Dirck de Lint

Dirck de Lint

Palmer's Folly, fiction, Issue 53, December 2020.

Dirck de Lint lives in Regina, Saskatchewan with his wife, his son and a variable (but, oddly, almost always prime) number of cats. What little free time he has not applied to writing is often given to vintage fountain pen repair or baking. His work has appeared in Pseudopod, AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, and the anthologies Creatures in Canada and Monsters in Spaaaace!

Get to know Dirck...

Birthdate? 30 November 1966

When did you start writing? There are two answers to this. The technically correct answer is... unclear, but somewhere before age 10 in an intermittent way, with more vigour from age 16, and in fits and starts ever since.

The truthful answer is in 2014, as that's when I decided I had to consider actually showing my writing to other people, including the editors of publications. Anything before that was... well, not junk, but certainly uncritiqued. That's also the time I finally managed to kick loose of the popular fetter of "I'll write when I have time."

When and what and where did you first get published? This is also complicated. My first two acceptances arrived in the inbox at essentially the same time, August of 2016. The first one that the contract was completed for was SF set centuries post-human, "Reiteration". It was picked up by AE, who were attacked by an extremely industrious hacker almost immediately after the final edit was approved. Thus, their August 2016 issue didn't see the world until two years later.

The other was "The Third Act", a very quiet kitchen drama involving a mob accountant having his life expertly threatened. It was presented in Trigger Warning: Short Stories with Pictures in September 2016 without any behind-the-scenes drama. The emotional attachment to these stories is intertwined, and since I have the luxury of not having to be precise in my assumptions, I treat them both as the first. Polyzygotic twins, these two.

Why do you write? Largely to distract myself from the terrible state of the real world. I might posit a roving cloud that turns people inside out (with or without a subsequent dance number), but no real people are suffering. Apart from readers, who... well, I'm assuming they're consenting to exposure to the nonsense that escapes my head.

Why do you write Science Fiction and/or Fantasy? The same answer, effectively. SF of the mushy kind I produce, Fantasy, and Horror are all profoundly not-real settings, and that puts even more distance between the worlds of my imagination and the worrying developments found in headlines. And let's be clear-- my answer for this was the same before 2020 lowered its unlovely rump upon our collected heads.

Who is your favorite author? Your favorite story? If pressed for a single author, I will say Patrick O'Brian; as a get-away from modern woes that I don't have to make up myself, the Aubrey/Maturin novels are hard to beat. He's just one of a swarm that I really like, though-- H.G. Wells, Chuck Wendig, H.P. Lovecraft (with an appropriate blush), Iain Banks, Premee Mohamed, Terry Pratchett, Laird Barron... just off the top of my head.

My favorite story... at the moment... is Charles Stross's "A Colder War". An absolutely chilling importation of transdimensional titans into the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction.

What are you trying to say with your fiction? Apart from "BOOGA BOOGA THERE'S A MONSTER!"... I guess the consistent through line is that there's always stuff happening just out of our sight that would absolutely blow your mind if you managed to pull aside whatever the curtain of the moment is. That's more or less the same thought that underpins Cosmic Horror, but not necessarily so all-encompassing or bowel-loosening; sometimes it's perfectly delightful.

If you could write your own epitaph, what would it say? I promise I'm not that noise you heard. You know. THAT noise.

Do you blog? I do, after a fashion. I used to do an entry every weekday as a way of keeping myself from buying old pens on eBay over lunch, but part of what got me started on really writing was noticing how many words a month came out of that 30 to 40 minutes of laying down text. I still keep at it, on ravensmarch.wordpress.com, but that's become largely a way of proving to a nebulous external locus of control that I am writing, damn it, why must you judge me so? with very occasional editorial entries and references to fountain pen trivia.

There's also the blog-esque site that I occasionally post some writing on, which revels in the highly original address dirckwrites.ca. That's also where I'll announce publications and once in a while burble about uneducated philosophy.

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