An Interview with Nalo Hopkinson

This interview was conducted in an on-line chatroom on May 19, 2001, and June 4, 2001, between Los Angeles, California, and Toronto, Ontario, where Nalo Hopkinson lives.

GLAVE: How has your family, the environment/landscape, immigration, and the publishing industry influenced your work?

HOPKINSON: My father was a writer, actor, and an English and Latin teacher. My mother worked in libraries most of my life, and still does. So basically my parents have influenced me by surrounding me with words and story. My brother Keita does the same. Visual art is his medium; he paints his stories. So he brings a painterly analysis to my work that I find really helpful, because it's such a different mode of "seeing" than a text-based one. Being surrounded with text and story and people who make text and story was like an informal apprenticeship. I could have learned how to string sentences together without school; I only needed to pull a book down off the bookshelves at home or attend a performance by my father or his peers.

I suppose, one writes about one's surroundings. Anywhere I've lived, either in the tropics or in North America, it's been primarily in urban settings. I write about urban environments a lot, but what I find is that North American understanding of my work sometimes focuses on the "tropical" part of my experience to the exclusion of the "urban" part. Though when I write, I don't think, "I'm going to reveal some significance about this urban setting." I just put the story in a cool place. For example, Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) literally begins on the corner of a street near where I used to live. I was walking home one night, passed a junkie in a doorway, and he mumbled at me, "We have to get to know one another better, you know." That is one of the first lines in Brown Girl.

Sometimes I'm asked how emigrating from the Caribbean to Canada has affected my writing. I should point out that I lived in the United States when I was a kid, and returned to North America—Canada—in my mid-teens. Still, in some ways, winter feels like going into space. It's varying degrees of cold in Toronto for almost eight months of the year; you need a space suit for survival when going outside. It's like suiting up to go jaunt on the moon. No wonder I'm a science fiction writer. What really gets my goat, though, is the people who think it's totally acceptable when I say that it's cold to tell me that I really should go back to the Caribbean because people from hot countries aren't made for cold climates. That kind of rhetoric was at one point used by Canadian immigration to refuse entry to Canada of people who came from warm climates, on the grounds that they wouldn't be suited to work here. Conveniently enough, the warm country people also tended to be the dark-skinned people.

Because of my dad being a writer, he had a lot of colleagues who were also writers. Many of them moved here (Toronto), so when I began to think about writing too, I had quite a few literary "aunties" and "uncles" to mentor me. It's been wonderful. People have been very generous as mentors, both from within the Caribbean community and in the greater literary community. I think of writers like the late Libby Scheier, who was teaching creative writing in order to bring in some much-needed income but who, when I was just starting to learn, let me take her course and pay for it bit by bit. Money is time is bread to an artist, so I recognize the huge generosity of writers, artists and scholars such as Roger McTair, Lillian Allen, Marlene Ziobrowski, Pamela Mordecai, Kelly Link, David Findlay, Jennifer Stevenson, Dora...