Meg Elison was born in South Carolina, where her parents were stationed. “I have no memory of that place and no affinity for the southern coast, though I hear it’s beautiful. I did a residency in Savannah, GA, and could see Columbia, place of my birth, from there. Nothing called to me across the water.” As a family, they moved a lot, but Elison always found her way to libraries and stores with discounted books. Inspired by women writers, by junior high she was writing sword and sorcery stories, tuckerizing classmates into characters.

Elison left home at age fourteen, working at a pizza place at night and as an au pair during the day. To say she’s moved around a lot would be an understatement: Elison has lived in Maryland, Oregon, Northern California, Massachusetts, Missouri, Savannah, Nevada, North Carolina, Utah, Southern California, and New York, as well as Europe, and more. “I always say I’m from everywhere because no place in particular feels like home. I have the army brat’s superpower of unpacking fast and getting the lay of the land in forty-eight hours.”

Meg Elison describes her career as “starting backward because I didn’t know any better in 2014.” She didn’t know about the SFF community or the possibility of publishing short fiction, and she hadn’t heard of writing workshops. She attended a community college in California and then transferred to UC Berkeley, intending to pursue religious studies, “both because English and media studies were impacted and because I’ve always been interested in the subject. I had to take a religious language, and the only thing I could get into was Sanskrit at 0800. That course kicked every square inch of my ass. Everyone else in the room had a background in Sanskrit or one of the languages derived from it, and I started from zero with a brand-new alphabet. I was surprised how much I loved it, and I can still recite some of the poetry I learned. That class, as well as a long lecture series on the early desert fathers of the early Christian church and another on Hildegard von Bingen, a twelfth-century Benedictine nun and multimedia artist, have had lasting effects on my work.” Elison did find her way to writing professionally, and once she started, she became an unstoppable force. “I read books, and I wrote a book, and I ran forward with it like a spear when it was done. I did a summer writing workshop at Berkeley in my last year there and got real critique on the first 13,000 words of what would become The Book of the Unnamed Midwife.” Instructor Justin Torres encouraged her to take her work seriously. “It was good crit and great encouragement, and I pushed.”

Meg Elison’s debut was Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (2014, Sybaritic Press; republished by 47North in 2016), a feminist postapocalyptic novel that launched The Road to Nowhere series. In 2016, Vice’s science fiction platform Terraform published short story “Next of Kin”: a notable venue for an author who, upon strength of her initial publications, immediately became notable. Over the next few years, she maintained that standing by publishing unflinching fiction that both challenged and entertained readers, including “Personal Trainer” in Compelling (Issue 2, June/July 2016), “El Hugé” in Catapult (April 6, 2017), and “Big Girl” in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (November/December 2017). The Road to Nowhere series continued with 2017’s The Book of Etta and 2019’s The Book of Flora. PM Press published the collection Big Girl in 2020, and standalone novel Number One Fan came out with HarperCollins Mira in 2022. To date, Elison has published over thirty stories, plus an assortment of smart, sometimes scathing nonfiction pieces. She has racked up an impressive number of awards nods for her fiction, including being a Sturgeon, Eugie, Otherwise, Nebula, and Hugo finalist as well as a Locus Award winner.

Meg Elison lives in North Adams, “a very small former mill town in Western Mass . . . All my new friends here are writers and artists, and the air smells like maple for half the year. It was a huge change from Brooklyn, but I’ve come to really love it.” Her newest work is novella Foundling Fathers, just out from Tachyon Publications.

Who are the authors or what are the works that you see as important to you as a writer, and what do you love most about them?

I grew up collecting paperbacks out of thrift stores and reading everything they had at my local library, so the filter order was determined by who got published the most and circulated everywhere. That meant reading Stephen King, who’s still important to me even as I’ve come to read him more critically. He wrote so accessibly about cosmic horror and the multiverse, but also about class and white America. I owe a great deal to gothics like Daphne du Maurier, who taught me dread, and to the first science fiction I read that bent my mind: Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, the writers on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the folks whose bylines I’ve forgotten from Omni in the late eighties and early nineties. They showed me worlds beyond worlds, within worlds, and uninstalled the low ceiling from a poor kid’s mind so I could see the stars.

