Author Interview: Bryn Hammond

I had the pleasure of interviewing Bryn Hammond who is one of the authors included in the next New Edge Sword & Sorcery magazine! Dive deep into Bryn’s mind and learn about her writing. And if you want to read some of Bryn’s work, the latest issues of New Edge Sword & Sorcery magazine, including Bryn’s tale in issue 8, are crowdfunding now on Backerkit: https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/brackenbooks/new-edge-sword-sorcery-2026.

Your work blends historical depth with sword & sorcery. What first drew you to this fusion of styles?

Although I’d grown up much more on fantasy and science fiction, I fell into historical fiction, almost by accident, writing my Mongol novels. I did early on like to read history, preferably antiquated like a bit of Gibbon, or ancient historians themselves. Historical fiction used to be a part of the grab-bag – the way Beowulf strays into historical incidents between the monster fights, or the way the matter of Troy was treated as a history and wavered between history and romance in medieval tellings. I miss those days. In modern fantasy or even science fiction I do tend to enjoy an earthy kind of ballast from the use of history.

When I emerged from my phase of Mongol historical fiction, and I found a sword & sorcery community, I just felt I wasn’t finished yet, I was still fascinated by the Mongol world. So that was a natural, for a strongly historical setting to my S&S.

Your protagonist Goatskin draws on steppe history and culture. How do you balance real historical inspiration with fantastical elements?

It’s tricky, but historical fiction was a tightrope too.

So far, in Goatskin tales published and underway, the fantastical elements have emerged out of the history and culture. So in my first story for NESS, ‘The Grief-Note of Vultures’, we had weird birds where the vultures have human parts, but this came from ideas of amalgams of spirits, and the frescoes of tortures that they lived inside were based on a real set of frescoes and a speculation I saw briefly, and pursued myself, as to why they were painted. And in my novelette for this year’s issues, the fantastical begins with balbals come alive, the stone figures you see about the steppe; and continues along lines of our thoughts about their purpose. In Waste Flowers we had a kind of guided tour of history come alive across the Gobi desert, and a look at Mongol underworlds, with my rendition of a real hymn to the king of the dead.

You’ve mentioned being influenced by Mongol culture and epic traditions — how do those influences shape your worldbuilding and character development?

Character, that’s a gnarly one, how do you shape character from your sources.

To take epic: from the start I have drawn on epic portrayals of a hero particularly, I think, to imagine Sister Chaos. In the story titled ‘Sister Chaos’ my two start out talking to each other about a piece of verse I took from the Norse – because epic traditions have commonalities – that’s about how once you have a legend, you feel you always have to escalate your feats, and this becomes weary for a hero; and my two differ a little as to how they see that inevitably futile self-challenge. In ‘A Day in Irighaya’, in Beating Hearts & Battle-Axes, I quote a snatch of steppe epic for Sister Chaos, rather I have Goatskin apply it to her – she has this characteristic out of epics, that is better off left in the epics, as it gets them into trouble; she goes too far, like an exaggerated epic character. So in sword & sorcery, where characters are only too human, yet still have a determination to live larger than life, I do like to draw on how old heroic poetry has done that.

On the world I write. Tradition can set a writer free, as I found out to my own sense of revelation while faithfully following the Secret History of the Mongols for my Mongol novels. It isn’t about constraint. Strangely at first glance, that practice of faithfulness became an experience of utmost creativity for me, when you have a source and need to interact with it daily: it sends you off in directions you wouldn’t have walked yourself and this stretches your creativity, challenges you, yes, and leads to discoveries you’d never have found on your own. I learnt to let an outside element in, not to just be about me, me, and I have profited enormously from that extended exercise in interaction. Since then, ‘making it all up’ seems more impoverished.

Can you walk us through your research process when you prepare to write stories steeped in specific historical traditions?

I have stuck to the historical tradition of the steppe, since 2003, which gives me immersion in the research. That’s a wide area in space and time, I’m interested in everything steppe, from end to end and from antiquity to premodern. And a little modern.

I have a great backlog of things found in the research that I want to do justice to in fiction, and sometimes it’s years before I find a way to try, or else I’ll suddenly think up a better way than I’ve tried before. The Goatskin tales have all started with this sort of thing, a piece of culture that has fascinated me long since.

When I was writing historical fiction I was disciplined, I’d spend six or so hours of the day writing and then I’d sit down and read academic books for several more hours. And the scary thing was – this both made me nervous and was somehow a delight – what I wrote the next day was much influenced by what I had happened to read the afternoon before. And I tried to read the right thing for that stage of the work, but truly, the chance factor was precious itself. You don’t want to be too intentional.

Your blog mentions work with magazines like New Edge Sword & Sorcery. How has working with short fiction and magazines influenced your longer form writing?

Well, I went from a very large historical novel – Laury Silvers called it ‘kind of like War and Peace in the days of Chingiz Khan’ and in size, it is – to the short story in sword & sorcery, frankly the first time I’ve written short stories for decades, and I think my early ones play fast and loose with what’s expected from a short story. Not that that’s a bad thing in my book. Now I’ve written two novellas, which, obviously, hover in between, though closer to the short end.

