Emerging Writers Series: Grace Chan
“Creativity is incredibly powerful for me. As we grow up, we often mould ourselves to the expectations of our families and our societies. We squash ourselves into the persona others wish to see, what they deem acceptable. The creative process is about tapping into that almost childlike wellspring of imagination and wildness.”
I adored Grace Chan’s speculative debut Every Version of You (Affirm Press, 2022), and the vivid real/un-real world it imagines, so I was delighted to have the chance to chat with her about her work and writing life.
As a short story writer, Grace shares her experience of taking the leap into a full-length novel, her thoughts on creativity, how she imagines the worlds she creates and the unsung role of speculative fiction in Australian literature.
I tend to start these interviews with a similar question to help readers learn more about you! Could you tell us a little about your journey to becoming a writer and what inspired you to start writing?
I’ve been bursting with stories since I was a child. I used to scribble little novels in notebooks and wrangle my friends into reading and writing with me. I was always drawn to speculative fiction; it suited my geeky, imaginative, idealistic, and analytic personality.
During my medical training, writing fell by the wayside. When I had a break from work in 2018, I realised that nothing else gives me joy like the pursuit of writing. At the time, I was reading a lot of speculative short stories. I attended a few writing conventions and started submitting my own short fiction. It began to snowball from there.
You’ve had several short stories published in other outlets, and I’d love to know a bit more about how you found the leap between writing short fiction to a full-length novel - was it a bit of a process, or did it feel natural to write something longer?
It was a natural process for me. I’m deeply in love with the craft of both long and short fiction. In short fiction, you can keep the lens narrow, pulling the reader along a thread through a vast space, creeping or hurtling them blindly around corners.
In longer fiction, you can do the same things, but you have more space to work with. You spend so much time with your characters and your world that it really seeps into your skin. The writing comes more intimately from a place that, for me, is emotive and preverbal, and the writing is transforming it into an imperfect expression.
Every Version of You is a fantastically imagined world (with so many elements that don’t feel imagined at all!). How did you go about researching and drawing together the themes and ideas covered?
The seed of the novel was the relationship between the two main characters, Tao-Yi and Navin - their love and the way they’re pulled in different directions by the virtual reality technologies and uploading a human mind.
A major theme of the novel is change. You could say we’re a collection of disparate identities; What stitches us into a semblance of a person? What holds a relationship together when the people within it transform? What about the transient nature of all experiences? What makes anything sacred or worthwhile when it’s all so fleeting?
Regarding the technology in the book, I extrapolated a lot from my personal experience of virtual spaces, the internet and technology - the incessant content consumption, the feeling of being fragmented and subsumed into algorithms, the way your body disappears when you plunge into cyberspace.
My work as a psychiatrist also helped me to imagine the psychological and physiological aspects of being constantly plugged into virtual reality–and then of abandoning the physical world altogether.
I’m always in awe of authors who have this capacity to create a vivid reading experience of a new or alternate world to our own - which you achieve wonderfully in Every Version of You. I’d love to learn more about your creative process and what creativity means to you as a writer?
Thank you. I love this question. Creativity is incredibly powerful for me. As we grow up, we often mould ourselves to the expectations of our families and our societies. We squash ourselves into the persona others wish to see, what they deem acceptable.
For me, the creative process is about tapping into that almost childlike wellspring of imagination and wildness.
I really love how Lee Lai depicted childhood play in their Stella-nominated graphic novel, Stone Fruit (Fantagraphics, 2021), as this feral, loose, transformative state of being and a way to reach the lost parts of oneself. I think that’s why creativity leads to such joy and connection.
Speculative fiction and science fiction have always felt a little bit on the ‘outside’ to other more mainstream genres of fiction, but it feels like there’s a growing taste for them. Would you say this has been your experience with getting your work published?
Yes. I’m definitely not a fan of the artificial divide between speculative fiction and ‘mainstream’ or literary fiction.
You hear people saying, ‘Oh, I don’t read speculative fiction,’ and I just think, well, you’re missing out on so much. Also, it’s an illusory divide anyway? So much literary fiction has speculative elements, and so much speculative fiction is experimental and literary.
To be honest, I still feel like I’m on the ‘outside’ of mainstream fiction. Almost all my short fiction has gone to ‘genre’ and speculative fiction publications. I’ve found that science fiction and fantasy communities can be a real home for marginalised writers.
In Australia, I think there’s still an attitude that science fiction is less valuable, which is silly, but it does make it hard for me to find a home for my writing. I hope publishers and readers will start to realise how wonderful and intimate, and thought-provoking speculative fiction can be.
Who are some of the key authors and writers that you’ve been influenced by - whose work is dominating your bookshelves that you think we should be exploring?
In my late teens and early twenties, I was inspired by Ursula K Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury.
I greatly admire Kazuo Ishiguro for the elegance, restraint, and intimacy of his writing. Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Vintage, 2003) bled into my subconscious and into Every Version of You.
I make an effort to read as broadly as I can, time permitting: speculative and literary and non-fiction, Australian and international. I’m astounded by the speculative fiction being written today. Ted Chiang and Ken Liu are masters of intelligent, moving short stories. Southeast Asian, Japanese, Chinese, and worldwide collections of speculative fiction.
I adore speculative fiction magazines, especially ones that highlight translated, diasporic, diverse works: Clarkesworld, Fireside Fiction, khōréō, Hexagon, Sine Theta (not strictly spec-fic, but some of their stuff has speculative elements).
Lots of our readers are emerging writers themselves. What would be three of your tips for others starting their writing journeys, based on your experience?
Write what brings you joy.
Do not feel guilty for doing life instead of writing—it’s necessary for the writing.
Read and engage with other people’s work, as it will fuel your creativity.
And lastly, what’s next for you in terms of writing, and will you be doing any in-person events to promote Every Version of You that we can get along to?
I’ll be on the ‘Grave New Worlds’ panel at Melbourne Writers Festival on 11 September, discussing dystopias with Claire G Coleman and Sami Shah.
I’m itching to return to short fiction. I have a few works on the go. I’m also nervously pondering something a bit different for my second novel.
I’ve long had an idea for a weird, claustrophobic story set on a human migration spaceship several centuries into the future. I’m claustrophobic myself, so perhaps I’m wickedly keen to induce that feeling in my readers.
Grace Chan is a writer and doctor. She can’t seem to stop scribbling about brains, minds, space, technology, and identity. Her short fiction can be found in Clarkesworld, Going Down Swinging, Aurealis, and many other places. Her debut novel, Every Version of You (Affirm Press, 2022), uses virtual reality and mind-uploading to explore change, love, migration, and what it means to be human.
Website: www.gracechanwrites.com
Twitter: @gracechanwrites
IG: @gracechanwrites
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in nipaluna (Hobart), Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under www.wordswithelaine.com.
