“Terrifying and necessary” – A Women’s Day Interview with Emily Weedon

All Lit Up: Congratulations on your book! We’d say that Autokrator is simultaneously a gripping page-turner and a difficult read, in the sense that the horrors imagined within feel very possible in times like these. What led you to start imagining a world where women have been long subjugated to a severe non-human status?

Emily Weedon: I don’t actually see my book as such a difficult read! I see most of all the love of Cera for her child, I see the bonds between women. I see the hope for things to be different and I see people struggling to love and live, no matter what the world throws at them. Still, terrifying and difficult is how many of the world’s greatest dystopias are regarded. Terrifying and necessary. 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm, A Clockwork Orange, The Road, Brave New World, The Marrow Thieves. I’m proud to wade into the terrifying machinery of some of humanity’s worst instincts. I sometimes get told “you write a lot of violence, for a woman” and I think there is always a suggestion that I should not be writing dark or scary stuff. To which I have to say, living as a woman is scary, in real life. And Frankenstein, one of my book’s great-grandparents, was written by a woman and is the great-grandmother of terror!

One look at the world around, including the level of individual families ravaged by domestic violence, women the world over still suffer from being second class citizens at best, and victims of domestic violence and femicide at the worst on an individual and societal level. I was dismayed, over the years while I crafted my debut novel to see that anything terrifying or shocking I came up with was generally topped by world events happening in real time. The political shifts in various countries, especially the US, show us that we are far from parity, far from acceptance. We are in fact slipping. I suppose the short answer is, I looked around me to create this world.

All Lit Up: There are certainly other books in this feminist, dystopian canon – thinking of The Handmaid’s Tale as the most obvious example – but Autokrator goes “darker,” both in the sheer scale of the women’s oppression and the length of time it’s been going on – centuries. What happens to a narrative when something has “always been” instead of a recent past remembered?

Emily Weedon: What a debt we owe to Atwood, and what an excellent question. Atwood’s world in The Handmaid’s Tale does indeed show the outcome of fairly recent events which people very much like us witnessed happening, like frogs in gradually heating up water, while Autokrator shows a world that has been stuck in a horrific dystopia for many, many generations. In our world, the lack of equality and rights for women goes back deep in time  – we often hark back to ideas about Virgin-Whore dichotomy, the evils of Eve, the purported sinfulness of women, an imagined matriarchy that was supplanted by a patriarchy at some point in time to grapple with how we got to a point where one gender is constantly placed ahead of another. The attitudes that lead to the othering of women are very, very old. I’m always interested in possible first causes as a creative writer. I was originally asking myself the question “Could the patriarchy be WORSE?” and to create what I thought might be an explanation for it in a made-up world, created a mythology, an ‘Ur’ story along the lines of our sinful, cunning, untrustworthy Eve myth. The ‘always been’ piece makes for a world even more set in its ways, a totalitarian ethos even harder to crack. This is story building: making greater stakes for the characters to fight against, a pitched battle more fraught.

All Lit Up: The two main characters, Cera and Tiresius, have stereotypical “feminine” and “masculine” characteristics. Was it important to you to show this duality at play?

Emily Weedon: Absolutely. And in the back of my mind I was thinking of that “can’t have it all” notion that women are doomed to choose between family and career. I am riffing on it in a sense by breaking it into two characters. In some ways, Cera has chosen family, but gets career/leadership thrust upon her. Tiresius has rejected family and even love and intimacy in favour of her own drug, power. Ironically, she gets a kind of family in a way, despite herself, and pays a huge price of playing with power. I also very much wanted to create a character, in Tiresius, who does not cleave to our traditional ideas of what a woman ‘should’ be doing. I wanted her to be a clean slate who is not motivated by romance, for example.

All Lit Up: We’re trying our best to avoid spoilers for anyone who may not have read the book yet, so we’ll say, generally, that there are some male characters in the novel that flout the “orthodoxy” of this world in interesting and surprising ways. Were you keen to explore that idea of orthodoxy running counter to human nature or self-interest?