When I was a freshman in high school, our literature textbook had “They’re Made Out of Meat” by Terry Bisson in its very first chapter. That story was an out-of-body experience for me. It showed me what could be done in less than a thousand words. Most importantly, it showed me the importance of the body in fiction. It set me on the path of becoming the writer I wanted to be and helped determine what I would write. It was the honor of my lifetime to know Terry near the end of his own life. He is an example to me, not only as an author I deeply admire, but as an activist who sat in jail for months rather than testify against his fellow radicals.

You had The Book of the Unnamed Midwife in 2014, collection Big Girl in 2020, Number One Fan in 2022, and much more. Where does Foundling Fathers stand in your body of work? How does it relate to things you often do, and what does it say about your progression as an artist?

Foundling Fathers was, at last, an idea that struck me as fun. I’m with Montaigne most of the time, who says that writing is born of misery. My early works, certainly, and the majority of my short fiction, were written out of my white-hot rage at the world. The rage is still in me, but it’s been tempered by a decade of absurdity and horror in American politics, so satire is a natural reaction to all that. I am still angry about the same things, but my jokes have gotten better. As an artist, I’m more flexible than I used to be. This is some of that flex, and I hope to show more in the next few years.

Foundling Fathers is a novella. What makes a work need to be novella length, instead of a short story or novel, both in general, and specifically for this book?

A short story can do one thing well. A novelette/novella can do one and a half things, one with a twist! A novel can do two or three things. When I get an idea, I ask myself what it’s trying to do and keep the length accordingly. I’ve read too many novels that should have been a short story, and I’ve been teased by short stories that could have been a novel. It takes years as a writer to recognize how big a chunk one has wrested from the ether. Foundling Fathers does one thing, with a twist. It had to be a novella.

What was the initial inspiration for Foundling Fathers, and how did the idea change or develop across drafts and edits?

I was talking with my husband about some race of fantasy weirdos in the Warhammer 40,000 universe who have cloned and made immortal their own sainted forebears, hoping to recapture their inimitable magic and wield it in the future. My mind wandered on the idea, and I started thinking about what the GOP would do with that power if they had it. The idea developed over edits because I had to figure out The Truman Show Disneyland that the clones of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin would have to be raised in to recreate their personalities. I was deeply influenced by Ira Levin’s 1976 novel The Boys from Brazil, which is about cloning Hitler and then killing off the mini-Hitlers’ fathers at the right moment in the boys’ lives. There it is again: horror and absurdity, side by side.

What were the most challenging aspects of writing Foundling Fathers, and how did you overcome those challenges?

It’s not possible to write about these figures of early American history without writing about slavery. To avoid the issue, even in a futuristic context, is to deny the truth of who they were and how they became rich and powerful. I had to work out a relationship between them and the labor that makes their world possible in a way that honors both the past and admits the reality of many people trapped in slavery today. I took advice from a historian who has done research on enslaved people at Jefferson’s home, as well as from a couple of immigration lawyers who deal with victims of human trafficking. It’s not the center of the story, but even at the edges it demanded serious consideration on my part.

What drew you to writing about these particular figures, what was the allure of building a story around Ben, Thomas, George, and John?

I started with the most well-known figures of the Revolutionary period, and the ones who I knew from their published correspondence and autobiographical writings. It felt easy to call Jefferson to mind, knowing him from his bitchy correspondence with Abigail Adams. John Adams wrote his wife horny, angry letters, and there he was in my discerning thoughts. Franklin wrote endlessly about himself, without shame, like a day-in-the-life YouTuber with no other income. Washington was so widely written about that I knew him a little from his own whiny, self-pitying letters, but mostly from the early hagiographers who wanted him to be a king. Hamilton was extremely spoken for, so these made up my quartet.

When I started to imagine how they’d treat one another as siblings, they took on a familiar shape, and I realized I could map them as the Ninja Turtles based on their core personalities. That helped immensely. When I didn’t know what Adams would do, I brought in Rafael.

What was the inspiration for Mary Libertas? How would you describe her, and what do you love most about this character?

