Theodora Goss

Welcome friend! Some authors write stories that entertain, some that unsettle, and a rare few who remind us why imagination is a form of truth-telling. Theodora Goss is firmly in that last category. Her new collection, Letters from an Imaginary Country, gathers tales of girl-monsters, fictional nations, reimagined classics, and speculative memoirs into a single, shimmering volume. As someone who also grew up in one country and built a life in another, I found myself deeply moved by the theme of dual identity that run through these stories. It was an honour to speak with Dora about the inspirations behind this collection! Let’s welcome her.

---

---

Get to know the author: Theodora Goss

Hi Dora! It’s such a pleasure to have you on Armed with A Book. To start us off, can you tell my readers a little about yourself?

–Well, I was born in Budapest, which seems important because I mention it a lot in the book!  But right now I live in Boston, where I’m a university lecturer. I did a PhD in English literature, which is why you will find a lot of academia and academic jokes in my stories—not dark academia but let’s say surreal academic (also known as realistic academia, since it is actually rather surreal sometimes). I studied the 19th century gothic, which is why gothic characters seem to populate my stories. Probably my best-known work is the Athena Club series of novels: The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, and The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl. But I love writing short fiction.

Jo Walton’s introduction is full of admiration — especially her classification of the “three kinds of readers” who approach intros. What were your thoughts when you first read her words, and how did it feel to open the collection with such high praise?

–It was wonderful to hear that Jo Walton had agreed to write the introduction to this collection! I suggested her to the publisher, Tachyon, and I was absolutely thrilled when they asked and she agreed. I have so much respect for her taste and intellect, and it’s an honour that she likes my work. It’s always great to hear praise, but hearing praise from someone you know is an astute critic is something to remember and hold on to.

What was the earliest seed of Letters from an Imaginary Country? Was there a moment — a memory, an image, a story — that made you realize these pieces belonged together?

–I initially submitted another version of this collection to Tachyon, and was told it didn’t quite work—which I realized was right. My publisher is very smart that way! So I took out about fifty percent of that book, created a collection of retold fairy tales that was published as Snow White Learns Witchcraft, and then looked at what I had left. The thread running through those stories, and several stories I had written since, was metafiction—writing about what writing does, what literature can do. Plus I had written the two Journal of Imaginary Anthropology stories, about creating countries by imagining them. The collection coalesced around the idea of imagination and writing—how do they create our reality?

How did you decide the order of the stories in this collection? Was it structured around theme, mood, chronology, or intuition? I am excited to dive deep into many of your tales in this interview.

–The publisher decided on the order! Well, I had an order, and then the publisher tweaked it. I really just thought about what a reader might like to read next—how a reader could travel through the landscape of the collection, going from story to story, country to country. I did try to look for connections, stories that shared borders in some way. I think Tachyon had the same goal. So hopefully the collection is easy to travel through . . .

The daughters of nineteenth-century scientists — Justine Frankenstein, Catherine Moreau, Beatrice Rappaccini, Mary Jekyll, Diana Hyde, and Helen Raymond — are unforgettable. If you could spend a day with ONE of them, who would it be and why?

–Why can’t I spend a day with ALL of them? That would be my first choice. Of course you’re talking about the characters in “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter,” which is the short story that turned into the novel series. I love them all . . . But if I could only spend the day with one of them, it would be Catherine, because she’s the writer in the group, and she could tell me what all the others are doing. I think she would be a great storyteller!

One of the most striking stories imagines a version of yourself who stayed in Hungary, while the “you” who immigrated watches her life unfold. Can you talk about the inspiration behind this story and how it evolved? What did exploring your “two selves” allow you to understand about identity, language, and home?

–I mentioned at the beginning that I was born in Budapest. My family left when I was five years old and I grew up in the United States. I went back to Hungary again for the first time when I was sixteen, and I went back a few times after that while I was in college and graduate school, but I could not afford to go back often until I was an adult with a real job. Now I go back every year. Often when I’m there, I wonder what my life would have been like if I had grown up in Hungary. Would I have been anything like I am now? Would I still be a writer? But from studying the gothic, I’m also very interested in stories about doubles—I’ve taught stories like Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Shadow” and of course The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So this is my way of writing a literary double. 

In the story where the White Witch conquers England and ultimately the world, young women choose her over the monarchy. What drew you to that dynamic, and what do you think the Witch represents for them?

–My White Witch story started with the image of Jadis, from C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, planning to conquer London—she later becomes the White Witch of Narnia. But my character is not Jadis—it turns out there is a long history of White Witches in both poetry and fiction. The character is a sort of archetype. Andersen’s Snow Queen is a type of White Witch. It’s always hard to explain my own stories because I sort of know what I intended to do in them, but I don’t necessarily know what the story itself intended to do, and that’s actually more important, and a larger component of what actually gets into the story. So my general idea was that the Snow Queen is not a villain—she’s not evil for kidnapping Kai (anyway, he went willingly). She is who she is—a force of nature. She is winter, cold, entropy. Also logic and order. My White Witch story is pretty clearly about a sort of fascism, but it’s also about the allure of cold and conquest and everything winding down. And it’s also about how the old order wasn’t so great for women like the protagonist’s mother anyway, so something else might be more attractive. A young woman might choose to follow the Snow Queen—just as she might choose to follow another female leader like Ozma of Oz.

