“Spit? An interview with Mutiny Crinshaw about its Copper Sun Cycle”

Grinning Kitten Press: Set the stage for me -

Mutiny Crinshaw: O Muse -

GKP: No, seriously. Say I just ordered one of these zines in your Copper Sun Cycle -

MC: Seriously? Did you just check your notes? For the name?

GKP: Yes. Say I just ordered one of these zines in your series and I open it up. What can I expect?

MC: Well first, I hope you ordered it by sending us a gift -

GKP: Right. Because if you send a gift to us -

MC: To Grinning Kitten Press, PO Box 1060 Eau Claire WI, you not only get the free zine, you get gifts in return. From our whole gifting-printing-press-network.

GKP: Nice plug.

MC: But yeah. You open it up, hmm. What do you see? Well, probably, in general, a story about this gender-queer, gender-fluid spellcaster who is also just sort of young, or naive, or idealistic, depending on your - and kind of just not very capable, as a person, struggling with the same things as a lot of us. What it’s like to be an outsider, but also want better. Not just for yourself, but like, you bear witness to all the harm that a hierarchical, violent, misogynist, imperialist - the whole host of problems - that society has, you witness what that does to yourself, your loved ones. And then recognizing that like magic, there’s a skill to making the world better, but what’s that cost? And what’s that collateral?

GKP: So this spellcaster, Axial….

MC: Yes.

GKP: And - they, right?

MC: Yes. They.

GKP: They have this magic. But they aren’t the center of all the stories.

MC: You’ve read a few. laughs But no. What I’m writing isn’t a linear series. It isn’t … the “main character” syndrome can be a problem. And continuity, don’t get me started on capitalism’s multiverse fetish….

GKP: Ok. So why this? Why sword-and-sorcery? Where did the motivation for this come from?

MC: Tumblr.

GKP: laughs No, really.

MC: Really? Okay. When I was young, there was this relative who would come and stay with us, a real traveling kid sort. Except they would bring this black trunk stuffed with Conan comics. Lugged it everywhere. Or kept it in our garage, maybe, it’s a fuzzy memory. It was The Savage Sword of Conan. The one that was so bloody and gory and full of sex and other cool stuff that they had to print it in black-and-white. And to a young queer kid, that was rad. It was so risque. Elbows deep, before I even read Tolkien, you know? In this world of monsters and mysteries and forbidden lore. Or maybe around the same time. Tolkien? I had played Final Fantasy before that, but this was older. Way older.

GKP: So you blame your parents….

MC: Yeah, get me down on the couch. What are you, my therapist? But of course, no one is looking at (Robert E.) Howard’s work now and going, “Yeah!” Isn’t holding it up as, you know. An example of liberatory literature. Even if we like the low-fantasy, gritty sword-and-sorcery setting, we look at that and still feel a little uneasy - at least, as radicals, as people who care about human liberation and anti-racism, we ought to you know? Feel that ick.

GKP: But, and if I’m understanding this right, like Lovecraft.

MC: Fucking Lovecraft.

GKP: Fucking Lovecraft. People of color, authors like Victor LaValle, have engaged his work and saying, “Yeah, the imagination is good. There’s strong, useful stuff in here. He hated us but we’re going to take his toys.”

MC: I have mad respect for LaValle. Yeah. Howard and Lovecraft were friends. You can see where Howard was inspired by the mythos - the gods.

GKP: The elder gods?

MC: I say, be the elder god you want to see in the world. You see? Lovecraft hated Black people, he hated Asian people, even “Shadow over Innsmouth” starts with the government putting the “monsters” from the Pacific islands into concentration camps.

GKP: You’re kidding?

MC: No, not at all. Read it again, it’s the first few paragraphs. But we read that stuff, and we love the monsters, right? Fuck it, WE ARE the unspeakable horrors that drive straight white men insane. Howard too was - I would say, align with other scholars, he was a racialist. Without criticism for the categories of race as he received them. We are more critical today.

GKP: Well -

MC: Well, we CAN be more critical of them today. That’s what I mean. We have people, this is important to me - we have people, scholars, who are like, “where did race come from?” These categories. Not nature. There is no genetic basis for race. It wasn’t Native people saying, “We’re Native” until colonizers showed up. But you look at sword-and-sorcery, Howard also believed in the Great Man theory of history. Among his so-called “savage” races, his “Blacks” and his “Picts” there are supposedly exceptional men, sometimes women, who are, like, fit company for Conan, who shape history. This is problematic - here I refer to [Howard] Zinn - but also a lot of great thinkers have fallen into that trap.

GKP: Frederick Douglass comes to mind.

MC: Just so. Powerful thinker. Deserving of more respect and engagement as an American theorist, actually. Get these european, these euro-american theorists, away from me. And because Conan, and other fantasy, it really fetishizes medieval europe. I wanted to go earlier, I wanted to place my stories somewhere where I could disturb those notions, tell the stories of small people against a backdrop of low, gritty fantasy. And so that’s why laughs why my answer is so long.

GKP: Tell me more about your inspirations.

MC: Really? I will try to keep it short. Zinn and Howard, yes, but also Graber, and also a lot of radical collectives have informed me - the Zapatistas, of course, the Combahee River Collective, the Lies collective, Crimethinc, the Wobblies, Bash Back!. I wanted to de-center so much.

GKP: An ambitious project.

MC: There’s no point in pretending, or doing, otherwise. We queers and radicals talk ourselves out of great ideas all day long.

GKP: I have to ask one more question. As someone who has read a number of these.

MC: Six -

GKP: Out of -

MC: I won’t even -

GKP: A lot.

MC: Six out of a lot.

GKP: “Batten of Blood” wasn’t even your best one, IMO. Why publish that one first? It’s not even -

MC: Chronologically? No. It’s not the first. It’s not the best or even my favorite. Here I will admit, it’s proof - proof of concept. Like the rest of Grinning Kitten. We want to see what can be done. I wanted to show - with my friend and comrade, Multi - some of whose pictures didn’t make it into the first printing - what we can do without much polish.

GKP: One more question. What do you hope to accomplish? I put this away, and…?

MC: Honestly? At this stage? I don’t know. Stoke the fires of rebellion. And we need new ways of communicating and printing and distributing, and new ways of saying things. So much is getting co-opted, not just Amazon owning two-thirds of the servers and all the print-on-demand and ordering but also like green-washing and pink-washing and rainbow-washing, cops at Pride, blah blah blah.

GKP: So this is the proof of concept for -

MC: Yes, that. And books are getting banned, not even very radical books sometimes. I want there to be an underground before we need it. I’m enlisting. I’m joining the war on libraries on the side of libraries. Gonna hold it open with just some spit.

GKP: Spit?

MC: You know? A potent metaphor, spit is. You hold it together - like a bird - it makes its nest with dirt, grass, a little bit of spit.

GKP: Ok. Spit.

MC: Yeah.

GKP: You want to end it there?

MC: Yeah. Yes. Fine.

GKP: Thanks.

MC: Yeah thank you.