Naomi Kritzer was born in North Carolina and lived in Indiana and Texas before age five. She grew up in Madison, WI, and lived in London for a year at thirteen. She moved to Minnesota to attend Carleton College, spending a college semester in Nepal in an off-campus studies program. Kritzer earned her BA in religion with a concentration in South Asian studies. She stayed in Minnesota after graduating, since she and her husband both found work in the Twin Cities, “and then we slowly just put down roots. Admittedly, in part by buying a house.” She lived in Minneapolis for seventeen years, then moved to Saint Paul, where she still lives. “My parents were both college professors, and I saw my mom go through the process of getting her PhD, including all-nighters to write papers, the misery of prelims, the whole process of researching and writing her dissertation, and then the horror of the tenure-track job search, and my conclusion was, ‘Ugh. No thank you.’”

Kritzer cites the high concentration of writers as one of the factors for staying in the Twin Cities area. “Seriously SO MANY, including absolute legends like Lois McMaster Bujold, Patricia C. Wrede, and Kelly Barnhill. My theory on why so many writers live here is that if you can tolerate a certain amount of winter weather misery, you can get all the amenities of a city (good restaurants, interesting museums, theaters, etc.) while also being able to afford a house.” She also cites community relationships with writers as being a part of her success. “I have been part of an organized ongoing writers’ group since 1997, though, and have gotten really excellent ongoing feedback from the other members of the Wyrdsmiths.”

Naomi Kritzer’s first sale was “Faust’s SASE” (Scavenger’s Newsletter #187, 1999). “It was a humorous story that parodied a bunch of the well-known form rejection letters (from Asimov’s, SF Age, and F&SF), each sent to someone trying to sell their soul. After it hit print, I realized that I, a complete unknown, had just publicly made fun of three of the most high-profile editors in the industry I was trying to write in: was this actually a good idea? A couple weeks later, I got a postcard from Gordon Van Gelder telling me he’d liked the story, which was a huge relief.” This was followed by stories in Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, and other venues, launching a career as a successful and respected SFF author. Debut novel Fires of the Faithful came out with Bantam Spectra in 2002, which was a Crawford Award finalist. It was followed by sequel Turning of the Storm in 2003. These were followed by the Dead Rivers series and the Seastead series.

In 2015, after Kritzer had published a handful of novels, around twenty-five short stories, and a collection, Clarkesworld published her short story “Cat Pictures Please” in their January issue, which was a WSFA Small Press finalist, a Nebula finalist, and won both a Locus Award and a Hugo Award. Following this, Kritzer seemed to stay on awards ballots, with works at various lengths and in various categories. To date, she’s had seven Hugo appearances, including three more wins; plus another Locus win, a Nebula win, and a Lodestar win for Best Young Adult Book (Catfishing on CatNet, published by Tor Teen in 2019), among many other nods—including international awards wins in several countries.

Her latest book is Obstetrix, due this month from Tordotcom Publishing.

Who are the authors or what are the books that inspired you when you were younger, and what are the works that inspire you lately?

When I was a child: A Wrinkle in Time.

Teen: The Hero and the Crown.

Lately: The Murderbot series.

I came late to the Murderbot series because I was writing a series about an AI character, and when I’m drawing from the same stream as another author, I like to give that work some extra space, so that if we overlap, I can say without hesitation that I didn’t accidentally borrow. But when I finally picked up All Systems Red, I was hooked from the very first paragraph. The way the protagonist’s character is expressed through voice, the ways in which Murderbot is a reliable narrator in some ways and unreliable in others, it’s just so good.

As someone who’s had a very uneven track over the course of my writing career, I’m also really inspired by Martha Wells, who spent decades as a mid-lister, hit all sorts of bumps with the publishing of her previous series, and just . . . stuck with it. And then finally broke out really big with the Murderbot series. She’s such a lovely person, the kind of community member we’re very lucky to have in SFF. It absolutely could not have happened for a more deserving person.

The protagonist of Obstetrix has a book that she has reread so many times that she can revisit the story without having the text. Do you have books like that?

I have always been an enthusiastic rereader, and my comfort books have varied significantly over the decades. When I was a child, my favorite rereads included A Wrinkle in Time and The Witch of Blackbird Pond, both of which I read until my copies disintegrated. In my teenage years, my regular rereads were Dragonsinger and The Hero and the Crown. I read lots of McCaffrey’s other books, but Dragonsinger was by far my favorite. These days, my favorite books are all stored on my e-reader (the fact that any book can be a large print book is just an amazing feature for me—to be clear, I have the fancy progressive-lens glasses and even a dedicated reading pair, but just being able to enlarge the font is still my preference). Like the protagonist, I reread something every night before I go to sleep; it has to be a reread, or I’ll stay up later to find out what happens. For my bedtime rereading, I currently cycle between Lois Bujold’s Chalion and Penric books; T. Kingfisher’s World of the White Rat books; and the Murderbot series.

