Novella Project: Tiffany Morris Interview

Today for the novella project we're speaking to Tiffany Morris:

Tiffany Morris is an L'nu'skw (Mi'kmaw) writer from Nova Scotia. She is the author of the swampcore horror novella Green Fuse Burning (Stelliform Books, 2023) and the Elgin-nominated horror poetry collection Elegies of Rotting Stars (Nictitating Books, 2022). Her work has appeared in the Indigenous horror anthology Never Whistle At Night (Vintage Books), as well as in Nightmare Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, and Apex Magazine, among others. She has an MA in English from Acadia University with a focus on Indigenous Futurisms and apocalyptic literature. She can be found at tiffmorris.com or on twitter/bluesky @tiffmorris.

Green Fuse Burning was reviewed earlier this week by Phoebe, which you can read here.

For your recent book Green Fuse Burning, what made you decide to write it as a novella? Was it a particular attraction of the form, or something about this story that suited it?

While I explore a lot of the themes that are present in Green Fuse Burning in my poetry, I really wanted a more expansive form to express some of the interwoven complexities of grief - having an interior glimpse into the mind of a character and how they respond to the things that happen to them felt like the most immediate way for me to do it. But the brutality of how this character experiences grief wasn't something I wanted to expand into a novel, because it's already emotionally difficult subject matter.

That makes a lot of sense - and certainly seems true of a lot of novellas I've read. They're a great way to explore a particular theme without overburdening the reader, and occupy a useful transition point between short fiction and a full novel.

Picking up from that - do you find generally that the form you choose ends up being dictated by the content, or do you ever go in thinking "I am going to write a poem/short story/novella/etc." and then shape the content to mould to the form?

It's funny, my writing process always forms from fragments and seeds - my Notes app is full of images, random sentences, or story idea - and sometimes things jotted down devoid of context that I can't really turn into anything. Ideas that I intend to be novellas or novels will inevitably end up being short stories - or even poems, because my tendency is to pack everything down into dense sentences. I suppose what it becomes really depends on if I think a character needs to think through and experience the idea. 

Do you think that density in your writing comes from being a poet, as well as prose author?

Sort of - I think I have a tendency toward maximalism in pretty much everything, haha. Even when I was writing my master's thesis, my advisor would recommend I expand and simplify my ideas for greater clarity. It's part of why I love the revision process so much - looking at what needs to be pared down, and what needs to be left as-is.

How did you come to be working with Stelliform?

I've been a fan of Stelliform since the very beginning - I won a copy of Michael J Deluca's Night Roll through a twitter giveaway and have been hooked ever since. I'm behind on my reading now, but I think I've read about 75% of their catalog, so I'm thrilled to now have a book of my own in the mix. Selena and I were fans of each other's work, and she reached out to me about submitting; I'd had a few ideas that I pitched rolling around but kept coming back to the pond.

Are there any particular novellas in Stelliform's catalogue you'd recommend or think more people should read?

I think Stelliform has something for everybody! I'm partial to Night Roll by Michael J. DeLuca, Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell, The Impossible Resurrection of Grief by Octavia Cade, and House of Drought by Dennis Mombauer. I haven't had a chance to dive into Sordidez [Roseanna's note: Phoebe has a great review of this up here] by E.G. Condé yet, but I'm looking forward to it!

Do you have any thoughts about working with a small press generally? Things that work better, or are just different than you were expecting, or advice you'd give your past self about the process?

I love working with small presses! Both Elegies of Rotting Stars and Green Fuse Burning have been released through small press, and while each experience was unique to the press, both were great. Having a small editorial team focused on your work is such an honor - you get the sense that there is a deep investment in your work, and also in making it the best that it can be. 

Picking up on the focus on your work, did this include you having any input into the cover design at all? And was that something important to you and how you felt your book was presented to the world?

I did! Selena was very considerate of what I might like for the cover - we both wanted to prioritize having Indigenous art, or work from an artist of color, or a queer artist, in showing reflection and solidarity with my own work. We're both huge fans of Chippewa and Potawatomi artist Chief Lady Bird's work, so we were thrilled when we were given approval to use her piece for the cover. It resonated so well with the spooky, swampy themes of Green Fuse Burning.

It’s striking and haunting and I think it looks great!

After your experiences writing Green Fuse Burning, would you write another novella? And if yes, do you think there’s anything you’ve learnt from this one that you’d take forward in a future project?

Thanks so much! 

Yes, I'd love to do another novella - the form is so interesting to me because it's a great way to delve deeply into an idea while still having some focus, or a thesis. There isn't the need to be as expansive as with something like a novel, and that constraint opens up a lot of room for experimentation. 

Final question: can you tell us a little more about your book?

Green Fuse Burning is about an L’nu’skw (Mi’kmaw) landscape painter who is tricked into a residency at a remote pond by her girlfriend with whom she’s having issues. As she works through her residency she experiences increasingly strange and supernatural sights and sounds - is it a manifestation of her grief or something more sinister?

Thank you Tiffany!

