Natalie Zina Walschots is the author of Hench, an acerbic spin on superheroes, the gig economy, disability, and the lengths one woman will go to for sweet, sweet revenge. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that it’s one of my favorite books of all time.
Natalie was kind enough to hop on the phone with me last week and talk about comics, craft, and, of course, diners as the pinnacle of human achievement.
So I know your first couple books were poetry – what drew you to writing fiction?
I’ve always enjoyed writing fiction. But it was definitely something that I did in either smaller doses or that was mostly for me, personally. I wrote a lot of fan fiction, actually, when I was younger, a teenager. That was a huge creative outlet for me. And, in a lot of ways, it’s how I learned to write fiction, in fact, writing fan fiction. But I found that – and this may sound corny – but a lot of what I had to express earlier on, especially in my early 20s, was – poetry was the right mode for it, the right medium to be doing that kind of work. It wasn’t so much of a conscious decision, like, ah, I shall write poems. So much as like, I write and that’s what comes out.
And then I started doing a lot of music journalism. That was my career for an extremely long time and I started freelancing in a bunch of different ways. I actually started doing, professionally, writing for video games. Doing dialogue, doing narrative design. Doing that kind of stuff. Puzzle design. Other kinds of game design work. Kind of like slightly before-slash-concurrently to when I started writing Hench.
I’m sure writing a lot of nonfiction, in the journalism way, contributed to the kind of, like, switching modes, but primarily there was now, you know, a story I wanted to tell instead of things that I wanted to express, or feelings that I was just working through. The work that I wanted to do clearly had to be done in a different mode. So it’s a very natural transition to, like, okay, this is a story I want to tell, this is what I want this story to be doing. Obviously, this is the format to do that.
What brought you about to Hench specifically, and the superhero angle of it coupled with the anger and disability and all that?
I’ve always loved superhero stories. I’ve collected comics since I was quite young – a young teenager, maybe even preteen. It’s something I’ve always felt really passionately about and been really interested in, and I’ve always cared really deeply about – and had a lot of questions about – all of the ordinary people who live in superhero universes. And in particular, the people who work for supervillains.
Henchpeople are omnipresent in superhero stories. And aside from, oh, there’s this person in a silly outfit who’s gonna be kind of like the appetizer fight for the real hero v. villain showdown, we never hear anything about them. I have always had this consuming fascination with, what is your life that you got here? Right? Like, how did you get to this place? How behind on your child support payments do you have to be to take this job that needs you to both be able to crack a face and also, like, be able to speed skate away on roller skates. I need to know. I need to know how you got this skillset and what landed you here. And nobody was doing this. I was patient for a very long time. And I slowly came to the horrible realization that I was going to have to write it myself.
So there was that angle. I just need to know what’s happening here, even if I have to make it up and discover it for myself. And then, when it comes to the disability angle, that was in a lot of ways, a very natural – I want to say outcome, to what is it like living in a universe where there’s superheroes. Especially when you might work for a villain and, you know, the answer is, well, you’re probably going to be profoundly impacted by your environment.
And if you’re going for any kind of realism, any kind of superhero realism, and any kind of medical realism, which was very important to me, you have to write about disability. Like, it just automatically becomes a conversation about disability, because you don’t – you know, we see over and over people just getting up, right? They’re made of rubber and nothing’s wrong. And it’s like, oh, I have a – my arm is in a cast for five minutes, I’m fine. And it’s like, you probably actually aren’t going to get up from this, and if you are, you’re going to have lifelong consequences.
So trying to portray that medical realism led me directly to engaging with disability, because it’s always bothered the crap out of me that, you know, you could have Captain America, like, throw a manhole cover directly into somebody’s chest and, oh, they’re fine. That dude is dead, man. There’s no way that – like, that person has died. We have watched them die on-screen.
But because we don’t see them, with their collapsed chest and in the ICU for six months and then – we never see that. But what if we did, right? Like, what if we did? I would imagine we would feel very, very different about a lot of superheroes and the work they do in the world. If we see the consequences of that.
Anna Tromedlov (the protagonist of Hench), was a very angry character, and allowed to be full of rage about her disability. How important was that to – I mean, when you talk about medical realism, I know I, personally, have been plenty angry in hospitals before, I absolutely understood it. I thought that was one of the great parts about the character. But I was just wondering if there was any pushback against that from a publisher or anything, because I know –
Oh, no, not at all. Not even a tiny bit, no. Anna’s profound and transformative anger at her situation was an absolute core of the book, and of her character. The publisher I went with got that immediately. And it was one of the things that in the first meeting that we had, that they called out and, like, we love this. Like, we love this extremely complicated, competent, angry person as a protagonist. And so that was always part of the deal. That was never – it would just be a different book, right? Totally, totally different book and totally different person.
I’m very lucky that they were – I found a great match. I have an incredible editor and my publisher has been immensely supportive and – and I’m really lucky that I found that match and found people who knew exactly what I was going to do and wanted to make that book as good as it could be, instead of having a different book that they wanted to try and smash mine into. Which would have been really unfortunate and not something, I would like to think, I would’ve allowed to happen, but – not at all.
Her anger comes from a real place. Personally, I haven’t had all of these experiences that Anna has, obviously, but, as somebody who has a chronic pain condition and has spent a decent amount of time in hospitals and urgent care and, you know, trying to get to the bottom of what is happening and not necessarily having that very warmly or sympathetically received, and not being always considered an expert on my own experience, and there’s a lot of my own stuff that went into creating that.
