Themes, themes, themes. Never set out to have any, but boy, do I. You don’t need to read much of my work to realise that certain motifs repeat, certain ideas are explored in different ways with different outcomes, and that I do – yes I do – have an obsession with family. Which is odd because I’m not family oriented. No kids, not close to my biological family and my husband’s family pretty much pretend their only son and brother is still single. But yet families – interactions, estrangements, remaking, building them – are features of everything I write in one way or another.
That I write about gay men is both a consequence and a cause of some of these recurring ideas, of course. Families, by their acceptance or rejection, loom large for many gay people. Particularly on the issue of surrogacy and adoption, making a family of one’s own is never going to be straightforward for gay men or gay women. If you involve friends in a surrogacy, then the family is automatically extended by a parent. Relations between the parents, the child and the adults, are more complicated immediately. And if the parenting of the parents has been lacking – if one or both of the couple have been cast out by their mother and father – the determination to do better by their own offspring will burn bright. And how does the child explain their unusual origins? More of an issue in the West with its emphasis on the nuclear family, of course, but even with marital break-ups and patchwork families, the child born to gay parents from a surrogate, or by sperm donation, will stand out from the crowd.
If the couple choose not to have children, or can’t, they may well still find they have to build up a non-traditional family to replace the one they have lost. This is something explored in gay fiction as well as m/m – the central importance of close friends, and surrogate sisters and brothers, in a society which is all too often openly hostile to the very existence of gay people, and to allowing a gay couple to interact as any other would do. An accepting circle, a relaxed environment of like-minded individuals, is what a family can provide automatically (to greater or lesser degrees) but can’t be always relied on by gay people. That’s why gay and lesbian and understanding straight friends are so highly valued.
Another theme closely related to this is belonging. As someone who changed hemispheres twice – each time completely remaking my home from scratch, and without any contacts or family to rely on – fitting in and understanding the new environment had been something I have had to do over and over. I often explore what it’s like to be the fish out of water, the prisoner in a strange and hostile land (as Raelne is in Reaching Higher) or a refugee having to start over again. It provide rich pickings for my imagination, but it’s also something I can draw on personal experiences to give emotional depth to my writing.
I don’t think I’ll ever be a broad writer, able to expound on anything. I have certain interests and I prefer to explore them as thoroughly as possible. Everything I write teaches me about myself and my interactions with the world. I hope my readers learn a little too, and that my own obsessions occasionally resonate with them. It’s what being an author is all about.
Ann Somerville
Love, romance and the occasional sound thrashing
http://logophilos.net
http://unique.logophilos.net
My latest novella, Reaching Higher, is the sequel to On Wings, Rising and is available today!
Review links here
Reaching Higher
Second chances are one in a million.
Encounters, Book 2
Kine Raelne and his crew came to Quarn on a desperate, illegal mission to try to save his home planet. Captured and condemned to death for their crime, he and two other mission survivors are offered a chance to redeem themselves—and to go home, if they’re lucky. But it means working with a bunch of Quarnians who have every reason to distrust them.
Suaj qel Gwan knows what it’s like to be the outsider, and he has more cause than most to hate Raelne and his kind for what they did. Suaj’s telepathic ability might mean he has to work with the offworlders, but it doesn’t mean he has to like it.
As they learn to work together to achieve their goals, Raelne and Suaj find within each other a reason to reach beyond their ingrained prejudice. But there are others who would use their fragile trust to achieve their own ends…
Warning: This title contains m/m sex, angst, interplanetary lovin’ and airplanes.
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