When not writing, Jennifer can probably be found watching Doctor Who with her wife, several cats in her lap and a mug of tea close at hand.
Connect with Jennifer Diemer on Twitter @jenniferdiemer or visit her website: http://www.oceanid.org/jenn.
Sarah Diemer is an award-winning author of young adult fiction. She lives in New York with her beloved wife, several furred creatures and a few mischievous pixies. She loves coffee, My Little Pony, graveyards, and glitter.
Her debut novel, The Dark Wife, a young adult, lesbian retelling of the Persephone myth, won the 2012 Golden Crown Literary Award for Speculative Fiction. She co-writes Project Unicorn, a collection of young adult, speculative fiction short stories featuring lesbian heroines, with her wife, Jennifer Diemer.
Connect with Sarah Diemer on Twitter @sarahdiemer or visit his website: http://oceanid.org/.
Q&A with Authors Jennifer & Sarah Diemer:
- If you could swap places with one of your fictional characters for 24 hours, who would you choose to be? Why? And what would you do that day?
J: I’d pick Juliet from my story “Solitary Birds.” She’s one of the first human inhabitants of a planet called Emerald, and I’m a total space junkie, so I’d leap at the chance to fill her shoes for a day and experience another world, sitting beneath the Quipa trees and watching the fuzzy nulas--winged cat-like creatures--flying in the strange green sky.
S: To be perfectly honest, I really struggled with this question. I very much enjoy putting my characters in HEARTBREAKING AND TERRIBLE SITUATIONS, though they always (usually) use their courage and bravery to get out of said situations. But still...I wouldn’t want to have to go down to the Underworld to get some peace and quiet, and combatting demons may not be the best way to spend a Saturday afternoon. Well. If the demons come armed with coffee and good conversation, sure. I would have to say that, if I could be any of my characters, I would be Persephone from The Dark Wife, because Persephone gets to spend eternity with her beloved. - How did you create Project Unicorn?
We were both total bookworms growing up and basically lived at our local libraries. But, as teenage lesbians, we found very few novels featuring characters that we could relate to--especially in our favorite genres, fantasy and science fiction. Even as adults now, the selection of genre books with lesbian main characters is extremely limited.
One day we joked with each other that finding a lesbian protagonist in a science fiction or fantasy story is as rare as finding a unicorn… And the concept of Project Unicorn was born. :) We decided to do something about this obvious and frustrating lack by writing a series of genre stories about girls who fall in love with other girls--and have fantastic adventures.
Project Unicorn: A Lesbian YA Extravaganza! is an ongoing fiction project hosted on our blog, MuseRising.com. Each short story features a lesbian heroine and is a work of genre fiction (fantasy, science fiction, horror, dystopian, etc.). And--this was of critical importance to us--every story is available online for free. We remember how tough it was to find lesbian-centric tales when we were young adults (practically impossible!), so we wanted to make these stories super-accessible to the kids who need them most. - What has it meant for you two to write Young Adult together?
Writing is our full-time job, and it’s awesome, rewarding, humbling, and emotional work. The great thing about being married to another writer is that we can help each other through the tough spots, bounce ideas off of each other...and just be total word nerds together 24/7. :) We both love to read young adult novels, and creating stories for young adults is an honor and a responsibility that we never take lightly. We cherish every comment and email we’ve gotten from readers who have enjoyed Project Unicorn and our other stories. - What would you like young readers to take away from your novels?
There’s a decades-old epidemic in lesbian literature of unhappy endings and disempowered lesbian characters. It’s incredibly disheartening, even depressing, when there are so few stories available to lesbian readers (of any age) and the majority of these stories are tragedies. The fact is...the two of us are lesbians, and our lives are not tragedies. Far from it! We’re really, really happy and really, really in love! Growing up as a queer young adult is hard, no question. So the most critical thing for both of us in all of our writings is to communicate a message of hope and empowerment to young (and old!) lesbian girls. Most of our Project Unicorn stories have happy endings for this very reason, and all of them feature strong, brave, capable young lesbian heroines who are the authors of their own fates, who find love and joy and adventure in school hallways and in deep, dark forests, on spaceships and far beneath the sea. Our characters live big, exciting, anything-is-possible lives because that’s what we want for our readers: all the magic this incredible world has to offer.
Now Available from Jennifer Diemer and Sarah Diemer:
Project Unicorn: Volume I
PROJECT UNICORN, VOLUME ONE is a collection of thirty young adult short stories featuring lesbian heroines. As ghosts and witches, aliens and vampires, the characters in this extensive and varied collection battle monsters and inner demons, stand up to bullies, wield magic, fall in love, and take action to claim their lives--and their stories--as their own.
Written by wife-and-wife authors Jennifer Diemer and Sarah Diemer, this volume of stories, with genres ranging from science fiction and fantasy to the paranormal, is part of Project Unicorn, a fiction project that seeks to address the near nonexistence of lesbian main characters in young adult fiction by giving them their own stories. PROJECT UNICORN, VOLUME ONE contains the full first three collections of Project Unicorn stories: The Dark Woods, The Monstrous Sea and Uncharted Sky.
Now Available from Sarah Diemer:
Twixt
You wake upon the cold ground.
As you struggle to rise, as your breath exhales like a ghost, you know only two things: You can’t remember who you are.
And you’re being hunted.
No one sleeps in Abeo City. The lost souls gather indoors at night as Snatchers tear through the sky on black-feathered wings, stalking them. But inside the rotting walls of the Safe Houses comes a quieter, creeping danger. The people of Abeo City have forgotten their pasts, and they can trade locks of their hair to sinister women known only as the Sixers for an addictive drug. Nox will give you back a single memory–for a price.
Like the other lost souls, Lottie wakens in this harsh landscape and runs in terror from the Snatchers. But she soon comes to realize that she is not at all like the people of Abeo City. When she takes Nox, her memories remain a mystery, and the monsters who fill the sky at night refuse to snatch her. Trying to understand who she is, and how she ended up in such a hopeless place, Lottie bands together with other outcasts, including a brave and lovely girl named Charlie. In the darkness, and despite the threat of a monstrous end...
Love begins to grow.
But as Lottie and Charlie plot their escape from Abeo City, Lottie’s dark secrets begin to surface, along with the disturbing truth about Twixt: a truth that could cost her everything.
The Dark Wife
Three thousand years ago, a god told a lie. Now, only a goddess can tell the truth.
Persephone has everything a daughter of Zeus could want--except for freedom. She lives on the green earth with her mother, Demeter, growing up beneath the ever-watchful eyes of the gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus. But when Persephone meets the enigmatic Hades, she experiences something new: choice.
Zeus calls Hades "lord" of the dead as a joke. In truth, Hades is the goddess of the underworld, and no friend of Zeus. She offers Persephone sanctuary in her land of the dead, so the young goddess may escape her Olympian destiny.
But Persephone finds more than freedom in the underworld. She finds love, and herself.
The Dark Wife is a YA novel, a lesbian revisionist retelling of the Persephone and Hades myth. It won the 2012 Golden Crown Literary Award for Speculative Fiction.
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