But also, at the end of the day, I tried to be true to her. What would she be feeling and experiencing? And what is the kind of innate response that her character would have to these circumstances and, you know, how can – I think anger is a great emotion. And it’s one that is often villainized, in a lot of ways that I don’t think are helpful. It can be incredibly destructive, and in particular incredibly self-destructive, but it’s also an emotion of change, right? There is a massive amount of energy behind it. And anger is one of those things that it gives us the ability to leave difficult circumstances or change them, or see something about the world and hate it and work to make it something different. Anger is often at the core of that.
I think often we do ourselves and those around us a great disservice when we encourage people not to be angry and to let go of their anger. There’s a lot to be angry about legitimately! And, you know, equating anger at things that absolutely deserve it as some kind of moral failing, I think is a grave mistake and encourages us to miss out on having a lot of those extremely important transformative emotions.
No, I agree, completely. That’s why I think the book was kind of a revelation to me because disabled characters, especially, we never get to be angry in, like, books and TV. It’s this weird – I don’t – I always call it inspiration porn, I don’t know if there’s a better word for it, but, like –
No, I totally know what you’re talking about, though, right? It’s like, oh, this person has, like, somehow – the gaze is just very messed up. That ableist gaze of, like, oh, you’ve suffered so much, you’re so inspiring. You must have emerged from this experience as this somehow more pure vessel incapable of negative emotion.
It’s like, nah, man, I’m pissed.
Yeah. Exactly.
This can be bad and suck and also is not my entire personality and also does not define me, and also it’s – all of that stuff, too, but I’m also allowed to be mad about this. And Anna is super allowed to be very mad at the things that happened to her, and she can be a whole person. Who is still extremely pissed about the things that partially made her into the person that she is. I think that all those things can be held simultaneously and all be true at the same time.
Switching gears a little: How did it feel to have your first published novel become so big right out of the gate?
Oh, Jesus Lord, right? Yeah, it’s completely surreal. It still is, to this day and this moment. It’s unquestionably the greatest thing that has ever happened to me, in terms of my career, right? It is an extraordinary thing to have happened. My high-water mark goal of success for this was, I really hope some people read and like this. I super hope, when I started looking for a publisher, I hope somebody takes it, I hope they get it, and I really hope that some people read and like this, that would be great. You know, that would make me really happy.
And my experience has surpassed that so many times over, that it is often difficult to process, still. I know that it’s been a couple years now, but, it is still very challenging to process and I have to pinch myself all of the time. It can be really nerve-wracking in a particular kind of way, right? It’s like, oh my god, all of you have read this. You have so many opinions and, yes, most of them are good, thank goodness, but there are so many opinions and there are so many complicated feelings and it means something to people. And that’s both wonderful and terrifying all at the same time, but mostly, I just feel incredibly lucky. Inexpressibly lucky, to get to do this.
Are you still working on video games then, or has this kind of taken over? Because it was such a big deal?
So I was lucky enough to sell the sequel a little while ago. So that is very much in progress. That’s definitely taking up most of my time. In fact, this – I’ve blocked out this weekend – this is the one exception I’m making from Friday to Monday as a writing retreat to get some big world-constructing work done. So, it’s coming along. It should be done quite soon actually. I actually haven’t done a ton of video games stuff in the last couple of years because again this has ended up taking up much more of my time in the best, best possible way.
I have got to do some other and unfortunately still, at this moment, very secret projects.
Ooh. Well, that’s exciting.
A thing that happens both – this is very true about the world of video games but also other kinds of media, too, is that most of the cool stuff you get to work on you don’t get to talk about for quite some time. And I’m definitely in the really awesome state of like, oh, man, I get to do all of this super, super cool stuff. I really hope I get to tell everybody about it soon. But there’s lots of really cool stuff going on.
I do have one last question. Diners.
Yes.
You made sure to include one on Leviathan’s campus in Hench. So are they the peak of cuisine and society’s culinary experiences? That’s how I feel. Honestly, I just I wanted to talk about diners.
Oh, yeah. Absolutely, I love diners so much. Unquestionably, the thing I miss most in a post-COVID world is diners, like, greasy spoon breakfasts. It is one of the great joys of my life. And something I have not done in a very long time. Because, you know, is long- COVID worth these eggs? I don’t know if it is. And I’m just doing that math all the time, but, man, I could really use some eggs – yeah, I love diners. They are my favorite genre of restaurant.
In the before time, I wrote a lot in diners. Much more so, I would say, than coffee shops – like, order some toast and coffee and you can stay there pretty indefinitely, and that’s pretty great. But, yeah, I love them. I love them so much, and they mean a lot to me, so they’re definitely gonna show up in things I make.
I think they’re one of the great prototypical spaces. They’re very liminal, very liminal spaces, also. You know, they’re kind of one of those surreal in-between – like, I think the diner is really the equivalent of the D&D tavern, you know, in terms of, like, everybody is there. They’re narrative safe zones, where everybody’s stories can kind of converge for a second and be cool before branching off into all their individual nonsense again.
The diners in Toronto, are they open 24 hours? Because the ones here in Albuquerque … are kind of trash. I miss my New Jersey diners that were open all night and I was just curious.
A couple of them are. We have a few, like, good old holdouts. I lived in Montreal for a while, also. And a lot of them are 24 hours there. And that ruled. Something I miss very much was being able to get to a 24-hour diner – but we have many fewer now, sadly, but we do still have a few and they are greatly beloved.
Thanks so much for talking with me, Natalie! You can find out more about Natalie and her work here, and you can check out the first chapter of Hench here.