Micro-interview with Petra Kuppers

We’re delighted to have Petra Kuppers, author of the poem “Bone Planet” in The Future Fire #68, join us for a short chat.

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Art © 2024 Toeken

TFF: What does “Bone Planet” mean to you?

Petra Kuppers: “Bone Planet” is a poem about pain, and about my ongoing long-term speculative engagement with my deteriorating joints as a world of experience. As a somatic practitioner and dance artist, I often travel into my own body’s fields, and then through its sensations and imagery out into the wider cosmic world. So this sonnet is part of a crown (i.e. seven linked sonnets) that all travel around a planet of my inflamed interior.

TFF: If you moved to another planet, what animal from Earth would you bring with you?

PK: As I do travel so often, all the time, to other planets, I take with me what lives in me: mitochondria and other organelles, bacteria, all the tiny creatures that surround the particular energy of my own conscious life.

TFF: Would you like to live forever?

PK: In terms of material and energetics, I might anyway: stardust, transformed, vibrations, shimmerings… in terms of unified consciousness, probably not.

TFF: What are you working on next?

PK: I have just released a poetry collection that brings together true crime, decaying bodies, horror tropes and ecopoetry, full of nematodes, springtails and worms and the aliveness of soil (Diver Beneath the Street, Wayne State University Press, 2024). Now I am working on the material this poem is part of, a kind of Starship Poetics, a science fiction pain/joy universe.

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Extract:

In the grey-green shelter of living bone, you grow ragged,
edges blood-less, crusted. Leucocytes eat this brown lump

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Reminder: You can comment on any of the writing or art in this issue at http://press.futurefire.net/2024/01/new-issue-202468.htm.

New Issue 2024.68

“I have always loved playing around with words. I didn’t know it was called poetry. I was just an innocent kid messing around with words.”

—Benjamin Zephaniah, 1958–2023

Issue 2024.68

Short stories

• ‘The Rose Sisterhood’, Susan Taitel - art by Fluffgar
• ‘Escape Choice’, Emma Burnett - art by Cécile Matthey
• ‘A Witch, a Wakening’, Laura Blackwell - art by Sarah Salcedo

Novelettes

• ‘The Ensanguined Shore’, Jennifer R. Donohue - art by Sebastian Timpe

Poetry

• ‘Bone Planet’, Petra Kuppers - art by Toeken
• ‘Homunculi of Creation’, Avra Margariti - art by Melkorka

Download e-book version: PDF | EPUB

New issue 2019.49

“It won't be any of those things,” J.D. [Sauvage] said. “I don't know what it will be, but it will be something different.”

—Vonda N. McIntyre, Starfarers

Issue 2019.49: Poetry Special

Flash fiction

• ‘Ganymede Riots’, Victoria Feistner (illustrated by Miguel Santos)
• ‘Salamander Love’, Petra Kuppers (illustrated by Cécile Matthey)
• ‘I Believe’, Dawn Vogel (illustrated by Katharine A. Viola)

Poetry

• ‘Not Far Enough’, Paige Elizabeth Smith (illustrated by Fluffgar)
• ‘Lights’, Kim Whysall-Hammond (illustrated by Toeken)
• ‘Cleopatra Diaries’, Jennifer Crow (image courtesy MMA)
• ‘Falling Out’, Hayley Stone (illustrated by Eric Asaris)
• ‘Moon’, Jeana Jorgensen (illustrated by Joyce Chng)
• ‘Red Tide at the Finca’, Michael Díaz Feito (illustrated by Jason Baltazar)
• ‘The Wolf’s Tale’, Rebecca Buchanan (illustration by Jessie Wilcox Smith)
• ‘Shrouded’, Jennifer Bushroe (illustrated by Dr. T. Eratopo)

Download e-book version: PDF | EPUB | Mobi

Interview with Petra Kuppers

It is our pleasure to welcome to the blog Petra Kuppers, author of The Road Under the Bay and River Crossing in TFF, and of Playa Song, part of our disability-themed anthology Accessing the Future. We asked Petra to tell us more about her work as disability activist and performance artist, and about her new publication Ice Bar; a collection of short stories on disability, LGBTQ experiences and the future; pain, myths and the body; climate change, access, and non-realist embodied and enminded difference in science fiction, fantasy, horror and literary work.

