Many D.C. readers will recognize the name Tara Campbell: For years, she was a mainstay in our city’s literary scene. Known for what she calls “crossover sci-fi,” Campbell’s work tends to contemplate “what happens when an ordinary person (or creature) faces extraordinary circumstances,” she says on her website.

Before she taught creative writing at American University, she graduated from the school with a masters in fine arts. In 2016 she won two awards for DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities: the Larry Neal Writers’ Award in Adult Fiction and the Mayor’s Arts Award for Outstanding New Artist. From 2018 to 2002, Campbell was part of the D.C. Arts and Humanities Fellowship Program. A blow to the local writing scene—she’s also led creative writing classes throughout the DMV—Campbell moved to Seattle last summer. Luckily for us, she’ll be back in town this month to launch her sixth book, City of Dancing Gargoyles, at two local institutions: Politics and Prose and the Writer’s Center—where she’ll once again lead a mini writing workshop.

Washington City Paper recently spoke with Campbell to discuss speculative fiction, novels in stories, and, of course, gargoyles.

Washington City Paper: Tell us about City of Dancing Gargoyles.

Tara Campbell: It’s an eco-fantasy novel featuring two sentient gargoyles named E and M who are searching for water and a new home. After their church crumbles, they have to make their way north through a 22nd-century American West that’s been ravaged not only by climate change, but also by the aftermath of some secretive alchemical testing that has resulted in anomalies like kissing dragons, wrestling kudzu, and bleeding books. 

WCP: When hearing the phrase “speculative fiction,” most readers will immediately think we’re referring to either science fiction or fantasy, and there are elements of both in your novel. But this work leans strongly in to literary writing, with beautiful, sometimes even lyrical storytelling and far less of the extensive worldbuilding than we’d normally see in the aforementioned genres. How do you approach “speculative literary” writing?

TC: Before I stumbled upon the term “speculative fiction,” I used to say that I write science fiction for people who don’t think they read science fiction. But that was only an approximation of what I was doing, and I’m glad that more people are discovering the depth and breadth of fantastical writing beyond strict genre definitions. 

I love the way “speculative literary” opens up narrative by allowing us to go beyond the bounds of realism to get at emotional truths. If something feels surreal, why not try to capture that cognitive dissonance by portraying it as something palpably unreal? Certain parts of American culture are indeed surreal to me, like our relationship with guns, or our lack of reckoning with history, or our income inequality, and those areas of disconnect came out indirectly in stories about sneaking needles striking us everywhere from home to school to church, or screaming ropes howling in the darkest corner of a dusty barn, or sword fighting robots protecting the bunkers of the uber-wealthy.

But hitting people over the head with sociopolitical commentary is not the point. Above all else, I want it to be either beautiful or funny (or both). It is possible to write speculative work that also pays attention to language and character development. It is possible to write literary work that escapes the bounds of realism. That’s what I hope to do.

WCP: You’ve always been a rebel when it comes to form, and this book is no exception—you’ve pushed the boundaries of traditional narrative structure throughout this story. How do you approach form? Do you think of experimenting from the start, or is it more about listening to the story as it develops on the page?

TC: Most of the elements in this book began as individual stories, and because I experiment, they all took different forms: monologues, reports, traditional third person narratives, charts, poems, etc. I feel like each story will tell you what format it wants to be in, and if it doesn’t work the first way you try to tell it, you can try a different path. So yes, I’m very much in the camp of letting things develop as they hit the page.

When I began thinking about how to combine the stories beyond a simple collection, however, that’s when I had to become more intentional. I charted the stories, categorizing them in terms of theme, tone, setting, format, subject matter, point of view, and began strategizing how to integrate all the potential perspectives. I wound up having to morph some of them from story to setting, and had to decide who would be likely to tell which kind of story.

WCP: Many writers struggle to effectively convey different points of view when their novels have multiple main characters. You seem to do this effortlessly. How do you create such defined, unique characters while working within one project?

TC: E and M came about because I started with the concept of [the short story] “In the City of Digging Gargoyles,” and they just kept digging. And digging. And they weren’t telling me what the heck else they were doing, so I just had to keep coming back to them and have them encounter more parts of this world I was creating. As they journeyed, one gargoyle revealed themself to be more trusting and curious, whereas the other one was more skeptical of humanity, and I realized that those are my two figurative wolves warring inside me. It was like getting to see how things would work out if I cultivated one side of my nature vs. the other. 

Two of the human characters, Dolores and her mother Rose, were inspired by the mother-daughter dynamic of one of the individual stories, where a mother becomes so obsessed with accumulating wealth for their security that the daughter fades into the background. That’s not exactly how things work between the characters in the novel, but I wanted to examine the tension between a mother trying to keep her child safe while that child just wants to live her life—and how that dynamic changes when they’re climate refugees in a postapocalyptic world.

WCP: In your opinion, is this a novel in stories?

TC: Yes, I can see that way of describing it, though because I can’t do anything the standard way, it’s more like a novel in stories with connecting narrative tissue. I’ve always been obsessed by the idea of stories within stories, so maybe it’s more like a Matryoshka novel? A pomegranate novel? A bunch of bananas? It’s impossible to say.

WCP: Who are some authors that have influenced you, particularly in relation to City of Dancing Gargoyles?

TC: Well, I always like to give Michael Moorcock props for the idea that initially sparked the stories. He wrote a list of suggestions for how to write a novel, and one of them was a pre-writing technique that involved putting together a list of images, deliberate paradoxes like “In the City of Screaming Statues.” I was so fascinated by that example image, I made a list of verbs and nouns that fascinated me and smashed them together in ways that made no sense. His idea of deliberate paradoxes was the key. It gave me permission to not line everything up in logical terms before beginning. Sometimes starting with the impossible makes things possible.

I’ve begun describing my work as the love child of Margaret Atwood and Douglas Adams (yes, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams). I know, it’s an unlikely—frankly ludicrous—pairing, his kaleidoscopic wackiness with her verbal restraint, but like E and M warring away inside me, I am a study in contradictions. I’m aware of how supremely messed up the world is, but I can’t succumb to the darkness entirely. I always need a little laugh to make it through my dystopia, so here we are.

Tara Campbell reads from City of Dancing Gargoyles at 5 p.m. on Oct. 6 at Politics and Prose’s Connecticut Avenue NW location. politics-prose.com. Free.

Her second local event—a reading followed by a mini workshop—starts at 7 p.m. on Oct. 8 at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda. writer.org. Free.