Authors Tess Sharpe, Nicola Griffith, and Katrina Carrasco all write lesbian fiction that challenges and expands upon the genres they each work in. Sharpe’s crime fiction and thrillers are full of action, heart, and grit, her latest — No Body No Crime — about a rural PI trying to locate the missing woman who she once buried a body with. Griffith’s prolific and much accoladed body of work spans historical fiction, science-fiction, fantasy, crime fiction, centering Black, brown, queer, and disabled perspectives throughout these tales. Her work challenges the status quo of these genres. Her popular crime fiction trilogy — the Aud Torvingen novels — recently received a re-release. And finally, Carrasco is the author of queer Western smuggling action-adventure novels The Best Bad Things and Rough Trade. Spread across continents, we were lucky enough to wrangle up these icons of sapphic literature for a conversation about their work, bending genre, writing bodies, why queer people deserve more than just survival and much much more. Together, the trifecta’s bodies of work — all distinct, but touching in interesting ways, as the conversation below reveals — show just how expansive lesbian literature can be. Enjoy this very queer conversation between three brilliant minds!

Within the various genres you all write in — thriller, Western, noir, fantasy, historical fiction, crime fiction, to name a few! — do you see your work as queering the genre beyond just the level of injecting queer characters into it?

Nicola: I don’t really see my work as queering a particular genre so much as simply writing what I want, and, more to the point, what I believe to be a reflection of reality. If I’m deliberately trying to queer anything, it’s the world, one reader at a time. Queering real-world attitudes and understanding. Queering time and space. All my fiction, past and future and here and now, is stuffed with queer, disabled, Black and brown, poor, and gender non-conforming characters — but (with one exception) they’re never about being queer/Black/disabled. They tell stories about people in different times and places living dangerous, comfortable, exciting, boring, challenging and joyful lives. Doing well and doing badly (also, y’know, saving the world, being heroes, falling in — and out — of love, and all the good stuff of real life that, in fiction, you can turn up to 11) not because of or despite who they are — their particular identity — but because of or despite what they do or don’t do — the choices they make. It’s that — the sheer ordinary humanity of my characters facing relatable (but, y’know, exciting) challenges — that changes readers’ attitudes. It’s doing that that helps the reader be brave enough to imagine how it might be to live as someone not like them. When they do that, it changes what they think and how they feel. Just for a little while. And sometimes a little while is all it takes.

My historical fiction (Hild, Menewood) and historically accurate (apart from magic and demi-gods) fantasy (Spear) are set in the so-called Dark Ages (seventh-century north of England, and sixth-century Wales) where history has told us women were chattel, queer folk were shunned, everyone was white, and disabled people were abandoned at birth. Which is (to use a scholarly term) a steaming pile of horseshit. The history of that time was all written by straight white Christian monks with agendas. Archaeological evidence shows, very clearly, that, oops, those chroniclers just left out all the people that inconveniently contravened that agenda. This has led to a very distorted view of the past. Of course queers and crips were there—we’ve always been here, at every level of society and every time and place. We’re just like everyone else. We are everyone else.

My crime fiction (three Aud Torvingen novels, starting with The Blue Place) is about a woman in the here and now — Atlanta, Norway, Arkansas, New York, North Carolina, Seattle, Atlanta again — who is a force of nature, who — while she makes many mistakes along the way — always wins in the end. Aud is a hero, but she’s not a hero because she’s rescuing her sister, or because she’s traumatised, or angry or broken; she’s not after revenge. She’s a hero Just Because. Physically, she has many gifts and she wants to use them to do good in the world, just because she can. Aud uses violence as a tool — one of many at her disposal.

My science fiction is set in the far future on another planet (Ammonite) and in day-after-tomorrow Britain (Slow River). Again, women and queer folk, disabled people and people of colour are just…people. We are here now; we were there then; we’ll be there in the future.