Emily Weedon: Sociology delves into ways the individual lives within systems and tries to make their way through them. I am terrified of any system that disconnects from the individuals it is made up of, be that self-perpetuating bureaucracy, totalitarian government, or repressive religion. We absolutely need some rules to thrive – rules of engagement, mores, ethics, standards of behaviour to live together in communities, to thrive. But too many inflexible rules stultify us, suffocate creativity and innovation. It’s no accident that many cultures have what are thought of as moral holidays –  for example Setsubun in Japan when many traditional roles and practices are reversed, or Western Mother’s Day when women are celebrated, for one day – what a tribute! It’s a pressure release valve that lets people subvert rules for a short period before going back to the norm. Obviously, we can’t break all norms. We need to pick a side of the road to drive on or we would have chaos. We also can’t be all norms, or we wither. I think the world is in a constant state of pushing the boundaries and re-establishing the rules. Autokrator puts us in a place and time where these tides have begun to run against each other in cataclysm. 

All Lit Up: Some of the behaviours and traditions of the Autokracy are also a little humorous – like the “women’s weeds” worn by the heir to the throne, or the phallic statues everywhere – you’ve captured the inherent ridiculousness of fascism very well. How did those fascistic extremes (thinking of leanings toward “classical” architecture and art, for example) play into the setting of the novel?

Emily Weedon: I think a lot about the ridiculous things people do to justify themselves, and I was definitely poking fun at the grandeur some cloak themselves with en route to grabbing total power. I was thinking in some cases about fascism but, truly, inspired by older sources. Fascism of course borrows from the ancient world in scope and legend to try to legitimize itself. But the ancient world with its Corinthian and Lotus pillars and stylized heroic bodies is both beautiful and a little hilarious too. Phalluses are everywhere in modern and ancient design. I suppose the binary opposite to phallic skyscrapers would be a hole, and lo and behold I have a community of women, earthbound, living in caves!

I was inspired to do “women’s weeds” by the Shakespearean trope of cross-dressing characters and by the elaborate work that goes into constructing regal and/or pageant clothes like those worn ceremonially by Queen Elizabeth II or Jill Biden, so part of this was just fun world building, stitching small details into a bigger tapestry. Women’s weeds were also playing with the fact that, in a deeply hierarchical society where women are the lowest creature, men play with the idea of  forcing other men to dress as women as a dominance behaviour. It’s a burn. I loved the idea of the classical, idealized male statues contrasted with the earthy Venus of Willendorf female icons, the Pocket Goddesses.

All Lit Up: You’re a screenwriter: does that inform your novel writing, and if so, how? Did you find it the same or very different?

Emily Weedon: A screenplay is a much more tightly sprung, structured plotline based on fewer but pivotal story beats than a novel generally is. A two-hour screenplay is only about 70 single-spaced pages. Only a novel is big enough to embrace a complex world like that depicted in Autokrator and only novels can really get into the kind of world building that truly captures the imagination – I think this is one of the many reasons why we have endless sequels in big films – a film has to focus on tight storylines. More detail and nuance will require more iterations. Screenplays also require 100 percent visual storytelling, and constant action (dialogue is considered action because people talking is at heart conflict of a greater or lesser degree). Novels allow us to slow down, delve, go back at times, feel greater swathes of time passing. They also allow us into the mind and insights of characters – possibly the most wonderful outcome of writing and having consciousness – we can download what is in our mind to the mind of another person. As the world we currently live in gets more fractured, I have great hope the novel form continues to connect us, to try to understand one another. In screenwriting, thoughts generally have no place – everything must be externalized. However, having picked up screenwriting first, I know I tend to tell plot-driven stories more, and to want to dive into the action, media res, rather than doing long, slow builds.

All Lit Up: What’s next for you? Can you tell us if you have a new book or other project in the works?

Emily Weedon: I am thrilled to say I am about to release my next book in September – Hemo Sapiens, with Dundurn Press. It is a femme fatale take on the vampire myth which replaces the supernatural with anthropology. It’s sleek and delicious and set in a modern Toronto we recognize. Move over Lestat and moldy, velvety vampires! I take on many issues of female sexuality and my fascination with the ancient world in it.