Cat Hellisen – the Interview

Below is an interview with Cat Hellisen, author of Oh Baby Teeth Johny With Your Radiant Grin, Let’s Unroll on Moonlight and Gin. The interview was conducted via email, where we talked about their inspiration and writing as the outsider. 

Mark Robertson: What inspires your writing, and where do you get your ideas from?

Cat Hellison: There’s no one thing that inspires me — mainly it’s reading things and going, hey that’s cool, but what if this other thing also happened? Or shoving two or more random cool things together. I love folk and fairy tales and a lot of the imagery and story threads show up in my work. I can be inspired by a line in a song or a scene in a film, or a beautiful piece of writing, or a scientific article, or a history book — all things go into making the compost that grows new stories.

Often I start a story with a single image/scene in my head  — whether it’s a lake deciding to occupy a corpse and see the world, a man dreaming he’s in love with a garden that eats people, or a girl finding the empty hand of a god — and I run from there and see what happens. Many of my narratives centre on people who feel powerless or don’t fit into their community, and I generally explore things like gender, sexuality, power, and religion in some way. Sometimes I think I have a concrete concept in mind, but usually I just let the underbrain run wild and see what it comes up with.

MR: Since you originate from South Africa but now reside in Scotland, has the move changed your approach to writing, e.g. through the different landscapes, folklore, or culture? 

CT: I’m very much influenced by the natural surroundings, so in that sense, yes. But I also spent nearly 40 years in SA, so my cultural influences are going to be firmly rooted there, despite the shifts in it due to Scottish culture. I’m also always writing as the outsider and immigrant, which is a huge part of my fiction — the person who doesn’t fit in.

In terms of folklore, I steal widely and wildly, so I am influenced by folklore from all over. But when you live in a place you do have some of the unspoken lore filter into your consciousness and your writing, so my writing is very much changed by living here.

MR: I find the idea of writing about a person who doesn’t fit in fascinating, allowing one to experience an unfamiliar world alongside the characters. What draws you towards this approach? And what creative possibilities arise from writing as the outsider? 

CT: I’m drawn to the experience of the outsider because they say “write what you know”. For a less flippant answer, I’m neurodivergent, I’m trans, and I’m an immigrant to the UK — while I experience many things that are universal to all people, I also experience things that put me into an outsider category in some respect. And I’m happy there; the stories in the margins interest me more.

The creative possibilities mean that it’s fairly easy for me to slip into the skin of the character who finds reason and importance in their status as the other. And so many genre stories are about the outsider who changes the world. There’s plenty of scope there to play with how a society or culture is viewed, how a worldview may be wrong or right, or mostly some muddle of both. I especially enjoy writing characters who have to face the bad parts of their cultural worldview — the ones they have accepted because they swim in it — and have to make a choice to think or do differently.

MR: Talking about this in regards to Oh Baby Teeth Johnny With Your Radiant Grin, Let’s Unroll on Moonlight and Gin, I could not stop thinking that Johnny and, to some extent, Valentina represent outsiders in this world; Valentina through her desire to reroll, whilst Johnny introduces the reader to this downtrodden world ruled by the Fay, speaking from a position opposed to or removed from society. How did you approach these characters and the world they inhabit? 

CT: So, interestingly, Oh Baby Teeth Johnny is really an offshoot of a story that already exists. It’s a novel called Muse, which has since been extensively rewritten since I wrote the Johnny short. The setting is, effectively, that everyone is dead having been blasted out of existence (bar a few alive humans) by an alien race (the Fay). What happened after is that the dead humans started rolling their memories back together and created what’s essentially a dream space afterlife, cobbled together from scraps.

By default, everyone is an outsider here, but as we know, there are always those who see a gap and put themselves in power. Since the characters are all made from fragments of memories — some their own, some… not — it’s the things they held onto strongest in their lives that form their core. For some, that’s fear, or arrogance, or weapons, or music, or fairy tales. I think I was musing on what makes us human, and by extension, what makes us what we are. Are dead people shuffled together from random memories still people? Are they fictions? And if they are fictions, why doesn’t that make them human? How do you escape your world when you’re already dead?

All people are just stories about themselves, really. I’m not sure that in any way answered your question, but my approach was really to say, here are these people with these desires, in a world they created, in bodies that reflect who they once were — and how is that going to drive their motivations, their deepest wants?

MR: Thank you very much for your insights and thoughts about your writing process. I would like to end with an outlook for readers as to anything from you they can look forward to.

CT: I’m going to have an audiobook coming out towards the end of 2025, but there’s not much I can say about that now beyond that it’s about monsters and magic and sibling rivalry. I’m writing more short stories, and I’ll have one in the Tanith Lee Storyteller Anthology, which is very exciting.

CT: In the meanwhile, I’m writing more shorts, editing the audio books, and working on a new novel about magic in a parallel world, old goddesses, visionary poet-slackers and general weirdness.

MR: That sounds exciting; I look forward to hearing more about it. Many thanks for taking the time to do this interview.