An Interview with Jo Carthage, Author of “Monsoon Queen”
"Monsoon Queen" is set in the spice markets of 1812 Tajoura. What inspired you to choose this unique setting for Noor's story?
Monsoon Queen
I like to mix writing what I know with writing where I want to go. I've never been to 1812, but it's a fascinating moment in East African and Yemeni history that I've been curious about for a long time, so as I was finding the setting for my book, I kept coming back to that area. Most of the story in this book is centered on the region around the Mandeb al-Bab (باب المندب) which is the "Door of Mourning," the collection of waterways and rocks between the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea. This is the beautiful map from the David Rumsey Map Collection that I used (though there are many, many, many other beautiful maps from that period to enjoy); I hand-drew all of the maps in this book, so you can probably guess how much I enjoy making the narrative visual for my readers, whether they speak Arabic or English or something else entirely. The book came out on November 12th, 2024 and is available wherever ebooks are sold.
In Arabic, possessives aren't shown with an " 's ", but with what is called an iDaafa construction, where you put two nouns in order and then interpret them as "the X of Y" or "an X of Y." So The words "باب المندب" are just the words for "door the-mourning" but an Arabic reader would read them as "a door of mourning."
Language and maps and history and, yes, queer historical fantasy novels, can all bring us places we've never been and in fact cannot go. I could go to the Mandeb al-Bab today, but it wouldn't look the same as it did in 1812.
Some things would be the same. The Qing Dynasty boat that sunk in the Red Sea in the 1760s was only about 50 years old at Noor's time, but it would still have been full of Chinese porcelain and green glass bottles and the remains of Indian spices. The longest lasting ships in that area, dhows with one and two masts, would still be made of often-Lebanese cedar. But today, the British ships in that region are made of steel, not oak.
So writing Noor in a place I can never go, but that I have some knowledge of because of language and history and my own work in the Middle East and Africa, was a chance to try to experience something -- and let my readers experience something -- that none of us will ever be able to touch.
Noor's journey involves a complex relationship with Rami, the dark prince. How did you approach writing their dynamic, especially given the themes of mistaken identity and redemption?
When I first drafted the story, theirs was the primary dynamic I focused on, but when I came to re-draft it to send it to my lovely editor at NineStar Press, I found I kept going back to Noor's relationship with Razan. As a queer woman, I'm familiar with many of the different flavors of queer women's friendships and find the split-attraction model helpful for relationships with aspec folks and non-aspec folks alike. Noor could have kept her relationship with Razan in the real of friendship and it would have been valuable and meaningful. But as I wrote, I kept feeling a nudge from inside the narrative that said these two want friendship, yes, and also romance and sex. And it took me a few weeks of editing to give myself permission to try it out, just to see what would happen, and I found it added an entirely new line of strength to the novel that I am immensely proud of. I realized I had always written Noor as bisexual and Razan as a lesbian, but just hadn't given them room to breathe and figure out what their relationship truly was in the course of the earlier draft. And once I did, I loved it even more.
Their relationship of course also adds depth and complexity to Noor's connection with Rami, given his service to the British Empire and presence at the raid where British canons fired by British soldiers killed Razan's parents in Sidon in what is Lebanon today. She rightly hates him, and while that relationship will grow more complex, they never become friends. But Noor has a different history with him, and so over the course of the full quartet (spoilers!) they will evolve into a v-shaped poly relationship, with Noor as the hinge; which means for those who aren't familiar with the terms of that space, that Noor is in a relationship with Razan and Noor is in a relationship with Rami, but Razan and Rami are not in a relationship with each other. Which is how most of our adult relationships work, isn't it? I've been with my partner for near 20 years at this point, and each of us have relationships with people who aren't the other's friends. Having your own spheres of interest and influence is good and healthy. In my experience of the world, and while not everyone is polyamorous, most people are familiar with the having different relationships with different people and maintaining those relationships for the love of someone else.
To the question of mistaken identity and redemption, I tried to keep tightly focused on who knows what when and where on the page itself. Noor is the kind of person who, when she sees someone bloodied and in pain, tries to help them. Rami is someone desperate for a way out of a gnarled knot partly but not entirely of his own weaving, but with no way to get assurances that he can escape and be safe and heal. They are sometimes at cross purposes, particularly in this first book in the War Between Cedar and Oak Quartet, but they find their ways to each other and to a better future than either could have had alone.
The novel features a strong bond between Noor and Razan. How did you develop their relationship, and what role does it play in the larger narrative?
In addition to the relationship work I touched on above, I also very much enjoyed finding ways to show how big a nerd Razan is, without the modern signifies. If she lived in 2024, she would be wearing TARDIS dresses and running Tor nodes out of her closet and dying her hair a dozen colors a year. But she lives in 1812 in the Gulf of Aden and I had a lot of fun figuring out not only what she would be geeky about -- shipbuilding and communications tools and cartography and astronomy and route charting -- and then finding how she would reveal those things about herself to Noor, since Noor is our POV character.
Magic and historical elements are intertwined in "Monsoon Queen." How do you balance these aspects to create a believable and engaging world?
Jo Carthage’s novel Nuclear Sunrise
I drew a lot on K.J. Charles's ways of incorporating magic in her Green Men world, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, and Naomi Novik's Temeraire series. Magic being one tool in an arsenal and used by specialists, different societies dealing with it differently, and people needing to figure out what it means for them, those are the three threads that underpinned what I wrote.
To keep the magic grounded in reality, I made sure to have characters without magic comment on it. That gives the readers a clear sense of where magic fits into their broader world, whether they're an imam or a conscripted sailor. I also show Noor using it in small ways to make her life easier, the way a person might use a third hand or an extra mouth. Not something any of us have had, but something that with a little bit of thinking, we can see the possible uses for and problems with.
