1.- Could you introduce yourself to Jamreads’ readers?
Hi! I'm Emily Tesh, a UK-based author of science fiction and fantasy. I write character-forward books, usually with queer themes, and I have a strong interest in the way human beings create environments and are in turn created by them. This describes my novellas (historical fantasy romance set in a magical woodland), my science fiction (dark dystopian high-stakes space opera) and now my contemporary fantasy (the magic school book). From the outside my work looks like it's all over the genre shop, but it all makes perfect thematic sense to me!

2.- When would you say you started writing with publication in mind? How it all started?
With publication in mind is hard to pin down. I've been writing since I was a teenager and at various times I saw myself as a silly hobbyist, a future great voice in literature, and almost everything in between. My earliest actual published work was poetry - in various magazines, and one anthology, during my late teens. I wrote a novel while I was at university and another in my early twenties, and I saw both of those as potentially publishable, although in retrospect they most certainly were not. But in between that I was also writing constantly for my own entertainment and the amusement of my friends, and I now think that work was much more important to my development as a writer than any of the self-consciously Important projects I worked on in my teens and twenties. My first novella was published when I was thirty years old, and my first novel when I was thirty-four. I think that timing was about right. It takes time and practice to get good at writing the way you want to write, and I'm glad that so much of my practice is unpublished work that no one will ever see.

3.- Your first published series was The Greenhollow Duology, two fantasy novellas published by Tor. Could you tell us a bit about the idea behind it?
Greenhollow feels like a long time ago to me now - I wrote the first book in 2017! It's a story about a wild man who lives in the woods. Tobias Finch takes care of the environment–the woodland, for all its apparent wildness, is a deeply human environment, one that has been shaped by humanity for centuries–and, in return, the environment takes care of him, providing him with food, with materials for his home, with the companionship of dryads, and with a strange form of immortality. But it's also a story about his isolation and stagnation, and how that changes when he meets a handsome young man who asks unusual questions. Greenhollow is a comforting little queer romance, and I still get people asking me for more sequels, which I'm afraid to say will probably never happen.

4.- Silver in the Wood won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella. How did it feel? Do you think awards put a pressure on authors’ next releases?
Honestly, at the time there was so much going on in my personal life - I'd just had a baby and I'd barely slept in weeks! - that the award win barely registered. I was very happy and grateful, but I don't think I really appreciated what a huge honour it was or that it made the stakes higher for the next thing I wrote. Which is lucky, of course! The post-award slump is a real thing that happens to lots of authors. You feel like you have to live up to people's faith in you.

5.- Going forward, your debut novel was Some Desperate Glory, which curiously is your dip into sci-fi. Why did you decide to change genres?
I really don't think I did! I don't find the distinctions between fantasy and science fiction as genres all that persuasive (despite many clever authors' best attempts to make the whole thing sound plausible, faster-than-light travel and everything that follows is in fact still a pure fantasy.) And Some Desperate Glory is distinctly over towards the fantastic end of sci-fi as far as the technology goes. How do shadow engines work? Who knows! Is it really possible to build an ascended artificial intelligence god machine? Probably not! The book's focus is on what Ursula K. Le Guin called 'social science fiction' - history, culture, and politics. To me, a space opera setting felt like the natural fit for the story I wanted to tell.

6.- Some Desperate Glory is a title that resonates much due to themes such war, indoctrination and found family; did it evolve much from your original idea?
Not really! Some Desperate Glory was always theme-forward as a novel; I knew what kind of things I wanted to talk about. Or rather, I knew the character I wanted to talk about (in the early stages of a project my writing is driven by character above all) and the thematic shape of the book was a natural projection outwards from there. Kyr, the protagonist of Glory, is a young woman whose worldview is deeply limited by the ugly society she belongs to. The book was always designed to explore what that meant and what it would take to change such a worldview.

7.- Your new novel, The Incandescent, is (in my opinion) a fresh approach to a kinda classic setting as magical schools. Why did you choose a main character such as Dr Walden?
There are various things I could say–such as 'I found her thematically compelling in a book about (among other things) overconfidence, selfhood, and responsibility', or 'I hadn't seen it done before and I wanted to try it', or even just 'I thought it would be funny'. I do find Walden immensely funny–she is a type of person I have met over and over, the high-achieving overworked thirtysomething Millennial, and I keep getting reader responses saying, effectively, how dare you call me out like this? I am calling myself out as well. I am also this type of person. 

