An Interview by Molly Tanzer

“The Last Triangle” by Jeffrey Ford will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Pre-order here!

The idea of “using” has all sorts of lovely resonances in “The Last Triangle”, as does the idea of needing help to break an addiction. Do you think Ms. Berkley saw herself in Thomas from the get-go, or did the realization come to her over time?

I don’t believe either of them was conscious of their need for each other at first. Thomas is staying with Ms. Berkley before she discovers the “the last triangle.” As it turns out they both need each other in their loneliness but also are both eventually willing to make sacrifices for each other, and that latter fact elevates “using” to something else entirely.

Obviously there are several unanswered questions at the end of “The Last Triangle,” but I’m curious—did Thomas ever get to find out what happened to Godfrey St. Peter? Willa Cather seemed to enchant Thomas more than any spooky old magician…

I’m glad you brought this up, because I never really thought about why that book of all the ones I’ve read and could have plugged in there or just made up was the one I referenced. I read it a long time ago when I was on a Cather kick.  She’s got some great fiction–The Professor’s House, Death Comes For the Archbishop, My Mortal Enemy, etc. Thinking about it now, I guess it has to do with the fact that Ms. Berkley is living a life sort of like that of the professor in the Cather novel. He has kind of an adventure of the mind, thinking about the Tom Outland story. In “The Last Triangle” Ms. Berkley has an adventure with her own Tom. Beyond that I’m not sure why it’s in there. I’ll have to go back now and read the Cather and think about it more. Does Thomas finish the book? I’d like to know the answer to that myself.