The Fairy on the Submarine

Rhonda Parrish, editor of the highly anticipated Fae anthology, interviews contributor Rhonda Eikamp.

What was the inspiration for your Fae story?

Editor Rhonda Parrish put out a great call for submissions, looking for the most unusual settings for fairy stories authors could come up with. I knew I wanted to go with something underwater and the Civil War submarine idea just came out of nowhere.

Can you tell us a bit about the specific type of fairy creature in your story?

There was no particular folklore type I had in mind, unless it was maybe the winged sprite that is inimical to humans. I wanted to create something earthy, cthonic, more animal than human, which could inhabit the world with us but escape notice most of the time. Its concerns would be so different from ours that there would be almost no communication and the human and fairy characters would each have little understanding of what the other wanted.

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Was this your first foray into writing fairy stories?

No, there was a story I’d almost forgotten about, from my first iteration as a writer (in the late 90’s to around 2001). And now that I think about it, the fairy queen captured by humans in that story was similar to the one in Possession – savage and animalistic, not quite comprehending what was happening to her. As if one had captured a ferret. So maybe this is an image that appeals to me.

Do you believe in fairies?

I’m an ancient-history and prehistory buff, and I love the idea of real origins for most of the myths and monsters and folktales we know. So I believe these ideas may have come from encounters between various peoples in ancient times, that the fairy idea may be a remnant of that kind of encounter.

Read Rhonda Eikamp's story, "Possession," in the anthology FAE, available now. 

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Rhonda Eikamp is originally from Texas and lives in Germany. She wrote for the small press up to 2001, with two honourable mentions in Datlow’s Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. More recently, her fiction can be found in Daily Science Fiction, The Colored Lens, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Birkensnake. A story of hers will soon help annihilate SF in the upcoming Lightspeed special issue “Women Destroy Science Fiction”. Her past lives have included working at the UN in Vienna and picking grapes in Mainz. She currently translates for a German law firm.

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