To wrap up Pride month and the celebration of the Pride StoryBundle of queer fantasy and science fiction, we have an interview with author and editor Catherine Lundoff. There’s only a week left to grab the Bundle!
Pick up your copy of the Pride StoryBundle through July 1st at https://storybundle.com/pride to read Catherine’s novel about menopausual werewolves, Silver Moon! If you buy the bundle at the $20 level, you get 16 books and you can earmark part of your purchase price for Rainbow Railroad’s life-saving work with LGBTQ refugees. Happy Pride Month!
How do you celebrate Pride?
Catherine: I’m often at a table selling books at a lot of our regional Prides. If I’m not doing that, I’m hanging out with my friends and talking to the vendors and anyone else who looks interesting. I also like to do author readings, see queer theater and films and engage in whatever interesting cultural and political events are happening. I like celebrating as many aspects of Pride as I can!
We have so many wonderful queer books being published these days, but new queer writers can still face unique challenges. What advice would you offer them?
Catherine: Don’t give up. Finding and building an audience can be hard and slow but have faith in your work and keep going. Support other LGBTQ+ writers and work with them when you can to make everyone as successful as possible.
Can you tell us about the book you have in this StoryBundle?
Catherine: I have 2 books in this StoryBundle, Silver Moon and Blood Moon. We decided to run both of them because there were several years between the re-release of Silver Moon (Book 1 of my Wolves of Wolf’s Point series) and March of this year, when Blood Moon (Book 2) came out so we wanted people to have the opportunity to read them back-to-back if they wanted to. My Wolves books are about a group of middle-aged women in a fantastical Western town in the U.S. who turn into werewolves as they enter menopause. There’s a mystery, a paranormal romance, a touch of the dark fantastic, lots of queer characters, found family and coming out at midlife. These could be just the books you’re looking for!
What do you find engaging or important about writing LGBTQ+/queer fiction?
Catherine: Well, first and foremost, I think it’s critical to have our stories out there and by that I mean all kinds of stories and queer fiction. I think this is particularly true as big publishers consolidate and opportunities for queer authors broaden in some respects and narrow in others. I think our stories reflect our history and culture as much as our imaginations and often, who we are at this point in time. Our words are part of how we will be remembered, hopefully inspiring new generations of queer people to create their own as well as having a better understanding of what came before them.
What other books or stories do you have out that readers of this StoryBundle might enjoy?
Catherine: I have several collections of short fiction out, of which Out of This World: Queer Speculative Fiction Stories might be of most interest. And for stories that aren’t yet collected, I should mention that I have a series of f/f 17th century Caribbean pirate and spy stories up at Heather Rose Jones’s Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast. I recommend LHMPodcast anyway since it’s full of excellent information about queer women in history as well as fiction.
Aside from your own work, what are some of your favorite queer reads you would recommend to folks?
Catherine: Of the books that I’ve read most recently, River Horse by Melissa Scott is some excellent queer epic fantasy, I’m currently enjoying A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark and I’m almost done with The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows by Olivia Waite, which is a terrific f/f Regency-flavored romance with charming older heroines.
