21 min read

Clark Meets Clarke: Metal from Heaven Interview

august clarke and I talk butches, straps, and queer role models in this interview about his novel, Metal from Heaven.
Clark Meets Clarke: Metal from Heaven Interview

Hello, my people!

I try to be a man of my word, and I am--just not always the fastest man of my word. Which is to say, I have finally finished editing the transcript for the event that I did in October with august clarke when his book Metal from Heaven came out. I have described it as a lesbian biker gang revenge story meets radium girls meets Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. If my previous exhortations haven't convinced you to pick up the book, hopefully our conversation will.

But first!

Pre-Order Campaign Announcement

We are ~4 months out from pub day for The Sovereign! As with the previous two books in The Magic of the Lost trilogy, I’d like to offer you a pre-order gift with the publication of The Sovereign.

If you pre-order The Sovereign (from anywhere you like, but here are some helpful [affiliate] links: US/UK) (if you pre-order from The Common Press or Gays the Word, I’ll make sure to hand sign and dedicate your book)  and upload proof at this form, I’ll send you an approximately 200-page document of cut scenes, points of view, and experiments from all three books on September 30.

That said, I can’t really wait that long, so I’m also going to share one excerpt a month for newsletter subscribers only, all the way until The Sovereign comes out.

UPDATE: Previously, I had hoped to include a bookplate for the first 50 people to pre-order The Sovereign. However, due to the cost of postage, it is more financially feasible to send the bookplates to several indie bookshops, and if you order from there, you can get a signed (although not personalized) bookplate. If you decide you want to change the location of your pre-order to take advantage of this, don't worry about changing your proof of purchase. I trust you. See the list below for the current bookstores offering bookplates; most of them ship broadly! If you want me to include your local, let me know. Thank you for understanding.

Current Bookstores Offering Bookplates for The Sovereign and Fate's Bane

And if you’re waiting for something special for Fate’s Bane, hold tight. 😉


C. L. Clark: Right. Okay. Now, to the sex stuff. So it's basically all sex stuff, but it is kind of academic too, because I do have academic-ish craft-ish questions about how we're both interested in this, how we're going about it. Talk to me about the strap-on.

august clarke: Indeed.

CC: Yes.

AC: I think, as we've discussed before, that uh, there is a startling lack of depictions of lesbian sex in the wonderful moment we're having where there's lots of really great Sapphic--writ large--stories and genre fiction. And when there is sex between women*, um yeah, they're never wearing a dick. And I think that this is a pretty critical problem of world building and a lack of ingenuity and interest in the fact that sexuality makes culture, too. If we are world building, a society, a culture, sex and sexuality is part of that culture.

Every culture has sex as a business at some point, every culture has sex at some point, probably. We have neolithic dildos, in fact, right? Like it is a sort of transcultural phenomena that we make prosthesis as a part of our experiencing each other and being with each other, and I think to a certain extent this might be a discomfort with depicting women's* sexuality period. Or women's sexuality as active.

I think that there is a much greater representation of protagonists, or at least point of view characters who are sexually inexperienced and who need their love interest to guide them into sexuality and show them all of the ropes and do unto them. I really struggle to think of point of view top characters in genre fiction, period.

CC: Period. Regardless of genres, genders, or gender pairings or anything.

AC: Yeah, it is almost always the perspective of the bottom or--I think assigning top and bottom to men, women couples is weird and doesn't work, in fact--but it is either the bottom's perspective or the woman's perspective, usually. Or occasionally you might get a man's perspective and drawn her as well and indeed men in genre do have sex here and there.

But I think that with that lack of world building interest, we also have a loss of the technologies we produce as queer people to be with each other. A thing that I was really concerned with in writing this book was making sure that there was a subcultural aspect to the queerness here. Which necessarily pairs with there being queerphobia in this world. If you have a queer normative world, which—that's a huge thing in itself. But if you have a world where at the very least same gender attraction is not policed, and is sort of normative in this space, and there's no pushback at all, then you have no reason to make a subculture. And then you, by extension, have no reason to make sex toys that are appropriate for the kind of sex you wanna be having, right?

