In this episode of Strange Horizons at 25, Tim Melody Pratt walks us through their extensive oeuvre in the SH archives, recounts meeting their life partner through the magazine, and explains how it all intertwined together into a life and career bursting with magic.

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• Want to meet the team? Podcast editors Kat and Michael will be at World Fantasy Con, alongside Poetry Editor Vanessa Jae and Fiction/Articles Editor Joyce Ch'ng! Come to the first Strange Horizons Tea Party in years on Sunday at 11am, and celebrate our 25th anniversary with us.

Episode show notes:

• Read Tim Pratt's work in our archives.
• Visit their website, follow them on Bluesky, and check out their Patreon to read their monthly short stories.
• Buy Tim's latest book, Starfinder: Era of the Eclipse, or the one before that, The Knife and the Serpent.
• Find further links to Tim's work and other things mentioned throughout the transcript below.

Transcript

Kat Kourbeti: Hello Strangers, and welcome to Strange Horizons at 25, a 25th anniversary celebration of Strange Horizons. I'm your host, Kat Kourbeti, and it is my privilege today to welcome you to another episode that looks back at the history and impact of Strange Horizons on the speculative genres.

Today's guest is Tim Pratt, who has extensively published with us in the magazine's early days as far back as December of 2000, and has since gone on to win a Hugo Award for short fiction, garner many nominations for other awards such as the Astounding, the Rhysling, Nebula, World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Mythopoeic, and the Stoker, write and publish over 30 novels (!), and is now senior editor at Locus Magazine, among other things. It's great to have you here, Tim.

Tim Melody Pratt: It's great to be here. I love Strange Horizons. I'm happy to reminisce. Although 25 years can't possibly be right, because then I must be approaching 50, which that seems implausible. Just doesn't seem real.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I'm really not sure about the uh, timespace continuum on that one. Yeah, questions and concerns about all of that.

But first of all, I gotta say, you are such a prolific writer. I saw on Bluesky earlier today that you calculated, you've produced 286 stories.

Tim Melody Pratt: I actually looked up that number, because I knew Strange Horizons was one of my earliest sales, and the first story I had in Strange Horizons was the sixth story I had ever sold. Number six. And so then I was like "well, I wonder out of how many", because I hadn't really looked and I knew it was a bunch, I would've guessed a couple hundred. And then I went to ISFDB, the Internet Science Fiction Database, and pulled their thing down, kinda looked at it and you know, I could be off by a story or two, but it's around that. Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: That's a great and crazy number.

Tim Melody Pratt: A big number.

Kat Kourbeti: But what is your secret?

Tim Melody Pratt: So this is my hobby, right? Writing fiction has always been the thing I wanted to do. I was an outlier among my friends in high school and in college to an extent, because I knew what I wanted to do. I didn't know if I'd be able to do it, but I've known from first grade as soon as I figured out, "wait, books are not just objects that appear, right? People make these. This is a job you can have." Once I knew that it was the job I wanted, and short fiction is my favorite. I love short fiction. That's how I came up in the field. Strange Horizons was instrumental in that, for my career. I published short stories; novels for me have always been— well, they pay a lot better. I like them, I enjoy getting to hang out with characters and in a world, but in turn, as an artist and as a consumer of fiction, I love short stories more. So mostly it's just keeping at it.

And then 10 years ago, I realized I wasn't really writing short stories because novels pay better, right? So I was doing a lot of novel writing and I really missed it. I was only writing stories if an anthology editor or magazine editor solicited me to write something. I thought, "this is terrible, I wanna center short fiction in my life again. How do I make it something I will actually do instead of just thinking, oh, I should do this?" So I started a Patreon, and I'm not gonna do a big plug for my Patreon, but in May 2015, 10 years ago, I started a Patreon promising to publish a story a month, because if I had people waiting for it, if I had people giving me money, then it would be a deadline and I would actually do it. And so I got back and I just uploaded, a couple days ago, my 120th story for that Patreon. I've never missed a month.

So yeah, of that 286, 120 of them are stories for my Patreon.

Kat Kourbeti: Wow. It's great to have something to keep you going, and to always meet that promise to yourself and to your supporters on Patreon. And I hope we can learn from you today.

Tim Melody Pratt: I still publish in the magazines and anthologies too. The nice thing about the Patreon is as long as my readers are happy, I can do whatever I want. I can experiment with stuff, I can do more experimental fiction, can use it as a test kitchen for characters I think I might wanna write novels about. And they seem happy so far. Most of them have stuck with me all this time.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. That's great. Ooh, and we can chat a little bit about that journey of, "here's a short story that might then become something else." But I do wanna talk about your extensive presence on the Strange Horizons sphere.

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: You joined the Strange Horizons family very early. December of 2000 would've been like four months into the magazine's history.

Tim Melody Pratt: Sounds right.

Kat Kourbeti: So how did you come across the magazine in the first place?

Tim Melody Pratt: At the time I was really actively submitting stories. I had a story come out in a small, tiny magazine in 1999, and then I had a handful in like e-zines and stuff in 2000, before I had one published in Strange Horizons, which for it to come out in December means I submitted it months earlier. We did have an internet back then. It was different than the internet is now, but I knew a lot of young writers and a lot of people who have since gone on to be big writers. And I had my Clarion cohort— I went to Clarion in 1999, so we would all let each other know, "oh, there's a new market, oh there's a new magazine, they're looking for stuff."

And I was just writing a ton and had a ton of stories that I was sending out, 'cause I was just trying to break in. I wanted this to be my life and I was at the start, so I was generally pretty keenly aware of any new magazine that was paying decently, that seemed like it had legs. I mean, I wouldn't have imagined that Strange Horizons would still be standing 25 years later. Not anything against Strange Horizons, just what magazine from 2000, what e-zine, webzine, is still around? It's a very small list.