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

Novella Project: Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris

Get lost in the swampland in this short novella exploring grief, climate change anxiety, colonization, and mental health.

Note: Tiffany Morris includes the following content warnings at the beginning of the novella: parental death, suicidal ideation, animal death/gore, explicit sex.

Tiffany Morris’s eco-horror novella Green Fuse Burning keeps a tight focus on place, a large pond, while exploring major issues from grief, PTSD, climate change, colonization, and more. Rita Francis is a Mi’kmaw artist working in landscaping paintings. She goes on a week-long residency paid for by a grant that her white girlfriend, Molly, applied for in her name in hopes of igniting Rita’s artistic spark again. The cabin is on the shore of an isolated pond, and Rita goes early in the season since the warming climate has made the summers too hot and the winters shorter. 

The novella opens with Rita’s first night at the cabin when she’s woken up by what sounds like people dragging a body to the pond. She tries to watch through the window but decides not to go outside. Since she hardly has any cellphone signal at the isolated cabin, she resigns herself that there’s nothing she can do, and she’s not entirely sure what she might have seen was real. She reassures herself: “She’d sleepwalked as a kid, hallucinated all manner of things, found herself waking up on the porch some mornings with muddy feet and the imprint of grass on her arms, impressions of an unknown hour” (13). When she goes into town the next day to ask around, she’s met with the typical rude locals suspect of anyone new, particularly an Indigenous woman.

Rita only has a week at the pond to work on her paintings. Even if the pond seems to have some odd flora and fauna—including some loud and bloody crows—that’s no reason to run away and possibly strain her relationship with her girlfriend even further. But the longer she stays at the pond, the more things unravel. Her girlfriend leaves her a cryptic voicemail, her paintings are oozing, her will to live is fading, and there may or may not be something coming for her from the swamp.

This novella tackles a lot of themes in a tightly plotted story. One of my favorite parts was the meditation on what it means to be an artist. Rita’s livelihood influences her reaction to the weirdness of the pond as she processes it through her paintings. Beyond that, art influences this book, from the great cover, to the inside illustrations. Importantly, the story is structured as if the reader is walking through a gallery of Rita’s work, reading the descriptions of each painting. The following section of the story features some of the inspiration from that painting, and they grow weirder as Rita spirals into the swamp. I loved how the voice of the gallery descriptions differed from the voice of Rita and gave the reader such lines as: “In these paintings we see the murky, urgent depths of a woman’s spiritual journey into the swamplands of uncertainty” (7). Through these paintings and descriptions of Rita’s artistic process, Morris captures one branch of eco-anxiety not depicted as often as a general fear of the changing climate. For artists who work intimately with the land, that change is explored through art, which means a much more intense focus. It’s impossible for the artist to look away from the climate crisis if their chosen focus is landscape, such as Rita. 

While this novella is a fecund meditation on grief and its branching impacts, one of my favorite aspects was the descriptions throughout. Morris’s title comes from the Dylan Thomas poem “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” Thomas’s body of work is full of lush, wordy poems, so for Morris’s to draw inspiration from his work—and to quote from the titular poem as an epigraph to the novella—promises the reader an equally lush reading experience. She absolutely delivers, and I enjoyed the natural descriptions throughout, especially as they become weirder and more horrific. One of my favorites opens the second chapter: “As Rita made her way through the fog-wreathed world of the pond loop, she admired the vibrant greens around her with a morbid thrill. […] It invaded, pillaged, choked out everything else that breathed, leaving only a teeming verdant landscape in its wake” (31). Morris’s poetic power of description adds depth to the relatively simple—but effective—plot and makes for a rich reading experience. 

Without dipping into spoilers, the swampy weirdness comes fast and quick. While a more common critique of books is that the middle lagged, in this novella, I wish we had lingered in the middle and let the weirdness build a little more slowly. Morris tackles so many themes—which connect back to the central grief of the death of Rita’s father—but I wish more of these paths could have been explored more fully with a slightly longer novella. Then again, that’s the struggle with the novella form—it’s a snapshot in many ways. Much as Rita’s paintings cannot capture everything about the pond, I found myself wanting to spend a bit more time there in the middle of this novella. 

In her debut novella, Tiffany Morris comes out swinging. This short, tightly plotted novella lives up to the linguistic delight of Dylan Thomas’s work, which is referenced in the title Green Fuse Burning. It also brought to mind Annie Dillard’s foundational work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) with the connections to animals that don’t quite behave as we would expect. Morris’s meditation on grief, climate change, colonization, art, family, and more reminds the reader of the interconnectedness of life—even after death. In that realization is where I find the power and importance of eco-horror. This subgenre, much like horror in general, offers a way to overcome the fear of climate change and move toward an acceptance of this grotesquely changing world. With this acceptance opens up the possibility to live a fuller life, to keep living, even in the face of terrible loss.

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Reference: Morris, Tiffany. Green Fuse Burning [Stelliform Press, 2023]

POSTED BY: Phoebe Wagner is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and climate change.