Marion Deeds

The first story I ever wrote involved a lost gold mine, and a girl and her horse. It was lavishly illustrated even though I could only draw horses facing to the right. I was seven.

In the fourth grade our teacher read us Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, and for me, a shimmering portal opened. From there it was Andre Norton, who led (in a nonlinear fashion) to Ursula LeGuin, Vonda McIntyre, Octavia Butler and Patricia McKillip, as well as Golden Age stories and some of the Heinlein juveniles. Along the way I discovered Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte and Jane Austen.

Even with those influences, classic and interstellar, it’s surprising how often lost gold mines still show up in my work, along with magic, found families, food and the ocean. The ocean’s a favorite, and my short story “Littoral Zone” won first place in the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference short story contest in 2017. It was published in The Noyo River Review.

Comeuppance Served Cold, a fantasy noir story in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett, will be out March 22, 2022 from Tordotcom Books. My portal fantasy novel Copper Road and its prequel, Aluminum Leaves, were published by Falstaff Book. You can find my short fiction and flash in Daily Science Fiction, Podcastle, Flash Fiction Online and various anthologies. I review for Fantasyliterature.com and I blog at www.deedsandwords.com. I'm currently working on a series of novellas set during the Jazz Era, in a United States where booze is banned but magic is legal.

I live in northern coastal California, where I go for walks, take photos and feed the neighborhood crows.