Tess: Much like Nicola, I’ve always just felt like I never quite set out with the purpose to queer up a genre, but to reflect a reality that I’ve lived. I grew up in what my cousin Ryan (the other queer writer in the family, highly recommend his show on Netflix Special, which he wrote and starred in) calls “a very gay family” and so I found myself writing queer stories that were always quite ahead of the market for many years, first in YA where the origins of queer kidlit was focused on the coming out story, and then in adult, which fell behind YA in terms of genre stories featuring queer characters while YA blossomed with them. Because of this “ahead of the game-ness” I’ve watched my work with queer characters be labeled as “they just happen to be queer” by the industry and the critics and watched as that “just happen to be queer” moniker went from being a detriment to selling a book to now it being a positive in the last decade as we’ve evolved in all age categories for queer novels. I’ve never really seen my own work this way — I think the queerness is quite integral to some of the plots, especially queer secrecy and some of the character dynamics just don’t work in my mind without the bisexuality of the characters, but it’s a label I’ve never been able to shake.

It’s also created a situation of the books being “firsts” for a lot of readers. First YA book someone reads that has a sapphic love scene that doesn’t cut to black, first queer YA mystery, first book where a character identifies as bisexual on the page (I know this sounds silly, but back in 2014 when it was published, it was a Very Big Thing for many readers). I’ve found that books that are someone’s queer firsts in literature can be a very visceral and healing experience — and very formative.

Nicola: Tess, yes! Being first is qualitatively different to being ‘one of the first’, and even being one of the first is a different experience to being one of many. This applies whether talking about being the first to actually do something or being the first queer (or woman or all-women or disabled queer woman) story a reader encounters. It took more than 25 years to get the Aud books published in the UK (even as they were winning awards in the US). Oh, one editor said, we’ve already published one of those. By which she meant, We published a crime novel with a lesbian in it two years ago and, well, how many lesbian readers are there, anyway? Another editor wouldn’t take them because, she said, The author is clearly having too much fun. By which she meant, Queer women aren’t believable unless they’re anguished and twisted up.

Katrina: I wonder if messing with genre is a form of queering genre? Making it do something unexpected, breaking the “rules,” etc. I approach genre in my writing as something to be played with, and I do bristle a little bit when my work is placed into a single genre box because I want it to be more expansive than that. The many tropes and conventions that can come with genre fiction often feel like guardrails I want to smash through. So I don’t know if I’m queering genre or trying to break it!

Nicola: Katrina, yes! The number of times I’ve been told, But you can’t *do* that in x or y genre! And I say, Watch me. Genre is just a marketing label, and genres have become a set of reader expectations. You can mess with those expectations, but it comes at a cost — I’ve been upbraided by more than one angry man (it’s always men) who accuse me of soiling their pristine genre with my filthy women/queers/crips. SFF readers, particularly, used to shy away from anything relating to the body: hard, shiny, and intellectual = Good while soft, organic, and emotional was Bad…

What draws you to the respective genres you work in?

Nicola: For me, story and character drives the genre — genre is just the vehicle I choose to cross a particular story terrain. But I’m going to let someone else run with this one first.

Tess: Growing up in a very lawless rural area definitely defined me, both for my setting as a writer and the crime genre I write primarily in. I started out as a sci-fi and fantasy writer back in my yesteryear (literally, I was a teenager) and I’m lucky to get to entertain those genre whims with my IP and Licensed work with Marvel, DC, etc. But I find writing sci-fi and fantasy on my own really difficult and unfortunately not terribly financially lucrative because I get lost in the world-building and it takes me too long.

But when I write a Romance novel, it’s all about honing craft (and enjoying the banter. I love Romance banter). I go back to Romance between crime novels and the other genres every time to challenge myself because the biggest challenge, I’ve always found, is writing a book where the reader knows the end result (that happily-ever-after) but is there for the ride and journey. This restriction causes you to reinvent the wheel, time and time again, in a way I’ve found no other genre does (at least for me).

