I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!
Today we are joined by Jane Mondrup. Jane lives and writes in the small Northern European country Denmark. In her fiction, she’s exploring the boundaries around and between different speculative genres. She’s published a few books and some short stories in Danish, while Zoi, which will be published in both languages, is her debut in English. You can find her at: instagram.com/jane.mondrup/ | janemondrup.bsky.social | facebook.com/forfatterjanemondrup
Why do you write?
Because my head is
full of strange ideas that I need to do something with, and because I always
loved stories. I was the classic nerdy child, and reading was my haven. To me,
writing is a lot like reading—a very slow and intense reading process that lets
you shape the story as you go along. When that works (and it doesn’t always), it
lets you explore worlds and ideas that are of course your own, but they come
from a part of your mind that you cannot access otherwise. That’s incredibly
satisfying.
What made you start
writing?
Initially a
creative writing course in 8th grade. Following that, I wrote a number probably
very typical teen-nerd SF stories, but at the age of 19 I developed a total
writer’s block, always asking myself if what I wrote was good enough—and of
course it wasn’t. This lasted until I was in my late twenties and started writing
scenarios for LARPS. They didn’t have to be Masterworks Of Art, and once I got
my inner literary critic to shut up, I found myself wanting to explore some
elements of the scenarios. Some of these explorations went back into the
drawer, but one ended up as my first novel, Zeitgeist (which only exists
in Danish so far).
What do you do when
you’re not writing?
Apart from writing
my own stories, I spend a lot of time doing writing related stuff. I have a
half-time job at a small publisher, as a fundraiser and editor. In my spare
time, I do organizational work in the Danish Writer’s Union and a local SFF
convention. And I read, of course. But I also work in my garden and do projects
on my house – one I built myself together with my partner. The house is
situated in a small eco-community, which means I have a wonderful found family
of community neighbors right nearby, and they are also an important part of
life, along with my partner and my daughter.
Describe your book
poorly
There’s this big
cell-thing in space, and it sort of swallows up other living things, except it
doesn’t eat them but makes them part of itself. People get sick a lot in there
because the cell-thing bombards them with hormones, and there’s no gravity so
they float around, and everything’s squishy and weird. Then some squishy stuff
begins to grow on them and turn into icky half-finished bodies until they’re
suddenly finished, and now everybody’s two people. Oh, and they’ve left Earth
and can never come back. And I think they are communicating through poop.
If you could spend
the day with another author, who would you choose and why?
If I can have
someone who’s dead, then Octavia Butler. She wrote the way I strive to—inventive
and original stories that are at the same time extremely gripping, with
characters who truly come alive on the page. Apart from the hope that she could
teach me something about writing, I would just enjoy talking to someone with
such a fascinating mind. We would have some things in common, like growing up
as weird, introverted kids, and keeping the weird kid interests as adults. But
her life would also have been very different from mine. There would be so much
to talk about, and so much just to listen to.
What is your
favorite book from childhood?
Michael Ende’s Neverending
Story. In my opinion, it is one of the absolute masterworks of children’s
literature, and you can easily read it as an adult too. The main theme of the
story is how imagination is both crucial and dangerous. The people who visit
the world of Fantasia must lose themselves completely in this world in order to
find their true will and come back to reality, healing both worlds. For someone
spending most of her childhood in the imaginary worlds of books, that story
resonated in more than one way.
What are you
currently reading?
I just started
re-reading Translation State by Ann Leckie, since I made the mistake of
listening to it the first time around, and it deserves a fully focused
attention. Before that, I finished reading the series by Octavia Butler that’s
both called Lillith’s Brood and Exogenesis. It has some themes
and ideas in common with Zoi, and Butler is a true master of
storytelling, so I enjoyed the heck out of the books, even though they were in
many ways rather bleak and misanthropic. But Octavia Butler can make me love
the most terrible story.
If you could go
back and rewrite one of your books or stories, which would it be and why?
As a matter of
fact, I’m currently rewriting one story, the children’s book Vattes vandring,
for a new publisher. It is scary to discover how much I could improve on a book
I was quite satisfied with before I started on the revision. With luck, I will
soon be doing the same thing with my debut novel Zeitgeist since that may
be re-published too, along with its hitherto unpublished sequel.
What would you do
if you could live forever?
Start hating it
after a while, I expect. I have always found the idea of eternal life very
unappealing. Of course, a few extra decades in good health would be nice,
perhaps even as much as a century. But eternity? No way. That said, if I
couldn’t get out of it, what I would do was change. A lot. Enough that I
wouldn’t really be the same person, or even the same kind of creature. In Zoi,
you will find that idea explored.
What scares you the
most?
The end of the
world. Really. I’ve been terrified of nuclear war and environmental breakdown
since the age of ten. This comes up a lot in my fiction. The absolute worst
thing I can imagine is surviving such a disaster and being left on a devastated
planet. The next worst would be not having a planet to be a part of. I don’t
believe in personal reincarnation, but to me it feels extremely important that
my biological material will reintegrate with other life after I die. Dying—or
for that matter, living forever—in space is one of the most terrifying things I
can imagine. So of course that’s what I expose the characters in Zoi to.
I like to think they chose it themselves.
At the age of five,
Amira watched footage of the first zoi specimen arriving in our solar system,
and she became instantly fascinated with the huge, cell-like creature floating
among the stars.
Decades later, she and three other astronauts have taken residence in a zoi as it continues its voyage through space.
They have no way of steering its course. Communicating with their non-sentient host is limited to signals of physical needs. And while the zoi meets those needs, it also exposes its passengers to hormonal and even genetic alterations.
Links
to purchase:
[The first link is
to the publisher’s website where the other three links can be found]
https://readspaceboy.com/portfolio/zoi/
https://www.amazon.com/Zoi-Jane-Mondrup/dp/1951393422/
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/zoi-jane-mondrup/1147010568?ean=9781951393427
https://www.abebooks.com/Zoi-Mondrup-Jane-Spaceboy-Books-LLC/32133906647/bd
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