"Once upon a time I wrote the way a very young child draws, with absolute confidence that the work is genius. A splotch of colour there. A smear. Spirals and zigzags. Exploration and process are at the heart of art when we are only beginning. My writing has always been intentional. Both intensity of feeling and lushness of language have been primary goals of mine from the get go, but it did not always involve this level of anxiousness, of desperation…"
Rivers Solomon is an American author of speculative and literary fiction. In 2018, they received the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses' Firecracker Award in Fiction for their debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, and in 2020 their second novel, The Deep, won the Lambda Literary Award. Their third novel, Sorrowland, was published in May 2021, and won the Otherwise Award.
"It probably won’t surprise anyone to hear me say that boundaries between genres are not borders to be respected so much as walls to tear down. I can’t imagine being a writer of only one genre, and I find that most of the time, even works that I’m writing to fit a particular genre are influenced by my experience of other genres. I think that everything I write is “literary,” but we also have to understand that these terms have marketing implications and so on…"
"Part of me wonders if I should’ve labelled by characters according to contemporary definitions of gender and sexuality so there’d be no doubt in anyone’s mind. To me, all of these labels are context dependent and therefore it does not feel authentic or organic to use words that have developed out of our contemporary discourse to describe my characters…"
"I’ve been really intrigued by the idea of the end of the world — how it’s never really real, though it may feel like it is to us living in the midst of climate change as we are. Except on the scale of billions of years, according to the kind of timeline where suns birth and die and so on, worlds are quite adaptive creatures. Earth has had five or so ice ages. Dinosaurs have come and gone, many dying, others living on as birds. Mass extinction is par for the planet’s course…"