I was rapacious looking for markets and Strange Horizons turned out to be a very sympathetic market for me.

Kat Kourbeti: That's really cool. And what was your experience overall? You've published a variety of things with us. There's stories, there's poems, there's reviews, even. Do you have any stories to tell us from your Strange Horizons publication experience?

Tim Melody Pratt: Well, yeah, if I can maybe digress a little bit and give you a little meta, not just about the work but how I came to be sort of involved with the Strange Horizons sphere.

In March of 2001, so some months after I had first published something with the magazine, Strange Horizons hosted a brunch for Nalo Hopkinson, amazing writer, wonderful person, one of my favorite people in the field. Nalo was great. And I was living in Santa Cruz at the time, the brunch was in Oakland, and Nalo was gonna do a little hangout with people involved with the magazine, and then there was gonna be a reading and stuff, I think at Other Change of Hobbit, when it was still around. And they invited me because I was a contributor and 'cause I was vaguely in the area—you know, I was 90 minutes away, but I was close enough. I was down in Santa Cruz and I was like "well, do I want to go? Do I not want to go? I guess it would be fun."

I loaded up and I went up, and the brunch was held in the house in Oakland of a Strange Horizons staff member, their bookstore manager, and also a contributor who'd at the time written articles for the magazine—she went on to publish fiction there too—named Heather Shaw. And Heather opened the door to let me in. And, you know, this gorgeous, blue-eyed, incredibly harried woman opened the door, frantically running around trying to get everything ready and greeted me and welcomed me... I was just struck immediately. I don't know if it was love at first sight, but it was certainly, "I wanna get to know this person better" at first sight. And she barely noticed that I was there, 'cause she was hosting a brunch, right?

So we do the thing, we're running around, whatever. And it was a wonderful event, and Heather remained fascinating, what I could see of her, and I went home after the event and I went online and I read some of the stuff that she had written. She had an article on the same issue that I did about the works of Octavia Butler back in December, 2000. And so I wrote to Mary Anne Mohanraj, founder of Strange Horizons, who knew Heather and had been at the brunch and all that, and basically was just like, "so what's Heather's deal? Is she partnered up? Is she somebody that I could potentially ask out?" And Mary Anne was like, "as far as I know, you could ask her out."

So I wrote to Heather and I had read some of her work by then, so I was complimentary, and wanted to hang out. And eventually we did. We went on our first date to the Rose Garden in Oakland, and we read poetry to each other. I was 24, she was maybe 28. And, you know, I ended up moving in with her, I ended up living in that house where the brunch was hosted. Some years later, I proposed to her in the Rose Garden where we had our first date. We have now been married for—it'll be 20 years in October, and we have a kid who would not exist without Strange Horizons, a marriage that wouldn't exist without Strange Horizons, essentially the entire shape of my adult life.

How this relates more directly to Strange Horizons, Heather was on staff and she was friends with Jed Hartman, who had a long association with the magazine. She had been close friends for years with Mary Anne. By dating Heather, I was in this circle, right? I never got any special privileges though, let me tell you man—I got rejected a lot from Strange Horizons over the years. The stories they published are a tiny subset of the ones that I sent to them, believe me. But that's how I was so associated with it for so long. I would go to their tea parties when Susan Groppe was fiction editor and then later editor in chief. Susan was our pal, Susan lived around the corner from us. We would watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer together, right?

So Strange Horizons, a lot of those people—not all, 'cause it's a huge staff of course—but some of the people who were central in the early days were part of my social life and my social circle. And I was never on staff at the magazine, but I did contribute to just about every department.

Kat Kourbeti: I think this is the most incredible story we've had on the podcast so far. Holy moly.

Tim Melody Pratt: Without the magazine—honestly, if I had been like, "I don't feel like driving 90 minutes" that day in Santa Cruz, if I had just hung out and took a nap, which was my other option, uh, my life? Inconceivably different, I cannot even imagine where I would be. I really can't.

Kat Kourbeti: Goodness.

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah, you think of those little moments in life, right? Those little turning points, and that was probably the biggest turning point that I can point to in my life. So thank you, Strange Horizons, I'm glad you existed.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Wow. And to still be around 25 years later so we can hear the story...

Tim Melody Pratt: It's true. Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: That's incredible. First of all, meeting your partner already, in the field that you want to exist in, that must have felt like fate.

Tim Melody Pratt: It was fantastic. Certainly I had dated other people, (but) I had never dated a writer who was serious about it like I was. And you know, Heather has published a ton and she's done a lot more editing than I have. We ran a zine together for a while called Flytrap. The ability to entangle those parts of my romantic life and my committed partner life with my creative life was great. And she understands. We support each other creatively so much, we collaborate almost every year on a holiday story for PodCastle. We've been doing that for 10 years now.

Kat Kourbeti: Beautiful.

Tim Melody Pratt: It's great.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, that's really cool. I do think that having that supportive partnership, even if the other person's not a writer, is very important. But if they are as well, like they really get what is going on in your brain half the time when you're trying to problem solve or make something happen, and they can really be a part of that. And to know that you're collaborating on stuff every year, that's super cool.

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah. We did one story a few years back that we collaborated on with our son. You know, he had an idea for a story and we worked on it together and published that, and then LeVar Burton did it for his podcast. He picked it up. So my kid has all these bragging rights.

Kat Kourbeti: When you've got talented parents, it comes with the package. That's awesome.