CC: I feel like you could still have it, it just becomes a mainstream item like any that you buy--you buy your cups, you buy your crockery, your silverware, you buy your dicks.

AC: And indeed, why don't the couples in fantasy also have dicks that they wear? Get into it.

CC: Well, that does make me kind of wanna go back to something that you said, which is the kind of narrative pairings that we get—or rather, reasons why we don't see the sex toys so much and one of the questions I asked myself was, and/or is it also because having a strap on or a dildo even more removes the necessity of the “[cishet]man” figure in these mainstream genre industry type conversations.

AC: I mean, I think it has this weird doubled effect of both obsoleting the cisguy, while also masculinizing the woman in a way that I think many, many people who are distributing advances, perhaps aren't looking for.

If you are, especially if--In Metal from Heaven, Marney calls it her cock and identifies it as a part of her person, that is, her body, and feels kind of weird without it sometimes. Marney wears a harness under her clothing all of the time. Which sounds uncomfortable.

CC: I did think that, but let her do what she's doing, you know.

AC: If it's what she needs, and it is what she needs. So be it. Yeah, I think about thigh situation would be really tough.

CC: Not to mention all the acrobatics they get up to.

AC: Yeah…like they're jumping off of trains and…very that.

CC: I mean, I barely like, you know, go for a run without getting a wedgie.

[Audience]: Does she have a packer? Or does she have a harness with a removable dildo that she can put in?

AC: Yeah, so she doesn't have a packer. I think that, full stop, if Marney Honeycutt was in the room with us right now, they would be on testosterone. But it is the case, at least in her context, that packers as such aren't a readily available technology or social symbol. Marney wears an empty harness that she sometimes puts her cock in when it comes up.

CC: [snickers]

AC: That was for you. I mean, I think another thing is, like the strap sucking is important, and I think—

CC: I told you.

AC: It's a beautiful way to live life.

CC: Why suck the strap? Why watch the sunset, etc, etc.

AC: Why indulge in any of the not strictly necessary beauties that animate our world? Come on. I mean, it's also part of what defines Marney as the particular kind of queer she is in the space she’s in, because this is a world where, as has been the case historically, particularly in American lesbian culture, upper class lesbians are really freaked out by butch/femme dynamics, particularly butchness, which they associate with being lower class and being chauvinistic or brutish. So Marney encounters a lot of aristocratic, good Lunarist women who wouldn't claim the kind of sexual object that a strap on is.

I would love to see more strap-ons in fiction. I'm very grateful that you are a fellow soldier in this.

CC: Book three is coming for you.

AC: I’m so ready.

CC: You and me both. Since we’ve naturally segued into it, I want to make you talk more about the class structures that you've put in. One of the things I really liked is just how much it felt like reading about butchness and queerness and lesbianism as I did--I'm not that old really, but my coming of age was like cowboy dykes, Melissa Etheridge, k.d. lang, [inserting Tracy Chapman], and Stone Butch Blues. So reading Metal from Heaven was kind of like getting to see all of that in fantasy in a way that I’d craved it since I was thirteen years old. Can you tell me more about how you how you dealt with the class dynamics going into it, what the process was like, what, why, how you decided that this is how you were going to make this book this way.

AC: I think that the reoccurrence of the Internet meme in which someone presents an image of Stone Butch Blues and says, “Read this” is often showed by people who have not, in fact, read Stone Butch Blues, which is enormously about unionizing and labor protests and also trauma survivorship. And reading other—have you ever read any Naiad Press books, like that weird 90s press?

CC: I don't think so. Or if I have, I didn't know that I was.

