Born and raised in London but a resident of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for the past twenty years, Mary Soon Lee has both experienced different cultures and lived them; her parents are Irish and Malaysian-Chinese, and this has informed her work, both poetry and short stories, science fiction and fantasy. She is an SFPA Grand Master and a Rhysling and Elgin award winner, and most recently came out with How to Navigate Our Universe, a book of how-to poems about living in the universe we inhabit. We spoke about these things and more in our interview with her for this month’s Penumbric.

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You’re originally from England, and your parents are Irish and Malaysian-Chinese. And of course you’ve lived in the US for quite a while now. What influences has this varied cultural upbringing/exposure had on your writing? On your way of thinking about yourself?

The biggest impact my family background has had on my writing is in The Sign of the Dragon, my novel-length epic fantasy told in poems. The book’s hero, King Xau, comes from an imaginary country with Asian elements, and his first enemy, King Donal, comes from an imaginary country with Celtic elements. When I was creating my fictional world, those parts of my past surfaced. I have a number of short stories and poems that also contain Asian elements, but The Sign of the Dragon is by far the most significant.

I always thought of myself as half-Chinese when I was growing up, and it was very important to me even though my father was the only Asian person in my day-to-day life. His mother, although I saw her far more rarely (when she left Malaysia to visit us), also had an impact on me, and there are echoes of her in Xau’s grandmother.

I saw more of my mother’s family than my father’s, and spent a sizable amount of time in Ireland. My Dublin relatives were invariably kind and affectionate. Curiously enough, when I was very young, three or four years old, I had a strong Irish accent. I acquired this by playing Irish songs, over and over again, on our record player. The records came from Papa (my Malaysian-Chinese father), not my mother, from his time studying in Dublin.

Is it, or has it been, difficult to navigate amongst cultural expectations? Or, rather, do you feel there have been cultural expectations or roadblocks to navigate? (Especially over time—there seem to be different hurdles every decade! But also possibly good changes, too.)

I think I’ve been lucky. My parents didn’t pressure me in this regard. Perhaps it helped that they were from different backgrounds from each other, and so didn’t have a shared set of expectations? I was aware that I stood out as not-white in my predominantly-white school, but there was almost no direct discrimination. People incorrectly assumed that a close friend of mine was my sister, because she was also not-white, but her parents were Ethiopian and Scottish. N.B. I grew up in London, which was pretty diverse, but my school was largely white.

You write across a broad spectrum of genres, including astronomy poetry and mythology. Yet as you’ve said in previous interviews, you weren’t originally interested in writing fiction or poetry. For those reading you for the first time, how did you “become” a writer? Have you moved to mostly poetry now?

When I came to the USA and applied for work, I accepted a job offer to apply artificial intelligence to molecular biology. But the start of the Gulf War delayed my work permit. While I was waiting, I wrote to occupy myself. I liked writing so much, I decided to stick with it. Years later, after my second child was born, I switched to writing mostly poetry, because I had very little free time. (For anyone wondering, I find it easier to write a single poem than a single story, even a short story.) When my children were older, I resumed writing some stories. In the first half of 2022, I wrote thirteen short stories, but I stopped again after being diagnosed with breast cancer that summer. I’m hoping to resume writing occasional short stories later this year.

The Sign of the Dragon opens with such an amazing poem, and remains strong throughout—it’s also such a cohesive, epic work. And the poems look at many aspects of Xau’s life (and deeply into the lives of those around him). What inspired you to write it this way? Did it come to you as a full story, or did each poem sort of lead itself from the last? What started you on this journey? How did the characters become so full, so deep?

Thank you! I’d intended the first poem, “Interregnum,” to be a standalone poem, but the boy in the poem, Xau, stayed with me. I returned to him and wrote poem after poem about his life. It took a while before I realized this was going to be a substantial project with dozens of poems. At that point, I thought about the shape of the story. I knew the overall arc long before I decided upon the individual incidents. Certain sections of the story were written in a mostly linear fashion, but often I darted back and forth in time, adding poems as the whim took me.

That said, approximately the first sixty poems were published as The Sign of the Dragon: Book 1 back in 2015, and, as a result, I considered that part of the story as semi-fixed.

As for how the characters acquired depth, I obsessed about them for years! I thought about them while I was doing chores, or going for a walk. I remember resolving one problem while I was listening to a concert!

How to Navigate Our Universe takes us on such a journey—not only to physical planets and galaxies, but also to human (and animal!) feelings, desires, and needs when confronted with the vastness of the space around us. How did you put this book together? Did the poems fall naturally into groups? Were there poems that didn’t quite make it in?

As with The Sign of the Dragon, it grew out of a single poem. I wrote one of the shortest poems in the collection, “How to Be a Star,” in response to a prompt about writing how-to poems from “The Daily Poet” (by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano). The poem I wrote right before it was “How to Destroy a Dragon,” the poem after was “How to Be Invisible,” and neither of those had any connection to astronomy. Months later, I returned and wrote a lot more How-to astronomy poems, then stopped for a while, then resumed. In short, the book grew in spurts. The poems didn’t immediately fall into groups, but the pieces were there once I thought about assembling a book-length collection. And, yes, there were poems that didn’t make it in, especially in the final part, where I deviate from the how-to format. I didn’t want that section to overshadow the main conceit of the book.

Some of the poems talk about colonizing other planets (e.g., “How to Infect Mars” and “How to Colonize Ganymede”). How do you feel about human colonization of other worlds, or moving into space in general? (Or, you know, cats ... say, on Mars?) (I think “The Cats of Mars” is spot-on! They would absolutely eat 58.2% of the fish and shed where inconvenient.)

I grew up reading a great deal of science fiction and loving Star Trek (the original series), so I have a core enthusiasm for human exploration of space. It’s more nuanced now, as I consider historical colonization and the needs here on this planet, but it’s still there.

You’ve said that a big way in which you interact with fellow writers is through Zoom. Do you still do that? Do you find it more helpful than in-person meetings? In what way?

Zoom is now my main interaction with other writers. I participate in Zoom sessions organized by Timons Esaias: a group of us join for morning sessions where we each work on separate writing endeavors. The sessions are bookended by chatter. At the start of each session, we say what we’re planning to write; at the end, we report on how it went. I find it very helpful, a spoonful of community without leaving the house.

What’s next? You’ve mentioned a project including poetry about having breast cancer (congratulations on having completed treatment!). Did you continue writing, then, throughout treatment? Everyone assumes that writing about it would be helpful; have you found that to be true for you?

I continued writing, at a greatly reduced rate, throughout treatment. I found it encouraging to be able to be creative, albeit sometimes in tiny amounts.

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You can find Mary Soon Lee’s work on Amazon. You can follow her blog “Mailbox Blues” at https://marysoonlee.com/mailbox-blues/ and her book reviews at https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6731291