8.- What would you say inspired you to write The Incandescent?
I can point to a couple of things! One is Naomi Novik's excellent recent series beginning with A Deadly Education. I read those books and was really struck by the strangeness of the setting, which is a kind of Victorian industrial-magical torment nexus. And I thought: well, yes, the British boarding school is an inescapable Victorian torment nexus, but–not like that! Novik's school has no teachers and no adult characters; it's a world of ferocious teen autodidacts under impossible pressure. It actually made me think much more of a contemporary world of technology rather than the lurching nineteenth-century beast that is traditional elite education. Many Millennials and Gen-Xers working in tech do have that kind of competitive autodidact approach to their expertise, or did when they began! In case it's not clear, I loved the book. But it made me start contemplating why that school didn't feel like a School to me: and the answer was that it was missing the hierarchy relationships, the power relationships, that schools create between adults and children.
All of this jumped out at me because I do in fact have a fair amount of experience of the English education system, both as student and teacher. I went to schools like these, and I taught at schools like these. So a lot of The Incandescent is taken directly from life: it's full of personal experience, observational writing, and staff room jokes. I wanted to write a book about school that really felt like the schools I have known.

9.- Class is an important element in The Incandescent; why did you choose to put that emphasis into inequalities from the base?
You simply cannot write honestly or realistically about education without talking about class! This is especially true in England (and I do say England rather than Britain advisedly here; the different countries of the UK have different cultures on this point.) It's a truism that the English are obsessed with social class; it remains such a fundamental force in how society operates here that it's hard to avoid thinking about it. I think one notable difference in how social class operates in England as opposed to the USA (at least as far as I can work out) is that it is not necessarily or precisely equivalent to personal wealth. I have known extremely posh people who lived in poverty, and very wealthy business owners who would be deeply insulted if you described them as anything other than working class.
At the same time, money does matter. You cannot buy elite status–in fact, you will get sneered at for trying–but that doesn't mean you have to give up on it. You can't buy elite status for yourself. You can buy it for your children. And the way you buy it is to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds sending them to a small number of private schools where they will gain the social connections and cultural markers which mark them as belonging to the club. Technically, everyone is welcome–if they can afford it. To pick a recent striking example: the first non-white Prime Minister of the UK, Rishi Sunak, was a member of the Conservative party. He might not have come from a traditional upper-class white English family… but my dear, he went to Winchester. (That's Winchester College, boarding, founded 1382, fees approximately £60,000 per year, or a little over $80k annually in US dollars.)
So education is a class thing. The type of education you give a child says something about the kind of adult you expect that child to become. An elite education is supposed to produce an elite adult. I wasn't interested in writing a simple polemic about this. I know this system, it produced me, I worked for it; its injustices are obvious. I was interested in why people love the world of elite education anyway. And they do. The entire contemporary genre of dark academia is a tribute to how much people like to daydream about a special school, for special people, who aren't like everyone else.
I think SFF readers in particular tend to be romantic about education. SFF at its best is a genre that rewards a curious reader, a person who likes to spend time working out the rules and implications of a new world, a new system. It's not surprising that a lot of us were good at school, or have fond feelings for the whole concept of scholarship. But, on the grounds that the purpose of a system is what it does: I don't think schools and universities actually exist to teach people things or to further the cause of human knowledge. I think those things happen as a side effect. The systems of education are the systems of social organisation and social control, which is to say they are the systems of power. That's what I found compelling when writing about them.

10.- Which other pieces would you recommend for readers of The Incandescent?
If you would like to read an SFF novella that handles the questions of class and power in educational systems far more deftly than I ever could: Sofia Samatar's The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, which is up for a Hugo this year, is exquisite. Samatar is simply one of the best we have. Read everything else she's done as well. 
If what you enjoy is monsters and teenagers in a weird Victorian torment nexus, I really did love A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik! It's enormous fun, and Novik's pacing is second to none. Every book of hers makes me want to read just one more page until suddenly it's two o'clock in the morning.
Another big influence on The Incandescent was a series which has been very successful in the UK but I think didn't really make it across the pond–Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London books. Aaronovitch takes another British institution–the Metropolitan Police–and makes it magical. What I admire most about his work is his commitment to observational writing in a contemporary fantasy world: his books are set in 21st century London and full of diverse, varied, strikingly real people from all walks of life. I once sent a friend of mine to an event of his that I couldn't make it to with instructions to ask about how on earth he does it so well: Aaronovitch answered that he talks to people. It comes across. You can really tell he's done the work.
That answer has stuck with me because it's such a simple, useful piece of advice for a writer. If you want to write about a wide range of human experiences well… you need to know a lot more about humans than you can manage just sitting at your desk. You need to talk to people.

11.- What can we expect from Emily Tesh in the future?
I am in the delightful career place that is being off contract, which is to say that for now I have total creative freedom! As is probably obvious from my work to date, my own writing can be a little unpredictable. I keep telling my agent I want to write more novellas and then producing a book that was supposed to be a novella but has somehow failed. The current not-a-novella is about warrior heroes in the land of the dead. It's a love story.