I noticed that a lot of (your) Strange Horizons oeuvre at the very least, has mythology themes and religious themes. There's demons and angels and crossroads and bargaining for things, and personifications of concepts, and also an entire series of poems about mythical beasts called The Bestiary.

Tim Melody Pratt: Yep.

Kat Kourbeti: Can you tell me a little bit about what drew you to those themes at the time, and was there an attempt to create a collective body of work, or was that just what you were thinking about?

Tim Melody Pratt: I was really a mythology nerd always growing up, and in fifth grade I had a teacher give me a copy of Edith Hamilton's Mythology, and from there I was off. I read just tons of world mythology, I was always interested in that stuff, was always interested in personification of concepts and people being avatars, right? People being more than what they were, (that) was something that always really fascinated me.

That first story that was in Stranger Horizons, The Fallen and The Muse of the Street, was about a fallen angel and a demon who basically tried to screw with one of the nine muses, so obviously I was doing a very pantheistic kind of approach, right? All the gods exist if you believe in them, that kind of thing, which is something I got from reading contemporary fantasy and mythic fiction. Like, I was a huge Charles Delin fan growing up.

(What) I really have always loved in my default mode, and honestly as a writer, is intrusions of the magical into everyday life. Because I love that juxtaposition of, "I've got my drip coffee maker and my smartphone, and now there's an entity in my house", 'cause why would they go away if they've been around forever? They're just going to adapt, they're going to change.

I also in college dated a woman who was a pagan, who was a devotee of Aphrodite and who was a firm believer in the presence of the magical everywhere. I'm a materialist, I'm a skeptic, but I still love this person dearly. We just have different worldviews. But she talked a lot about the presence of the magical everywhere in the everyday. She's like, "you don't have to knock wood for good luck, because now the spirits dwell in everything. Sure, they used to be in the trees, but they've had to adapt like pigeons to urban areas. You can knock on whatever, knock on a concrete pillar, there's something dwelling within it." Which was a worldview that I also wrote some poems about, I think not in Strange Horizons, but I wrote a little bit about her worldview, I think in Star*Line.

So that has been and remains an ongoing fascination for me, just ways to sort of interrupt everyday reality. And that's a lot of what my stories in Strange Horizons were. I won't jump ahead and talk about other ones.

Kat Kourbeti: I was going through different points in your Strange Horizons journey and I was just noticing how there was a pervasive (theme), and that always fascinates me with writers who keep coming back to something that fascinates them and that they're interested in. I think we all do that to a certain extent, whether it's conscious or no, but I think for you it was probably a lot more consciously, "I want to explore this, I want to see how that would work", maybe.

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah, I would read mythology, or I would read Borges, I would read the Book of Imaginary Beings, I would read Gustav Davidson's Dictionary of Angels, which is an amazing book about angels and fallen angels. My first thought would always be, "what would it be like if I encountered one of them in the streets in Santa Cruz or whatever. How would that feel?"

In my fiction, I like to write about psychologically realistic people dealing with impossible things, that's really the thing that interests me. I think it's an interesting way to reveal character, because I'm a very character-driven writer. So what I like to do is make a character who I think is plausible, and then present them with something that's a real break with their understanding of reality, usually. Sometimes they know about magic already, but often I really like to do that abrupt confrontation with something impossible and unexpected, and then see what the character does. That's how I write, mostly.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, Little Gods—

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: —struck me, 'cause that kind of captures that theme. It's about a man who loses his wife basically, and then in the process of grief becomes aware of this other cast of spirits and beings and gods that exist all around, that normally people don't see. It's a really moving and very powerful exploration, I thought, of grief and of how that particular person deals with that, but also I really liked the mundane personification of these gods and concepts that can exist in various pantheons and religions and spiritual beliefs across the world. That theme just keeps coming back in your work, which I find very interesting.

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah. Some of that came from The Dictionary of Angels, which is fascinating because there were angels for everything. There'd be an angel of 4:00 PM on Tuesday. And so I had gotten to thinking about pantheistic belief systems in which there are tons of gods, and not even just, "oh, there's the family on Olympus". There could be a god of this particular bend in this river, something that has some magical powers, but it's not all powerful, right? But it has influence within its sphere. So I thought that was neat.

I had a really bad breakup and I was thinking about the messy, uneven grieving process and I thought, "wouldn't it be interesting to personify the stages of grief as deities? Like you're actually talking to the Little God of Bargaining, dealing with the oppressiveness of Little God of Depression..." And obviously the stages of grief are kind of simplistic. People do go through most of them, you just don't go through them in the progression, right? You don't go through them in order. And in the story I simplified and ran through them in order. But that's where that came from. I could have just written about somebody who was really sad about the abrupt, violent death of a loved one, but I'm a fantasy writer. So I figured out a way to externalize that.

And that story was hugely consequential for me. I think it might've been the first major award nominee to come out of Strange Horizons. It was a Nebula finalist, which launched my career in a lot of ways. Like my first story collection is called Little Gods; that was how I was able to sell it, because I had a story that had gotten some attention.

And that also, I like to think, helped raise the profile of Strange Horizons a little bit. Some of the people in SFWA, at the Nebulas, who maybe were less aware of this new magazine—'cause it was, what, 2002? So it wasn't a brand new magazine, but it was its first couple years—maybe some more people noticed it because of that.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I think so. And it's interesting how the history of the magazine just—there's staff turnover of course, and there's some awards and there's a constant churn, but those kind of pivotal moments, like here's this... that's really awesome, that we were instrumental in that for you, and in so many ways, dear God!

Tim Melody Pratt: I always say me and the magazine came up together. Strange Horizons and I entered the field essentially at the same time, and we grew in prominence together. I got a lot more outta my association with them than they did with me, I'm sure. But we did, we sort of rose at the same time. And I would go—you know, they would have the tea parties at conventions (like) WisCon and stuff, and I would go and I would take part in that stuff. I would do the group readings. I believed in the magazine and I loved the magazine.

And as the years went by and the editors started to be people who I hadn't been to parties at their houses, once it expanded—this is good for the health of the magazine, but I became less centrally associated with the magazine, and I haven't published there in some years. Again, most of my short fiction these days is in my Patreon, I'm just not submitting a ton to magazines. If I were, I would still be submitting to Strange Horizons, 'cause I still think they do beautiful work.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, thank you. Yeah. I mean, someday, maybe?

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Never say never!

Tim Melody Pratt: I'm hoping to. I have a story coming out in Uncanny later this year, which is a delight 'cause I don't publish much fiction in the magazines, and I'm like, I miss being part of that conversation. It's just finding time to do a dozen stories for my Patreon and then extra stories too.

Kat Kourbeti: And the novels, and your day job...

Tim Melody Pratt: And the occasional novel. Only one or two a year. Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Only! My goodness. Give us some of that juice, please! Like, what's going on up here?

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah. Don't have other hobbies. Sit in your house and type a lot. That sadly is the secret.

Kat Kourbeti: And would you say you're still writing about those themes, and those mythology things now? 'Cause I know you also write a lot of science fiction, like more "traditional", quote unquote, science fiction. What sort of themes are you drawn to nowadays?

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah. About 2017, 2016, I thought it would be fun to write a space opera, so then I became a science fiction writer. I did a space opera series, The Axiom Series, that did pretty well. And then I did some multiverse stuff, which I was doing in Strange Horizons way back in the day, like God of the Crossroads, right, multiverse story. I was always interested in that sort of thing. Even back then, I did a little science fiction—Artifice and Intelligence is one of my favorite stories I had in Strange Horizons. It's about AIs, not in the sense of chatbot LLMs, but in the sense of true artificial intelligences. I mean, it's science fantasy, let's say, it's got ghosts and stuff in it too, but—

Kat Kourbeti: The line in that one actually, that a programmer summons a real ghost for that to be the "ghost in the machine", which is the AI concept of yore... I just thought that was a beautiful conceptualization again of something living, with the tech.

Tim Melody Pratt: Well, the collision of the modern and the ancient is something that I have a lot of fun with. That story was neat; Heather Shaw, my wife and I used to give each other little challenges to write stories, and we would give each other a content requirement and a structural, like a form requirement. And it would be like, "you have to write a story about goblins and it has to be in present tense" or whatever. Just something to put the net up and give you some constraints.

And I still remember that story, she said "six scenes, three AIs". So my rule was I had to do it in six scenes, and I had to include three different artificial intelligences. Probably it's the most successful story that I did based on that little game we used to play back in the day.

Though you did ask a question; in my short fiction, I still do a ton of mythic stuff. My novels lately have been mostly more science fictional multiverse stuff, space opera stuff. But my love for bringing magic into the everyday world has not gone away, and I would say the vast majority of my short fiction is still that sort of thing.

Kat Kourbeti: Fascinating. What you said about the game that you and your wife played, (is) an interesting thing about the inherent creativity that exists within limitation. How do you start your stories—here's the question within that: do you set yourself parameters for your short fiction, and you say "I wanna do this and this, maybe with a sprinkling of this"? I'm sure that there's a variety of situations, but is there like a process you go through when you generate ideas?

Tim Melody Pratt: Occasionally I will come at something with a structural constraint as my basic idea. There was a time that I wrote a story that was based on a daily gratitude journal. "Three things I'm grateful for", I did a story in the form of that. I did a story for an anthology that was in the form of a Kickstarter campaign created by a mad genius who wanted to destroy the world. So occasionally, you know, there will be some structural stuff like that.

There are other writers who do that better than me. Nick Mamatas often does really interesting formal constraint kind of stories. Another person who, as I recall, had some association with Strange Horizons.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah!

Tim Melody Pratt: So [shows phone to Kat]—this is my notes app with my "story stuff" notes, which as you can see, go back a while. So whenever I have a thought or an idea or an image or a "wouldn't it be cool", or I watch a movie and I think they didn't end it the way I wish I would have, or they didn't have a twist that I was hoping that they would, I will make a note. And sometimes they're a character in a situation, sometimes they are literally a line. I think I have one that just says "enragement ring", which I don't know what that is at all, but at some point it'll probably end up in a story. And so I just, I have these little things I jot down and every month I go and I scroll through it and I see if any of them are ripe or if I feel like any of them have become something that can be a whole story, or I'll take two ideas and I'll stick them together.

Like I had a little story note that was about "what if you went over to a guy's house to hook up with him and there was just a giant f***ing pit in the floor"—sorry, I don't know if we curse on this podcast. But you know, what if you hooked up and then you're snooping on the way to the bathroom and you open a bedroom door and there's just a huge bottomless pit, right? Wouldn't that be weird? And then I was like, "that's not a whole story." And then I had this other note that was about epistemology and eschatology and the end of the world and apocalypse. And if you're a materialist and you don't believe in the afterlife, then you can never know that you are dead because by the time you're dead, there's nobody to know that you're dead. Wouldn't the end of the world be the same way if everybody's gone? If there's no world anymore, nobody can know it's the end of the world. You can only know it's the pre-end of the world. And I'm like, I could have, as a freshman, gotten high and really talked about this for hours. So I jammed those together into a short story called The Pit and The Epistemologist, that I published on my Patreon last month.

Kat Kourbeti: Very cool!

