I’m excited to host Courtney Floyd this week for a conversation about her debut novel. Higher Magic comes out next week—a really fun, tight book about a PhD student at a magical grad program trying to balance the demands of her teaching load, her dissertation project, her love life, dismantling a sorcerous conspiracy, and campus labor activism. I had a great time reading it; it touches on a lot of aspects of the fantasy-academic setting that I’ve wanted to see someone sally forth against for a long time. You can find a copy at Bookshop.org or wherever fine books are sold! Courtney was a Viable Paradise student a couple years back, and I had a chance to read the first chapters of Higher Magic then—it was a delight to read the whole thing, and to have a chance to chat with her about the book. This was actually my first try at this sort of interview, but since the book was coming out later, the interview with Django ran first. We conducted our conversation through text chat, so you can read the entire thing, emojis and all.

Courtney Floyd: Hi Max, I’m here and ready when you are!

Max: Hi! Glad this worked out!

Courtney Floyd: Same here!

Max: Informed consent notice: this is the first time I’ve done something like this so we’re going to be exploring the territory a bit here. For instance, I just discovered that Google keeps trying to autocomplete my messages, which I do! not love!

I’m excited to get a chance to talk with you about Higher Magic, which I did love.

Courtney Floyd: Ahhh, that’s not cool Google. This is also my first time doing something like this, so I have no expectations about how this should go. 🙂

Max: Excellent! Into the unknown (It’s been about five years since Frozen 2 so I hope we’re earworm safe at this point)

So! Higher Magic—in addition to being its own thing—is a fascinating braid between a lot of different kinds of novels, in a way that feels very read-in to the text itself.

You’ve got the Magic School novel, an outgrowth of the Boarding School novel (a genre not as well known in the USA) and of course there’s a lot of the Campus Novel here as well. And the Labor Organizing Novel, and the romance, and the urban fantasy... how did you approach bringing it all together? And where was the seed from which it all grew?

Courtney Floyd: Oh, that’s a great question. I went into this thinking less about genre and more about narrative theory writ large. I did my PhD in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, but as part of that I studied the rise of the novel in Western culture and spent a lot of time thinking about (and immensely appreciating) how self-referential the form is. For as long as we’ve had novels, we’ve had authors being meta about the fact that we have novels. So, I knew I wanted to play around with that with a strong narrator. In terms of all of the flavors of academic novel, though, that grew out of my fascination, as someone who was home schooled K-12 and only experienced a formal education system in college, with the idea of what these institutions meant for identity. [Edited to add: That fascination led to copiously reading magic academia novels of all sorts, which absolutely informed my writing process.]

When I started writing seriously, I was convinced I’d be an urban fantasy author, so I suppose that component is just part of my writing DNA.

Max: That must have been a huge adjustment, coming into institutional education in college!

Courtney Floyd: It was! I very nearly dropped out in my first year because of culture shock (and imposter syndrome).

Max: Something that Dorothe’s wrestling with in Higher Magic, too.

I remember how disoriented I felt showing up at college—after going to a small rural prep school which we couldn’t have afforded if my parents hadn’t taught there—there were all these huge crenelated stone buildings. I remember having a distinct impression that they were there sort of to keep me out!

“I have come to this place as the Huns” or something like that. The challenge of finding a space for you in a much larger institution

Courtney Floyd: Absolutely! I went to a university in my hometown and was very familiar with the campus and library, but even so there’s a world of difference between walking around campus and walking into a classroom full of people––all of whom appear to understand what’s expected of them in that space.

Courtney Floyd: I share this story semi-frequently in my day job (I work in higher ed), but for the first year or two of undergrad I was convinced that going to office hours was cheating. I just didn’t know what they were for. Unstated norms and expectations like that add up to something we call the “hidden curriculum,” which has a disproportionate impact on first-gen, low income students and students from minority backgrounds. I hadn’t seen anyone exploring that in novels about academia, and I knew it was something that needed to be explored.

Max: That’s a great name for it! I remember one dining hall argument over whether it was okay to ask for extensions on projects—there was a really clear divide between folks who’d come from a more elite-school environment, who all thought it was best practice, & folks who hadn’t, for whom it seemed, well, as you say: like cheating.

“Hidden curriculum” also an apposite term for Higher Magic, too, with its hidden students...

Courtney Floyd: Absolutely. There are so many ways our real-world institutions allow students to disappear. And, simultaneously, so many people working to prevent those disappearances.

When I first wrote Higher Magic, the disappearance plot felt a bit far-fetched to me. Unfortunately, it becomes a little less speculative every day.

Max: Particularly with literal “disappearances” in the news—we’re talking the week after Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction from Columbia.

Which brings me around to something else that really struck me about Higher Magic—there’s this extremely sharp interplay between.... concepts of space in the novel? This is gonna get a bit bull session, apologies in advance

Courtney Floyd: Ooh, I’m intrigued already.

Max: Well so, insert big generalization siren sound effect here — the Novel as a project has often lived in tension between, say, drama, which tends to revolve around visible action (though characters can at times tell the audience what they’re feeling and certain staging decisions can prompt us to believe them), and something like poetry, which can delve into interiority and subjectivity.

When we see people acting on stage we wonder, what’s going on in their heads—when we read a book we both track the “external” action and get access to, well, some of the characters’ interiority

(I said this would get a bit bull session!)

Courtney Floyd: I am nodding along enthusiastically.

Max: So in Higher Magic you’ve got Dorothe’s narrative point of view—occasionally interrupted by bits of found text (the interstitial lectures, Anne’s logs).

