Silvia Moreno-Garcia on the importance of finding yourself

SINGAPORE - For someone who has never been to Singapore, Silvia Moreno-Garcia has a clear first impression. “I know that it’s a multicultural society,” she says on a video call from Vancouver, where she lives. The photos she has seen of Singapore look “sci-fi, almost”. She also knows the works of local writers Ng Yi-Sheng and Neon Yang.

The Mexican-Canadian novelist and speculative fiction editor is the author of Mexican Gothic, which won the 2021 Locus and British Fantasy awards for best horror novel, and co-editor of the 2016 World Fantasy Award-winning anthology She Walks In Shadows. She also runs Innsmouth Free Press, an imprint for “weird” fiction.

On Nov 21, she will give a keynote speech at the Singapore Writers Festival titled Writing Between The Real And Unreal. It will explore artificial intelligence and authenticity in the age of easy fabrication.

The concern may seem contemporary, but Moreno-Garcia, 45, takes the long view. “Anxieties about authenticity are not new, but nowadays, they have maybe been magnified,” she says.

Her latest novel, The Intrigue, treads the same territory. Set in 1940s Mexico, the historical noir follows a love-scam artist who courts lonely women by letter and takes their money.

“The same anxieties would have been present in the 1940s if you were trying to find a love match with somebody and you were writing back and forth.

“Humans have been doing the human thing, which is to lie, for a very long time,” she adds wryly. “Technology just allows us to lie in more effective ways.”

Moreno-Garcia’s concerns about authenticity extend beyond technology to questions of cultural identity, such as who gets to define a writer’s cultural background.

At a Florida conference, a scholar researching Latin American science fiction asked her whether she had written books in Spanish. The scholar excluded the English-language writer from the project.

“It felt weird to be told I’m not Mexican or Latin American enough, not exotic enough,” she says. “What makes a Mexican writer Mexican, for example?”

The question applies as much to diasporic writers as to those who stay home but work in another language or market.

Moreno-Garcia addresses cultural issues through choices about how Spanish appears in English text. For almost two decades, she has refused to italicise Spanish words in her works.

“It others them, makes them appear foreign. If a story is set in Mexico, those words aren’t foreign to the speaker or culture.”

She also rejects footnotes, saying: “When I read A Christmas Carol, it was not explained how cold snow is or why people have chimneys.”

Both choices aim to put readers inside the culture rather than outside it, looking in. “Those two choices are part of my desire to portray my culture as I see it, and to capture its shades and intricacies and idiosyncrasies as best I can.”

For her, it was also a question of setting. She grew up in a smaller industrial city in Baja California before moving to Mexico City in the 1990s, where McDonald’s, Starbucks and a dubbed version of The Simpsons were part of daily life: “I am an urban creature. My reality was not riding a donkey every day and weaving on a loom.”

Early in her career, that put her at odds with what she thought readers wanted. “I felt I had to write either a Lord Of The Rings pastiche with blonde elves, or tell a stereotypically rural Mexican story, because it felt like those were the only ways my work would be appreciated.”

It took her a few years to work out who she wanted to be as a writer. Other writers, she adds, will eventually face choices like these.

“Part of being a writer is the journey of finding yourself. Otherwise, you will find somebody else. It will not be you.”

Book it/Singapore Writers Festival

Where: Various venues
When: Nov 13 to 22, various timings
Admission: Festival pass priced at $30. Eligible for Culture Pass credits
Info: www.singaporewritersfestival.com