Caitlin Carpenter, an assistant editor at Tampa Review, interviewed speculative fiction writer Lauren C. Teffeau about her latest novella A Hunger with No Name. They discussed themes of generational storytelling, her creative inspiration, and delved into her writing process.
Caitlin Carpenter: Memory and spoken history are major aspects of your book. Can you talk about why you emphasized the importance of generational stories?
Lauren C. Teffeau: I think intergenerational knowledge transfer is one of the most important things humanity needs to figure out, because as I get older I see the same patterns, cycles, mistakes, happen over and over again. Another way of saying this is why does every generation have to learn the same lessons? Learning our histories is an obvious starting point, but it’s not enough if the current rise of fascism is any indication. Learning about something is also not the same as experiencing something directly, as every parent trying to impart their wisdom on their children can attest. What is the best way to share information to keep us growing as a species with each successive generation?
As a graduate student, and later as a social science researcher at a university, I studied how people adopt new technologies and utilize the online information sphere. The internet radically changed how people accessed and shared information, but now we are seeing that same technology become broken up, paywalled, siloed, and in some cases censored, making information harder to find, harder to share. This comes at a time when books are being banned, library budgets slashed, digital archives deleted, and expert voices drowned out by misinformation. We’re taught the truth will out at the same time as history is written by the victors. We are in the middle of an information war, and too many of us are too busy writing tweets and watching TikToks to take notice.
History is vast and growing at an exponential rate. It is no longer possible to learn it all in one go (and perhaps it never was), so omission, compression, and generalization are necessary. But who makes those decisions? The people with the power, privilege, and opportunity to do so. When I was writing A Hunger with No Name, I wanted to explore the idea of a society that had distilled their history down into lessons associated with constellations in the sky, a winnowing process that mirrored the winnowing of their society over the years. Then I wanted to compare that to another society that had access to a highly curated set of information, which would be given to them so long as they were interested in learning it. Would they actually seek it out or would they live their lives in disinterested comfort?
Which version of generational knowledge is more successful? Essential but limited information imparted through storytelling and stars? Or knowledge collected from a variety of sources over years but doled out through a mechanical process? I don’t think there is a definitive answer here, because context is everything, but I hope A Hunger with No Name emphasizes the need for cultural values to lead that discussion because without it, our history—even living history—is susceptible to erasure and appropriation by outside actors.
CC: You mention the Tiwa people in your Acknowledgments. Why was it important for you to do this? Has Tiwa culture influenced your perspective or writing?
LCT: Not directly, no. Like my main character Thurava, I live in a place that was not mine originally but is where I settled with my family. In the book, there is a whole legacy of the region the Astravans live in that was lost in the Great Scatter, just as there is a long history for the lands of the American West that is too often ignored by the dominant culture. I wanted to honor the high desert for the inspiration it provided to me for this book, but that means recognizing all parts of its fraught history and my position in them.
CC: What draws you to speculative fiction as a genre?
LCT: Speculative fiction stories have always captured my attention more completely than other types of stories. It’s a preference that started very early on. I can clearly remember seeing Darth Vader on a television rerun as a young girl and being overwhelmed by feelings of fascination and strangeness of something that was inherently compelling even if I didn’t quite understand what it was. As I grew older, fantasy and science fiction worlds were always the ones I gravitated toward and wanted to get lost in, whether it was books, movies, or video games. I’ve always had a vivid imagination, and this genre allows me to harness it without imposing any limitations on the types of stories I write. The fantastic is, to my mind, the ultimate expression of fiction (stories that are not true) that still speaks deeply to the human condition and in some cases holds truths even the most diligently accurate story cannot.
CC: What was the creative process like with this book? Was it different from your previous works?
LCT: Not every story is exactly the same, of course, but I seem to have developed two writing modes: possession projects and battle projects. Battle projects are usually idea- or world-forward in that I have an idea or story world that I want to explore in a narrative way. The trick is I must find the right point of view character to bring that idea or world to life. That process can often feel like a battle as I try to fit all the pieces together into a cohesive whole and find a compelling character to chart the way. My debut novel Implanted was like this, where I had a very ambitious idea for a world, but it took a while to settle on my main character.
In contrast, possession projects are story ideas that are more character-forward. And once I know the character, I usually have an idea of how the story should be structured to best capture their arc. Once those pieces are in place, I then feel compelled to start writing and figure out the rest along the way. That process often feels like the story is possessing me until I fully get it out of my system and onto the page. A Hunger with No Name was a possession story. I had a dream of a young woman staring off toward the horizon and being both horrified and fascinated by what she saw. When I woke, I started writing the story that ultimately became the book. I don’t often get inspired by my dreams at night and write instead from daydreams, but possession works in mysterious ways, I guess.
CC: When you were a younger reader, were there any books that helped you realize you wanted to be a writer?
LCT: I can’t think of any particular book, but I was a big reader at a very early age. I read Babar stories by Brunhoff, Holabird’s Angelina Ballerina series, and other classics over and over again. I distinctly remember being told that people actually wrote the books I got in vast quantities from the library, and that was a job someone could grow up to have. I wanted to be that person very much and spent the next twenty years or so trying to talk myself out of it since my parents impressed upon me it wasn’t a secure or practical career to have. Burnett’s The Secret Garden was another touchstone along with Stevenson’s Treasure Island. L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Alexander’s The Book of Three, Cooper’s Over Sea and Under Stone, and McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown were other favorites that came later. In middle school, I was also deeply affected by the idea of true names in Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea and how knowing the true name of things gave people power. I guess as a writer, I’ve taken that idea to a literal extreme.
CC: Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?
LCT: Don’t let other people talk you out of writing or else you will always be left wondering, and those wonderings will turn into the bitterest kind of regret. This bitterness is at work in the people who sneer at your dreams now, who delight in criticizing stories they could never hope to have written, who want to destroy your accomplishments so they need never face the fact they weren’t brave enough to honor their own creative impulses. Better to have tried and decided it’s not for you than not try at all.
If you do try, find a way to balance your creative practice with other aspects in your life. You need people in your corner (family, friends, colleagues) who know this is important to you. They don’t have to understand it, but they do need to respect it. Learning to write, learning to write professionally, learning to write well enough to be published, learning to write well enough to be published again and again… All of it will be much, much harder than you expect. Once you’ve developed your craft, perseverance and luck are huge factors in how your career evolves, and you can only control one of those. You have to make peace with the process of putting yourself out there again and again and knowing you will be rejected the vast majority of the time. There will be some points in your life where this is easier to do than others, and that’s okay. Find joy in the work because the rewards of publishing will not be enough to sustain you otherwise.
Lauren C. Teffeau is a speculative fiction writer based in New Mexico. Her novel Implanted (2018, Angry Robot) was shortlisted for the 2019 Compton Crook award for best first SF/F/H novel and named a definitive work of climate fiction by Grist. Her latest novella, A Hunger with No Name, an environmental fantasy, will be published on September 20, 2024 by the University of Tampa Press. She’s had over twenty short stories published in speculative fiction magazines and anthologies including the Sunday Morning Transport, DreamForge Magazine, and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Chromophobia: A Strangehouse Anthology by Women in Horror. To learn more, please visit her website.
Caitlin Carpenter is a junior at the University of Tampa majoring in English, an assistant editor at Tampa Review, and a member of UT’s chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, an international English honor society. In her spare time, she enjoys reading fantasy/science fiction, therapeutic housecleaning, and searching for the perfect poke bowl.