Today is the day to celebrate.

Three things before the main event.

1-Have you ever wanted me to write a love letter to a coat? Well now's your chance to read it. My essay "Pretty Things" is featured in an excellent anthology called Consumed, put out by So New Media, which features stories by talented ladies such as Pia Z. Ehrhardt, Jackie Corley and Gail Louise Siegel. Thought-provoking stuff on why we women like to buy, buy, buy. Buy it today!

2- Got a question for Dear Mrs. Zulkey.com? Send one in!

3-Learn the lyrics, love the lyrics:

White Sox! White Sox! Gooooooo White Sox!

Let's go go go White Sox
We're with you all the way
You're always in there fighting and you do your best
We're glad to have you out here in the middle west

We're gonna root root root root White Sox
And cheer you on to victory
When we're in the stands we'll make those rafters ring
All through the season you'll hear us sing

Let's go go go White Sox
Chicago's proud of you

Root root root root for the White Sox
We'll cheer you on the victory
When we're in the stands we'll make those rafters ring
All through the season you'll hear us sing

Let's go go go White Sox
Chicago's proud of you

Let's go go go White Sox
Chicago is proud of you

Listen to it here (scroll down to "let me hear it!")

Finally. Anyway, I saw today's interviewee a few weeks ago at a Bookslut reading here in Chicago and was blown away by her relaxed reading style, her amazing stories and her overall coolness. Her stories have been published in a number of anthologies. Her amazing fantasy book, Trash Sex Magic is her first novel. She is currently working on a series of romantic comedies.

The Jennifer Stevenson Interview: Just Under Twenty Questions

How did you get connected with Small Beer Press?
Nalo Hopkinson. (This is going to be my answer for 90% of the questions anyone ever asks me about how I've advanced my career!) Nalo went to Clarion 95 with Kelly Link and Lucy Taylor and a bunch of other hot young writers. Nalo and I got together during the Wiscon 20 program survey process-she was very generous helping me with Trash, getting my Bahamian hero just right-and later she introduced me to Kelly. Nalo urged Kelly to read Trash when it was younger and not so well written as now. For six years Kelly kept asking me, did you sell that book yet? And when I parted company from my agent with Trash unsold, Kelly pounced.

In Trash Sex Magic, you wrote a sex scene about a woman and a tree. Did that make writing human sex scenes easier?
Honestly, a sex scene is a sex scene. You the writer are talking to the reader, writing to turn them on. It doesn't matter what the critters are doing, as long as it activates human responses.

Do you have any advice to writers on how to create naturalistic sex scenes?
One: Write what turns you on. Two: If you're writing science fiction and your sex scene is about giant squids, well, do your best to imagine that they're loving it, and remember that the purpose of a sex scene (rather than a rape scene, or anything else that has a sex act in it but isn't sexy) is to get the reader hot. Giant squid coitus is a closed book to me, but human sexual response is pretty standard. Think in terms of how you want the reader (who is no squid) to feel and you won't go wrong.

You're a charismatic reader. Do you practice before your appearances?
Thanks-yes, I do practice, although mostly to time the reading. My parents both read aloud to the family, and I grew up with high standards. My husband and I read aloud to each other, too. Cheaper than TV, and you don't have to plug it in.

You come from a family full of writers. Do you critique each other's stuff? Ever any professional jealousy?
My family is gone, alas, but we all had our specialties. My mom wrote for newspapers before she was married. Then she got interested in writing for kids when she had young kids. Her only published book, Stubborn Binder, is dedicated to me and my brother. She also wrote for the Great Books for Children reading program. Years later she went back to write news and features for a local newspaper in her 'empty nest' phase. She always supported my writing, although she told me not to hope to get published. (She had this proper-fifties-housewife idea that women can't get published.) My maternal grandparents both wrote feature articles for newspapers and magazines, and my grandfather, who was hipped on Great Lakes boats and ships and also on the kind of thing you get in the Foxfire books, once attempted a mystery novel. He would probably be horribly shocked at all the sex in my published work, but I bet he would read it all the way through-the better to be absolutely fully informed about how shocking it is!

For those of us who aren't that well-versed in fantasy, what's the difference between fantasy and fiction?
Some people would say that fantasy is the oldest form of fiction. The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Anaead, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and more recent works like the Bible are foundation works of human culture, and they all have fantasy elements. Fiction without fantasy is actually a later invention; people have had to work to get the magic out of it to make it "just" fiction.

I read in an interview that you've worked on stuff that is all-dialogue. Have you done any playwriting?
Nope, but I wouldn't say never. I've loved writing all-dialogue work. My story "Something For Everyone" in Sextopia (ed. Cecilia Tan, Circlet Press) is all dialogue, about using Jewish sex magic to power commercial airlines between Mercury and Saturn. Well, what it's really about is paying middle-aged women big bucks to have sex with young studs all day long. I've done a few other short pieces in all dialogue. Terry Bisson started doing it and impressed me so much that I had to try, too. Tremendously challenging unless you have your characters nailed, but so much fun when it's done right.

Your readers love your characters. Do you ever steal snippets from real life people to color them, or are they all 100% fictional?
Who said this? "I mince my friends thoroughly before I serve them in my fiction." Might have been Voltaire. Sounds like him. I've minced the quotation, too, I suspect.