Do you feel that genre fiction (SFF in particular) does something different or special from mainstream/commercial fiction—that is, from works with no speculative elements?

There are a couple of things I find both really fun and really interesting about SFF. The first is that we can write about the present day but sideways. Most science fiction and fantasy is more about the era in which it was written than it is about the future (or past) in which it’s theoretically set. Sometimes that lets us pull out some aspect of the present and put it in front of the reader to examine more closely. Sometimes that lets us fly below the radar of censors.

The second thing I really love about SFF is that we can take metaphors and make them literal, or take literal things and make them metaphors, sometimes in the same story. With my novelette “The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea,” I took the selkie myth and thought about what the stories about selkies are saying, metaphorically. The stories about selkies frequently involve some guy who traps a woman and forces her to stay with him by hiding her seal skin so that she’s denied her magic. There are so many men out there doing basically exactly that, in a metaphorical way. They find a dazzling and amazing woman and then set about trying to dim her light because they’re afraid she’ll leave him. Anyway, in the story I wrote, I played with the idea as a metaphor (the protagonist is an academic who’s had to prioritize her husband’s career over her own; it turns out that he sabotaged her deliberately). But there are also literal selkies in the story.

You could write a non-genre lit fic story where the selkie myth is a central, guiding metaphor. But once there are actual selkies in the story as well as metaphorical selkies, it becomes a genre story.

How did you initially get into writing, and at what point did you decide to take it seriously and try to get somewhere with publishing your work?

I have been telling stories since early childhood. I have a sister who’s three years younger than me, and we used to walk to and from school together; Abi says that I would tell her stories to entertain her on our walk, and she assumed that this was a Big Sister thing, that Big Sisters were, as part of their Big Sister duties, expected to tell stories to their younger siblings. At some point, she found out from her friends who had big sisters of their own that this did not come standard.

When I was in grade school, most of my storytelling took the form of narrating games of let’s-pretend. In late grade school or early middle school, my friends and peers grew out of that style of play, and sometime after that, I started writing stories down. My middle school writing was very disjointed because I wanted to just write the fun parts, which for me were the big, dramatic climactic scenes.

I got more serious about my writing in high school. First, I started writing at least the occasional story with a beginning, middle, and end. Second, I started submitting stories to magazines occasionally. My mom had an old copy of Writer’s Market, and this meant I knew to go look for a current copy at the library. Third, I shifted my ambition from “I want to be a professional actor” to “I want to be a professional writer.”

About two years after I finished college, I found a writer’s group (the Wyrdsmiths, which I’m still in) and started writing regularly in a disciplined way. I sold my first short story about two years after that. (It was about ten years after I first started submitting stories.)

Looking back at your publishing history, what do you see as the most important ways in which you’ve changed as a writer?

The thing that feels to me like the biggest change is that when I sit down and write a story now (a short story or a novelette, specifically), I do so with a lot of confidence that someone will want to publish it. It’s a very different experience as a writer because, on one hand, it’s very satisfying to sit down to write with that sort of certainty, but also, it makes it a lot harder to pretend to myself that I’m not writing for an audience.

Your site describes your latest book, Obstetrix, as a novella. Your work at all kinds of lengths has been well-received, such as the aforementioned Hugo-winning novelette, “The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea” (Asimov’s 9-10/24). What are the challenges specific to writing at novella length, and what are your strategies for facing those challenges?

When I sit down to write a story, I generally know pretty quickly the overall shape it’s going to take—there are ideas that feel like short stories, and there are ideas that feel like long stories, and there are ideas that feel like novels. I have written two novellas at this point, and what I really liked was that they really were compact novels as opposed to long short stories. But because they’re short novels, they have some of the same challenges of novels, in that I can’t sit down and go over the whole thing in one sitting when I’m trying to make sure I didn’t make any silly mistakes like forgetting some important plot thread. I really liked writing them, though. I also love novellas as a reader—I’m really glad they’re making a comeback.

Some readers describe Obstetrix as “not science fiction,” despite the fact that the Macmillan site describes this book as “a tense portrait of a future we desperately hope to escape.” As someone who has been writing science fiction for quite a while (and won awards doing so), what are your thoughts on whether or not this book is “science fiction,” and whether or not these distinctions even matter?

The thing about near-future SF is that sometimes the future catches up with you as you’re writing. As of right now, there aren’t any doctors who have been put on trial for performing an abortion, but there’s a midwife who’s been charged and is in jail awaiting trial (in Texas), and Louisiana has filed criminal charges against a doctor in New York (New York has refused to extradite her). There’s also no brand-new giant maternity clinic in Minnesota to handle all the people who can’t find maternity care in the Dakotas. But these things feel immediately plausible in a way that, for example, the fictional pandemic I wrote about in “So Much Cooking” in 2015 did not.