AC: Naiad press is this bizarre lesbian press that was operating, I believe in the 90s to the early aughts, and they published a lot of really, really pulpy stuff written for lesbians by lesbians with no expectation of commercial success whatsoever outside of that. And reading some of those books, they also tend to be really about working class lesbians, right? I think outside of like Alison Bechdel depicting diesel dykes here in there…So much of my understanding of butchness is so closely related to work, workspaces, because I think blue collar work has had room inside it for female masculinity for a long time. I mean, there's a reason why for the longest time, lesbian jobs archetypally were like the construction worker, army nurse, PE teacher, farmer, trucker, women in the trades who, by virtue of their labor demanding physical effort from them, also got to embody the kind of movement through space that suited them. I thought it would be pretty disingenuous to write the sort of story…

I mean, also the story was a labor story kind of from the jump, right? This book starts with a strike breaking massacre. And I think that keeping Marney's sense of gender and sexuality deeply entwined with the fact that she comes from this working class background, and the fact that her particular family background is a conservative one, that even though there were many masculine women in her upbringing, they weren't masculine women who were crawlies.

CC: Do you want to explain crawlies to the class? This is just what like one of two particular stunning strokes of world building. In a book that is full of stunning strokes of world building, this is one of my two favorites. Go.

AC: So I wanted to come up with a brand new homophobic slur. As I think, you know, sometimes we are moved to do. And I think that there are a couple ways to go about this, like Seth Dickinson in the Masquerade trilogy goes with tribadist. But a lot of the language we have around homophobia and queerphobia is very Christian. Sodomite is referencing Sodom. Homosexual has a very Victorian vibe that I didn't think would cross over well here.

CC: That's what I feel like Seth was going for with tribadist. It's the academic action that “these” people do.

AC: It's clinical, it's removed. It's weirdly diagnostic. Totally makes sense for that world. This is less like an academic term in more like something you yell out of a truck window. Crawly derives, in this setting, from buggery. You get buggery and then you get bugs and then you get creepy crawlies, which are crawlies.

But crawlies call themselves crawlies, generally speaking, a crawly bar, will put a little garden signs out front to indicate this is where the crawlies hang out. The lesbian gang that Marney is in, they all wear--it's all butches and Sisphe--and the butches who are the active train robbers, the active bandits, wear masks with bugs on them and call each other by their bug names. Marney is the whip spider. And they have a very, very close to mid-century American butch/femme dynamic within crawly culture.

It is more contemporary to just call everyone crawlies, but there are boy crawlies and girl crawlies. Marney is a boy crawly. This is an outdated term even for her because I think it's interesting to think about how much I connect with certain aspects of butchness which are kind of dated, weirdly, or historicized at the early least.

CC: We'll come back to that.

AC: Yeah. This is in contrast to the aristocratic sapphics, as mentioned earlier, who called themselves Lunarists. Because, of course, they would. And the Lunarists are--imagine the worst Connecticut boarding school full of the hereditary rulers of the world's kids. Like, imagine if those people who are hazing each other to near suicidality every other day for kicks because they're sixteen. Imagine if all of those people were like, “Let's make a GSA,” but! What if the GSA was a respectability politics machine? What if this was a way to sort of gear up towards the idea that, “Now that we're industrializing, we can do social progress? But we, the Daughters of Bilitis, are actually quite appropriate to spend time with. We are not crawlies.” Which then becomes a problem when Marney meets them and she's like, “Yeah, I'm a crawly.”

CC: They’re like, “Excuse me?!”

AC: Yeah. It's a lot of pearl-clutching. I don't know, I thought it was an interesting dynamic to play with in a fantasy space because I hadn't seen it played with in a fantasy space before. I hope it's out there. I hope we just haven't found the book.

CC: I mean, it definitely felt like the first exploration of it in such a and such a deep way, or at least a way that resonated with me. I've seen it just sort of casually mentioned, casually noted like, oh, these are the names that we use to denote just all of the queer people. I remember an old--oh, what's her name? [Trudi Canavan, the Black Magician trilogy]. All of the gay boys were called “lads” and I was like, oh, okay, fine. That's simple, but it didn't have the same visceral like--oh, crawly. I can see how that's a bad name, but we're going to take it. A lad is just a just a guy, you know?

So this is what I wanted to do. Do you mind/would you like to read your first paragraph? For folks? The first paragraph and the first sentence of the next paragraph, that way we can at least touch the strike and make the transition a bit smoother, since we're talking about the strike breaking aspect. But mostly I just want everybody to hear how fucking gorgeous this is.

