AUTHOR INTERVIEW: John Wiswell Talks Someone You Can Build A Nest In

Hello and welcome to this Track of Words author interview where today I’m delighted to welcome the excellent John Wiswell, to talk about his fascinating new novel Someone You Can Build A Nest In – which is out now from Arcadia Books (UK)/DAW Books (US). This really is an intriguing book packed full of talking points, and I roped in my good friend (and increasingly regular Track of Words contributor) Fabienne Schwizer to help narrow things down to a manageable number of questions. So read on to find out more about Someone You Can Build A Nest In, its brilliant cast of characters, some of the themes explored throughout the book, and plenty more – and prepare to really want to read this book!

Track of Words: To start things off, could you tell us a bit about Someone You Can Build A Nest In and what readers can expect from it?

John Wiswell: John: You know all of those Fantasy novels where everybody wants to slay the monster? Well this is the book about how the monster feels about all that business. Shesheshen is a shapeshifting horror who’s mostly trying to hibernate, and maybe have a hunter for a snack. After hunters poison her and drive off a ravine, she thinks she’s done for. But she wakes up in the care of Homily, a kindly human who mistakes the shapeshifter for a fellow human. Homily is sweet and gentle. She nurses Shesheshen back to health, and soon they grow painfully close. The closer they get, the harder it is for Shesheshen to keep her secret. Just as she’s about to tell Homily the truth, Homily tells her why she’s here: she’s hunting a shapeshifting monster. Has Shesheshen seen it anywhere?

ToW: Without spoiling anything, who are the main characters and what do readers need to know about them?

JW: It’s a novel of monster slayers, and heroes and rulers, everyday workers and butchers. But mostly? You just need to know Shesheshen and Homily. Shesheshen is our shapeshifting horror, a monster who is lonelier than she knows, who has always stayed to the shadows of society to survive. Homily is our world-traveling, kind-hearted heroine, the one who mistakes Shesheshen for human and nurses her back to health. Neither expected the bond they would form. Both are hiding things. Dating’s hard, isn’t it?

ToW: What can you tell us about the world in which this story is set?

JW: The story takes place on an independent state on an isthmus that lies between two empires, neither of which will allow the other to take control of it. Their independence is utterly subject to a balance that could destroy them. The isthmus is ruled by a barony, and the Baroness seldom sets foot here, since the last time a shapeshifter like Shesheshen appeared, it laid its eggs in her husband. The Baroness rules the local town of Underlook ruthlessly, if from afar. The townsfolk of Underlook, then, are pretty adversarial at every sign that a new shapeshifting monster has woken up. At every angle, Shesheshen experiences the hostility of the human world. That’s why she’s bewildered that a kindly human like Homily exists.

ToW: Shesheshen is such an interesting character, there’s lots to ask about her. To begin with though, where did the name come from and how do you pronounce it?

JW: (Laughs) I should have put a pronunciation guide for her name on the title page, shouldn’t I? Poor Shesheshen. Her name is pronounced in the cadence of “succession.” It came from sounds my own asthmatic lungs made on a few nights. I tried to put those sounds to text. Later when I invented my monster, disability was so deeply coded into her that I wanted her to have a name that came from it, too. You could say she takes my breath away.

The US cover of Someone You Can Build A Nest In – via DAW Books

ToW: Shesheshen is a literal monster, but she’s deeply sympathetic and underneath her monstrosity Someone You Can Build a Nest In feels like a story about perception. Can you talk about what signals monstrosity in your novel and how you see that interacting with contemporary society and its values?

JW: Monstrosity is a political construct – not just a social one, but a political one, used to marginalize people and animals for the gain of others. This goes for wild animals whose habitats we destroy and then demonize for showing up in our backyards looking for food, and for people who are exploited. Every queer person has experienced being treated as a scapegoat by the fearful and the power hungry. Shesheshen is a total outsider in her civilization, so much so that she views civilization as the greatest kind of evil, since it keeps sending people who harm her. That gets much more complicated when she starts making attachments to people, and yearns for that connection she’s been denied until now.

ToW: Shesheshen has a similar sort of viewpoint to a character like Murderbot – an outsider, someone others see as terrifying, someone who really doesn’t understand a lot of social cues. Did you intentionally code her as what we would consider neurodivergent, and do you think readers are growing more receptive to this sort of character?

JW: I’m neurodivergent myself, and for once I didn’t socially mask in writing. We neurodivergent folks often get taught to write “normal” points of view, which is stifling, and causes many of us to drop out of writing entirely. For this novel, I opened up more of my own perspective than usual, while still letting Shesheshen’s personality dominate. It was genuinely liberating. It felt like breathing after holding one’s breath. That there are more readers open to this, and also more neurodivergent readers who are vocal about wanting publishing to give us a place, has been wonderful.

ToW: How does/did Shesheshen learn to distinguish gender? She refers to herself as female, but it’s interesting to consider how the social ideas of gender might be somewhat removed from how she evolved.

JW: Now that is a fun question! Some of it has come from roles she’s wound up playing when she encountered humans in the wild, and in trying to pass as human and be paid less attention in the village of Underlook. And she’s absorbed some ideas of gender from watching humans. But her principal influence is her mother. Shesheshen has grown up in the shadow of her mother’s memory. She sees her mother as a role model as a monster and a survivor, and so has taken on several parts of her identity. Her mother’s steel fangs were her inspiration for many of her own prosthetic body parts. Gender is another part of it. She’s grown up believing she should one day develop eggs and lay them in someone like her mother did, although those ideas will be challenged in the book. Having been slain when Shesheshen was born, her mother exists only as a legend. But Shesheshen wants to live up to that legend, and derives much of her identity from it.

