Some Thoughts with ... Foz Meadows

27 Jan 2025

The Author/s

Foz Meadows

Foz Meadows

Foz Meadows is a queer fantasy author, essayist, reviewer and poet; their work has been published in venues such as Apex Magazine, Goblin Fruit and The Huffington Post. They are a four-time Hugo Award nominee for Best Fan Writer, which they won in 2019; they also won the 2017 Ditmar Award for Best Fan Writer, for which they are a three-time nominee. In 2017, their portal fantasy An Accident of Stars was a finalist for the Bisexual Book Awards, and in 2018, their queer Shakespearean novella Coral Bones won the Norma K. Hemming Award in the short fiction category. Their most recent novel, A Strange and Stubborn Endurance, is a queer romantic fantasy published by Tor; the sequel, All the Hidden Paths, is due for release in December 2023, while another queer fantasy novella, Finding Echoes, is due for a late 2023 release with Neon Hemlock.  

The Interview

1. Could you introduce yourself to Jamreads’ readers?
Hi! I’m Foz Meadows, a queer Australian SFF author based in California. My most recent publication is Finding Echoes, a fantasy novella from Neon Hemlock, and I’m also the author of the Tithenai Chronicles duology, A Strange and Stubborn Endurance and All the Hidden Paths, from Tor.

2. Why did you start writing?
I grew up in a house full of books and started reading early; writing became a natural extension of that. The first “book” I wrote around around age 5 was a My Little Pony story: I don’t remember what the actual plot was (in as much as it could be said to have had one), but I stapled the pages together to make a physical booklet and traced over pictures to make the illustrations. Once I started, I never really stopped, and as I got older, my writing started to mimic the form and structure of whatever I was reading at the time. One of my earliest proper attempts at a novel around age 10 was a story about wild horses that was essentially my own version of Elyne Mitchell’s The Silver Brumby – I didn’t get very far with it, but it marked the point at which I began to think of writing as a possible future career, rather than just a thing I sometimes felt compelled to do for fun. 

3. How did the idea for the Manifold Worlds series appear?
Saffron, the protagonist of the Manifold Worlds, was someone I first dreamed up in high school – a clear self-insert character, at least back then. I’d imagine her being saved from maths class by an interdimensional portal and going on adventures in my stead, but whenever it came time to write her down, the end product never worked. It wasn’t until I got older that I was able to look back and understand why: all my younger imaginings were simple escapist fantasies that weren’t interested in engaging with the more tangible implications of that escape. I wanted the fun of travelling to other worlds, but shied away from understanding what, in that scenario, the cost of exploration might be. It was this realisation that provided the key what if behind the Manifold Worlds: what if a portal fantasy fully engaged with the loss of what was left behind? What if there was no convenient dream to wake from, as for Alice and Dorothy, or a timeslip that rewound you back to the instant and age at which you’d first left, as for the Pevensie children returning from Narnia, but a conscious knowledge that you were considered lost by your family, and an equally conscious choice to be made about when to return, and what lie would have to be told to explain your absence? What if your adventure wasn’t conveniently safe – if you could be hurt; if you weren’t a prophesied savour; if the world and its languages and cultures were unfamiliar to you – but was still worth having? That’s what I wanted to write about, and hopefully, I succeeded.       

4. What would you say are the main inspirations for Kena?
I’ve always loved mythology, language and the draw of a good mystery, whether political or historical. The story of the past is like a ghost haunting our narrative of the present: no matter what we think we know, there’s always more that’s been forgotten, and there’s something terribly compelling to me about trying to bridge that gap. Kena and its neighbour, Veksh, are inspired by my love of all these things, but also a deep fascination with culture: how it forms, how it changes, how it’s upheld, and what becomes lost in translation.  

5. Which one of your characters would you say is your favourite?
I don’t have favourite characters in the same way that I don’t have a favourite book or movie: not because I don’t like some more than others, but because the term favourite is, on its own, too broad a descriptor. Within A Tyranny of Queens, I really love Lita, a secondary character who helps Saffron while she’s back on Earth, because she’s very much carrying her own, separate story within her, one whose edges we can infer, and which moves her to aid Saffron, but which ultimately takes place off page. From Lita’s perspective, Saffron isn’t the protagonist, but a sidequest. I also dearly love Naruet, a neurodivergent trans man with portal magic, who came onto the page with an unusually strong, clear voice, and who was, with hindsight, a subconscious early bid at better self-knowledge.     

6. Queerness is a recurrent theme in your books and characters. Why would you say it is important to have queer representation?
Cishet authors are never asked, “Straightness is a recurrent theme in your books and characters. Why would you say it is important to have heterosexual representation?”, because both the value and validity of the cishet experience are assumed to go without saying. Such authors are, instead, asked about romance, relationships, trauma – broader themes, within which the cishet lens is invisibilised and thus presumsed universal by its status as the cultural default. Asking why straight people write about straight people would be like asking why the sky is blue; except that the sky isn’t only blue, is it? The sky can be grey or peach or violet, louring malachite or burnt salmon, galaxy-spangled or black veldt; and even when it’s blue, it’s never a single shade. And yet, when writers deploy the term sky blue, we think of a single, specific daylight shade – the sort of colour a committed gender essentialist might paint a baby boy’s nursery. And the sky is, indeed, frequently this colour; but if such was the only description of the sky ever truly permitted in film and literature for a over hundred years – if we considered books which detailed the darkness of midnight immoral, or thought it a lurid flamboyance to describe an ocean sunrise, or hissed through our teeth at how forced, how unrealistic, how pointlessly woke it was to acknowledge the turbulent colours of a storm – it would, I think, make more sense to interrogate that prior unwillingness to fully depict reality than to query why someone would choose to amend it.       

7. What can we expect from Foz Meadows in the future?
I’ve been working on a lot of different things – there’s nothing I can announce (yet!), but even when I’m not actively writing, I’m always thinking about what to write, and I don’t think that’s ever going to change.