And their lips rang with the sun--and honey!

We haven't had an author interview for awhile, so why not begin November with one? Today we chat with the enchanting Amal El-Mohtar, whose luscious way with words leaves me dazed and delighted.

Amal is a Canadian-born child of the Mediterranean, and would have you believe that her longing for fruit in all seasons is in no way the result of her having compromised her virtue with goblin men. She's currently pursuing a PhD in English at the Cornwall campus of the University of Exeter, where, living in an Old Library built from dismantled ships, she still drinks copious amounts of tea, plays harp, and reads books. She reads lots of books. In fact, it has been suggested by some that her editorial favour might be bribed by gifts of bookshelves. Such rumours are unsubstantiated, and are, of course, likely to be dirty, dirty lies... still, dark shelves are best, preferably with an oak or walnut finish.

Amal's favourite colour is blue. She also keeps an LJ somewhat tidy.

Papaveria Press describes The Honey Month as "[a] fascinating experiment in literary synesthesia in which the scents, tastes and textures of assorted honeys are transmuted into a wordsmith's cycle of fey mischief. These bewitching poems and stories unwind a fevered world of magic and longing and young women who chance the uncanny and gain wisdom beyond their years."

1. Tell us a bit about this particular book and how it came together.

It was a complete surprise to me, at just about every step of the way! It all started in a New Jersey diner (which I will never forget because it was called, fabulously, The Diner), when a few convention-going friends and I were escaping the hotel's horrible restaurant in order to acquire something edible. I had a sore throat, and as I was dolloping honey into my tea, struck up a conversation about honey with Danielle Sucher, to whom Catherynne Valente had just introduced me. We discovered we shared a passion for honey, all the different colours and flavours and kinds, and I suggested it might be cool to swap honeys with each other when we were back in our respective homes -- she in New York City, I in Ottawa -- since we both had some we wanted to share with each other.

Did I mention that Danielle's a fabulous gourmet who ran her own Occasional Restaurant for years? No? Neither did Danielle, in that particular conversation. So I was very much not expecting it when a box of thirty-five different kinds of honey in 1/2 ml vials showed up at my house a couple of months later.

Since I only had about seven or eight that I was going to send her, I didn't feel the exchange was fair, and offered to write her something spontaneous for the balance. I decided that for every day in February, I would pick up a vial, describe the colour, scent, and taste of the honey inside, and then as quickly as I could, before the flavours faded from my tongue, write the first thing that came to mind. Sometimes it was poetry, sometimes it was prose -- but 28 days later (oops!) I had about sixteen thousand words, and people were nudging me to make a chapbook of it. Then Erzebet YellowBoy said she wanted to make it into a book, and I said YES PLEASE, and the rest is history!


2. You write poetry and edit a speculative poetry magazine (Goblin Fruit). What made you decide to start this magazine, and what are you looking for?

Jessica Wick and I had talked about doing an editing project together for years, but mainly we started the 'zine because we weren't seeing enough of the kind of poetry we really loved -- poetry that we might find an instance of in this 'zine here or that 'zine there, but not really consistently. We wanted lyrical, imagistic, emotionally powerful stuff with more myth and folklore to it than we were accustomed to finding in the wild, so we figured, hey, let's take what seeds we can and plant our own orchard, hmm? Thus, Goblin Fruit.

We want poetry that surprises us and makes us ache and sigh and gasp, poetry that leaves us breathless or shivering, poetry that teaches us a slantwise way of seeing a familiar story, or place, or person. We want poetry with gorgeous language, poetry that expands the borders of our world while enriching what's already within it.


3. You sing and play the harp! How did you come to that? Does this influence your writing?

I do, and do! Singing I've done as long as I can remember; one of my earliest memories of singing is of making up a song about ladybugs and dragonflies for my two year old sister to stop her from crying. As we grew up, she and I would sing together all the time, memorize all the songs in all the Disney films (most of which we still know by heart) and sing as we did the dishes or ran about outside. I came to the harp via Loreena McKennitt's music, which devastated me by wedding the Celtic sounds I'd fallen in love with to the familiar music of my childhood, growing up in a Lebanese family. I really credit her music with making me feel, in a way I couldn't quite articulate to myself at the time, that I could have both things together -- both my Middle-Eastern heritage and the language in which I had been taught to think, both the culture I'd inherited and the culture that fascinated me and teased me in all the books I was reading and loving.


4. Do you have any recommendations for multicultural novels?

Gosh. I've been in the thick of my PhD for the last two years, and so novel-reading's been on the back-burner. But I read Nora Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms this summer and really enjoyed it; anything by Catherynne Valente is guaranteed to have a great deal of thoughtful multicultural representation and engagement, showing people of various colours, and faiths, and sexual identities. I also read Mary Anne Mohanraj's Bodies in Motion, and adored it completely: several interlacing stories exploring the experiences of different members of two Sri Lankan families over several generations. It made me cry in public, on a train. I can't recommend it enough.


5. What do you want to see happen as the speculative fiction genre continues to evolve?

I want to see it diversify naturally, organically, of its own accord, with love and curiosity instead of fear, distrust, and contempt; I want to see it legitimised in the eyes of the mainstream; I want to see people embrace the term "science fantasy" and cease to organise their views of F&SF along gendered lines.

Oh, and I want all my brilliant, novel-writing friends to sell them to excellent publishers so I can see their spines on my shelf.

The spines of my friends' books. Not, like, my friends' spines. Honest.


6. What can readers expect from you in the future?

Ooh, let's see: I have a story about assassins, librarians, and a girl who's a book coming out in Apex on November 6 [Ed. note: It's already live, so go read it!]; a poem coming out in the Welcome to Bordertown anthology in May 2011, edited by Ellen Kushner and Holly Black; a story about an artist, a singing fish, and the critics they destroy in Ann and Jeff Vandermeer's Thackery T. Lambshead's Cabinet of Curiosities, also sometime in 2011. I have something like five different novel ideas bouncing about my head, none of which I can properly work on until I'm done my PhD on representations of fairies and other supernatural creatures in Romantic-Era British writing. So it goes!


7. Do you have a favorite recipe you'd like to share?

Alas, no! My mother never taught me to work from recipes. All's I can say is, if you fry up some onions and garlic and add stuff to it? You're pretty much okay. :)


8. Pick a question you would like to be asked and answer it.

Hmm. "What's your favourite kind of tea?" Currently, Whittard's "Spice Imperial" blend, containing vanilla, orange peel, and cinnamon. Smells of winter comfort.

So what are you waiting for? It doesn't get any more delicious than this. Go check out Amal's wonderful, slim volume of gorgeous words and amazing flavors, The Honey Month, and prepare to sink into the sticky, the sweet, the savory.