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah, I've been making up stories my entire life. I get ideas everywhere, I have more than I could ever possibly write. And sometimes they're novels and sometimes they're flash pieces and sometimes they're novellas. It all depends. Occasionally I'll have a really silly implausible idea that'll fall apart completely if anyone interrogates it, but I can get away with it for 800 words, right?

Like I wrote a story about Mothman, the cryptid, (who) appears as a herald of disaster, usually there's a bridge collapse. There was a bunch of fires in Russia. I was like, "this would be a useful alert system if you could clone Mothman, and you could have thousands of Mothmans distributed across the world, and then if they would start appearing and saying cryptic things and calling you on the phone and mumbling about various disasters, this would be great". It would give you some warning, right?

This is a stupid idea. You can't write a novel about it. But I wrote a flash piece about it!

Kat Kourbeti: I could stretch this into a novel. Here's my problem: I can't keep things short.

Tim Melody Pratt: Ah, sure.

Kat Kourbeti: To save my actual life. I come up with a concept that I only want to do a short story for, and before I even know it, I've written 8,000 words, I haven't even gotten to the bit that I wanted to write the story about, and I'm like, "oh no, I think it's another book".

So you tell me this—challenge accepted! I could write you an outline.

Tim Melody Pratt: My natural length starting out was novelettes, right? Gimme 10,000, 15,000 words. Those were harder to sell.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Tim Melody Pratt: So I trained myself to write 5,000 words, 3000 word stories. I would set myself this limit, and then I struggled, but I learned—that was really crucial for my development—to vary my toolkit. I don't always need 15,000 words. Like it doesn't really need this little subplot or whatever.

Kat Kourbeti: Okay. And because you do this at least once a month, if not more, is there like a shorthand you've developed for yourself in finding that crux of a story? The twist ending, the thing that will kind of give it its potent jab that will leave the reader thinking about it?

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah. Well, when I went to Clarion in '99 one of my teachers was Tim Powers, who's an amazing writer. And Powers talked about "my lunch lady is a werewolf" stories, right? You have a story and it's about how you find out your lunch lady is a werewolf, great. Why? Who cares? Why is that important to the character? Why is that important to whoever discovers it? Why is it important to the lunch lady? What sort of thematic resonance or weight does it have, what are you trying to say? Are you trying to say something?

This is not Powers, this is me: are you trying to say something about the conflict between the wild and savage and the institutional constrained nature of school? You have to be saying something. So I will have a cool idea and then I will be like, "what does this have to do with anything? Like, why do I care?" And because I'm a character-driven writer, it's enough for me. If it changes something in the character's life or their point of view or their understanding of the world, that's enough for me.

So the classic thing to figure out, like what character you should write is, "who is going to suffer the most in this situation? Who's gonna have the hardest time?" If you send a person through a portal to another world, you can send a survivalist who is incredibly well-equipped with all of the material things that he will need to live in this fantasy world. But isn't it more fun to send somebody whose only skillset is making cupcakes? And then have them figure out how they can apply this skillset in a way that will keep them alive.

Kat Kourbeti: Ooh.

Tim Melody Pratt: It's just more interesting.

Kat Kourbeti: Love that.

Tim Melody Pratt: You can have The Cupcake Chronicles. That's free. That's for you.

Kat Kourbeti: Isn't there a T. Kingfisher book about a baker witch and her familiar is a sourdough starter? (It's called A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking.)

Tim Melody Pratt: Oh, yeah. That rings a bell.

Kat Kourbeti: It's absolutely doable. I can see that being a thing.

My other question is around all of these different formats that you've written throughout your career and still are; you started writing reviews pretty early on as well. Do you think that your reviewing has contributed to your fiction writing in some way? Or do you see that as a separate world?

Tim Melody Pratt: So when I went to Clarion, we critiqued each other's stories. And the reason you do that is not because your critiques as someone who knows nothing and is a new writer yourself are going to be really helpful for the other writers. If they are, that's great, that's a nice side effect. The point is to teach you to critique your own work. The point is to let you develop that toolkit so that you can turn it on your own fiction. That's why you do it. It's not a workshop to make people into editors, to edit other people's work, the point is so that you can do it to your own work.

So in the same way that that helped my writing, reviewing certainly helped my writing. And I'm not a critic really, I'm a reviewer, right? Like say, I liked this, this is why. Try to give you a sense of the sort of things I like and the sort of things I'm just irrationally biased about. Like, I hate science fiction novels that have a big time jump partway through. You know, if we're like, "now it's 30 years later", I get mad and it's irrational. There are great books that do it, I just don't like it. So I try to be upfront about that sort of thing.

But yes, by reading critically—'cause even if you are just kind of, "I like this or don't" reviewer, you still have to have critical faculties about it. It helped me see things, especially in my novel writing, that I was like, "that's a neat effect. I'd like to figure out how they achieve that". And the cool thing about books is it's not like a stage magician doing a trick where you can't see the wires. It's all on the page. Every single thing the writer does is just words on the page; that means you can figure it out. It might be hard, it might be subtle, but you can study the text and figure out every single trick that they pulled, every technique that they used, and then you can steal it and you can use it in your own work.

So reviewing helped me develop that kind of critical faculty and that ability to go in and pillage other people's books. There's so many writers I've stolen stuff from: Joe Lansdale, Joe Abercrombie, Joanna Russ, Connie Willis... Tons of authors have things where I can point to my work and say, "I got this because I stole it from them."

