INTERVIEW WITH TARA CAMPBELL

By: Ashley Werner

Café MFA’s associate editor, Ashley Werner, interviewed AU MFA alum, Tara Campbell, about her new book, City of Dancing Gargoyles, her time in the MFA program here at American University, and other things writing. Check out information about City of Dancing Gargoyles at https://www.sfwp.com/books/gargoyles..

Café MFA: You are an AU MFA graduate, what did you work on while here? Did your thesis influence this book or was it something different?

Tara Campbell: When I started the program in 2016, it just so happened that my first book was being released the same fall. Some fellow students asked me why I was in the program when I already had a novel out, but getting published wasn’t my reason for enrolling in an MFA. After cobbling together classes and writing groups on my own, I felt like I’d plateaued, and I wanted to challenge myself. My first book was science fiction, but the project I was working on when I entered the program was historical fiction—a new genre for me—and there’s no better mentor for that than Dolen Perkins Valdez!

Toward the end of the program, Dolen suggested blending genres, meaning characters could have “powers” even within historical fiction. I wound up pivoting back to more explicitly speculative work after the MFA, so even though my subsequent books aren’t directly related to my thesis, I still apply valuable craft lessons of restraint and precision to my work. I love writing at the intersection of speculative and literary worlds—firmly grounding readers while still leaving aspects of a different world to be pieced together as the story progresses.

Café MFA: Your book City of Dancing Gargoyles has such a unique subject, something different than we feel has been seen recently in the sci-fi book world lately. What were some things that inspired it?

Tara Campbell: The tricky thing about working between genres is that you’re often working outside of tropes rather than within them, so you wind up writing something that lives on its own separate shelf. It’s exciting to write, but more difficult to market. Stylistically, I’ve started describing my work as the secret love child of Margaret Atwood and Douglas Adams. It sounds ridiculous, but that’s just who I am. Thank goodness there are publishers like SFWP (Santa Fe Writers Project) that are willing to take a risk and publish work that colors outside genre lines.

This book started as a series of short stories I wrote from a prompt I created for myself during the pandemic. I’d read a novel-writing exercise by fantasy novelist Michael Moorcock focused on imagery and deliberate paradox. I didn’t think I was writing a novel at the time—I was just trying to keep writing anything at a time when concentration was elusive. What captivated me was the example phrase he used: “the City of Screaming Statues.” That one nonsensical phrase created so many questions in my mind, I decided to use the structure “In the city of verbing nouns” to create my own images—and thus my own questions to answer through writing.

I wrote a list of nouns that fascinated me (gargoyles, dragons, ghosts, books, wolves, etc), and a list of interesting verbs (burning, kissing, bleeding, flying, etc), and picked one at random each day. If the two words made sense together—say, “flying” and “dragons,”—I’d have to put one back, because the point was to figure out how two words that made no sense together could belong together—hence the bleeding books, floating wolves, flying trumpets, etc in the novel.

This is why I love the umbrella term “speculative fiction”—you get to be weird in an entirely unique way. If I have to specify, however, “eco-fantasy” is probably the closest thing I’ve heard to describing it. 

Café MFA: Sci-fi and fantasy can be a bit of an intimidating genre to write in for some people, especially trying to come up with explanations for the scientific or fantastical aspects. Can you describe your process for worldbuilding?

Tara Campbell: I encourage my students to write from the characters outward, meaning prioritize worldbuilding in terms of how it affects your characters. I call it “inline worldbuilding,” which I suppose is a visual reference to how inline skates are streamlined compared to roller skates—let’s be as sleek as possible when it comes to how much information we need to keep moving ahead, at least to begin. We don’t stop to explain the physics of our universe in, say, a love story (unless perhaps one of the lovers is a scientist), so I invite students to be similarly character-focused when writing speculative fiction. Really ask yourself what matters to the characters or affects their journey, vs. what’s just a “nice-to-know” or the dreaded info-dump.

Now, many people enjoy coming up with new universes or languages or magic systems, and I have no objection to that, but that can sometimes crowd out the actual story. Or that investment in worldbuilding can make the prospect of writing the actual story even more daunting, crushing you under the weight of creating a story that lives up to this whole complex world you’ve built. I’m an advocate for taking that pressure off yourself, because even when you start to write, you’ll still have to ask yourself how much of this multifaceted world makes sense to bring into the actual narrative.

The main thing is to create rules that make sense internally and stick with them, meaning consistency in your system of magic, for example, or having a grasp of what the science is and getting as close to it as possible before deviating from it. How your characters react to your world is the key, and ideally, what you and your readers are paying the most attention to.

Café MFA: Can you tell us a bit about the journey to publication for City of Dancing Gargoyles? Do you feel like your studies at AU prepared you for the process of publication?

