Author Interview – Sarah Brooks

The Years of the Tarantella is a very rich and evocative piece. Have you been to Calabria, and/or did you borrow details from other locations to flesh out your setting? On a related note, is there a particular musician or piece of music that inspired your main character?

I spent a year teaching English in a little town in Calabria, and I’ve stolen shamelessly from the place and the experience for this story! I had a fabulous time, and the town was very beautiful, perched on a clifftop overlooking the sea. But I always felt there was something vaguely sinister about it, with its crumbling buildings and stray dogs and general faded air. Corruption and organized crime are huge problems in Calabria, so there was the constant sense of something lurking below the surface.

The idea for the story itself came from the time half the town piled onto buses to take the ferry over to Sicily for carnevale. We set off early and when we stopped for breakfast, just as we arrived in Sicily, a few of the men started playing the Calabrian tarantella on their guitars, and everyone started dancing… I think there was a sense of, ‘We might be in Sicily but we are Calabrian! And we will play our Calabrian music to show it!’ And the parade itself was quite strange and wonderful, with its grotesque floats, and everyone throwing confetti, and the sheer number of people sweeping you along with the crowd, whether you wanted to go or not.

What is your writing process like typically? Or do you have a different process for every story?

I always read the answers to this type of question avidly, in the hope that one day I will find the One True Process. Until then, it involves a lot of procrastination, and the guilty feeling that I should be doing ‘real work’.

What is your favorite piece of insect-related fiction?

Charlotte’s Web, by E.B. White. Sniffle.

As we mature, our relationship with the creepy-crawly elements of the world changes, as does our emotional (and sometimes physical) response. Can you tell us one early or notable experience you’ve had with bugs that helped shape how you view them?

I was pretty scared of all creepy-crawlies when I was younger, despite my mum’s best attempts at inoculating me against this by calling all beetles discovered in our house ‘Albert’ and heroically rescuing spiders from the bath. Things weren’t helped when I went on a camping trip to Morocco with school when I was 17, and we came into alarmingly close contact with camel spiders (which aren’t actually spiders but ‘solifugae‘, an order of their own, or so the internet tells me). They scared the living daylights out of us, especially when seen scuttling towards us at a terrifying pace early in the morning, before we’d managed to get out of our sleeping bags. (I have never before or since got up so fast.) Anyway, despite that traumatic experience, I kept travelling, which meant meeting more and (bigger) creepy-crawlies — cockroaches in youth hostels in China, a gigantic grasshopper-type thing (affectionately named Lorenzo il Magnifico) who lived in my bathroom in Italy for a month — and eventually settling into my current state of slightly horrified fascination with them.

What have you read recently/what are you reading currently/what is on your TBR pile that you’re excited about?

I foolishly started reading the Chaos Walking trilogy, by Patrick Ness, just before my PhD thesis was due, and found it so insanely gripping that I just couldn’t tear myself away, despite my looming deadline. An absolutely wonderful series.

What are you working on now/what do you have upcoming that you want people to know about?

Despite the fact that I really, really should be working on some academic articles, I’m writing more short stories at the moment, and also have a story out in the current issue of Interzone [ed. note: issue 249] (also based on travelling -- this time on taking the Trans-Siberian Express from Beijing to Moscow).

Since we’re coming up on the holiday season, and there’s no escaping it -- what is your favorite holiday-related entertainment (movie, TV special, song/album, book or story)?

The Muppet Christmas Carol! For me it’s not only the Muppets’ finest hour (especially Gonzo as Charles Dickens -- brilliant) but also my favourite of all the versions of the story. I force my family and friends to watch it with me every year.

We all have our favorite authors, some of whom everyone has heard of, and some of whom are relatively obscure. Who is one of the more obscure writers you love? What do you love about their work? Tell us which story or novel of theirs we should drop everything to read right now.

One of my favourite books, that most people I know have never heard of, is ‘Lud-in-the Mist‘, by Hope Mirlees. It was published in 1926, and is very English, and very strange, and about fairies and fairy fruit and general creepiness. Drop everything. Read it right now.