AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Alyssa Gonzalez
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
Today for our very first April interview, we’re talking to Alyssa Gonzalez, an autistic author of short stories.
Tell me about a recent work you released.
In fiction, I am primarily a short story writer, though I am also looking for a literary agent for a novel I just finished writing. My most recent accepted short story, “Light Was Her Burden,” is about the different kinds of strength a person can find in herself. It takes strength to hide, suppress, and keep secrets, strength that those of us who have lived that kind of life know can be used for other purposes as well. But this strength comes at a dreadful price, and an altogether different kind of strength comes from not paying that price anymore and choosing to live openly and honestly even in a hostile world. “Light Was Her Burden” explores these thoughts in a world populated by a mix of ordinary humans and “aberrations” with tentacle-based superhuman abilities.
“Light Was Her Burden” is among the short stories featured in Autonomous Press’s upcoming anthology, “Spoon Knife 5: Liminal.”
What is most difficult for you about writing?
I require a central emotional idea before I can write a new story. I use fantastical settings and conceits to tell stories about people, and that means that the core of my stories isn’t their magical or speculative elements, but the emotional conflict that drives my characters. “Light Was Her Burden” would not be the story it is without its aberrations, but the conflict at its core could be told in a purely human setting, and that is true of most of the best speculative fiction. So, when the urge to write strikes me, it goes nowhere without an emotional hook. I often feel like I retread the same emotional ground over and over again, because some emotions have become familiar and accessible to me, and I can get bored and frustrated with them. Finding new ground, or a new spin to place on the same central emotions, ends up taking up a lot of the planning phase of my writing process, to keep things interesting for me as well as my readers.
What one thing do you wish more speculative fiction readers knew about autism?
We care more than you could possibly understand. Popular culture paints us as cold, unfeeling, mathematical, invested in logic even in situations that make no sense without emotion, unable to understand the inner lives of others, and those portrayals are insulting. This is especially so when it is combined with the too-common trope of using autistic traits, or misreadings thereof, to characterize aliens, robots, reptilian beings, or magical creatures outside of human society, furthering the sense that people like me have no true place in human settings. For most autistic people, feeling is a far more intense experience than our allistic counterparts could hope to imagine, part and parcel of our intense sense of justice and fairness, and few attempts at bringing us into narratives bother to grapple with this fact.
Further to that point, we are not innately sexless, and characterizing autistic people as not understanding or desiring sex or intimacy is ultimately damaging. Although asexual and aromantic autistic people do exist, their overrepresentation in media depicting autistic people, and the presentation of their asexuality or aromanticity as key aspects of their autism, gives readers and viewers a skewed impression of what most of us are actually like.
Have you had trouble with the publishing industry because of being autistic, and/or because of being marginalized in another way?
I have trouble with every aspect of human life in which I cannot carefully avoid dealing with allistic people. The foremost difficulty is that allistic people have a habit of having one set of rules in writing and an altogether different set of rules in practice, and I had to learn the hard way, over and over again, that the written rules are at best a hint at what the real rules are. Think about how the official requirements for running for US president don’t outright state that more money than the average American will see in their entire lives is a requirement, but functionally, it is, or how the rules of most workplaces don’t say that attending after-work socials with one’s superiors is part and parcel of getting promoted, but it often is. These unwritten rules, that allistic people are usually loath to articulate or even truly acknowledge, put those of us who must get acquainted with new social settings before we understand them at a disadvantage, and navigating the process of getting published is little different. I have to ask myself in every situation I encounter: I followed the rules, but did I follow the rules?
Do you have any writing advice for other autistic people?
Most of my published work is for Autonomous Press, a small, independent publisher focused on writing that embraces, celebrates, and embodies the autistic experience. I am where I am today because I never stopped embracing my weirdness. My characters are autistic whether I want them to be or not, because in my world, allistic people are the aliens. You do not have to hide what makes you special to succeed, and your work will be better if you celebrate and embrace your strangeness. It might be harder to get published, but nothing worth doing is easy. The era of our visibility is just beginning, and the room for us in the published world is growing. Stay shiny.