Jennifer Mason-Black
Jennifer Mason-Black is the author of Devil and the Bluebird (Abrams 2016), which received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Shelf Awareness, and was included in the Locus Recommended Reading List 2016. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Fireside Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, and The Sun, among others. She is a member of SFWA and the Author’s Guild, and lives deep in the woods of Massachusetts.
Interview
What was your favorite book when you were a child?
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
What’s your favorite line from a book?
“And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”—The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich
Who are your top three favorite authors or illustrators?
Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Hand, Douglas Adams
Why did you want to become an author or illustrator?
Honestly? To keep myself company.
Do you have any advice for future authors or illustrators?
Be yourself. Really, the most important thing to bring to writing is yourself. The awesome bits, the anxious ones, how winter air smells to you and why that movie makes you laugh so much—the way you experience the world is unique to you. So don’t write what you think you should write and in the way other people do. Write what you want to write and in the way only you can. That’s where the magic is.
