For Nights of Deep Telling: How Rachel Pollack Inspired Blackwarren Books

In continuation of our tribute to Queer literary icon Rachel Pollack, we’re sharing this deeply personal story from Blackwarren founder Vaughn R. Demont in his own words.

“I want to write urban fantasy. Do you know what that is?”

The above was spoken by me a few too many times when I was in grad school. Most of the advisors were focused on literary fiction (“grit lit” and Cormac MacCarthy were all the rage), people who claimed to have read Gravity’s Rainbow and understood it, students that were low-key editing already finished manuscripts as their creative thesis and tweaking their manifestos. My advisor at the time was an award-winning writer of LGBT fiction who had garnered a fair amount of prestige and taught at Goddard College as a result.

He thought that Urban Fantasy was “urban fiction” delving into urban stories where “urban” meant apologist writing for the gentrification of Greenwich Village. He never made an effort to learn and assigned me towering works of literature, hoping I would emerge from the storm of pages not unlike DeNiro’s death scene in Brazil, chrysalis-like, as a true writer of literary fiction.  Impostor Syndrome is not a myth, is what I’m saying.

And then, while walking across the quad, I saw a woman talking to a group of students about Doctor Who. I don’t watch it, but it was still something genre, speculative, fueled by imagination, so I hung around on the perimeter. I mentioned that this was the first time I heard anyone on the small campus talk about something unrelated to futile attempts to write The Great American Novel (which does not exist).

She asked me if I was familiar with Elisabeth Sladen’s portrayal of Sarah Jane Smith. I’d never seen it, but I had enough Whovian friends that I’d heard that she was the only Companion that mattered. She mentioned that Sarah Jane Adventures was out (This was 2008) and that I should give it a watch. I mentioned I was more familiar with Buffy the Vampire Slayer (this was before we found out about Joss Whedon, mind you), and the conversation shot off from there.

Lighting an Unquenchable Fire

“I want to write urban fantasy. Do you know what that is?”

I now know how foolish it was to ask Rachel Pollack if she had ever heard of Urban Fantasy. She’d won awards, created the subgenre of Suburban Fantasy for Unquenchable Fire, won the World Fantasy Award for her queer retellings of American folklore with Godmother Night, and yes, she knew Neil “Fucking” Gaiman (Mr. Gaiman, you’re famous enough to have that in your name now.). She talked with me in her office about my reading list and told me, “These are all great works of literature, but why are you reading these if you’re studying urban fantasy?”

My creative thesis at the time was Lightning Rod, which my first advisor had mentioned was “too confusing, is the protagonist a werewolf?”  This is despite the fact that in the first chapter, it’s said definitively that he’s not, but I hadn’t learned how genre writers are treated at MFA programs, yet. When Rachel read my work, her first comment was “This doesn’t really feel like urban fantasy. Where are the dragons, where is the magic?” So I requested to have her as my advisor and she thankfully accepted me as her student/mentee.

Suddenly I liked grad school again. I felt like I could be a writer.

At graduation, all of us were introduced by a faculty member of our choice, and we were encouraged to keep our speeches short (after we had paid $45k in tuition), but none of us did. I chose Rachel because I couldn’t imagine anyone else. During the introduction, she said that I had “found one of the rarest creatures, a perfect metaphor”. I thanked her personally on stage, for encouraging me to “chase the dream”.

Afterward, I asked her what she had meant by “perfect metaphor”, and she gave example by Buffy the Vampire Slayer (again, this was before we knew about Joss Whedon), and how it portrayed high school as a literal hell. She then told me that the metaphor that I had created was “awakening to magic as a metaphor for surviving abuse.” I told her that I hadn’t intended that, but if there’s one thing you learn as a writer from mentors, it’s that if someone sees something praiseworthy in your work that you had no idea was in there, you smile and nod and say it was your intention all along. She helped me see that I wasn’t an impostor anymore.

The Roots of Blackwarren Books

After, we still kept in touch. I would email with my progress, then my struggles with writer’s block, which she had taught me early on is a real psychological condition when you can’t write anything for more than a few weeks or longer, and that it was one of her peeves when people would claim to have writer’s block because they were stuck on finishing a paragraph. It became a peeve of mine as well. Mine was a multi-layered mess of depression, anxiety, and impostor syndrome, as well as defeatist attitudes regarding my writing.

I wanted to try NaNoWriMo, so I emailed her about how my block was starting to crack, and that I wanted to write something Urban Fantasy, but I could already hear Goodreads and Twitter taking me to task for not writing according to the strict, yet invisible, guidelines of M/M Romance, despite that it wasn’t what I was writing. “Write what you want, and exactly what they don’t want” is the best way to put her reply.

So? Instead of an 18-22-year-old boy, I wrote someone in their late twenties. Instead of high-flying prose wending its way through Mills & Boon style, with eloquent elocution, I wrote someone who uttered profanities easy as breathing. Instead of an Instagram-Hot elf or vampire or shifter that exists to be an object, I wrote a Goblin who calls out classist attitudes. And you probably know the rest. Rachel inspired me to write Nick Blackwarren, keep writing him, and further develop the world that was born under her tutelage.

I took that inspiration further and started Blackwarren Books, where LGBT+ authors wouldn’t have to compromise their work or vision for the sake of marketability. I wanted to have a publisher that would publish Rachel Pollack, yes, and any other queer work of genre fiction where the queer characters were not there solely to validate a straight cis character’s allyship, where they could save the day openly without coding. And we wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for that one simple exchange.

“I want to write urban fantasy. Do you know what that is?”

Yes, she did, and so much more. And for that, I will be forever grateful.

Rachel Pollack’s time on Earth may be coming to a close, but all of us here at Blackwarren Books will keep her in our hearts until then and beyond.