Suzette Haden Elgin's Artwork
FAQ
[Frequently Asked Questions]
Q1.Why doesn't Suzette learn how to do perspective right? In lots of her drawings, the perspective is crazy!
A. Hard as it may be to imagine, the way Suzette draws things is the way she sees the world. She has chronic vertigo and double vision, plus intermittent oscillopsia, as the result of spinal polio at age nine and postpolio syndrome. No need to worry about what the medical terms mean -- you can see the results by looking at her drawings. That's how things have looked to her most of her life.
Q2. Where can I find the book (or books) to go with the drawings? You can tell that the drawings go with a world and that the world isn't this Earth.
A. You're right that there's a book in progress, especially for two of the items that turn up in the drawings over and over: the possums; and the Ozarques -- the female figures wearing patchwork clothes, the ones that you see in some of the drawings handling flames of various colors. Suzette is slowly developing that world, and she plans to do a series of children's books about it; at the moment it's only the drawings and a stack of pages of notes. I'll let you know when the book is available, but it will be a while. However, the Ozarques (along with the "little people" called "the Quindaw") have already appeared in Suzette's books here and there. You'll find them in the third book of her Native Tongue series (the one DAW Books named Earthsong) and in some of her Ozark science fiction stories that have been published in Fantasy and Science Fiction. [Check out her bibliography for more details.]
Q3. Why possums?
A. Lots of reasons. For one thing, not many people were doing possums. The same way Suzette put flying mules -- instead of flying dragons, or flying horses -- in her Ozark Trilogy because nobody was doing flying mules, she started doing possums because she never saw any possums in sf art. She'd rather do things that aren't "Yet Another....." items. For another thing, possums are an Ozark animal, and she is a native Ozarker who focuses her sf work on the Ozarks. And then there's the fact that possums are nocturnal animals, and the world Suzette draws is a nocturnal world. And the fact that possums are small animals with satisfying shapes.
Q4. But her possums aren't accurately drawn! They're the wrong color, for example. If she wants to do possums, why doesn't she do them right?
A. Hey....they're not Earth-possums. Not Terran possums. They're Alien possums. She does them right.
Q5. Why cows?
A. Suzette is terrified of cattle the way some people are terrified of snakes or spiders. We have black bears around our place, and we have rattlesnakes and cottonmouths and copperheads. She respects those animals but she's not afraid of them. Cattle are a different matter, and we have those when the neighbors' herds wade the river during drought, or just get loose by accident. A steer pitched her over a fence once when she was a toddler, and she's never gotten over it; she'd a lot rather find a bear in the yard than a cow. So she draws cows. You'll notice, however, that when she names them she calls them "Ozark Gentlecows." That's a clue.
Q6. Some of her drawings do have dragons in them. How do they fit into all this?
A. Suzette has written a couple of sf short stories for children (not yet published except in a long-ago book from our own OCLS Press) in which the Ozark dragons appear. They're not your standard dragon; they're shapechangers. And because they're an Ozark species, they are, in Suzette's words, "excruciatingly mannerly." They do their very best to appear to people only in shapes that those particular people won't find scary. Suzette says that when you see a pickup truck in the Ozarks, you never know: It could be an ordinary pickup truck -- or it could be an Ozark dragon being mannerly.
Q7. Is Suzette working on anything new and different?
A. Not all that new and different; developing the world for the children's books is a big enough project to last a very long time. However, because her Ozark Trilogy is coming out in a reprint edition next year (spring 2000, University of Arkansas Press), she has been doing a few drawings set on Planet Ozark and showing scenes from the trilogy, and she plans to do more if she can find time.
Q8. Why doesn't Suzette work in "bigger" media -- like oils or acrylics, for example?
A. That's an easy one. We don't have room. We live in a small underground house that's already jammed to the rafters with computers and printers and books and copiers and ongoing projects. There's no place to put "big" media and no place to work with them. Working with colored pencils on paper takes the last scrap of open space we've got around here!
Copyright © 1999 George Elgin
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