A common word that comes up in the blurbs of Trash Sex Magic is "weird." Do you think you're weird? If so, how did you become weird?
Oh, please. Everybody's weird. I just make money at it. My personal weirdness, which I think is the juice part of this question, comes from having been isolated in a family that never had social contact with anyone except my maternal grandparents. We read to escape, we read to learn, we read to breathe, I think. We were also heavy nature nuts. Think "extreme geek with almost no awareness of just how weird she is and, frankly, not much interest in knowing." I always imagine that I seem to be more inside-the-box than I am, but I get away with it. Geek charm, I guess.

Do you have anything good to say about the Midwest as a setting for a story, or is it just mostly where you grew up, and what you know best?
Absolutely I love the Midwest. I love the rolling countryside and the flat fields, the little kettle moraines full of swamp and cottonwoods, the miles of wetlands, the particular trees we get here (oaks and beeches and maples and birches and cottonwoods and willows and elms and, well, the trees). I love the many sounds of peeping frogs, and our wack insects like stag beetles and katydids and lightning bugs and cicadas. I also love waste spaces, little plots of dirt that man has abandoned after pushing down a building or letting a parking lot overgrow, and I love the plants and creatures that take back those waste spaces on behalf of Nature, even though an eco-purist abhors that those plants and animals are often invaders, not native to this region. I think the Midwestern farmer's pragmatism blends seamlessly with the Chicagoan's exuberance for hard work and achievement into a regional esprit that makes me proud. I never knew how close I felt to the Midwest until I moved East for a few years. Nice place the East, but it ain't home. It was a joy to come back home and get properly mosquito-bitten again.

You seem like the type of writer/reader that people feel they know about before they actually do. That is a weird setup to my question, which is, do people often recommend books to you thinking that they know what you like, only to be way off?
I think everybody does that, don't they? Recommend their favorite books to friends, whether it's a match or not? As for people feeling they know you before they really do, this is part of being an author, just as it is part of being an actor or any other sort-of public figure. When I write a story, I'm trying to get the reader to feel something, maybe something I already feel or just imagine feeling. If I did a good job, the reader feels those feelings too. This makes them think, not unreasonably, that they know something about me. A smart reader knows that a writer lies for a living, and that just because one of my characters feels something doesn't mean I too have an investment in that feeling. (Nobody asks Stephen King if he has ever chopped somebody's legs off at the knees…or do they? Poor guy, I bet his fan mail is way weirder than mine.) But I think a reader can safely bet that I love trees, I wasn't raised rich, and I think nine-year-old girls know everything.

Your husband runs a scenery construction shop, which is fascinating. What have been some of the coolest sets you've seen him make of late?
We both run it-I do the books. Cool sets? Boy. The designer makes or breaks appearance of the set, really-we just make it work. The Madison Ballet Nutcracker, designed by Joe Varga, was a stunner: two big drops with legs and borders, one all gold and red flowers and one an incredibly moody and gorgeous all-blues winterscape. For Orfeo, for the Lyric Opera of Chicago (designed by Tobias Hochschiel-hope I've spelled that right) we did a huge floorcloth covered in fake rocks that the singers actually walk on, and it had to fly out so we had to make sure the rocks wouldn't fall out of the sky on somebody during a rock-free act. For Regina, for the Lyric Opera again, we did this fabulous curving lacquer-red staircase that rose 17 feet high over about 25 feet in length and couldn't be supported underneath the whole length. John Culbert designed it, but we engineered it to make it cantilever out and connect with a huge portal thingy. Fun and beautiful. We've done tons of shows designed by Kurt Sharp for Drury Lane Oakbrook but Tintypes sticks out in my recent memory, with a wonderful early 19th Century theme, very cozy and nostalgic. The starry backdrop for the Goodman Theatre's production of Dan Ossling's design of Galileo was also gorgeous. And for fun, we did some pieces, including a giant chase-lighted Star of David, for Spamalot.

Where or when do you usually get your ideas?
a. Ideas come from everywhere, all the time. I missed five hours of sleep last night because I got up to go to the bathroom and then went and had an idea. Writers have no judgment in this respect. Smarter people sleep more.

What's going to be your next publication?
So far, it's a ways off: I'm writing a funny, sexy fantasy called The Brass Bed, first episode in The SeX Files series, about a reluctant incubus, a female fraud cop, and the con artist who brings them together. Del Rey Books bought it. Should be released in November 2006. This book is a loaded with sex and humor, and the incubus guy alone is worth the price of admission. Back in 1811 he told his mistress that women don't have to enjoy sex. She turned him into a sex demon and bound him to a brass bed: You don't get out of the bed until you have satisfied one hundred women. Fast forward 200 years: the fraud cop is number one hundred.

I remember that people got outraged when Nike introduced a shoe called the incubus. Have people gotten mad about the incubus that you have written about or was that just a bad marketing thing?
I didn't know Nike had an incubus shoe! Cool. Nobody knows about my incubus yet; it's not yet published. If anybody gets that mad, I hope it's a televangelist. The modern equivalent of a Victorian bishop. P.G. Wodehouse used to say that being denounced from the pulpit by a bishop is worth fifty thousand in sales.

What type of writing would we never find you doing?
Hm, maybe a historical Western or a story set in the Medieval period. Too much research in a new area!

How did you find or choose the photo on the cover of Trash Sex Magic?
The divine Kelly Link did the cover. She used elements inspired by stuff I used in a collage for the book. (For the collage I cut pictures out of magazines and stuck them to self-stick Bainbridge™ Board.) I sent her scans of the collage, and she picked images she liked. She hired a painter to do the foxes, hired a photographer to do the picture of the actress, and I dunno where she found the tree roots picture.

How does it feel to be the 130th person interviewed for Zulkey.com?
a. Pretty fabulous! I feel like having a bubble bath and drinking champagne.

More interviews here.