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GUEST PROFILE An Interview with Mary Rosenblum 
Mary Rosenblum, a prolific science fiction and mystery writer, says she never saw herself as a writer when she was growing up in Pennsylvania. She earned a biology degree from Reed College in Oregon and was a researcher and science writer when she decided to try her hand at fiction. A single mom of two sons, she sold a herd of goats she had raised to pay for a six-week writers workshop. Out of that workshop (to which she will return this year as an instructor), came her first fiction sale. Rosenblum’s novels include sci-fi works such as Horizons (2007), Water Rites (2006) and Chimera (1993), as well as the Gardening Mysteries series, with Rosenblum writing as Mary Freeman. MR: I was always a story maker. Any time I was bored and had no book nearby (or was sitting at a school desk), I made up stories to entertain myself. Sometimes they derived from stories I’d read, sometimes they were new, but stories were my way to never be bored. But think of myself as a writer? No way! Writers were born, after all. They sprang full blown from the womb with a scarlet “W” on their foreheads, and if you didn’t have that, you shouldn’t even think about it. Such was the response to any “I want to be a writer” foolishness. MWLM: Tell us what drew you to science fiction. MR: I fell into science fiction when I was 12, and we vacationed for the first of several summers with my double cousins at Nag’s Head, North Carolina in a shared house. We kids had to endure a forced two-hour “rest time” every afternoon (the adults were the ones who needed it!), and I quickly ran through the books I’d brought from home. But under my bed was a box of Galaxy magazines. I was instantly hooked! My imagination always worked over time, and suddenly I could contemplate museums on Mars (I remember that story vividly), crises in space, the life and death of vacuum outside a bare skin of hull, and the vastness of a universe that I could, by golly, see by going outside at midnight and looking up! What a way to step outside the things we have so taken for granted every day that we no longer really see and look at them with clear eyes. What a way to look at who we are and ask, “Where are we going?” and “What are we doing?” in a way that makes people think. I fell in love with that genre and have never fallen out of love. Yes, it is full of trashy stuff, but the good science fiction is, in my opinion, the most flexible and powerful genre of them all. You can make people think about big things without realizing it. And I know it works because some readers have chided me for keeping them awake at night, thinking. MWLM: You supported your young sons with your writing. How did you do it? What motivated you to keep going and not get that regular day job? MR: Oh, wow. That was a long, tough time. I survived because of two things. One, I was willing to not live according to the standards of the day – that is, buy all the stuff, do all the stuff that the ‘successful’ person does. Two, I was willing to work my butt into the ground to live the way I wanted. I did both. We lived on less than $20,000 a year. Well, less, some years. I grew all our food on our 2.5 acres and heated the house with our woodstove. I cleaned up neighbors’ downed trees after storms (firewood), I picked up apples in people’s yards when they didn’t want ‘em (fed the goats that gave us milk and meat), I cut, raked, and stacked hay by hand, with a scythe no less, to feed those goats in the winter. I cut, split, hauled our firewood. Any way I could avoid paying out cash by putting in sweat, I did. As my kids got older, they helped. Neither of them is in credit-card debt; they know the reality of working hard when you have to. For fun, we did things that don’t cost any money. We didn’t eat in restaurants. I brought dinner made at home to the games when my kids were doing things like wrestling, baseball, search and rescue. 10 pounds of flour can make a lot of treats for your kids with some yeast and sugar and home-raised fruits. You have to decide what’s important to you, and you have to balance that against how you want to live. If you want to live a $90,000-a-year lifestyle, you have to earn that $90,000. I really, really wanted to be doing what I was doing, and I was willing to work very hard to do that. Actually, we qualified for welfare most years. I never took it. We ate better than most people, and I had enough money for our needs. My kids didn’t have designer jeans and fancy toys, but they don’t desire them as adults. Welfare would have been a “loser” brand. We were not losers. MWLM: How did you balance writing and being a mom? MR: I prioritized. My kids came first. Always. Livestock came next. They couldn’t feed and water themselves. But if a story was really working, and the house needed to be vacuumed, I did the story first. So sometimes things were messy, and sometimes everything was clean. Let’s face it – kids are kids, and sometimes the rational discourse just doesn’t work. But I did my best to trade respect for respect: “Let me finish this chapter, be quiet, and we’ll go to the park and play.” I had to remind ‘em sometimes, but I always carried out my part of the bargain, and I made it a peer exchange rather than a bribe or a threat. ‘I need this so I’ll trade you that.’ That worked well for us. The writing wasn’t my thing – something to shut myself away from my kids. I did it in the main room, they would be watching TV right there, and I could join in from time to time. Writing was our thing. They could look over my shoulder and read any time they wanted to. MWLM: What inspires you in your writing? Where do your ideas come from? MR: Oh gosh, ideas are everywhere. I get inspired by people, by news stories and magazine articles, by possibilities, by strange connections and conflicts that can make us think. Make us think. I keep saying that, don’t I? But that is really why I write. Because I think all the time, wonder about things, and I guess I just want everybody else to do that, too. Why is he so sad? Why does this marriage work? What will happen if we really live in space? What if he didn’t really kill her, but just wanted her dead? MWLM: Tell us how you broke into the science fiction market and about the Clarion West Writers Workshop. MR: Actually, Gardner Dozois, editor of Asimov’s magazine, really gave me my break. He published me – he published me a lot. I got featured as one of the top 10 authors in Asimov’s in terms of stories published a few years back. Stan Schmidt, editor of Analog magazine, turned down my very first story submission and scribbled me a note with lots of exclamation points. He hated the ending. Of course, what I didn’t realize was that meant he had loved the story and thought he’d buy it, and then the ending sucked. Well, it did. When I timidly asked him at a conference if he wanted to see a revision, he scolded me: “Of course I want to see a revision or I wouldn’t have spent all that time on the story.” Well, I had painted myself into a corner and never did make the ending work to my satisfaction, but it was a cool start, and the story got me accepted to Clarion West Writers Workshop – where I will be an instructor in 2008. Talk about full circle! Clarion West is a six-week long, very intense bootcamp for writers. I wrote 60,000 words in six weeks and sold my first story to Gardner Dozois. I sold my goat herd to pay for [the workshop] and got a friend with girls my sons’ ages to take my kids in for six weeks. MWLM: It must have been heart-wrenching for you to sell your goat herd to pay for Clarion West and be apart from your children for six weeks. How did that experience inspire/complete you as a writer, a mom and a person? MR: It was very hard. I really felt that this was important – important enough to shake up our lives over. I missed my kids a LOT, and they missed me. But you know what? I sure knew the cost of what I had signed up for. I wrote 60,000 words in my six weeks there and made my first sale. I busted my behind! But it was sure great to hug my kids again. I called ‘em a lot. MWLM: Can you go into detail about your nonfiction accomplishments? MR: I did nonfiction before I did fiction. (Fiction writers are born with that scarlet “W” on their foreheads, remember?) I was doing research in fetal endocrine systems (I have a biology background) before my first son was born and had published a paper in a scientific journal. ‘Why not try non-fiction,’ I thought? That was fun! So I tried and landed a monthly column [in Countryside and Small Stock Journal] with my first query! I did that and sold some other pieces in the farm/garden/livestock universe. It was going well, but then I thought, ‘Why not try an actual story?’ That was the Analog story, and I had so much fun, this was so wonderful (I hadn’t gotten Stan’s exclamation-pointed rejection yet) that I applied to Clarion West. And got accepted. That pretty much ended my non-fiction career. MWLM: Does your background in biology influence your science fiction writing? MR: Of course! Most of my science fiction started out in the biosciences and ecology. I now have a wealth of knowledge about space habitats and long-term space travel, but research has always been easier because I had a strong science vocabulary to start with. MWLM: Tell us about your first novel and how it came to be. MR: I was getting published in short fiction, breaking in nicely and really wanted to write a novel. I wrote one and actually got an agent, although she wasn’t all that enthusiastic about the novel (it was just not very good). Then I published three novelettes in Asimov’s about a global warming future. (The science was there, even back in the early ‘90s, folks, but nobody was paying attention!) They got great reviews and critical attention. I wanted to continue the characters in a novel. My agent encouraged me, and I wrote The Drylands. It sold to Del Rey (Random House). I just re-released it as Water Rites from FairwoodPress (www.fairwoodpress.com), including the original three novelettes that complete the dramatic arc. MWLM: If there’s one lesson to be learned about writing/getting published that you can give to other “writing mamas,” what would it be? MR: If it matters to you, do it. Figure out how to make it happen. Just be stubborn. Put your kids first, your writing second, and all else takes up the hindmost. Bottom line: If it matters to you, do it. MWLM: Any upcoming projects we should watch out for? MR: Tor Books asked for two more books, so that’s waiting in the wings. I tried “alternate history” (what would the world be like if something had gone down differently?) and had a ball, so I may try that. Just watch my Web site for news of what’s out. www.maryrosenblum.com. My current science fiction novel, Horizons, will be out in paperback in November from Tor Books. Water Rites – this is our future unless we reverse global warming – is available from www.fairwoodpress.com. MWLM: How do your kids feel about your successful writing career? MR: They’re happy with it. They read my stuff – it’s part of our life. Canadian resident Chynna T. Laird is the author of I’m Not Weird, I have SID – the story of a young girl who struggles with Sensory Integration Dysfunction. Laird is also a contributing author to Chicken Soup for the Soul: Children with Special Needs and a former contributing editor to WOW – womenonwriting (www.wow-womenonwriting.com). Visit her Web site at www.lilywolfwords.ca
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