A friend that had graduated from Clarion suggested she apply and so she did. She had been thinking about game writing, and still loves interactive fiction. Which is a pity, since she would actually to be like Rainbow.īefore she went to Clarion she wrote only to amuse herself. But she is not all that much like Aunt Mar or Hester, nor is she much like Rainbow. The only part of “The Deepwater Bride”, a novella Muir wrote, that is all that personal to her is that it is about a young queer woman. She also wanted to imagine Innsmouth with a Starbucks. She wanted to see if she could tell a Lovecraft type story in which the protagonist was a teenager and all of the characters in the story are female. Women and youth are two, just to name a couple. She knows that there are many things he stayed away from when he would write.

Muir is a huge Lovecraft fan, and one of her stories began from this enjoyment of his work. She finds she may have some certain stance that she writes from that is oddly Kiwi, and thinks she is only going to be able to identify it the more she lives and writes away from her home. Before her stories would be set in Germany or America, but the first story she sold since moving to the United Kingdom was set in Howick and Whitford.Īnother story she worked on after leaving New Zealand she set in Waiuku, which is another town in Auckland that she used to live in.

While living in the United Kingdom, she keeps coming back to New Zealand in a way she hadn’t in the past. Being in New Zealand physically makes it easier to be a Kiwi writer. She used to believe that being a New Zealander had not affected her writing all that much, either in setting or flavor. She lives and teaches in Oxford, in the United Kingdom. Tamsyn Muir, a Kiwi, has spent most of her life living in Howick, New Zealand, spending time in Waiuku and central Wellington.

Tamsyn muir