I always figure, as writers we get one big lie that's table stakes for engaging in our writing. That might be that there are aliens, like in my last novel, Nuclear Sunrise. In this case, it's that there are mages in the world, unorganized and allying with whomever they most align with, painfully rare and even more painfully misunderstood. They get their power from different things, but they have it, and it is enough to change the world.
"Monsoon Queen" involves a resistance against the British Empire. What did you learn, throughout your research, about the historical relationship between Great Britain and Yemen?
I first went to England when I was 13 and have a photo of me standing at the ramp of the HMS Victory with my friend group. I tend to take in the physical details first: how low the ceilings were, the thickness of the ropes, the number of canons. The layers and layers and layers of white wash covering who-knows-what on the walls of the former brig; the hook beside the cell doors for the whips to hang and drip. The spacious area where Lord Admiral Nelson worked, with those big, beautiful windows -- and that his loo was the sea like everyone else's. The architecture of that ship shows hierarchy and values and power, yes, but it was also made of the wood of 2000 oak trees. The British brought their trees with them when they sailed to far off places, stood on them, slept on them, ate on them, died on them. Their blood soaked the oak boards the same way that the blood of Yemeni people soaked the cedar planks of their dhows in centuries plying the waters of the gulf.
To be clear, the real HMS Victory never went to the Red Sea that I know of. It was long past serving as the flagship of the British Navy by the time the story starts. But it would have only taken a few differences to make it happen -- a captain interested in what Yemen had to offer, in controlling the Red Sea and access to the holy sites of Islam, and trade headed north for the Mediterranean.
I learned this year that "Mediterranean" is "البحر الأبيض المتوسط" in Arabic. The words, in order, are "sea the-white the-middle." And when I learned that, all I could think of was Homer's "wine-dark sea" and how different people, looking at the same water, could see such different things. Speakers of Arabic might see the white foam capping the waves in a storm, or the way the bright water in full sunlight seems to glow white; ancient Greek writers and the Englishmen who translated them saw the darkness, like wine, of the water under the waves.
That kind of parallax, of thinking in two -- or three or four or ten -- registers is vital for thinking about the relationship between Britain and Yemen. For those who are interested in some accessible, beautiful non-fiction writing on that intersection, I would love to recommend Why Yemen Matters, a series of essays edited by Helen Lackneer and A Winter in Arabia by Freya Stark. Neither are formal historical monographs, both engaging and fascinating, and both a powerful window into this world.
Can you share any insights into your writing process, particularly how you weave together elements of romance, fantasy, and history in your storytelling?
I have a debt of honor with myself that I either write 1000 words or edit 2000 words a day. Now, these can be any words I'm not paid for as part of a job, and "edit" can mean "re-read what I wrote and fix punctuation and spelling and phrasing." It can also mean knocking out a chapter late at night when my kiddo as asleep or hard restructuring an entire book. But having that floor of effort works well for me.
When it comes time to write something new, I tend to use Anne Lamott's "one inch picture frame" from her book Bird by Bird. I see where I am in the story, try to see what the character would see through a one-inch picture frame, and describe that. And then the next thing. And then the next thing.
This year, I have learned about myself that I don't write well out of order. It feels like letting all the wind out of my sails. For example, I've been writing a free piece called for the past 4 years, posting chapters in chronological order. But back in April 2020, I wrote whole sections of it as part of my friend's 18 Somethings Project for writers, including a few scenes I still have not posted. And it takes me 10x as long to write the stuff in between those scenes, because the thing that gives me energy to write at 2am or while the toddler naps or on planes or in between classes in grad school is the need to get to the bit I see in my head. But if I have already written that piece down? That drive is lessened.
So, for future projects, I'm going to write in order, because that works best for my process.
I wish I could answer about weaving all 3 of those together -- speculative elements, history, and romance -- but to me, they all feel as natural as salted chocolate caramels. Those are the elements I enjoy reading and so they're the ones I often enjoy writing.
For someone interested in writing a genre-defying piece this like, I would recommend just letting yourself relax a little, if you can, and write exactly and only what you see in your mind. Because I'm the kind of person who if you tell me to "relax" I immediately tense up, here are a few techniques that work for me.
If you're having trouble getting words on the page --> pull out your phone, turn on the voice notes, and describe the next few pages. Then sit down and write down what you said, editing as you go.
If you're afraid you'll write something ugly --> You can't edit a blank page, write what Anne Lamott calls a "shitty first draft" and then you'll have something to edit. All first drafts are shitty, including this interview. Editing is where the light and the beauty come in.
If you're stuck at a plot point --> My friend Tasyfa says if that happens, the problem is usually 10 lines back. So look back earlier in the plot, and see what there is to be seen.
If you don't have an idea for a book but want to write one --> Go out and live! Do dirty work and volunteer and take the bus and dig in the ground if you can find a bit of ground to dig in, and raise kids and care for elders and protest and sing and cause good trouble. In between all that, take notes, and write what you see.
If you've only written short things and want to write something long --> You can look up standard story structures, if that helps, and sometimes and for some people it does. But I find if you focus on getting words on the paper, and read-read-read-read and write-write-write-write, the story will end up about the length it needs to be, and you'll start to know what that length is at the beginning of projects, the same way you can look at parking space and tell if your car will fit in it or not.
My last piece of advice on process is to avoid mean people. Writing groups where you get negative feedback can be a total creativity killer. Most writers have enough negativity in their own minds, no need for external sourcing. Stick to your 6 friends who you write for, and write for them.
About the Author
Jo Carthage (she/her) writes historical romance, SF, and fantasy. Queer folks have always been here and we deserve to be in stories. Read for slow burn, enemies-to-lovers, hurt/comfort, and intense world-building geekery. Check out more about Jo on on X, Instagram, or tumblr.