Katrina: I always want to create a character study that has a compelling plot. I’ll wrap that core in any pieces of genre that help me keep the reader invested and put my characters into difficult situations that reveal more of their depth. Mystery/crime can offer tight tension engines that keep the plot humming along; historical offers the constraint of having to fit world-building alongside story; noir provides some starting tropes that can be turned on their heads.

Nicola: Like Katrina, for me the genre is all about how best to explore the character and (sometimes) theme. My first novel, Ammonite, was SFF because it had to be. I wanted to challenge the implicit understanding that women aren’t fully human, we’re just alt-humans, girl-humans. SFF writers of the past had explored women-run worlds and concluded that without men, women form cold and loveless societies, or follow insectoid behaviour, or behave even more viciously than men when it comes to persecuting other genders. The best way to challenge all that rubbish was to create an entire world of women, and only women, and really see what happens — which of course is that women fill all the personality and behavioural niches available to humankind: We’re generous and mean, vicious and gentle, smart and dull, bold and fearful… All the things. The two Hild novels are all about exploring why and how it could be — absolutely was — possible to live and thrive as a queer woman 1400 years ago. I wanted to see where and how history got it all so wrong.

You all write (queer) female physicality so well, so I was wondering if you could write about your approach to writing queer bodies.

Nicola: The main thing? It’s about the *body*. The second thing? I make sure that queer body is a site of delight rather than pain or trauma. As to why and how I do that, well, I wrote my entire PhD thesis on this (“Norming the Other: Narrative Empathy Via Focalised Heterotopia”) so I’m happy for someone else to kick us off on this one and chime in later.

Tess: I’ve spent many years — decades, really — very cut off from my own body to cope with chronic pain. I think as a whole, I’m more focused on writing disabled bodies. It was really eye opening to write Iris’s POV in The Girl in Question, my first character with endometriosis like me. Her endo is a plot point in book one (The Girls I’ve Been) but we’re only in her girlfriend’s POV in that book, so diving into her POV in the sequel and the pain and the impediments it causes when she’s running for her life and her fear of not being fast enough while she’s trapped in the woods was not just a physical challenge but a really emotional one. Digging back into my own experiences at 17, which is when my own endo really started setting in and robbing me of the life I had before as an athlete was incredibly intense. There were times where I was like “I do not want to do this.” I think it’s partly why I gave Iris a better end result than 17 year old me: She’s headed towards endometriosis excision surgery by the end of the book, something I didn’t get to experience until I was 36. She has the most ideal endo experience if there exists such a thing: diagnosed very young, excision surgery young, and (in my mind) as pain free as one can get after that surgery. I think it was healing in a way, to give her that. The thing myself (and many other people with endo) do not get without many years of suffering and medical gaslighting.

I’m a do-er when it comes to action and research. If I can do it so I can describe it better, I’m gonna do it. Whether it’s running through the woods barefoot (not the wisest decision on my part) or having my mom lock me in a car trunk or training with specific weaponry, I can be very method-actor with physicality in order to get it right. I think it’s the years of Stanislavski and Meisner acting training.

Katrina: I relate to both Nicola and Tess’s answers here — like Tess, I’ve physically acted out scenes to see how they’d feel, and I took boxing lessons to better write boxing matches and fistfights. It’s also important to me, as is it to Nicola, that I focus on embodied queer pleasure rather than trauma. I make a point of including explicit queer sex scenes in my books because there’s still so much shame attached to queer pleasure in the US and globally. For the same reason, I make a point that these sex scenes include female characters. Women are bombarded by cultural messages that we should be ashamed of sex, that our bodies are gross and need endless “fixing,” that we exist to please men. Also, women are so strong, and we constantly get the message that we’re not! I love writing female characters that refuse to be constrained by all that patriarchal garbage.