She’s relating the world as honestly as she sees it, but—while I never get the sense that she’s lying to us, there are aspects of her own situation that are invisible to her, or submerged, at least in the opening chapters.

She’s a worker but, while she’s not hostile to the union, she doesn’t at first think of herself as involved in a worker’s movement, or her first instinct isn’t to reach out in that direction.

Max: She’s quite conscious of some ways in which she’s different from other students (she’s the first generation of her family to come to college, she has this ‘curse’ around technology), and suppresses or ignores other aspects—while she’s supportive of students who need disability accommodations, she’s reluctant for much of the novel to conceive of herself as anything but able-bodied, in spite of her debilitating panic / anxiety attacks.

So we have her internal narrative space, we have the publics within which she consciously positions herself (she’s a member of the magic-using community, a member of the faculty, an academic), and publics in which she exists but not, at first, consciously...

And then we have Anne, who— kind of goes around bringing inner monologues into public / dramatic space? functionally?

Courtney Floyd: Oh, yes, okay! Brace yourself for a wall of text!

You: Yes! Please!

Hahah turnabout is more than fair play, I’m sure there was a pithy question hidden in there that a better interviewer than I would have been able to come up with

And when I say “not hostile to the union” I mean she’s very pro-union, the union just isn’t her first phone call. For much of the first half of the book, she’s wrestling with her problems by working-harder (many such cases)

😅

Courtney Floyd: So, as a writer I’m firmly of the mind that all narrators are unreliable narrators––and that a lot of what makes a narrative emotionally satisfying is prodding that unreliability. (As a teenager I was obsessed with Wuthering Heights, which has an iconic unreliable narrator, so I can’t help it, I was born this way). That doesn’t have to be a malicious unreliability. We all have gaps in our awareness and our sense of what’s possible or even allowed.

I think that’s amplified by the fact that Bartleby is neurodivergent. (Her experience, by the way, is very much informed by my own lived experience of grad school. But where she begins to understand herself as neurodivergent in school, I made it all the way through my program without reaching that conclusion.) There is a stark lack of research about what certain kinds of neurodivergence look like in women that, combined with the persistent (ableist) myth that someone with low support needs can’t be disabled, makes it difficult for many women to get accurate diagnoses. Ultimately, Bartleby’s neurodivergence––though unnamed and unknown to her in the first half of the book––informs her sense of what she can and should do. Where she can turn for support. What’s allowed when she’s struggling. If that makes sense?

Max: Yes! That makes total sense.

Courtney Floyd: Anne became this really useful foil in sort of internalizing things that Bartleby hasn’t yet processed or admitted to herself. In a way, it is an assistive technology.

Max: Hah! I hadn’t thought of it that way. Assistive skull!

Courtney Floyd: I wish I could have one of my own. 💀

Max: 💀

So as Dorothe arrives at different conceptions of herself, different approaches also open up to her.

Courtney Floyd: Right. And she can begin to challenge her own preconceived notions about herself and what it means to be a mage student.

I like your conceptualization of that as spaces. Because you’re right, she’s navigating all of these varied spaces and positionalities throughout the novel.

Courtney Floyd: I think part of that is rooted in the fact that the university isn’t a single place. Everyone experiences it differently--which is something I tried to amplify with juxtapositions between Bartleby and her friends. Particularly James and Darya.

Max: Yes! Great point.

I’d love to hear a little more about that.

Courtney Floyd: Bartleby is sort of a super first-gen in that she’s not only the first person in her family to go to college and magic school, her parents are incredibly resistant to the idea. She’s struggling with exams. Darya, by contrast, is sailing through the program. And James comes from a long and distinguished line of necromancers.

Even Bartleby’s officemate, Mags, comes from an academic family. So there are these tiers of experience. Doorways into the academy, as it were. And for some of her friends and colleagues, it’s clear that going to magic school was a foregone conclusion.

They interact with the space differently, and bring very different assumptions about what’s expected and possible as a result.

You: I can see that even shaping Dorothe’s response to encountering candidacy-ending challenges—she doesn’t want to have to leave her program, but it’s possible for her, and that possibility even plays into some deep-seated doubts about her own right to be there.

Courtney Floyd: In a way, that would be the fulfillment of a very different kind of prophecy (familial expectations).

You: Hah! Exactly.

So much of this book circles back not just to space but to visibility, in many different senses: who’s seen, who’s unseen, who gets to be seen, who can see themselves, by what means is seeing controlled... What sort of world is it possible to see.

And with that—I’ve asked a lot of your Tuesday! Thank you so much for taking the time to chat about Higher Magic. I loved reading it. And, readers out there: go check it out!

Courtney Floyd: Thank you for a wonderful conversation! This was a blast!

Higher Magic is out October 7, and a very pleasantly autumnal read it will be.

And there’s still time to preorder Dead Hand Rule before it hits stands on October 28! Available wherever fine books are sold. I’ll have a launch event at Porter Square Books on October 28, cohosted by the sagacious and perspicacious Elizabeth Bear—and PSB is always a good go-to source for signed copies of my books, as (am I allowed to say this yet) the holidays creep up on us.

Speaking of that, some other recent reading: On Sunny Morraine’s rec I read Chris Hayes’ The Sirens’ Call, which went a bit deeper and more conceptual than I expected in a way that I liked and found useful—more on this later. And I’ve finally got around to Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time; I’m not done with it yet (plan to finish tonight) but I was grooving on it and enjoying the sensawunda of it all and found myself blindsided by one of the most profound moments of true, honest Good Parenting that I’ve ever read in science fiction. More about that later, too. But: give it a read, if you haven’t, and if you’re on the lower edge of the arachnophobia scale.