Meg Moseman author of FOUR ZINES OF ELSEWHERE #author #interview

By: Meradeth Houston on 4:00 AM

I'm incredibly happy to introduce my friend and fellow author, Meg Moseman, to you all today! Meg and I have worked together in the library writing group for over seven years now and she has been an indispensable help in so many of my books. Her work is positively lovely and I deeply admire it (and her!), so when I learned she was making her Zines more widely available online, I was very excited! I love the combination of her artistic outlets, art and poetry, and will share more about her piece next week. But for today, let's get to know Meg! (And, should you be interested, my answers to these questions can be found on her blog:)

Are you a plotter or a pantser?
I’m a plotter who spent years trying to be a pantser. You see, Diana Wynne Jones wrote about how, for her, careful outlines “kill it dead.” I loved her accounts of her process, and I wanted mine to be like that too. Of course, (surprise!) different people are different. While I come up with wild and strange ideas when I’m lucky — in the right mood, confident enough, what have you — they don’t come on command. What’s more, I am usually not good at plots at all. They bore me. I like situations and feelings — perhaps why my published writing is poetry, even though I am probably better at prose.

Who are some favorite authors, and why do they mean so much to you?
My deepest favorites are Diana Wynne Jones and C.S. Lewis. Diana Wynne Jones is a wild, sideways, gloriously original thinker who writes twisty, sneaky, wise, literate fantasy, mostly for children. I’ll talk more about C.S. Lewis in a moment, but for now I’ll say he represents (by comparison, at least) my “left brain” (though I know that dichotomy oversimplifies the reality): bright, clear, thoughtful, reasoned, scrupulously moral  — intensely emotional, too, more openly so than DWJ, but in a what I think of as a “daylight” way; there are intuitions, surreality, and dream-logic like hers, too, but they are not given as much sway. I haven’t bonded as deeply with any authors since, but, for speculative fiction, I love Jason Vanhee’s short YA horror novel Engines of the Broken World, everything I’ve read by Octavia Butler, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Charles Williams’ novels, and David Lindsay’s bizarre A Voyage to Arcturus. For classics, I especially like Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and Blake.

Snag a Copy!

What inspired your most recent book?
This book is an anthology of zines I’d made before and printed locally. In the first three zines, I took poems and snatches of prose I’d written previously and illustrated them copiously. In the fourth, the art (mostly self-portraits, defined loosely) came first, and I wrote or borrowed (from public domain sources) commentary to accompany them. All are part of a larger project I call Evernost — a prose/poetry/visual art thing revolving around a fantasy plot, a girl’s mystical experience, and the cycle of the seasons in constantly evolving ways.

How does your day job as a bookstore clerk affect your creative work? Has it changed your standards? Has it changed how you look at writing?
I started out thinking I was a middle grade or young adult writer. You’d think working in the children’s section of a bookstore would be inspirational, but even though I love my job — I work with smart, hilarious, wonderful people — engaging with books as merchandise (how many Amazon reviews? how long did it take to sell last time we had it? appealing cover?) rather than as — relationships? — records of inner worlds? — intense and unique emotional experiences? — makes me jaded and pessimistic. I think it’s given me a desire to be not only different (I hope, and half-believe, that we are all different, unique, despite our drive to shove ourselves and each other into boxes) but visibly different. I’ve wanted to mix poetry and art and prose for years, but I’m not sure I would have dared to if I hadn’t been depressed by the volume of passionate, good, careful kids’ fantasy and seen how generic it all seems from a distance. (Seems, not is. I’m vain, though; I don’t even want to seem generic, especially not to myself.)

Inspiration and perspiration — in what forms does inspiration come to you? How important is “the muse” to your creative process? What parts of writing “just come” and what parts require hard work? 
My muse is — tricky. She runs away whenever I look straight at her but waves sparkly things at me that I can only see from the corner of my eye when I’m trying to work. For a few years, I could make myself write thousands of words a day whether I was “feeling it” or not, but that sense of resolve has faded, and I didn’t get satisfying results anyway. Beginnings, seeds, ideas, feelings — come (though rarely these days; I struggle to fulfill old visions rather than stumbling upon new ones). Periods of enthusiasm, which may be slightly different from inspiration itself, make work exciting rather than painful. But soon enough exhaustion sets in and everything is hard work — that’s the base state.

Tricky touchy one: God. We are two pretty secular people, but we both find ourselves drawn to topics usually associated with religion (again in our different ways). Why?
I’ve been fascinated with the trappings of religion — every religion I met, pretty much — since I was tiny and asked my parents, with giggles and unbearable embarrassment, to have me baptized. When I was thirteen came C.S. Lewis’s adult fiction and Christian apologetics, which I devoured even though I disagreed passionately with most of his arguments. Something about his imagination, his style of thinking, and his wit “clicked” with me more dramatically than any writer’s has before or since, to the point that I still can’t tell which thoughts of mine are mine and which come from something I’ve read of his. I hope that Evernost, in addition to fleshing out moments of intense inspiration, will also help me grapple with his thought.

About the Author:
Meg has enjoyed drawing, writing, and assembling books since the age when she could barely write her own name. She lives in the mountains of Montana, where she puts her English degree to use in the children’s section of an independent bookstore. In her spare time, she reads, writes, and illustrates fantasy and poetry, mostly centered on a huge project she calls her “I want to be William Blake when I grow up” project. Favorite authors include C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Diana Wynne Jones, Kafka, Melville, Dickinson, and many others. Her poetry has appeared in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly and The Mythic Circle, and she recently self-published Four Zines of Elsewhere! Check out her Amazon author page, or, if pictures are more your thing, her Instagram and her Redbubble.