Petra Kuppers, an internationally active disability scholar and artist, is a recipient of the American Society for Theatre Research’s best dance/theatre book award, and the NationalWomen’s Caucus for the Arts’ Award for Arts and Activism. She received nominations for a Pushcart (from the Dunes Review) and for the Best of the Net Anthology (from Anomaly/Drunken Boat). Petra is a Professor of Performance Studies in the University of Michigan’s English and Women’s Studies Departments, and she teaches on the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College. She’s a disability culture activist, a wheelchair dancer, and a community performance artist.

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TFF: You are a professor of Performance Art and part of a performance and dance collective. Movement seems to be something very important in your life. How did it start?

Petra Kuppers: I think the fact that my love of movement has lasted into adulthood has to do with being a disabled woman of size who loves to move and be in her body! If everybody around you tells you, “this is not for you,” it’s quite easy to go all contrary and make that something the center of your life. That’s certainly the case with me. I remember being in my late teens in Germany, in hospital, waking up from one of my knee operations. The doctor told me “I am sorry, but you won’t dance again.” Maybe that doctor was doing me a weird kind of favor, offering me a challenge I could not resist. I continued to dance, explored Contact Improvisation, Butoh, Laban Creative Movement, and many somatic modalities. These days, I dance in a different form: five-minute dances, little engagements with specific environments, which then lead to dances with words. I often free-write after movement, and these little site-specific movement/writing nuggets become the seed of a story. That’s the way most Ice Bar stories were born. Site-specificity is still central to most of the stories: sitting on a wheelchair ramp in Grand Rapids, Michigan, by the Rio Grande in New Mexico, or on a barrier island in Georgia.

The Olimpias: The Asylum Project  at Judson
Church/Movement Research. Photo Ian Douglas

TFF: Do you think that performing on stage holds a particular value for people belonging to minorities and marginalised communities?

PK: Yes. On stages, we can show ourselves as well as the wider world our own beauty, pain and depth. I am mainly a street/park performer, which means that I work with fellow disabled people in public environments rather than on stages and in galleries. So few disabled people have (cultural) access to those spaces. Having fun while disabled in public feels like a very powerful way of shifting stereotypes around disability. The same is true with fiction: disabled authors tend to write about everyday life differently from someone ‘imagining’ what it would be like to be disabled. Non-disabled people often make a particular disability (and often its cure) a major plot point. Few disabled writers do that in the same way… for most of us, disability is part of our make-up, not the central feature of it. We can get on with character and plot development in a different way, if we are not caged in by non-disabled stereotypes. We can have fun… in stories as well as on stages.

TFF: Reading praise for your upcoming collection Ice Bar, I was fascinated by the adjectives used to describe your style: “gemlike”, “psychedelically nightmarish”, “gritty”, “fabulist” and many more. What is the most unexpected description of your writing that you have come across?

PK: What an excellent (as unexpected) question! One of my readers wrote in an Amazon review about me being ‘an explorer.’ That seemed a fabulous and surprising way of thinking about what I am doing in Ice Bar: I write as an ethnographer of disability culture, approaching new forms (poetry/performance/dance/fiction) all the time in my ongoing journey to chart cultural ways of understanding difference…with ’disability’ being just one of these borderzones of difference.

TFF: In all three of your Ice Bar stories originally published by TFF, water seems to become a space for transition, either into other places or into other identities and states of mind. Many of the stories in your anthology also explicitly reference to water—what makes this such an interesting and flexible narrative setting?