Tara Campbell: In addition to the technical skills I referred to earlier, I think the main thing AU underscored is that your writing identity extends beyond any one publication opportunity. When you have a handle on who you are as a writer and what’s important for you, then you can make the best decisions in terms of publication. David Keplinger was really helpful in talking me through an earlier publication opportunity, prior to this book, that I wound up not taking. Turns out it was for the best because another publisher came along later that was a better fit for that particular book. This experience gave me a longer view, helping me to be patient enough to wait for the right fit rather than just any opportunity.

The power of community is also something AU reinforced. I view myself as equal parts writer and teacher, and connections I made in the program have led to fantastic teaching opportunities, such as at the National Gallery of Art and Clarion West. But community is important in publishing too. Five of my six books were published by presses with whom I already had a relationship, such as having previously published a story with them. I was just putting in the work, submitting, getting my stories out there, supporting other writers at events, reading and forwarding their work as well, building up my knowledge and visibility over time. When things happen, they may seem sudden, but it’s really the result of long, steady work, being present in the writing community.

Café MFA: We understand you’re going on a book tour. How do you handle marketing, or do you have a team for that? How does one get a team or set up all the events for post-publication?

Tara Campbell: Oof, it would be nice to have a team. Nope, all the blurbs, interviews, events, workshops, conference appearances, etc were organized by yours truly. Now that most of the events are behind me, I look back and can’t believe I did all that. But I had a long lead time and support from my publisher, who made sure I sat down and made note of all the people/venues I could reach out to, and provided top-notch editing, a kick-ass cover, and marketing materials for a full, professional presentation. And of course SFWP was also doing their part behind the scenes, sending the book out for review, awards, and other opportunities, not to mention handling the distribution, which is a job and a half. It may seem like a pain to have to wait for over a year to see your book out in the world, but those months are critical to building out your launch one step at a time.

Café MFA: Any advice or things you wish you knew before publication? Any wisdom for the graduates dreaming of publishing their work?

Tara Campbell: After launching this book I’m feeling a lot like I felt just after the MFA: a bit rudderless and fatigued—and, honestly, a little panicky about the loss of direction and intensity. But I have to remind myself I’ve felt like that before and recovered. I think it’s important to keep sight of the larger cycles of writing, and to not despair when you’re in one of the valleys. Smaller things build to larger things, so even if you can only manage to do one small part today, you’re still working toward your goals.

It also helps to try to maintain an internal focus of control for assessing success, by which I mean measuring yourself against your own goals, your own priorities, rather than against what other people are achieving or things that are outside your control. Awards and sales numbers are obvious metrics, but they will drive you crazy if they’re the only measures you use, because those aren’t under your direct control. The thing is to focus on the work, so when you look at the book years later, you’re still proud of it, no matter how many people have or haven’t read it—yet!

Café MFA: What are your future writing and publishing plans? Do you have anything big on the horizon?

Tara Campbell: This question brings me back to the previous one. I was surprised (and a little dismayed) to find how much the launch and all the related press and interviews and social media posting and such diverted me from producing new work. But that said, I am pecking away at a potential sequel. I’m not like traditional spec fic writers in that I don’t plan out three-book series. Each book is its own thing, but there are elements of this book that still interest me. I've been doing a lot of research into fungi and things like black mold because I want to bring them more squarely into my next book, making their role more prominent. It’s a fungal/microbial world, after all; we humans are just living in it.

Later this month I'm going to a residency at Hedgebrook in partnership with Clarion West—the Convening, they’re calling it—and we’ll be doing some speculative workshops with an eye to the legacy of Octavia Butler. And I’m looking forward to doing some deep reading for my spring semester teaching at Johns Hopkins’ MA in Creative Writing, with stories by N.K. Jemisin, Rebecca Roanhorse, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Caroline Yoachim, P. Djèli Clark, and AU’s very own Yohanca Delgado (MFA, '19). Even though I’m not getting a lot of new work done at the moment, it’s nourishing to reread and discuss work I admire so deeply.

Bio: Tara Campbell is an award-winning writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse, and 2019 graduate of American University's MFA in Creative Writing. Publication credits include Masters Review, Wigleaf, Electric Literature, CRAFT Literary, Uncharted Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Escape Pod/Artemis Rising. She's the author of the eco sci-fi novel TreeVolution, two hybrid collections of poetry and prose, and two short story collections from feminist sci-fi publisher Aqueduct Press. Her sixth book, City of Dancing Gargoyles, was released by Santa Fe Writers Project (SFWP) in September 2024. She teaches creative writing at venues such as Johns Hopkins University, Clarion West, The Writer's Center, and Hugo House. Find her at www.taracampbell.com