AC: Because I do a bunch of silly goofy sentence fragments, the first sentences in to the end of the first page. Because there're a lot of two word sentences going on. All right.

Know I adore you. Look out over the glow. The cities sundered, their machines inverted, mountains split and prairies blazing, that long foreseen Hereafter crowning fast. This calamity is a promise made to you. A prayer to you, and to your shadow which has become my second self, tucked behind my eye and growing in tandem with me, pressing outwards through the pupil, the smarter, truer, almost bursting reason for our wrath. Do not doubt me. Just look. Watch us rise as the sun comes up over the beauty. The future stains the bleakness so pink. When my violence subsides, we will have nothing, and be champions. In the chasms, wheat spikes and poppies will grow. Rarely is the future so immediate and tangible. Bless our triumph! How small you seem. How small you were. Remember?

That morning. Barely morning, still dark. A redness cast over the factory. I was freshly twelve. That meant I was a worker in earnest.

Metal from Heaven cover, featuring a group of four people from the back as they over look a city cast in luster-pink.

CC: So that first page, and frankly, the last page, but I'm not going to tell you guys about that--the last sentence fucking mm--So I read bits of Scapegracers and so I know that this is not a full departure from your actual style, but tell me what it was like, what thoughts you had as you transitioned from those books to this book, and also just why/how this is style that you've created for yourself. Why is the truest way to get your stories out? [I really struggled trying to ask this question but essentially, I was trying say, I love your prose! Talk about it!]

AC: I mean, I think there was definitely a moment when I was first conceptualizing this book where I thought about doing it in a third person omniscient straightforward linear way, because I think—while this is not exclusively the case, there is an observable trend in genre fiction where the prose is pretty unobtrusive. You can rip through 500 pages and like three hours because everything about the story is designed to just do momentum momentum momentum. To do the big adventure.

And I think that rocks, and it really works for a lot of stories. But I don't think it would allow for what I was trying to do here. A thing I really was trying to do in Scapegracers, which does show up here, is I think it's really interesting to ask somebody to really be in somebody else's body. Not just in their head, but in their body. I think that the mind body split is fake and silly. We are only our body. Our body is our whole mind, right? And I also think it's an experience that, particularly in genre fiction, we don't see often, where we're just in somebody else's embodied experience of navigating the world sensationally, in a way that isn’t pulled back in an intellectualized or stripped down to its component parts so that you can move, move, move, move, move through the story. And this story is told in direct address to somebody, the “you” in question.

And I think telling someone a story--I'm trying very carefully not to spoil anything here--I think telling someone a story by having them experience, inviting them to experience, demanding they experience, how you physically felt in the best and worst moments of your life, demands a lot of the reader in a way that I am interested in doing.

I think literary fiction does this very well and often. I think that there are plenty of instances of people doing this better than me, in fact. But I think it's exciting to imagine what it is like to be not in the head of, but in like the hands and guts of our, I suppose, anti-hero, as they relentlessly pursue the single thing: the destruction of this one person. Particularly with the story that's so much about death and dying, too. I think really insisting on the living part of a story about death and dying does a lot for at least my experience as a writer. When I was writing Scapegracers, the word visceral got thrown around a lot. There was a lot of very chewy, tactile descriptive words with my prose.

And I think—[In Scapegracers] it was like, this is what being a teenager is, being a teenager is stumbling around in your body and your body being weird because you're 18 years old and you're angry

CC: But they don't stop being weird!

AC: Exactly. And like also they get creaky and surprisingly painful here and there in ways that you don't expect when you're 18. [In Metal from Heaven] this was much more intentional than Scapegracers was. Scapegracers, I was a 19 year old writing about someone my age, in the way that I experienced life and we experience life with our bodies, right? I hope that the experiment of doing that here in this different genre pays off. It was a very intense thing to write. And I'm gonna do a lot more of it, so I hope people are into it.