PK: This goes back to being a disabled woman. I live with pain and fatigue, and water is my dancerly medium. That’s where I can move, can shift my heavy body easily, can gyrate and twist in the ways I want. It’s my science fiction fantasy of low gravity! When I was a little one, my mother, who also had a pain-related disability, would go to thermal springs to help her pain, and I have inherited that habit. I will travel far for a good warm mineral soak for my aching bones. During the writing of the Ice Bar stories, a different kind of water pain was also with me: the protest actions around the oil pipelines, water protectors, in particular the indigenous women who walked the rivers and reminded all of us of our dependence and love for life-giving water. Each day I wrote Ice Bar, I checked in with their news stories and Facebook pages, and joined the protests in my own way.

TFF: The stories in Ice Bar seem to explore a larger than usual range of genres. Was that a deliberate experiment or did you just follow your multiform literary inspiration?

PK: It was deliberate. I love reading horror and dark fantasy, but it’s sometimes hard to be a feminist and queer woman and do that with real enjoyment. So I looked to feminist, queer, solarpunk, afrofuturist and other inspirations, and wrote myself into the interstices of genres, from cli-fi to science fiction and fairy tale retelling, from fabulist erotics to contemporary myth-making. All slippery genres which I approached from social justice perspectives. One of the books I had with me a lot during the writing of Ice Bar was Octavia’s Brood—that’s the kind of meta-genre and community work that inspired me.

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Thank you Petra for being our guest. We wish you the best of luck and we look forward to read all the stories in Ice bar!

New issue: 2017.43

“I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.”

—Ursula K. Le Guin

Issue 2017.43

Flash fiction

• ‘Trash Goes in the Ground’, Kelly Rose Pflug-Back (illustrated by Laura-Anca Adascalitei)

Short Stories

• ‘The Cost of Fire’, Kiera Duggan (illustrated by Katharine A. Viola)
• ‘River Crossing’, Petra Kuppers (illustrated by Pear Nuallak)
• ‘The Ghost Repeater’, Joshua Philip Johnson (illustrated by Jason Baltazar)
• ‘Good Fortune’, Karen Heslop (illustrated by Cécile Matthey)

Poetry

• ‘Nebula Girl’, Maria DePaul (illustrated by Carmen Moran)
• ‘Entwined’, J.N. Powell (illustrated by Rachel Linn)

Download e-book version: EPUB | Mobi  
 
Full issue and editorial

Recommend: women in noir/crime

Noir is a genre of fiction too often plagued with sexist stereotypes. If you are tired of plots where women characters are either manipulative femmes fatales or naive girls in need of protection, and you would like to read a good crime story without rolling your eyes every other page… maybe this month’s recommendations can be of some help! TFF authors, editors and reviewers have shared quite different examples: from more traditional noir to contamination with other genres; from novels to comics; from the darkest stories for adult readers to humorous YA series. Feel free to join us in compiling this list, adding in the comments all the noir stories with women and/or by women that you have read and enjoyed! Mainstream or obscure, we want them all!

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Petra Kuppers (website)

My choice of noir is Gail Simone’s graphic novel with illustrators Jon Davis-Hunt and Quinton Winter, Clean Room: Immaculate Conception (DC Comics, 2016). It’s got all the ingredients of a good noir: a besieged and heart-wounded hero (journalist Chloe Pierce), a scintillating set of beautifully realized locations (scenes are set in Germany, Norway, various points in the US), and an equally wounded and enigmatic femme fatale (Astrid Mueller, head of a cult-like organization). Members of Astrid’s organization visit the clean room, where they face their fears. They might end up killing themselves, as Chloe’s fiancee did, or, later in the story, a Hollywood action hero. Add to that mix intriguing monsters, skin gore, torture and self-mutilation, lots of nudity and sex, and more twists and turns than one can shake a stick at. The psychological tension runs high and makes this a brilliant read, with two powerful women leads, one black, one white, none of whom need rescuing, although both have an intriguing bunch of henchpeople (including a group in Chloe’s camp that reminds me of Mulder’s nerds in the X Files). Queer narratives complicate the story, releasing us from scenarios where there is only ever one ‘other.’