Nicola: I’ve always been a creature of the body; it’s how I learn, it’s how I think, it’s how I interact. And like me, all my protagonists operate viscerally. They tend to live large, they revel in physical joy. Unlike Tess and Katrina, though, I tend to research through my imagination rather than my body. For one thing, I’m a wheelchair user; for another, it’s hard to know how it might feel to climb Hadrian’s wall in the early seventh century when a) it’s 4,000 miles away, b) the wall then was very different to the wall now, and c) everything — I mean everything: roads, contrails in the sky, the stink of car exhaust — would have been different then.

Another connective tissue between all of your work is the concept of queer survival. What does queer survival mean to you?

Tess: Survival of all kinds is at the root of all my stories. Women surviving, girls surviving, men not surviving (if they are bad). I think that exploring what it is to survive and what we do to survive is a thread I will always come back to, because there’s so many possibilities and stories behind it.

Queer survival, especially, is the story of us. How in the end, we always have existed and will continue to, despite what is done to us, despite epidemics that have killed so many, despite societal ebbs and flows, despite bigotry and religion that condemns us. And in queer survival, there is queer thriving. Because in the end, it is not enough just to survive. We deserve to thrive.

Katrina: I agree with Tess that a large part of queer survival is our stories surviving. We are literally being written out of existence by the current American government — and of course, beyond these language-based attacks, our queer and trans communities face escalating violence, discrimination, and harassment. Queer survival to me means telling our stories and our histories — whether in books, films/TV, song, dance, or other arts — and then building and nurturing queer communities where we can share these stories and take care of each other. It also means making queer art and sending it out into the world as a lifeline for someone who needs to see themself reflected in a positive way to survive. Our art sustains us.

Nicola: I agree with Tess: Surviving isn’t enough; in my fiction we thrive. In my latest book in particular (Spear, an Arthurian retelling) I was responding to the implicit — and occasionally explicit — opinion that queer folk did not exist and certainly did and do not belong in the past, never mind the heroic and/or legendary past. I thought, Hold my beer. And instead of just putting in Black, disabled, and queer people in that past, I made us the heroes.

Your characters are often going through intense, high-stakes, violent situations. Beyond just thrills and plotting, what draws you to this kind of bold and twisty storytelling?

Tess: I grew up really steeped in this kind of work. I spent so much time with my grandmother as a child watching pre-code film, which is a place where women were allowed to be flawed and multi-dimensional instead of the basic Noir femme fatale (though I do love a good femme fatale). Pre-code film also tends to be very short film-wise, so you pack in a lot in the 70-80 minutes the films typically were. The older I get, the more I realize how influential being really immersed in that era formed me as a writer.

I love a book that’s more like a puzzle for the reader. That throws you in and doesn’t let go, that makes you work for it, that’s structured in a way that allows for the juxtaposition between past and present. I am not someone who eases you in as a reader. We’re gonna hit the ground running and (hopefully) forget to breathe a few times. And that mimics what the characters are going through most of the time and I’m fond of that parallel.

Katrina: I like having a propulsive plot as the container for my character studies. A friend of mine once described my writing as “medicine coated in peanut butter” — peanut butter being the fun stuff that helps the message go down. (Anyone who’s had to give pills to a pet should understand my friend’s turn of phrase!) I think it would be very difficult for me to write a “quiet” novel, though I am challenging myself with my current project to sort of turn down the volume on external events and make more room for internal workings. We’ll see how it goes.

Nicola: I don’t think of my storytelling as twisty. The Aud books, for example, are more like a high-speed maglev train hurtling through the dark that you can’t get off until the journey is over. The three Early Medieval novels are full of battles — literal and figurative — because there’s no higher stakes than fighting for your life. When I read, I gravitate towards high-intensity: Things have to happen. By that, I don’t mean things have to be happening all the time — I love quiet moments of contemplation, or simple comfort — but that I dislike (loathe, actually) stories in which characters dither and agonise. I end up yelling at the book, Oh  just decide already! And throwing it at the wall. I’m very much a Do or don’t do, there is no try sort of person, in my life as well as my work.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!