CC: I'm into it. Super into it. In a related way, when I think about my own my own gender, whatever the fuck that is, and just my general butchness, so much of my masculinity is a very physical thing. Like, I'm an athlete. I have spent time doing bodybuilding. I, you know, I break shit. I've had major injuries. Like when I'm with someone, what I do with another person's body is really important. Like dancing. So much of my identity is about how the body moves, how my body is or is not perceived. And for this book to have such an emphasis on embodiment, a) was exciting, really, really interesting, but also, b) how do you see yourself exploring that aspect of butchness in this? We talked a little bit about the dick, but the rest of Marney's body.

AC: It's more than the dick, yeah, it's the whole Marney. I mean, I think my experience of masculinity is also vary body-centric, but I am super not a jock. I am like a breakable—I'm an inside cat, shall we say? And I think that a lot of how I understand my masculinity is very relational to how I treat other people, and also like physically move around other people, right?

Some of which is maybe reductive and silly of me, you know, like the making space for other people in my life, like physically opening space to accommodate someone else. Making myself ever so slightly larger when someone needs me to be ever so slightly larger, being a top* fill in the blanks. And I think for Marney--Marney is someone who is barely literate. Marney has never received an education that resembles ours.

Marney grew up in a factory and was a child laborer in a factory, sort of Oliver twist style. And Marnie came into her butchness by physically being with and around other lesbians, older lesbians, and imitating them, right, imitating the way that they hold their shoulders, the way they handle objects with their hands. There was more of that that I cut.

CC: I need that, I need that.

AC: It's I mean, I think a comment I receive often from people in my life, my friend row [Hello friends from the front row!] can attest to this, is commentary on the way that I walk. Yeah, I know.

CC: Do you want to give us a turn or…?

AC: Yes, I have a very distinctive stride, shall we say? And it is a big part of why I've never ever passed, even when I was very much trying to be read as a feminine person. Because I don't move right and I don't sit right. And when I do try to move right, it's drag queen. It's super clocky.

It's fun, but it's not convincing. So I thought that leaning in with Marney to her mostly experiencing the world just through gesture, the way she touches her friends, the way she touches her lovers, the way she like handles her gun and things like this, right? She is meticulously attentive to how she touches things. Even when she is hallucinating and otherwise not in control of the faculties of her body.

I think that's really where a lot of her butchness comes out. I think that if you excised the language of butchness, she would remain butch because of how she moves through. This space of her life.

CC: I mean, butch is in the hands. It's a trope for a reason. Yeah...ahem. Anyways! Speaking of butches and older butches. Though I felt a very strong sense of coming home, much like Marney was sort of coming home as she was meeting these older butches, I don't actually know that I had actual older butches in my life. I knew about them from TV, magazines, but it was very distant phenomenon for me until I was a bit older and then I met Woody. I was 16teenish, I think, and she was a rugby player. And that changed everything for me. I obviously went to go on and play rugby and I was madly in love with this older woman. (She wasn't actually an older woman, she was just old to me, because I was 16 and she was 25, 26. I know, just decrepit.) But an actual Butch elder, I didn't have that. So, can you talk to us about how you created these relationships, why you created these relationships for Marney? And it's not just Marney who looks up to them.

AC: They're invaluable members of their community, right? I too, didn't have, butch role models when I was younger. Um, also, I was stealth. I was a “girl” until I moved to Chicago. I mean, I came of age in rural, Ohio, like southern rural Ohio. And the only butch I knew who was an adult was the head of the English Department of my undergraduate university.

CC: English department holding it down.

AC: Their name is Mad. They're a six-foot-something, broad-shouldered, blonde butch who wears a shirt and tie every day. Blindingly smart person, incredibly smart person.

So, of course, I did the evil thing where I was like, “I want to write critical theories.” We spoke relatively few times in my time in that town, because they didn't teach classes often. It would just be that I would see them sometimes, and they would be like, “Ah, a young lesbian. Hello, my child.” And the thing I wanted to do in Metal from Heaven, that differed from what I was doing in Scapegracers—in Scapegracers, there's a lot of adult queer people who are really nice and lovely and kind of uncomplicated, because I really grieved the lack of queer community I had growing up.