You have a story that blends book excerpts, letters to the author, and fragments from a great-great-grandmother’s diary — part murder mystery, part family excavation. How far back does your own family history reach, and how much of your real lineage influenced that tale?

–That particular story, “Come See the Living Dryad,” isn’t about my own family, but about some things I came across in my research. My doctoral dissertation focused on nineteenth century anthropology and how it influenced the idea of the “monstrous”—I was studying gothic novels like Carmilla, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Island of Dr. Moreau. After I finished my PhD and started teaching, I taught a class on the history of the monstrous, both in literature and real life. In that class, we talked about what people had considered monstrous throughout history, and one thing we discussed were nineteenth century sideshow performers—for example, Bearded Ladies or conjoined twins like the famous Chang and Eng Bunker. Of course, they were just people with various genetic conditions, but they were categorized by the society of the time as “strange” and “other.” The Living Dryad came out of that.

“Beautiful Boys” introduces an alien species that moves through our world in unsettling ways. How did this idea come to you, and what questions about desire or danger were you hoping to explore?

–At some point I was thinking about how, when I was a teenager, certain boys seemed like they belonged to an alien species. For example, the ones who were in a rock band and also the captain of the football team. In hindsight that’s not as impressive as it seemed at the time—we were all just kids. But a teenage girl doesn’t think that way. So I did the logical thing and extrapolated. What if some men actually were aliens? What would they be like? Why would they be on earth? And of course I like writing unreliable characters in general. I think my PhD scientist narrator is quite unreliable!

You enter the world of Jane Austen via Anne de Bourgh who is a quiet and elusive character. Why did you choose Anne as your narrator, and what possibilities did her perspective open up?

–That story came out of an essay I wrote for a class on Jane Austen, which I took in the early days of my PhD. The teacher told us to write an essay on a character and suggested we choose one that is less written about, one that exists at the margin of the text. I chose the most marginalized character in Pride and Prejudice: Anne de Bourgh literally never speaks (although she may cough once or twice). I argued that in a way, she is actually at the center of the novel. And then I started wondering what the story would look like from her perspective. I put that together with E.M. Forster’s analysis of flat characters, and decided to make a bunch of flat characters round. Including Pug.

In the Arthurian story, the interloper keeps being sent back to relive a moment. What does repetition reveal, and what does this character need to learn through cycling the same journey again and again?

–That story came out of wondering why Guinevere would have fallen in love with Lancelot—I always preferred Arthur myself. And then I thought, what if a time traveller were put back into the body of Guinevere and did actually fall in love with Arthur? But the timeline needed Arthur to fail and Camelot to fall. What then? Guinevere’s original story is about the tension between love and duty. My story is too, I think. It’s also about accepting pain in order to feel love—that’s what my time traveller learns, I suppose. 

David, Julia, and Madison collaborate to invent an imaginary country. Have you ever co-written a story with another person? If so, what was that experience like? If not, do you imagine it unfolding like these three friends — harmonious, chaotic, or something in between?

–No, not yet! I have no idea what it would be like, but it might be a lot of fun. I imagine it would be like a complicated dance. A difficult, complicated dance, since I care very much about writing—it’s hard to let go one’s own ideas about how something should work and share that creative space.

In two of the stories about invented countries begin magically but slip into darker political consequences once imagination becomes real. Did that structure emerge organically as you wrote, or was it something you intended from the start?

–I think that’s natural for the topic. If you create a country, you’re going to deal with a lot of problems, because countries are filled with people. And people are inherently contrary, troublesome, rebellious—I mean, God has that problem in the Bible, right? Anyone who wants to create a community has to deal with the fact that they’re made up of individuals with their own ideas, dreams, intentions. They are political actors. So you can’t create a country and expect it to turn out exactly the way you intended . . . In reality, there are always darker political consequences as well as flashes of brightness and heroism.

Which elements of your own life — Hungary, immigration, academia, fairy tales — slip most naturally into your fiction? Would someone who knows you well recognize more of you in these stories than a new reader might?

–All of them. And yes, absolutely. I think I’m all over these stories—they come out of personal experiences, things I’ve studied, family history, etc. And of course out of the things I’ve read, which can be as real to a writer as the real reality of the world we live in. But I think that’s probably true for any writer. All of us are all over our stories, whether we intend to be or now. How can we help it, when they come out of us? Like silk out of a spider—that silk is made out of her own body.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

–I hope readers like these stories! I had so much fun writing them, and I hope they are fun to read as well.

Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me, Dora. 

–Thank you for these wonderful questions! I’m not sure I answered all of them well, because it’s hard writing about your own writing—but it was a pleasure thinking about them.

---

Thanks for joining us! Add this book on Goodreads. It is available wherever books are sold!

Learn more about Dora on https://theodoragoss.com/.

Many thanks to Kasey at Tachyon Publications for the review copy and interview opportunity! You can read my review in the previous post.