Rebecca Roanhorse is a speculative fiction writer based in Santa Fe with a promising first novel, Trail of Lightning, due out this month. Set on a near-future Navajo Reservation, Lightning follows a young Indigenous monster hunter named Maggie who travels a post-apocalyptic land teeming with gods and beasts. Roanhorse launches the book this Tuesday at Jean Cocteau Cinema (she would like the public to know that there is a very good possibility of cake and specialty cocktails) where she’ll appear in conversation with science fiction and fantasy author Emily Mah.
When did you start writing?
I think I wrote my first piece in third grade, oh—it was a poem, and I won an award.
Congratulations!
Thank you! I knew writing was something I loved to do. It was always a hobby, and I didn’t get really serious about it until 2013 or so, when I started writing a book that became Trail of Lightning. I started writing it for myself, and then when I finished, I decided, hey, maybe I could get this published. And so, I did!
And now you have [six] books coming down the road. What's your process for keeping up with that astounding pace of so many books in just a few years?
So I have four books in this series, then I have a children’s book that’s coming next year on the Rick Riordan imprint for Disney, and then I have another series that’s starting with Saga Press that I’m calling an Anasazi-inspired epic fantasy. And it’s a lot. It’s a pretty rapid pace, but this is what I love. It’s sort of a dream that I didn’t realize I could dream. I’ve been feeling really lucky and really honored.
You describe Trail of Lightning as an Indigenous Mad Max. How do you decide between an introspective sensibility and a fast-paced action sensibility?
I guess you would have to read Trail of Lightning and come to your own conclusion about how much action takes place outside and how much takes place in the character’s head. She’s still really think-y. It is written in first person, but it’s first-person present tense, so it does have an immediacy and an in-your-face feel, but there’s still a lot of introspection. While the main character is a monster hunter, she’s fighting both monsters physical and monsters metaphorical.
You write about Indigenous futurisms and decolonizing science fiction. Is avoiding colonial tropes in your own writing something that comes naturally, or an ongoing effort?
It's an ongoing effort. I think that often my first attempt at a story will fall back on a lot of those colonial conventions, and I have to be looking out for the them all the time in the minutiae. I think my overall view is always towards something more sovereign, something that feels very Indigenous by its very nature. But it's hard to get your brain out of the thousands and thousands of books I've read, stories I've been told, and movies and TV and everything around you that's feeding you the same old things, particularly in science fiction. So you have to be vigilant, but you try to do it.
Can you explain what you mean by that activity in the minutiae?
Let’s say we were going to go to space, or on an epic quest. Often what science fiction and fantasy falls back on is this final frontier, one-man-against-the-elements, Manifest Destiny feeling. Or even the concept of terra nullius: The land is there to be claimed. I know going in I’m not going to do that. I have a big picture, but often when I’m getting down to the actual writing, your brain tends to fall into the same patterns. So you are going to have to forage for food, or fight the elements, or fight nature—when that’s not really an Indigenous perspective. You’re not at war with nature and the elements. These are your relatives or your companions. You should find ways to interact reciprocally. So you have to catch yourself.
At your most hopeful, how do you imagine your work making constructive change out in the real world against climate change and other violences?
I have the most hope that my work will change representation; that we won’t always see Indigenous people, Native Americans, represented in TV and film and books as stuck in the 1800s, as the noble savage dying off to make room for progress; those tropes that we still see in movies even today. That we’ll start to see Native Americans in the future. That we exist now, and that we will continue to exist and we’re more than the sum of our stereotypes. We can be monster hunters, or we can be space pilots or we can be housewives in suburbia. Whatever stories we want to tell, we should be able to tell. And we shouldn’t have to wear buckskin.
Rebecca Roanhorse: Trail of Lightning Book Launch:
6 pm Tuesday June 26. $10-$28. Jean Cocteau Cinema, 418 Montezuma Ave., 466-5528
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