Tara Campbell is an award-winning writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse, and 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
Jean-Paul L. Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books bookstore and publishing house, producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast (2023 Laureate Award Winner, 2024 BSFA, Ignyte, and British Fantasy Award Finalist), and was the editor of the SFPA’s Star*Line magazine from 2021-2025. He is also the poetry editor of Worlds of IF & Galaxy magazines. In 2024 he won the Laureate Award for Best Editor. He has written many books of poetry and science fiction. https://spacecowboybooks.com/
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JPG – CITY OF DANCING GARGOYLES has a really interesting format: it switches between epistolary and more traditional novel narratives. What made you decide to mix these formats to tell your story, and what advantages did it provide you?
TC – Well, I hadn’t actually planned on writing a novel. During COVID I was having a hard time concentrating enough just to read, let alone write, but I was inspired by a novel pre-writing technique by Michael Moorcock that centered on imagery containing deliberate paradoxes. The image he gave as an example was “In the city of screaming statues.” That image created so many questions in my mind: I had to know what the city looked like, what it sounded like, what set these statues off, were they screaming words or just sounds, did they ever stop, etc. I was excited at how many questions that one image created, so I created a writing exercise for myself based on nouns and verbs, putting together words that absolutely do not belong together, like floating wolves and sailing statues and glaring chocolates and all of these things that simply can’t be.
I wound up writing a couple dozen stories, and when I started thinking about how to bring them together in a collection, I created a chart to figure out how to group them, looking at commonalities of theme or tone or perspective or any way they would cohere. Then a writer friend suggested using an element I mentioned in one of the stories—alchemical testing—to imagine all of the stories as part of the same universe.
Once I started thinking in terms of a novel, I had to be more ruthless in how to change or cut stories for the purposes of the narrative. Some of the stories turned into setting or characters instead of self-standing works. But on the other hand, the epistolary sections let certain stories be as weird as they wanted to be in this future US that’s been that’s been altered by climate change and alchemical testing.
JPG – I particularly love the glaring chocolates, this idea that these delicacies are looking back at you. Very disconcerting. Now, you mentioned Michael Moorcock as a source of inspiration, and Moorcock of course is associated with the new wave of science fiction, which typically was willing to take more chances with the writing itself. Was this also an inspiration for you?
TC – I have to admit, the Moorcock inspiration was pretty much limited to the prompt. My experimentation was more a function of my writing flash fiction and how much room there is to mess with form, voice, subject matter, etc. in that genre. Prior to this book I had been writing what we call hermit crab flash, where you write a story in a format you’re not used to seeing as fiction: a scientific report, a letter, a recipe, emails, bureaucratic forms. Flash is like a cauldron where you can just sort of throw in all these ideas and give it a go. It lowers the threshold to try weird things, which has been instrumental in terms of stretching myself.
JPG – This book seemed to be a lot about the things that humanity has lost through a future climate and alchemical testing cataclysm. If I’m correct in that assessment, how did you go about choosing what aspects of humanity would perish during this apocalypse?
TC- Honestly, at first I was a little surprised that the book was classified as post-apocalyptic because I was not sitting there thinking I’m writing a post-apocalyptic novel. But then, I was also shocked the first time one of my stories was published as “horror” because I was like It’s just about a haunted novelty ring harvesting human body parts when it didn’t get what it needed…
Anyway, in terms of thinking about the future and what we’re losing, it’s basically an extrapolation from what we’re willing to give up today. Like, we’re willing to give up on our environment for comfort, we’re willing to give up our safety to own firearms, we’re willing to barter away the future against some convenience in the present day—especially with AI, how much water and energy that uses up. There are always going to be haves and have nots, there are always going to be people protecting their own interests, there is not always going to be enough water.
I focused on water because my prompt was “digging gargoyles,” which made me imagine they were looking for water, and that lack of water landed me in the southwest, where the church they used to be on crumbled once the town was deserted. I see the future more as a gradual crumbling like the church rather than one big cataclysmic event. I think it will be a gradual degradation of the environment, with people still trying to cling to their ways. There will still be pockets of comfort, and pockets of technology, but there will also be people like the mother and daughter climate refugees in my book, Rose and Dolores Baker. The whole book is extrapolating from present day tensions to a point when we have even fewer resources to go around. But, as in real life, there is always more to lose.
JPG – To get a little more specific about this future world: the alchemical testing. Is that the cause of the apocalypse in this story? I read it as possibly a metaphor for nuclear weapons, human abuses of power, or other destructive human behaviors. Did you deliberately keep this vague to not have, as you said, a singular cataclysmic event, and if so, why did you choose that as a device instead of getting specifically into the cause?
TC – I’ve been experimenting with ambiguity in my work because that’s something I’ve noted in other writers’ work that keeps me thinking about a story long after I’ve finished reading it. I didn’t set out to definitively answer all the questions the novel poses, although toward the end I do hint at possibilities for who—or what—could be responsible for the spread, and the idea that maybe humans aren’t as in charge as we like to think we are. That’s been a thread in a lot of my work, like my first novel TREEVOLUTION in which genetically modified trees gain the ability to fight back and manage themselves instead of being managed by us.
I love the idea that our plans can be thrown asunder by the natural world, but I don’t get super specific because 1) ambiguity is something I’m cultivating in my work, and 2) as we stumble through our daily lives, we don’t know all the answers either. Some aspects of our paths may have a feeling of resolution to them, but there are other larger mysteries that we still need to keep working toward understanding.
JPG – The way you describe it, it almost sounds like interjecting a splash of existentialism into what we think of as the current form of novels. I love that, and this ties into to your previous book which I haven’t read yet but now I really want to. Many of the non-human entities and things in this book have become sentient through your world-building and in a way, it felt like an uplift tale, like the hopeful side. Is this an uplift tale, or is this a device of anthropomorphizing for emotional effect?
TC – It’s basically wish fulfillment on my part. We as a species have effed up so many things, and when we’re gone the earth will quite happily—even more happily—go on. It brings me pleasure to imagine other ways of managing this planet being more successful than ours. As a speculative writer I’m always up for decentering humans.
JPG – For those that haven’t read the book yet, it is filled with this wonderful and crazy imagery: gun-toting trees and so forth, which is pretty delightful. Another one of the themes I found in this book is about finding acceptance in times of drastic change, and I wondered if you could speak more about this and some of the hopeful elements of the book.
TC – Yeah, “found family” has become a popular buzz-phrase, and I didn’t realize I was writing it at the time, but it’s certainly there. I think that’s going to be an important element in our increasingly fractured future. We’ve already sequestered ourselves in our different networks online, able to isolate in our own comfort levels, not coming together as often IRL. When our technology breaks down, or when we don’t all have access to it as much as we do now, we’re going to have to find a way to relate to each other person to person—or person to gargoyle—and that’s a lot of what’s going on in in the novel.
I find that imagining lives outside the human realm allows us to consider what other forms of life need to thrive. If removing ourselves from everyday concerns can expand our minds to empathize with a drunk butterfly or someone shelving bleeding books, then maybe we can empathize with less fantastical things, and think about the environment beyond how we can utilize it, and see other people’s points of view more readily.
JPG – You mentioned that a lot of the book takes place in the backdrop of the southwest, and the book alludes more than once to the fact that our little town of Joshua Tree has been destroyed by fire. Space Cowboy bookstore is in Joshua Tree, so of course I’m looking out my window thinking about this, and I wonder, on a personal level, what inspired you to use Joshua Tree in particular. It’s such a bizarre landscape, and to think of it burning—and there have been fires not very far from here—is such a terrifying visual.
TC – I have never actually been to Joshua Tree, and I think that’s one of the reasons it fascinates me. I see pictures of the landscape, and it’s so unique, and it makes me want to get down there soon, because the whole Southwest just seems so precarious. I was in Roswell and Ruidoso a couple of summers ago, and while we were there, forest fires were closing off more and more parts of the parks each day. We’d go hiking one day, and the next day it’s closed off, and I think that really hammered home how delicate that whole region is. And it will only become more so as the climate continues to change, and as water becomes even more precious.
It’s one of the places where people and whole communities are going to have to make hard decisions, especially when you consider that the Colorado River Compact was made based on inflated volume estimates. The Southwest is one of our canaries in the coal mine.
JPG – I want to go on a rant about climate change and Joshua Tree but we’ll save that for another time. Switching gears a little bit: what made you choose to have some of the main characters sentient gargoyles? Why gargoyles specifically?
TC- Honestly, it was because that was the story that was not resolving itself immediately. I had chosen the words “gargoyle” and “digging,” and I once I figured out why they were on the ground and what they digging for, they just kept on digging. And even though I kept coming back to them, their story wasn’t going anywhere, so I eventually had to send them out on the road so stuff could happen to them. They had to encounter the wider world of the book in order to change and grow and adapt.
I’ve been obsessed with gargoyles way before writing this novel, though. There’s a book called AMERICAN GARGOYLES: SPIRITS IN STONE by Darlene Trew Crist, with incredible photos by Robert Llewellyn, that inspired my main characters E and M. I think I picked it up on my first visit to the National Cathedral in Washington, DC in the early 2000s. People tend to think of Notre Dame when they think of gargoyles, but we have a wealth of them here in the US.
JPG – And is there anything specific, stylistically, about American gargoyles that differs from European gargoyles that intrigued you?
TC – American gargoyles—especially a lot of the ones on the National Cathedral—seem a bit stockier and more substantive, blockier than European gargoyles. It was fascinating to note how hardy these gargoyles are, and how varied they are. In fact, since moving to Seattle last summer, I learned a little piece of grotesque (as in the cousin to gargoyle) history that I might just have to work into my next novel. Stay tuned!
JPG – So, you’re an editor (Barrelhouse Magazine) and a teacher (Johns Hopkins, Clarion West, Hugo House, etc). What lessons from this work have you brought to your writing?
TC – Two things:
1) technically: concision. Getting right into the story as soon as possible. That’s something that has helped my own work, and something I express to students. When we editors are reading through dozens of stories in one sitting, there isn’t a lot of time for a bunch of exposition at the beginning of the story. I tell my students they can sneak it in in other ways, be crafty with when to bring in backstory, or when to just allude to things rather than show them in scene.
2) In broader terms: be as weird as you want to be. A lot of the stories in submission queue are well-written—the plotting is on point, the character development is full, and you can tell the author has taken great care with language—but they’re lacking that little bit of weirdness that we tend to look for at Barrelhouse. For us, the weirdness is what makes the story memorable, so knowing the publication you’re submitting to is helpful.
So, yeah, the message to students is to let your own nature shine through, and that’s something I also take to heart for my own work. I’ll continue to write my own brand of work, and I’m willing to do the work to find the editors and publications it resonates with, rather than try to squeeze it into some elusive approximation of “what readers want.”
JPG – What are you currently working on, and what comes next for you?
TC – Well, I’ve been writing a lot of interviews for the book, quite frankly, and social media posts and so on, but I am looking forward to doing some deep reading for a workshop I’m teaching for Clarion West focusing on collections by Kim Fu, Brenda Peynado, and Talia Lakshmi Kolluri. I’m also going to be doing 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. 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.
I’ve also 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. In fact (hint, hint) they already have influenced this book, even if they’re not in the spotlight. I’d like to continue writing about them, making their role more prominent. It’s a fungal/microbial world, we humans are just living in it.
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