook readers in those early pages has an outsized impact on the book’s fate, and I indeed find that kind of pressure very unsettling. Having said that, I am an ideas person and starting a book to explore my new ideas is always exciting. I do typically know where the story will end up when I start the book, but after traversing through the long middle of the book, my preconceived endings almost always come up short. For The Immortal Woman, I had a completely different, almost opposite, ending in my first 10 drafts. I’ve probably written 20 to 30 drafts of this book over the years. At about halfway, I changed the ending entirely. The original ending was sadder - the daughter character remained in North America, with more self-awareness and understanding of her history, but still without a clear path forward. That was a more realist take on the story. But I thought, I’ve already put those characters through the wringer, let’s end it on a note of hope. The current ending borders on a kind of fairytale in my mind. The daughter, having lived as an immigrant, an “alien,” on a continent that doesn’t necessarily welcome her, to then be able to find a sense of comfort and security in her own skin, and to be surrounded by a community again, is very much akin to a fairytale. But I have to point out the sinister note lurking in the last few paragraphs of the novel, where the daughter is aware that she’s living in an imagined bubble that can burst anytime; yet she just needs to hold onto that sense of belonging for a precious moment. I hope that sense of danger and brittleness is clear, because ultimately, I’m not writing a fairytale. Let’s not be naïve here.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Video footage and documentaries on modern Chinese history that I only had access to after I emigrated from China were crucial during my research for this novel. I am a piano player and music fan, so I often turn to music (e.g. songs from my Shanghai childhood, Astor Piazzolla, Rachmaninoff, Mandopop, etc.) to center myself or access a particular mood conducive to writing. I am also a politics junkie, reading news and commentaries daily and political theories often. Last but not least, my father’s unfulfilled, lifelong writerly dream provides fuel whenever I’m at my writing desk.

Visit Su Chang's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Immortal Woman.

The Page 69 Test: The Immortal Woman.

--Marshal Zeringue

KC Jones

KC Jones is a screenwriter-turned-novelist currently living in western Washington. When not writing, he can be found watching movies, playing video and board games, or enjoying nature—whenever it isn’t raining.

He graduated from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas with a degree in film production. His first published novel, Black Tide, was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a first novel.

Jones's new novel is White Line Fever.

My Q&A with the author:

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

White line fever is a colloquialism for highway hypnosis, which is the primary tool with which this malevolent stretch of road confuses, frightens, and ultimately kills people who drive it. The main character, Livia, has also been going through adulthood in her own form of highway hypnosis—until an unexpected turn shocks her out of it, and she suddenly realizes she doesn't recognize her life. Not her husband, her house, even herself. Her journey is not just surviving a trip down a hellish highway, it's reclaiming control instead of just going where the road takes her. To me, though, "highway hypnosis" just didn't quite ring as a title, whereas "white line fever" has a nice punchy cadence, like broken road stripes flashing past, and it's a bit strange, a bit unsettling. I came across the term while researching the psychology behind highway hypnosis, and knew immediately that it had to be the title.

What's in a name?

There's no deep meaning behind any of the character names, besides Livia most often going by the shortened "Liv," which is the thing she's not been doing for as long as she can remember, and will hopefully start doing again by the end. I had a bit more fun with her family name of Rhodes, particularly her father's Rhodes' End junkyard, which comes into play as both a name and place. The "Silver Bullet" campervan is another fictional name that I used pretty intentionally in a wink-wink, nudge-nudge sort of way. The road itself is nicknamed "The Devil's Driveway" for how dangerous it is, but its real name, County Road 951, takes inspiration from a couple of things. One is Road 5 NW, aka White Trail Road, a rural bypass in central Washington that I've driven more times than I could count. 951 comes from the address of a haunted house a childhood friend lived in. They never claimed there were ghosts in 951 (and only ever referred to the house by its street number), just a nebulous "bad magic," which I found far creepier, and thus the combination of numbers has always felt a bit sinister to me.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

Not in the slightest. Scary stories have been my thing since Goosebumps, and many of my formative experiences involved vehicles and creepy roads. I wrote screenplays prior to novels, and even with books I'm just writing the movie I see in my head. My teenage self would look at this and likely say "that tracks."

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

I don't like to start writing a story until I know how it ends. Endings are my lodestar, they help guide everything that comes before. I rewrote this story several times, from screenplay to exploratory novel to first draft to a complete page-one rewrite that more closely resembled the final product. But despite how completely different all of these versions were, the ending was always the same. How do you defeat a road? I knew from the outset, but getting the characters and story to the point where it's even a possibility was a journey of many beginnings.

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

Bits and pieces. Livia's tendency to avoid conflict, of trying to keep everybody together and happy, is definitely me, and shades of Becka's upbringing, and eventual turning away from it, are reflective of my own experience. Morgan and Ash's witnessing a family member slowly succumb to a terrible illness, and the ways that experience informs a lot of their behavior, is probably the most personal connection to myself in this. Personality-wise I'm way more Morgan than Ash (although I do like the "noise" of the kitchen when I need to shut everything else out.)

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

This is a hard one to distill down, because for me it's just living life. Watching, listening, experiencing. In terms of what paved the way for White Line Fever, my numerous trips down very long, very empty roads, an oddball group of childhood friends, and space. Yeah, the cosmos. I think about it a lot when playing with the more magic elements of stories. Its ability to be both beautiful and terrifying, essential to our existence and utterly hostile, vast beyond imagining and yet always right there, if we only go outside after dark and look up.

Visit KC Jones's website.

The Page 69 Test: White Line Fever.

--Marshal Zeringue