ToW: The Wulfyre family is full of great characters with fantastic names – it’s reminiscent of the Latin proverb nomen est omen, as well as illustrious company like Robin Hobb’s Farseers. What made you choose prophetic/significant names like Catharsis, Homily, Epigram and Ode in Someone You Can Build a Nest In?

JW: The Baroness is a woman of dramatic tastes! (Laughs) That family is the only one in the world we see with such a naming convention, and it’s something the parents and Wulfyre lineage think will help them stand out and show their dignity, as the power brokers of this tiny and perpetually imperilled isthmus state. They are surrounded on both sides by empires, and then it turned out there were monsters below them as well. Without spoiling what the parents intended by each name, I hope readers will chew over the choices even after they finish the book.

ToW: It’s so interesting to see the UK and US covers emphasising different aspects of the book. Do you have a sense of why the two publishers took such differing approaches, and how the UK/US audiences might differ?

JW: I love that the covers are so different! I’ve seldom seen two such different covers at the launch of a book. Some of this came from the artists. James Fenner has a long history of the strange and the monstrous, and his cover for the U.S. edition emphasizes Shesheshen’s monstrous glee. Whereas Stephen Player’s U.K. cover is much warmer, and emphasizes Homily’s calming and alluring worldview, and the warm influence she has over Shesheshen. Yet it seems nationality is not the determining factor in the appeal of the covers. Among people who have read it thus far, many U.S. readers like the U.K. cover, and many U.K. readers have messaged me to say they’re importing the U.S. one. Both covers are genuinely appropriate to the two characters. I’m tickled by the reception. I’d love if your readers would message me what their votes are.

ToW: Unlike some debut authors, you’re no stranger to the SFF community. How do you think being an award-winning author of short fiction and your reputation among your peers have impacted your long-form debut?

JW: I’ve been publishing short fiction for about fifteen years now. Time flies. I love the form, and have at least five short stories due out this year already. I’ll keep writing them, alongside novels. The arc of gathering a readership that enjoyed my sense of humor, my empathic sensibilities, and my penchant for putting neurodivergent and queer and disabled characters into the hearts of SFF has been long and slow. It’s rather amazing to see so many people open to it now. I’m not the only writer who does this. But I think together we’ve proved there is an audience that is hungry for different perspectives. So to some degree, short stories may have opened the door for my particular brand of weird long fiction.

ToW: Looking back now that the book is finished, how did you find the experience of writing long-form fiction, compared to short fiction?

JW: In every piece of fiction, I seek to do justice to my characters. Even in a 500-word flash fiction, I want to express their truth. In this novel, I got to watch two characters encourage each other’s growth over and over. It was a beautiful dance that was full of context that no other form of storytelling would allow. Although I am still tempted to write short stories about some of these characters…

ToW: Can you tell us anything about what’s coming up next for you, or what you’re working on at the moment?

JW: I’m busy on my second book for Arcadia right now. It’s not directly linked to Someone You Can Build A Nest In, but it has a deep thematic link. It explores more notions of humanity and monstrosity, and the connections between people. On a deeper level, Someone You Can Build A Nest In is about the body, and how bodies can express our identities. In the same way, this next book is about voices, and how they express more about us than we think.

ToW: If readers enjoy this and want to check out more of your work, where would you suggest starting with your short fiction?

JW: This is a good question. Permit me to give you a few starts. I have a story coming soon this summer at Reactor, “I’ll Miss Myself,” about a social media that shows you every parallel universe life you could be living – but also about the lies the app has told all of you about your possibilities. It shares a theme with this novel in unlearning the world to understand yourself better. Now, if you want to go straight to sympathetic monsters? “The Three O’clock Dragon” is about a dragon who tires of the government trying to kill her, and so she runs for mayor. It’s almost a companion piece to this novel. Or you could go with “That Story Isn’t The Story,” a novelette in Uncanny Magazine, about a familiar attempting to escape his violent master through growth and therapy rather than magic. That one might be the most intense here.

ToW: To finish off, if you could absorb one object into your body and put it to good use like Shesheshen does, what would you choose?

JW: A third hand would be great! (Laughs) Imagine all the writing I’d get done if another hand could always be ready to tag in and give another a rest.

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John Wiswell won the Nebula Award for his short story ‘Open House on Haunted Hill’ and won the Locus Award for his novelette ‘That Story Isn’t The Story’. He has also been a finalist for the Hugo Award, World Fantasy Award, British Fantasy Award, and Locus Award. His work has appeared in acclaimed publications like Uncanny Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tor.com, Nightmare Magazine, and others, as well as numerous podcasts, including LeVar Burton Reads, NoSleep, Podcastle, and Escape Pod. He was most recently a finalist of the Hugo Award a second time in 2022 for Best Novelette.

You can find him on Twitter @Wiswell and online at https://johnwiswell.blogspot.com.

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Firstly, thanks so much to John for a fantastic book, and for taking the time to go into details with these answers! I’d also like to say a big thanks to Fabienne for working with me on this interview, and for Ella at Arcadia Books for facilitating the interview!

Lastly, I really would recommend getting hold of Someone You Can Build A Nest In – you can read Fabienne’s guest review here, and I’ll add my recommendation too!

Someone You Can Build A Nest In is out now from Arcadia Books (and DAW Books in the US) – check out the links below to order* your copy: