In Conversation: Eygló Karlsdóttir

Writer of the extraordinary...

I don’t know how long I’ve known Eygló — neither of us can remember. We do know it came about via Twitter, in those dim and distant days when even fancy people had follower counts in the mere thousands and it was a really good place to chat and get to know people from all over the world. We got talking about writing somehow and have continued to ever since, a friendship spanning at least fifteen years but which has only involved meeting three times: at two WorldCon conventions (including one nearby in San Jose), and when we popped over from Copenhagen to meet her for lunch in Sweden a couple of years later.

I urge you to seek out Eygló’s work. She has a wholly distinctive voice that speaks of myth and forests and what it involves to struggle through being human. Her stories feel like they must first have been told around a campfire a very long time ago. Though that can’t be right, because they’re about now.

We also share an interest in photography, especially in trying to produce pictures with narrative impact, and bonded further over time spent on Instagram (again, back when it was different, a polite place for people to be supportive about each other’s imagery rather than trying to make a fortune as an influencer) and she was a regular contributor to a website I set up years ago called Because It Isn’t There. Which I still think was kind of a cool idea (it’s explained on the About page) but it needed a lot more tech savvy (and time, and venture capital) than I possessed. She makes great pictures too. Eygló’s imagination is inherently visual.

But mainly we’ve talked about writing. And so…

---

MMS: Tell us a little about yourself, your background — and how you got into writing.

Eygló: I guess starting with the obvious is the right thing to do here. I am a wildling from Iceland who went into Viking in Sweden and never went back home. I’ve been living here for… a gazillion years at this point. When it comes to storytelling, I don’t think I ever had any choice in the matter. Everyone in Iceland is a writer, I think one in ten Icelanders will publish a book at some point in their lives. Storytelling is a huge part of the culture and I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t telling myself stories or being accompanied by strange characters that weren’t really there. I was alone a lot as a kid (never lonely) and my imagination ran wild. As a ten-year-old I found a beautiful, albeit ancient typewriter in the basement of the house where I lived. This thing changed my life. Suddenly I could start hammering out words. First to learn how to type, you know fj fj fj in a row after row, but then I started writing “plays”. Conversations between characters that went on for page after page. My grandmother, who helped raise me, thought this was one of these silly things I got up to and hoped it would pass, but here we are.

I’m not sure I can describe the enthusiasm I felt when I realised that you could make up stories for a living. Even as a young kid I realised that the chances of actually being able to support yourself writing were slim, but the mere idea of it seemed to make the world a better place and though I have done a lot of odd jobs through the years I’ve never really wanted to do anything but write and make up stories.

It took me a few years to write my first short story. I still remember it. As an exercise I even rewrote it when I started writing in English. And the short story format is still where I feel the most comfortable, though I’ve written novels, self-published novellas and delved into poetry, though that’s mostly in Icelandic.

You do a lot of different writing for different media, where do you feel the most at home?

MMS: I tend to feel most at home in writing wherever I happen to be in the present moment (rather like in real life). Novels will always be where my heart lies, though as I get older I’m drawn to push the envelope on what a novel can look and feel like. As my scattered backlist shows I find it difficult to pick a lane and stick to it. I’ve spent far less time screenwriting — though it’s been the main focus over the last five years — and so I’m perhaps less adventurous (or confident) there.

I enjoy what each format can do and how different they are, and so whenever I’m writing a novel or short story or screenplay I can find myself thinking “Why don’t I spend all my time doing this!”... but then immediately flip back to one of the others. That’s one of the freedoms of being a writer. Nobody’s the boss of you. You can write whatever you want, however you want to. The trick, of course, is finding a way of selling it.

I’m fascinated both by the fact you write so often in English when it’s not your first language, and also by what you say about Iceland as a story-telling culture. It tells harsh and unusual stories, too, stripped of the usual Western European moral insulation, with a myth-level intensity and occasional emotional brutality, or what can appear so to a modern and coddled audience. I remember sitting wide-eyed at the end of the (very good) Icelandic television show Katla, for example. I’m no stranger to the dark, but holy cow — the conclusion of that show was DARK.

One of the things I love about your work is how distinctive it is. Your stories aren’t like anybody else’s. How much of that do you think is cultural, and how much personal? And do you find writing in English a challenge after so many years, or is it now the most natural way of expressing yourself in prose? Does the chosen language have a hand in pushing your fiction’s tone and subject in on direction or another?

Eygló: Thank you so much for the compliment. I do think that some of it is cultural. We read a lot of the old Sagas in school and our literary history is full of very dark stories. There is also something about the hostility of the land and the harshness of the landscape that pulls the darkness out of you. Or maybe it’s just me? I am quite landscape focused, which accentuates this, I’m sure. Iceland is a country with vast distance between places and people and I think our stories reflect this. I have always been quite fascinated with storytelling that isn’t like the normal western one we get bombarded with so much. I am especially fascinated with Japanese storytelling that is quite different from ours, but also quite dark I find. This has probably influenced me quite a bit as well.

It pleases me to hear that you are more interested in breaking the mould these days. I’ve always felt that nobody knows what will sell, not writers and not the people who claim they know, so the best thing we can do is to focus on writing the stories we would like to read, and the things that are unique to us, and close to our hearts.

I’m also very happy to hear you speak of Katla. I love that show, the idea of it and the execution. Coincidentally the place where it is shot, Vík í Mýrdal, is a place where I go in my head when I find it hard to write. Not sure why this is except for the atmospheric landscape there.

I could talk for a long time about the language aspects. It’s always hard to write and I don’t think that will change but I do have a ritual and a way to try to focus the English language center in my brain. I do keep four dictionaries up at all times while writing and often find myself grumpy because the word I found in English doesn’t sound as good as the word that first came to my mind in Icelandic, or Swedish. And this doesn’t change when I’m writing in the other languages.

Each language does pull at different strings. I find it fascinating that the only short story I’ve tried to write in Swedish turned out to be funny. And my writing is usually NOT funny. I don’t really have a funny-bone in my body. But there is something inanely funny about Swedish. I keep telling people that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is funnier in Swedish than in English for some reason. And I’m sure in the same way English pulls at certain strings. What I know is that it allows me to write the kind of stories I want to write, not least because I have never lived with English as a language belonging to a certain place. I learned English from school, from books and from television and a little bit from relatives who lived in the UK, or in Canada and from friends who live in different parts of the English speaking world. I think this makes it easier for me to place my stories in a world that is slightly different from our world, slightly outside of it but still relevant to it. If that makes sense?

You mentioned being all over the place when it comes to genres and I know the publishers don’t like that but I like hearing it. I enjoy writers who aren’t afraid to tackle the next topic on their mind, whatever it may be and certain writers, you among those, I will read even if they write about paint drying. I’m sure I’m not alone in this?

I’m also not sure which genre I belong in at all, partly because I think horror is a sub-genre of all other genres. Haruki Murakami is labeled Literary Fiction, but his books are definitely works of horror. The same can be said about a lot of other writers writing in different genres. There is horror science-fiction, and you can find cosmic horror monsters in The Lord of the Rings and this goes for other genres as well. I think that as horror writers we are uniquely fit to be all over the place and tip our toes into different genres, mix and match as we please. It’s not like wearing pink slippers to a funeral. Then again, I rely on other ways to pay my bills, so it’s easy to say this and harder to go for broke when writing is your living, I’m sure.

Do you feel this has changed since you started writing? Is it harder with self-publishing and all that comes with the latest technology, or has it always been this difficult to be a writer of different vocation?

MMS: As someone who grew up listening to recordings of The Hitchhiker’s Guide over and over, the background sound of my life for my teenage years (to the point where I’d basically memorized the entire thing) I love the idea it’s even funnier in Swedish. Pretty sure Douglas Adams would have been tickled by that too.

I definitely see horror as a kind of sub-genre within all the other “genres”. I think “noir” works that way too, and “humor”. They’re not mere flavoring, something to sprinkle over other genres for effect, but independent neighborhoods within the greater metropolises of styles/genres like “science fiction” or “literary”. I tend to be attracted to that style of horror far more than I am of the books or stories where it’s as if the writer declared “This is horror, nothing else”. That kind of fiction can feel limited, a horror village rather than being part of a great and varied city.

And like you, I’m definitely drawn to voice writers. There’s only so many plots out there, however you try to vary them — but a good voice writer can make any of them seem fresh and distinctive, much like a great guitarist can play a few notes out of the pentatonic scale over the same four chords as everybody else (I, IV, V, minor VI) and make it sound unique. There are writers who I’ll read for the voice alone. Martin Amis for example, who’s had hit or miss books — but who has never failed to make me feel that every sentence was nonetheless worth reading.

It is tough to follow the road of your own muse, that’s for sure. A lot of readers and most publishers prefer authors to pick a style and a subject matter and stick to it. And I get it. If I pick up the new Stephen King and it turns out to be romantasy I’m not going to be happy — even though the other qualities he always brings, the voice and story-building, will doubtless be there. I know I have readers who’ve preferred earlier styles of fiction that I’ve done. I’ve received many emails saying “When will you write some more science fiction?” or “Are there going to be any more Straw Men serial killer books?” And I loved writing both, so who knows. Perhaps there will. But at the moment I’m feeling drawn to a more literary space in which you try to show the reader something that steps outside the usual “setup, reversal, reveal, then a third act of people running around the forest with guns” model — and which doesn’t drag you around the houses with pointless manufactured twists. Where you can mix fiction and non-fiction and personal information and try to create something larger.

