Emma Törzs, author of Ink Blood Sister Scribe
Genre Fiction Category, sponsored by Macalester College
Each week leading up to the 36th annual Minnesota Book Awards, we are featuring exclusive interviews with our finalists. You can also watch the authors in conversation with their fellow category finalists here.
What is one detail you wanted to include in this book, but couldn’t find a place for?
This is broader than a “detail,” but I would have liked to include more global and historical examples of the magic performed in the novel.
Tell us about someone who proved instrumental to the creation of this book.
I am going to choose a very practical answer, here, and shout out my landlord/housemate/good friend, Eric Andersen, in whose house I’ve lived these past ten years. Eric lives his values in many ways including keeping rent as low as possible. He also pays all the bills, takes out the trash and recycling, buys all the toilet paper, and often cheerfully washes my dishes when they pile up higher than his comfort levels prefers. I can’t underestimate the ways in in which having affordable housing and feeling secure in my home life have allowed me the freedom to write.
Tell us about a favorite read from the past year. Why did you find it enjoyable, insightful, or memorable?
I cannot pick just one! But three of my favorite books published in 2023 were:
– Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, which managed to be both a social comedy of manners about young activists and also an absolutely harrowing eco-thriller that still haunts me.
– Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, a prison abolitionist novel with some of the best action scenes I’ve read; action scenes that make the reader complicit in their own entertainment.
– Big Swiss by Jen Beagin, soooooo funny and strange and upsetting and delightful. This book has the best and most hilarious description of a vulva I have ever read.
Please tell us something about yourself that is not widely known.
In every city I visit for the first time, I see if they have a shoe museum or a medical museum, and if they do, I go.
Share your thoughts about the role and value of libraries.
Who would I even be without libraries? My childhood was spent in the spaces between library visits, counting time by watching the pile of books on my nightstand diminish as I read them. The ability to take home stacks and stacks of books without paying for them struck me as miraculous then, and is even more miraculous now that I understand capitalism. Even beyond the loan of books, libraries represent a kind of public commons, where knowledge is given and shared freely, with no expectation of return. Such lack of expectation is nearly impossible to find elsewhere these days.
Emma Törzs is a writer, occasional translator, and teacher at Macalester College. Her fiction has been honored with an NEA fellowship in prose, a World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction, and an O. Henry Prize. Her stories have been published in journals such as Ploughshares, Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, and American Short Fiction.