F. J. Doucet

FJ Doucet's work has appeared in Silver Blade, Eye to the Telescope, Literary Mama, and yolk, among others. Her poetry was previously nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is among the nominees for this year's Rhysling Award. She is the current president of the Brooklin Poetry Society, based just outside of Toronto, Canada.

Get to know F.J. Doucet...

Birthdate?

Just shy of the summer solstice.

When did you start writing?

Long, long ago, in the before time… In other words, I cannot even remember when I started. The beginning is bound up in that hazy, mythic dimension of early childhood.

When and what and where did you first get published?

I suppose it depends on what you consider published. I used to write for fanzines in the 90s and early 2000s, under a variety of pseudonyms, until fanzines went the way of the woolly mammoth. My first “official” was when I was fifteen; I had some verses appear in an anthology for young Canadian poets, published by the Canadian Authors’ Association.

Why do you write?

To shape the world into something that I can understand, and to share that understanding.

Why do you write Science Fiction and/or Fantasy?

I don’t understand strict genre divisions; all of the oldest stories are fantasies about magic and immortality, and even the strictest of literary fiction seeks to weave a spell around its reader. I write speculative fiction because it most directly addresses that magic.

Who is your favorite author? Your favorite story?

That’s a terribly difficult question. My mind just goes blank when asked for an absolute favourite, but some of my many preferred writers are Tana French (mixed literary/crime writing with an underlying supernatural background) and Donna Tartt (The Secret History, that coming-of-age story with its powerful, mythic implications). In sci-fi, I’m fond of Robert J. Sawyer. His stories are always about the humans and what the science means for them and says about them as its authors, rather than about the science itself. And I’m currently very much enjoying the Fatma el-Shar’arawi series by P. Djèlí Clark, set in an alternate Cairo in which magic and jinn have been suddenly loosed upon the landscape at the end of the 19th century. Not only is it great fun, but it’s decolonizing as well, as Egypt, equipped with this new advantage, throws off the subjugation of the British Empire and rises to the global political forefront. I’m also personally invested in the series because the main character is called Fatma—my own name; the “F” part of “FJ”!

What are you trying to say with your fiction?

I think of my compositions as a map of details rather than a complete body. If we think about how the world exists on an atomic level, as empty space joined by a microscopic network of physical matter, we can superimpose that atomic reality onto a novel, a short story, or a poem. The plot is the space. The details are the matter.

If you could write your own epitaph, what would it say?

Not my own words, but what more is there to say: “Mortal fate is hard. You'd best get used to it.” ― Euripides, Medea

Do you blog?

I don’t really have time. It is even difficult to carve out a few moments in the day when I can sit down and compose a poem or add a few paragraphs to a story. Blogging is a worthy pursuit and part of a long tradition of personal essay writing and/or journalistic exploration, but it’s simply not something that I can do at the moment.