Mary is patterned on a lot of the conservative women I’ve seen serve the patriarchy believing they can change it from within and maintain a dignified and protected position despite their gender. We’ve seen them, over and over, from Josephine Dodge, who opposed women’s suffrage in the 1910s, all the way up through Phyllis Schlafly in the eighties, to Sarah Palin and Amy Coney Barrett in our own time, who have sought to empower and enrich themselves at the expense of all women only to suffer the inherent subjugation of their own movements and be tossed aside. Many of these women are well-educated and genuinely think they’re doing what’s right for the world, but in the end they all end up powerless, dishonored, demoted to positions of motherhood and nothing more, to be buried under their husbands’ names. The thing about conservative white women is that they are allergic to history and possessed of main character energy so radioactive that it deprives them of basic pattern recognition. Every single one of them thinks it will be different this time. Mary’s arc is so rote I could trace it in my sleep. I scarcely have to sketch her in the story before those of us who can still see the pattern will know what’s going to happen to her.

Despite her odious views and incomprehensible actions, I wrote her with grit and conviction to her unflinching servitude. Many people do not have what it takes to work for twenty-five years to literally give birth to and nurse the world as she believes it should be. Doomed though she is, she bets her whole life on this idea.

Publishers Weekly describes Foundling Fathers as “a clever mash-up of American history and modern politics,” but it’s also a clever use of science fiction. In terms of craft, what, for you, is essential to layering together politics, history, and social commentary into a readable, enjoyable story?

The best story is one that feels uniquely familiar. Using the scaffolding of the public education nearly every child receives in this country, I can create characters knowing that the reader already has an idea of who George Washington is, what he looks like, and what he stands for. Using the framework of cloning established in books like Jurassic Park and The Boys from Brazil, I can conjure up reproduced figures from our history without belaboring the method of their conception for the reader. I like to keep my worldbuilding details incidental, so that they feel naturally included rather than poured over the reader’s face like Nickelodeon slime. The layers here stay light and airy because the reader carries most of the background within them already.

You are also a celebrated short story author. What do you love most about writing short stories, what do you feel you do really well, and what do you find most challenging about them?

Short stories are harder to write than novels. With the length of a novel, I have the luxury to build a long relationship with the characters and the reader, all of us holding hands and finding an apartment together, cooking each other meals, and waking up in one another’s arms. Writing short stories is harder but has all the fleeting joy and lingering mystery of a chance encounter; a stranger kissed on the train and never seen again but perhaps never forgotten, either.

The key to being good at both is how it feels. That’s what you remember. The challenge is to feel it in myself and make sure the reader feels it, too. It’s intention and luck and the wisdom to know that the ones I don’t feel deeply aren’t worth letting out into the world.

For folks who haven’t read your short fiction, if they were to read one or two short stories, what would you want them to read, and why?

If you’ve only got a few minutes to spare, read “Where Are They Now?” about a fat kid’s revenge, in Lightspeed, or listen to the excellent audio version. If you’ve got time for something longer and more involved about self-driving cars, read “Autonomy” in Clarkesworld.

What, for you, is special about genre fiction—what does speculative fiction do that is different or important?

There’s a line from an Eminem and Rihanna song I think about all the time. It goes, “I can’t tell you what it really is; I can only tell you what it feels like.” It encapsulates, for me, the trouble of an epistemological existence. We don’t know, objectively, what is. We literally only know what it feels like. Terry Bisson was right: we’re made out of meat, and we’re limited in the ways that meat is limited. We only see part of the spectrum, only hear a narrow number of frequencies, only sense within the confines of what our flesh can tolerate. Our perception or ability to guess at what lies beyond our senses is limited and sometimes just made up. Speculative fiction is that process of telling what it feels like beyond the bounds of our senses because it often feels like something that does not exist within our realm of feeling: like dragon’s fire, like warp speed, like talking to fish and walking on clouds. It’s important because it transcends; it reaches beyond. It is the same imaginative power that gives us religion, and it works in the same way for the same reasons.

What else are you working on, what do you have coming up that you’d like folks to know about?

I have a forthcoming novelette in the July/August Analog, my first time in that publication, and also about cloning! Also very much about the nonindividual self, a concept I can never seem to walk away from. I’m excited for it to reach readers.

Is there anything else you’d like Clarkesworld readers to know about you, your work, or Foundling Fathers?

I have built my career so far on the grimmest stories I could imagine, and Foundling Fathers is a departure in tone. It was fun to write, and I hope it’s fun to read. I know it will be more fun to read aloud while I’m on tour.