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Tim Melody Pratt: To be more generous, I noticed the work of other artists and figured out how I could incorporate those techniques into my own work. Van Gogh didn't own those wild brush strokes, they just came to be one of the defining aspects of his work. Yeah, so reviewing did help. Mostly, truthfully, it was a way to get paid to read books. I mostly reviewed books that I was gonna read anyway, and hey, if you wanna gimme some money, also, I can tell you what I thought about it.

Kat Kourbeti: And at what point did the reviewing turn into a more serious position with Locus?

Tim Melody Pratt: I worked at Locus before I was a reviewer. I started there as a lowly editorial assistant in 2001. Around August 2001 I started there, so I'm coming up on 24 years this year. I'm 48, so yeah, half my life. And I just told my boss, who at the time was the founder Charles Brown, "I would love to review." And he is like, "we have good reviewers". You know, "who are you? You are not qualified to review for us."

Because I was nobody. I had published some tiny small press stories at the time, I did not impress Charles particularly. But then there was—I can't remember what it was, if it was small press horror or if it was a poetry collection or something, 'cause I read that stuff anyway—he was like, "okay, you can review this, 'cause nobody else is going to", and then I did an okay job, so I got more gigs.

I've always been a very occasional kind of random reviewer for Locus, and in recent years I have not reviewed much of anything anywhere. But it's something that I enjoy, mostly because I like the chance, the excuse to sit down and think deeply about why I liked or disliked something that I read.

Now I do these little tiny paragraph long capsule reviews, like for my Patreon. Just free, every couple months I'll be like, here's what I read, because I don't have as much time. I'm doing books, I'm doing stories, so I have less time to review. But yeah, I do enjoy it. It was meaningful to me. And again, there were times early on when, like a review for Strange Horizons, that was how I bought baby formula, right? Like—

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Tim Melody Pratt: It was nice to have sympathetic markets.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, for sure. Since then has it turned into anything kinda longer form, with the nonfiction?

Tim Melody Pratt: No. I'm really not much of a nonfiction writer, truthfully, like I don't think I'll ever write a book about writing. I know a lot of writers do, and I've read tons of them and found 'em useful, but every time I think about doing it, I just think of all the things I don't know.

I did some teaching about a year ago at Seton Hill, the popular fiction MFA program, Nicole Peeler runs it, and Jaye Wells is one of the teachers there. Like they have just a ton of great professors and they do genre fiction, they do romance, science fiction, fantasy, mystery. And they asked me to come as a visiting professor and do a thing, and as part of that, I had to teach a three hour class to grad students, and I had to do this two hour talk, and that's some of the most long form writing about nonfiction work that I've done in years. I had to really sit down and be like, "okay, what am I writing about? What do I think about these things?" And I taught character-driven fiction and point of view, 'cause those are the things I'm a really big nerd about.

Kat Kourbeti: It was Arkady Martine that I heard this from, but she said that she got it from someone at Viable Paradise—but she once told me that every writer gets one thing in their toolbox for free.

Tim Melody Pratt: That might be an Elizabeth Bear line!

Kat Kourbeti: I think it's a common adage in the genre writing circles at least, but I first heard it from Arkady Martine and I told her thank you, because it can really help you recognise what you're good at. And I would say yeah, no doubt about it, your free thing in the toolbox is characters and point of view and that sort of thing. Like, you can really make people feel real.

Tim Melody Pratt: Thank you. People compliment my plotting and I'm like, I don't plot, I create characters and then I put 'em in a situation. I see what they do, if they don't struggle enough, I make the situation worse for them, or I take another character and I have them have diametrically opposed goals and I bang them together and see what happens. That's how I write a lot of my novels. Or I'll throw in a third character with a completely perpendicular thing and just watch them intersect, watch them crash, and just everything blows in different directions, and that's my plot.

Ray Bradbury said that "the plot is the footprints of your characters leave in the snow as they run to and from their various adventures", and that's always been my approach. In my short fiction, sometimes there's not anything you could even recognize as a plot. I have been told, as some people have noted about my work, but—

Kat Kourbeti: It depends on the length and it depends on a lot of things, right? What you're trying to do with something.

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Doesn't always have to have a arc or a beginning, middle, end in that sense.

Tim Melody Pratt: A lot of this stuff is very Western story forms, and there are other ways to tell stories. This is just the sort of conflict-driven thing where a character wants something and they have to overcome struggles to get it or not get it, or discover that it's not what they wanted at all, which is usually the better ending. It's a dominant paradigm in our culture, but it's not the only way to tell a story.

Kat Kourbeti: A hundred percent. And so then my question is about your poetry.

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: 'Cause poetry is not the most common thing, I think, for a lot of people, especially in genre, and you've done a lot of it. What's your general approach to writing poetry? A lot of it is free verse, I think, from you that I've read. How do you think about poems when you're starting to write something?

Tim Melody Pratt: Absolutely. I love poetry. I was a fan of poetry from a pretty young age. In college I studied it a lot, I was a creative writing major. My thesis was not fiction, my thesis was a poetry thesis. I also was a TA for two years for a poetry class that was taught in the interdisciplinary studies department; it was a combination of Jungian psychology and poetry, because it was about going to the well of images that we have collectively in our culture and just as humans, and how you can draw on that stuff to get more power in your poetry. So that was great, it's taught by a guy named Jay Wentworth who's still around, and I hung out with him a couple years ago. Again, he was a great poet, one of my favorites, and he taught me a lot about how poetry works on a mechanical level, like how you make that stuff work. You know, enjambment and assonance, and I learned all of the metrical feet, like he taught me how to scan poetry, all this stuff that I had studied, but he was the first one who was really like, "this is how it works. This is how you disassemble the engine to see how the parts move." So once I had that tool set, it was just practice. And I have written tons of poetry, I've published a fair bit but I've written so much more than I've ever published.