Fundamentally, one of the things genre distinctions are useful for is to help people find the books they want to read. I think science fiction readers will enjoy this book; also horror fans and people who enjoy thrillers.

How would you describe our protagonist, Liz? What do you love most about her, and what is important to know about her?

Liz is a middle-aged obstetrician who’s spent a whole lot of her life dedicated to taking care of people. What I love about her is that she’s mostly out of fucks, in the sense that she’s not someone who normally worries all that much about what people think of her. When she’s kidnapped by the cult, she has to figure out how much to cooperate as she waits for an opportunity to escape, and she has to figure out how to survive and how to stay herself. I love that she never stops thinking about how to escape, even as most of the ideas she comes up with are completely impractical.

What was the inspiration for this book; why was it a story you felt you needed to write?

As states started passing absolutely draconian laws against abortion, and women started dying because they weren’t able to get the care they needed when their pregnancies went awry, I started thinking about the fear that keeps doctors from acting in the face of obvious dire need, and the moral injury of being forced to stand by and not provide the care your patient needs. The states with these laws are, in many cases, losing OB-GYNs, and I started thinking about how this was going to play out for expectant mothers in states where the nearest trained care is across multiple state lines. And the fact that there are people who absolutely would not hesitate to make a doctor their prisoner, if they could.

What were your intentions with the depiction of the cult?

I wanted them to feel like people you might know or have known in the past. Like people you’ve chatted with on Facebook. I wanted the evil to feel banal and not terribly dramatic, and I wanted readers to understand how the people in the cult got drawn in.

I think people tend to want to see cult members as deeply different from themselves: if cult members are deeply different, we don’t have to worry that we ourselves might wind up in a cult (or might already be in a cult). I want to subvert that impulse in my readers, to erase some of that comforting distance.

What, for you, is special or important about this book?

It’s a book that’s very much about finding ways to endure and hold on to your sense of self and your belief in a better future, even as you’re trapped in a hellish situation. I think that’s a broadly relevant theme right now!

You have a lot of short stories out. For readers unfamiliar with your work, if they were to look at one or two short stories, what would you want them to read, and why?

They should read “The Year Without Sunshine” (Uncanny, 11-12/23) and “So Much Cooking” (Clarkesworld, 11/15). Both of these are stories about collective responses to disasters, or as a friend of mine has said (about Minneapolis and Saint Paul, in the real world, right now), “the worst timeline, but the best people.”

Is there anything else you’d like to talk about, for example, recent or meaningful experiences?

I want to talk about my community’s response to fascism.

Lately (I’m typing this on March 1st; possibly by the time this runs, things will have shifted), a huge amount of my time and energy is devoted to resisting the fascist occupation of my metro area. “Operation Metro Surge” started in January and involved several thousand ICE and Border Patrol members converging on Minneapolis and Saint Paul, where they committed wholesale kidnapping based on skin color, shipped people off to concentration camps even if they were fully documented immigrants with papers, and murdered two people in the street in front of witnesses and cameras. While lying so flagrantly and so consistently that it’s like they read 1984 and treated Orwell’s Ministry of Truth as a design document.

Nearly everyone I know is involved in resistance work in some way, and I’ve done a wide range of stuff over the weeks, including standing watch over a mosque, shopping for groceries for an organization doing deliveries, fundraising, donating, helping people get connected to groups to volunteer with, helping groups find volunteers, acting as a receiving point for an Amazon wish list of stuff for an ICEwatch group and then sorting everything out and delivering it on for distribution. I haven’t done “commuting” (driving around looking for ICE) because I concluded after a ride-along that my lousy eyesight made me less suited to that role.

January and February were a mix of enraging and inspiring. Enraging for obvious reasons. In addition to the murders and the kidnappings, the harm that’s being done to my neighbors is incalculable. We’re now trying to raise enough money to at least keep people housed if they aren’t able to work to make money to pay their rent. Children have been unable to safely go to school.

Inspiring because of how many of my neighbors are committed to doing everything they can to stop it. People are out there standing watch over day cares and school bus drop-off points and businesses in the bitter cold. They’re following ICE around in defiance of open, aggressive intimidation, after two people were murdered for doing this. They’re delivering groceries and clean laundry and health care to people who can’t safely leave their homes. There’s a meme that goes around saying something like, “if you’ve ever wondered what you would have done if you’d lived in Germany in the 1930s, look at what you’re doing now,” and it’s felt like everyone in the Twin Cities saw that and said, “we’re going to be Denmark, then, motherfuckers.” I am so glad I live here.

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

If you visit my blog in the late summer or fall, you’ll probably see a whole lot of posts about political candidates in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. This is because I write an in-depth election guide for local elections. Some people would probably maintain a fully separate set of blogs so they could post just about writing in one place, and just about politics in another place, and that would probably be a good idea, but it always seemed like too much extra effort. Anyway, in my home community, people know I write science fiction, and some people even read my science fiction, but I am much better known for the election guide!