Marney's elder queers, the older lesbians and Marney's life, teach Marney how to be a bandit, teach Marney how to be an anarchist. Teach Marney how to be a gentleman, kind of.

CC: Some more than others, for sure.

AC: Usthe is a gentleman, I think. Brandegor is not.

CC: But has a charm.

AC: Brandegore's got something going on for her. But I don't think it's gentlemanly grace. And there's Prumathe who we meet in a brothel and is the life partner of the madam of the brothel. I wanted there to be a bunch of different adult lesbians in Marney’s life, and I wanted them to be various levels of good to Marney, because I wanted it to feel more like an incorporated community and less like, “And here are the good ones all grown up whom you might grow to be like yourself.” Like, Brandegor hits Marney when Marney’s a kid. Like they're not a straightforwardly kind and perfect community. They're a community of also traumatized, also bruised up people who deal with that with various levels of grace and compassion.

But they are Marney’s entire inner life. She thinks about them all the time. And they completely qualify her sense of self as she moves into who she is.

Her whole bandit gang is modeled off after a bandit gang of older bandits, down to the way they coordinate their heists. I think that kind of intergenerational queer relationship is so important in real life, and so I wanted it to be pretty foundational to this, too.

CC: I did not collect my until--I also had an English teacher. Well, there's always an English teacher like every stage, but in undergrad, mine was the reason I shaved my head. I don't think I actually did it until I left, but she was the reason I was like, oh, I could do that. I could do that, and it would probably look good.

But the thing with Giselle is that she kind of took me in and when I graduated, she took me home—not like that—and like introduced me to her partner and I ended up doing this archival project with somebody else about Kansas City's queer scene. So I talked to Giselle about the project and she's like, “Actually, it just so happens that I live in what essentially used to be THE lesbian neighborhood of Kansas City and is slowly getting gentrified as more of the art university kids move in, but all my friends still live here, we will have a dinner party and you can record us just telling you everything about the last thirty years” and so they did that. It was the most amazing thing.

I spent the whole night crying. I think I still have the transcript but Schaefer, whose project it was, he made a play from it and that was what the thing was. It was hands down one of the most amazing nights of my life. But if I can unearth it, I wouldn't mind doing some sort of—for one, it needs to be stashed somewhere that's not my Google drive, but just to, you know—we don't have enough of it anymore. Especially like that, just like the complicated and changing identities. Like, some people who are in that group are now trans and just so much, like discovery and stuff as people move out, people move in, and it was really cool.

AC: And that's is this a play I could read?

CC: I don't know. I could ask. [I have not asked, but I’ll work on that.]


Other News

  • For you writer types, Jami Attenberg's 1000 words of summer is starting this weekend--May 31. For two weeks, the goal is to write 1000 words a day, every day, and every day, she'll send you a letter--and usually one from another great writer--encouraging you on the journey. I'm doing my best to adhere to it while working on Warmongers, and I'd love company. Go here for more details.
  • New(ish) Short Story!  A long time ago, when The Story Engine Team was kickstarting the Deck of Worlds (which some of you know helped kickstart Warmongers--we're very symbiotic here), they asked me to write a flash fiction in a world made up with the cards. Until now, this story and the whole bundle written by other authors was only available to backers. Now, my story is available to read for free and the whole book, Atlas of Legendary Places is for sale to anyone! Check out my little story about a god of change and their too-dogmatic worshippers.
  • In my last post, I talked a bit about ultrarunning. This past weekend, I was glued to the BPN Go One More Last Man Standing Ultra, which was in a cool format that is basically like an EMOM (IYKYK), except it was every hour on the hour, you run 4.2 miles (so that by the time 24 hours have passed, you've run 100 miles). Doesn't matter how fast you do it, as long as you're across the line before the hour is up. I watched as the field was whittled down to two--and they ran alone for over 20 hours. The race ended in a tie at 56 hours because a thunderstorm swept in and flooded the trails. You can catch some of the footage @BPNsupps on Instagram.

Until next time,

Stay sharp, my friends.