It’s the same with short stories. I recently sold my hundredth and am feeling drawn to trying some more unusual things. Will that make them more popular or saleable? Almost certainly not. But it feels essential to keep moving and developing rather than going round in circles. When you’re a writer an awful lot of your life is spent... writing. So there needs to be some light and shade and change and challenge there too.

I don’t know whether the growth of indie and self-publishing has made all this harder, but it does seem to make it even tougher to gain attention and sales for work. There’s just so much stuff out there. Have you found that end of the business a challenge?

Eygló: Oh! I now need Stephen King to write romantasy! That would be excellent, then again, he is one of those authors who can make writing about paint drying interesting.

But to answer the question, Yes, I do find it a challenge. If you think normal imposter syndrome is bad, try writing in a language that is your second (or third) language. When you write in a language that you essentially feel you don’t have the “rights to” it is hard to have faith in your abilities without a huge pom-pom fuelled go-go quire at your beck and call. So, the whole process becomes daunting, whether it is all the tasks you need to do to self-publish or simply sending your writing to submission calls. I do appreciate being able to self-publish and though there are some important aspects that I know nothing about, like marketing, I quite like the fact that I get to choose what my books look like, and I get the complete creative licence to make it into whatever I want it to be. The whole book becomes mine, not just the writing but cover and all, for good and for bad. Though writers who do get through the gatekeepers, and I do like the gatekeepers for various reasons, are having to do a hell of a lot of marketing and other things writers didn’t use to do so I suspect this is hard for everyone these days.

But to reconnect with something you said, I think that the fact that we do have the internet gives us different abilities to grow and try out the strange experiments that we want to do. It is good for us to feel we are growing, even if the market wants us to stay the same forever and I’d hate to think that we are missing out on stories like The Metamorphosis, Northanger Abbey, Call of Cthulhu or Fall of the House of Usher because the stories we want to experiment with don’t seem marketable at the moment. If we don’t experiment, the artist in us dies a bit even though I know we all need to chase the market to survive. If for nothing else, being a pantser, I do appreciate sitting down in front of my preferred writing software not knowing what will come out. And I think chasing this satisfies something within us and may just spark something great and because there is so much stuff out there, being different might just be what tips us over, or is that just wishful thinking?

You are a writer that has been courageous enough to go out of your comfort zone and write in different genres and different kind of stories, do you regret not staying in the same lane? And has there ever been anything you have wanted to do but thought would be too unmarketable to be worth pursuing?

MMS: I’m not sure it was courage as much as that endless inability or unwillingness to stick to a lane. There’s an inner tug in my brain that tends to pull things off into weird directions no matter how much I try to keep it on the straight and narrow. I tried to keep the Straw Men books fairly normal thrillers, but then found myself making up twelve-thousand-year-old conspiracies and introducing Neanderthals into the second book. Not my fault. Blame my brain.

Do I regret not staying in the same lane? Sometimes. Choosing a particular genre and type of book would have led to a more predictable and straightforward career, for sure. But I would have got bored, and I can’t write when I’m bored. I hope that throughout everything I’ve done there’s a consistent voice and point of view that bolts it all together. I’ll admit to a degree of creative contrariness, too. As soon as you tell me something’s trending, an inner bit of me kicks against it.

So I guess I’ll keep putting out what I’m interested in and hope somebody out there responds to it. Which brings me to my final question — what are your current projects, and future plans for your writing?

Eygló: At the moment I am focusing all my efforts into finishing my part of a project I have been referring to as The Shelf Stories but may now have the name Paradigm Shift. I asked several authors (you among them) if they wanted to give me a story for a “feature” project. The idea is inspired by the Eminem song “Stan”. I was listening to it for the umpteenth time when it occurred to me that it might be fun to see what a “featuring”, like they do in music, would look like in writing. So, I am writing a story that will include all the stories I have gathered from very talented authors into mine. It has been described as a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster this thing, but it’s quite fun and intimidating, not to mention very hard to do but I am on my second draft after some minor setbacks and a long process. Hopefully my part of it is good enough to give the stories I have justice and if I’m lucky someone will be interested.

I am always writing short stories but when this project is out of my hands I am planning to edit and possibly expand a novella I wrote a couple of years back and got feedback on from someone that told me this should be a novel. It is Dark Fantasy that borderlines on our world, and the story won’t leave my head so it’s time to give it some love. I also have a couple of short project I am working on in collaboration with Ashley Stokes who is a very interesting writer and fun to collaborate with.

I quite like collaborations as it turns out, it challenges your own process and writing quite a bit. In between I am always writing short stories from time to time no matter what else I am working on. A hint of an idea will start to poke at me until I sit down to write it down. I can just echo what you said about the writer’s life, I will continue to do this no matter what. Never wanted to do anything else really.

Thank you for this, it’s been fun!

Find out more about Eygló’s fiction at her site, her Substack, and follow her on the socials.

---