You know what this anthology also has, in addition to a bunch of cool LGBT+ writers? Two of my French Canadian friends, who nevertheless wrote fantastic short stories and captured our hearts. And Jeanne is one of them! So I’m super excited to have her here today–she totally deserves the honor. 🙂
1. What inspired your short story? Where did the idea come from?
There was, silly as it sounds, a post on tumblr about house cat sized dragons, followed by a serie of drawings of tiny dragons trying to fit in boxes. Add to that my love of fantasy and the solarpunk element, and I had tiny mechanical dragons. As for the gardens, a friend reblogged pictures of string gardens and I fell in love. The story grew from there.
2. Had you heard of solarpunk before this call for submission? What do you like about the genre?
I’ve known about it for a while, though I didn’t really go further than enjoy the occasional tumblr post about it and gush about Art Nouveau and Ecofriendly technology. My family’s always been very concerned about environment, and I think that, to me, Solarpunk answered that concern and showed that there actually was a healthy, ecological, optimistic future possible.
3. What genre do you usually write in? Talk about your projects!
Fantasy. Medieval Fantasy everywhere. Knights, magic, assassins, huge towering cities and castles… I’ve also recently tried my hand at Street Magic -Modern Fantasy, basically- and I love it. Witches and faes and werewolves living openly in our world? Adapting to the modern environment and writing runes with sharpies and charming through pop songs? Oh yes.
As for my projects, they’re mostly confined to NaNoWriMo. I’ve got a story about magic bodyguard knights and a kingdom-wide conspiracy, and one about a magician getting his full magic back after a long time of having just half of it. They’re both somewhat on hold what with university taking so much of my time, but they’re definitely not abandoned. I love them to much to discard them after having written 50k words for each!
4. What do you love the most about dragons?
They’re just… Like… Winged, scaled cats? Be them huge or small, I see something so very feline in dragons, from their personality to their tendency to bother/be a bother to people. Were I’m going from that is that I absolutely adore cats. And dragons are cats. But with wings. What’s not to love?
5. What do you do when you’re not writing? Any day jobs or passion?
I’m studying Literature -shocking, I know- at University right now, which takes up a lot of my time but which I adore. I’ve also taken up drawing again, and my drawings are mostly of fantastical creatures. I… assume I should mention Tumblr, with the amount of time I spend on it daily. Oh, and a friend recently introduced me to Flight Rising, a neopet-like dragon breeding website, so I’m never really far from dragons…
6. What’s your favorite book or TV show? Why?
Favourite book, that’s gonna be hard… Can I say an entire serie? Or two? The Ewilan and Ellana series, by Pierre Bottero, are pretty much my inspiration for everything I write. It’s got magic, middle age-ish society, badass female character… Yeah, pretty much everything I love. Oh, and a dragon, too!
But more “writerly”, I am in love with Bottero’s work -and have been since I was about 11- because it is so very poetic and beautifully written. And while the Ewilan series (two trilogies!) are more aimed at teenagers, Ellana is very much aimed at adults, but it has as much if not more poetry and wonder in it.
Yes, I’m in love. I know.
7. Where can we find more of your work?
That’s a difficult question. Most of the texts I made public are either in paper-version-only of anthologies from my cegep program, or things too old for me to want to share them. I’ve been toying with the idea of a tumblr blog dedicated to my hopefully-daily writing, but it’s not up yet. So, sorry, no real way to read more from me right now. I’ll try, though, really I will. Promise.