And then I did some teaching, which is also a great way. When I was in college I did some teaching for mostly retired seniors, it was continuing ed stuff, and it was me and this other writer named Sean, who's—I cannot remember his last name, he was an Irish guy, Bostonian, Irish guy—and Sean would do the sort of like, "this is how you write from the well of your fury and this is how you dig into your childhood trauma to find the stuff to write about." And I would be like, "this is how slant rhyme works," right? He would do the passion stuff and I would do the nuts and bolts, "this is how you make this work," and that was how we divied it up.

But I love poetry. Like, I'm looking right now at my poetry shelf and there's so many writers I love, Sexton and Ellen Bass and Sharon Olds and just writers upon writers who did work that was so meaningful to me. And I still read a fair bit of contemporary poetry, I still go through the many used bookstores that we have here in the East Bay, and I'll browse through the poetry and pick things up.

Speculative poetry, obviously, just because almost everything I write has speculative elements. Even my thesis in college, about half of it had some sort of fantasy element. And often it would be material that I could have done a story about, or it would be material I did do stories about, but then I had a different way of accessing it. I actually won a Rhysling award from the SFPA for a poem called 'Soul Searching' that was in Strange Horizons, which is about a wizard who hid his soul away in an egg or a stone, so he could be immortal, but then he lost his humanity. It had been so many centuries, and in the story, it's sort of ambiguous: is this just a crazy person, is this a mentally ill guy who is telling these stories that aren't true? Or was he really a sorcerer whose humanity has gone away and he can't find his soul, he can't figure out where he found it?

And that was something I then wrote a book called 'Heirs of Grace' that had essentially that same premise. It was about a sorcerer who had lost his humanity by putting his soul away. That year I also won second place in that category in the SFPA, I think for a different poem that was in Strange Horizons. I can't remember, but that was cool. I still have the little plaque. What is it? The Nebulas are adding a poetry category?

Kat Kourbeti: Well there's a special Hugo this year, yeah, and we have two on the ballot. (In fact, one of them won the award!)

Tim Melody Pratt: I was thinking I need to write poetry again. I still write it some. I need to publish poetry again, now there's new worlds to conquer.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I find it really interesting that you return to perhaps even the same source material or source idea, and approach it from a different angle for a poem.

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah. Often the poem comes first. I'll try out this idea and be like, "oh, this is neat". God of the Crossroads, there's stuff in there that came up in tons of my fiction later.

Kat Kourbeti: We will link to all of that in the show notes for people to peruse. So then I suppose I wanna dive into the Beastiary collection of poems—

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: That's on Strange Horizons. So these are all different mythical creatures that you're describing. Where did that idea come from?

Tim Melody Pratt: Jorge Luis Borges, Book of Imaginary Beings, a fascinating book describing mostly things that Borges made up. They're stories in a sense, right? They're prose and they're short, but they don't have any of the sort of shape of traditional stories. They just very poetically describe these strange, imaginary things. And I mean, also, I'm like an old D&D nerd. I would look at monster manuals and beastiaries, and I always thought that stuff was cool. I loved medieval beastiaries.

I was in Europe a couple years ago and I got to go to like the Prado and some of the museums in Spain, and my favorite thing is looking at people who painted a lion based on having had a lion described to them once. Or there's a great painting commissioned by a guy who went overboard as a cabin boy and got attacked by a shark, and he commissioned multiple paintings of this experience, and the people painting the shark had never seen a shark before, right? These are sharks with like nostrils just above the mouth, like just weird things. So that kind of thing always interested me, and cryptids. I love cryptids. I've written about Bigfoot, I've written about Mothman, I've written about Batsquaches, the Goatman... the stuff I find really interesting, like something that you glimpse and then you make up what it's about.

So I had been interested in mythological creatures and I'd written stories about Behemoth and Leviathan and stuff like that, and the one that I remember really well (A Bestiary: Engulfer) is about the Norse dragon The Corpse Eater, the one that gnaws on the roots of the world tree. There's a part in that poem where it talks about how every person is a world, there are monsters underneath the world... by the transitive property, right, there are monsters within you. And so dealing metaphorically, psychologically, with stuff about just being a person in the world and struggling with things through the lens of these mythological creatures—'cause this stuff, people make this stuff up, right? And there's a reason that we personify the danger of dying in a shipwreck. "Oh, there must be monsters. There must be a Kraken. There must be Leviathan." Or that we imagine the universe started as a droplet of water that had a fish swimming in it, whatever it is. There's some sort of psychological depth to this.

And so I would just take those images and really just reflect on what do they make me think about in my own life? I think there's one about Spiderwoman (A Bestiary: Ts'its'tsi'nako), about a figure that moves between two worlds, which is something that I thought about a lot.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I like that first line, actually: "Imagine a woman, imagine a spider. Imagine the woman is a spider."

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah. The sort of Spiderwoman imagery. You know, and looking back, these are not cultures that were my culture. Maybe I shouldn't have been quite so cavalier with them. I used to write a lot more about living religions than I do now, treating them mythologically, which in retrospect is not the most respectful thing. In my defense, I was 25 most of these times, and was just gobbling up everything I could.

But the notion of this mythical spider moving through different worlds as one, that's always been very powerful to me, because as an artist, you get to do that. As an artist, you can find a place in every strata of society. You are equally at home in a squat where people are super high doing a poetry reading that nobody knows about, as you are in the house of the chairman of the NEA or whatever. And I'm like a poor trailer park kid from Eastern North Carolina, but I've gotten to experience all kinds of things because I'm an artist. It's enabled me to have access to all these strata, and I belong in all of them. Some of them I'm more comfortable in than others, but as an artist, you belong and you should see as much of it as you can, because it enriches and enlivens your art.

