An Interview by Jennifer Konieczny

“Crossroads” by Laura Anne Gilman will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Pre-order here!

John notes that “Others might think he carried rotgut or whiskey; water was safer. Water couldn’t be magicked.” Your Vineart War Series also connects magic and alcohol; in the books, spells are drawn from wine. What kind of magic, do you think, would result from whiskey? From rotgut?

I actually address whisky in the Vineart War novels, although it takes someone familiar with the drink to recognize it. A much rougher, sea-faring magic, that. Rotgut … I think that would be a very personal magic, taking on the character not only of the still but the distiller. I don’t think you could sell or trade that sort of magic: You’d have to use it yourself. I also wrote a story in the anthology After Hours: Tales From the Ur Bar wherein a Sidecar (a cocktail popular just after WWI) has a certain magical component … This has lead a lot of people to assume I drink a lot.  My answer to that is “by whose standards?” Hemingway would consider me a sad piker …

For me, the lone lawman facing down outlaws at noon reminded me of the western film “High Noon.” What are your favorite westerns?

I’m actually not a huge fan of Westerns; I’d get distracted watching the horses, not the actors (this happens whenever there are horses on-screen, actually). I saw Unforgiven and Silverado a bunch of times, and does Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid count as a Western? What I love is reading nonfiction about the American West and other frontiers; the sort of mentality it took to abandon everything known and to then deal with what you found past the known, especially when it didn’t match with what you had been expecting/told to believe. Every sort of personality comes out to play, when you get beyond “civilization.” And then, to see what sort of civilization they recreate, in their own image …