Valeria Vitale (TFF, blog)

The Blue Place by Nicola Griffith is a story that shows all the landmarks of the noir genre: a hardened former police officer, a corrupt aristocracy that flirts with criminal organisations, shady middlemen that love money too much, a fascinating client that are bound to bring troubles, and a city, Atlanta, that is, as in many noir, a crucial component of the plot. At the same time, Griffith’s novel eludes easy categorizations and keeps surprising the reader, choosing unexpected turns, changing pace and focus. What makes this story so interesting to me is not (only) that most of the main characters are women, but that this scenario is not treated as something exceptional: the novel unravels smoothly without anyone being disconcerted by the fact that, yes, women can be dark and dangerous too and, yes, they also make very good detectives.

The Blue Place portrays a number of relationships between women that are beautifully diverse and complex, and feed the plot without falling into stereotypes or being used as simple triggers: flirt and courtship, romantic involvement, friendship, solidarity, family bonds. They all feel real and profoundly human and make this story exceptionally engaging.

Cait Coker (TFF)

Jacqueline Carey's novels Santa Olivia (2009) and Saints Astray (2011) are unlikely to be read as noir, but I would argue that they are closer to that genre than to conventional dystopia, as noir is characterized through its ethical ambiguity and fatalism, and dystopia through omnipresent degradation. In Carey's world, there is a valid escape to be had from the shitty not-too-distant future southwest US, where a queer Hispanic teen named Loup is torn between revenge for her dead brother and escaping to a better life for herself and her girlfriend Pilar. The outer world, including Mexico and Europe, has rebounded after a devastating pandemic in a way that the isolationist US has not. Loup's and Pilar's journey evolves beyond a quest for survival to one of discovery of this outside world, from tourist beaches to fashion and pop music.

Their saga concludes with their search for social justice for their home, still under martial law, and for equal rights for genetically modified humans, both of which are impeded by the complex oligarchy of the US government and military, as in this case being born, for Loup, is a crime of itself.

Jessica Campbell (web page)

Robin Stevens’s ongoing book series Murder Most Unladylike is one of those things that’s tailor-made for those of us who like the aesthetics of classic English fiction but also like progressive politics (see also Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries). The books, intended for children and teens but very readable for adults, feature Hazel Wong and Daisy Wells, budding detectives at a girls’ boarding school in 1930s England. Daisy comes from the British gentry, while Hazel is from Hong Kong; they become friends and form their own detective society. The mysteries are interesting, and they frequently evoke the likes of Agatha Christie with titles like Arsenic for Tea and settings like a manor house and the Orient Express. Hazel’s first-person narration subtly invites readers into her experience as an Asian girl in a very Caucasian society. Then there’s her experience as a smart but quiet person who has to learn to assert herself with the brash Daisy. These are good things for kids to read about, and Stevens’s prose is never didactic. I was encouraged to read these books by a friend and her middle-school-aged son – and I’d be hard pressed to pinpoint which of them encouraged them more strongly!

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Please let us know in the comments your favorite women in noir and crime—you'll be adding to my reading list!

New Issue 2016.38

“We know how precious the water is. We know that we must stand for the water. Every time we drink water, we remind ourselves how important the water is. Don’t you do that?”

—Ladonna Brave Bull Allard, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe

Issue 2016.38

Short stories

• ‘The Grand Museum’, Ola Al-Fateh (illustrated by Martin Hanford)
• ‘The Road under the Bay’, Petra Kuppers (illustrated by Miranda Jean)
• ‘Before We Left the Forest’, Kelly Rose Pflug-Back (illustrated by Rachel Linn)

Novelettes

• ‘Siv Delfin’, Damien Krsteski (illustrated by Miguel Santos)
• ‘Good Genes’, Rebecca Gomez Farrell (illustrated by Pear Nuallak)

Poetry

• ‘How Far Does Night Have To Fall?’, F.J. Bergmann (illustrated by Cécile Matthey)

E-book versions coming soon

Review this issue on Goodreads