So specifically that poem, that stuff was on my mind. I don't even know how much comes across in that poem about that, but that's the sort of stuff I was thinking about.

Kat Kourbeti: Generally speaking, I think that people should be able to write about cultures and places that aren't their direct experience as long as it's well researched and respectful and done well. I think that should be completely open for people to do. It's when that doesn't happen where you run into caricatures and harmful stereotypes and things that are just like, why do that? And I don't think that any of the poems that we publish certainly would do that, 'cause otherwise I don't think we would've taken them.

Tim Melody Pratt: Strange Horizons has always been good about this stuff, yeah. I don't think I did a particularly bad job, but I—as a person who it will not shock you to hear is not strictly gender conforming, seeing well-meaning people who aren't steeped in a particular culture or, say, subsect of society, still blundering around and doing stuff accidentally—I'm very aware of the things that I don't know. So I'm more cautious now than I used to be about that stuff.

There are probably very few religions that are really safely dead, right? There are still people out there worshiping Zeus and Aphrodite. But as (far as) Western sort of cultural history, I'm happy I can write about the fae folk, right? I have been to London once, but my forebears are from there; I have connections to Appalachia where a lot of those stories have transmogrified. So there are things that I feel more comfortable talking about than others, but no, I don't think I was particularly monstrous in writing about monsters.

Kat Kourbeti: You did write, what was that other poem? Making Monsters, from 2004. It just fascinates me that you kept coming back to the Beastiary concept. Did you submit each poem as a new thing? Like, "hey, I've got this new idea?"

Tim Melody Pratt: I think I had sent a couple and then was like, "oh, I think these are connected." And so then every time I wrote something that was like that, I was like, "hey, do you guys want this as part of the thing?" And I can't remember how many there were ultimately, but yeah, I didn't intend it to be a series, it was an emergent property. "Oh, I keep writing these poems about monsters. Wouldn't it be neat if we did them as a suite?"

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I think I'm counting seven on this list. Yeah, that's not a bad number at all.

Tim Melody Pratt: That's good. Pretty solid. Could have done a whole book! I was so busy and I still am busy, but, oh, maybe someday.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Do other works of yours that say, aren't strictly speaking in this collection, fall within that thematic scope?

Tim Melody Pratt: Probably. I would need to look at a list of my poems to say which ones, but yeah, I imagine there were times Strange Horizons didn't want something that it went somewhere else. Wouldn't shock me.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. So perhaps a book is not that far off. And dare I ask, what are you working on now?

Tim Melody Pratt: Well, right this minute I'm on deadline for a roleplaying game tie-in novel. My rule for taking work-for-hire jobs is, "would my 14-year-old self have been delighted by this?" And they are, truthfully, a lot of fun, and the fans are a ton of fun too. And it introduces my work to a lot of readers who might not otherwise read my work.

I did a Forgotten Realms novel back in 2012 and a thing I made up ended up in Baldur's Gate 3, in the video game, which I didn't know until somebody pointed it out to me. But a drug I invented in that book is a thing that gives you a little boost and then messes you up. That was fun, that's my immortality. But I have been doing some writing for a company called Aconyte that does gaming tie-ins, and I am doing writing for Paizo that does Pathfinder and Starfinder, so I have a long association with them. So right now that's the project, but that's due in a month, and after that's turned in, I'll take a couple weeks and play video games.

But then the next thing is a novel called The Jewel in the Comet that is a sequel to my book, The Knife and the Serpent, which came out last year, which is a multiverse space opera, kinky genderqueer adventure novel. I'm super excited about that. I have notes and notes that I'm really excited to turn into an actual novel. So that's the next big thing. Otherwise just yeah, writing stories.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. So is there anything super recent or something that's coming up soon that you would like to plug or promote?

Tim Melody Pratt: Knife in the Serpent is the latest, original thing. That was last June, I think, is when it came out. I had a series for Arkham Horror, the Lovecraftian Game, a trilogy called The Sanford Files. The second book, Herald of Ruin, came out last year, and The Twilight Magus, I think they just did a cover reveal for this week. And John Coulthart, the World Fantasy Award-winning artist, has done all the covers and they have this beautiful, uniform, very baroque look. It's the twenties, so it has this very art deco feel. I love the covers so much. So that's coming out, and then in summer I have a Starfinder book, so it's spaceships and elves. It's great fun to jam that stuff together.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I've played a bit of Pathfinder. And I've definitely played Arkham Horror, so I will look all of those things up 'cause they're very relevant to my interests.

Tim Melody Pratt: They're fun. I'm a board game player, I'm a role-playing gamer from way back when, so when I got the opportunity to do that stuff for Aconyte, I was pretty excited to do so.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I do like what you said: "would my 14-year-old self be happy to read this?" Such a big part of finding the joy in things, and writing what makes the most kind of inner you happy. Ah!

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah. Absolutely. Ideally it should be fun. It's also work, I take it seriously.

Kat Kourbeti: For sure.

Tim Melody Pratt: These bills plump up the kids' college fund, which is coming. But yeah, I mean, I say no to jobs that I think won't be fun. Well, unless they offer to pay me a lot.

Kat Kourbeti: I think that's fair.

Tim Melody Pratt: You find a balance.

Kat Kourbeti: So thank you so much for spending some time with us and telling us all about your Strange Horizons journey, and my goodness, your marriage, your life. Thank you for being a part of Strange Horizons for so long!

Tim Melody Pratt: Thank you for being part of keeping it going. That's great.

Kat Kourbeti: Thank you so much, and we'll look forward to all of your future work.