I’ve brought an influence from the long form. I believe it’s why I jumped into a serial character at once. Sword & Sorcery, I’m glad to say, is hospitable to serial characters, and I always liked them in my reading. You get attached to them, of course, and a series of stories paints in shades and depths. The novel – and I wrote two large novels, with two characters up front, who grew and grew as people in the telling – the novel gives you room to explore characters over time, with subtlety, with change. That’s what I want to keep from the novel, that and the slow exploration of themes. Serial tales can do those things almost as well. A world, too, can only be deepened when you revisit, do close-up on an feature only mentioned in another story, for example, and the tales reflect back on each other. I loved that too about long form, how a facet can shine back on a certain thing hundreds of pages before. So it’s more a case of my past experience in the novel governing my writing of serial S&S.

Sword & sorcery has such a rich legacy — what do you see as the biggest myth or misunderstanding about the genre today?

Perhaps, that it doesn’t do deep work. I’m delighted when writers known for wider SFF come to visit Sword & Sorcery, but my fear is that they come to slum. I want them to bring along everything they have, their style, their serious purpose. That fear probably belongs in my own head, and is no doubt a sign that I still have a defensiveness around our genre of Sword & Sorcery, which has been maligned.

Another thing, I guess, is the ‘power fantasy’ that parts of the genre have leant into, parts I avoid. I don’t want to write power trips, or read them, to me power fantasy is the enemy’s tool, and sits uneasily with our genre of the outsider. However, there are writers who succeed in harnessing these together, such as June Orchid Parker in her Astartha tales.

Your stories like Waste Flowers and What Rough Beast? carry strong themes of outsider identities. How do you think these themes resonate with readers today?

They resonate with me, and thus I write them. Honestly I can’t speak for readers today, but I can tell my own experience. I have been drawn to fiction on outsider identities since forever, and indeed in Waste Flowers I do homage to a classic that has stayed with me from my youth. Because its sympathy for social outsiders has had the deepest meaning for me, which hasn’t changed through my life.

It’s a fuzzy thing, outsider identity, but if you’ve always heard the call of fiction about the down and out, those who face social contempt, those who don’t fit into the basic frameworks of society – I can’t tell you how my mind’s girders shifted once I was allowed to marry – then, I don’t know. I’m on your side.

I have before put out a call to folk who are marginalized in their lives, because S&S is shaped as a fantasy of outsiders. You don’t win kingdoms here, you don’t commonly win enough to change your life or change the world – who does? Not that we have to be pessimistic in S&S, but we like to stay real. It doesn’t support legitimacy or lineage, it can’t be on the side of the patriarchy though ye olde examples often didn’t see an illogic in that. It’s anti-power in its axioms, it’s yours to come and play.

How do your poetic influences — especially epic, oral-inspired traditions — inform your prose writing?

For years I was working at a translation of Beowulf and I noticed its poetic habits leak irretrievably into my prose. For years after that, I was writing historical fiction straight from the Secret History of the Mongols, which itself enlists techniques and style from oral epic. It’s a narrative told in prose and verse, it spills into poetry for emphasis or at cruxes; and the same in reported speech, people slip into verse, either from the wealth of oral epic they obviously had at fingers’ ends, or made on the spot by themselves, through their facility with verse. All this means to me that I’d belie the Mongols of the time if I didn’t imitate that myself. If I didn’t have people talk in snatches of verse at moments of high emotion or for gravity’s sake. If I didn’t let my own narrative hover between the two states. So, you’ll find a bit of rhyme and rhythm along the way, in mine.

Besides, I love fiction that does this, historical that owes to epic not only its story but its storytelling, its style as well as its substance. A couple I might name are The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste or The Dead Wander in the Desert by Rollan Seisenbayev.

In the latest story I have written for New Edge, a novelette to be in this year’s issue 8, I quote a piece of poetry from the Secret History, I quote from the Orkhon inscriptions; this one is about those oral epic traditions of the steppe and I go for it.

And Sword & Sorcery, again, has always been hospitable to this, and remains, I think, more open to prose styles that invoke poetry or that are seen as archaic, than perhaps wider SFF is used to at the moment. I love Sword & Sorcery for that. We have a few daring prose stylists in practice at the moment, who are well received, and I hope that strength, that characteristic of Sword & Sorcery continues.

Goatskin and Sister Chaos are central characters in your work. What qualities do you hope readers connect with most in them?

Goatskin has a quality perhaps less often seen in S&S mains, that I might call a sincerity, a lack of cynicism. She feels things, she’s not afraid to feel things, and her affair with Sister Chaos is a felt thing although not sentimental. She’s fairly naive at first and inexperienced with women, because her despised status in her society doesn’t give her the chance to meet women on equal terms. In other ways, too, I wanted to give her down-to-earth, real-life consequences to her low status. It’s hard to express what I mean, although this is a big feature of what I had in mind for her. I suspect I am too close to it.

I didn’t want either of them to be way out of the ordinary or anywhere near perfect in abilities or looks – though Sister Chaos, unschooled, is dead intelligent and a bit of philosopher. Neither of them are peak specimens in musculature or in beauty, I wanted more believable people. ‘Real’ has become a shorthand for me in what I want to see, what I want to write, and I definitely tried to bring the real to these two from the start.

Whether people connect with that is another matter, and out of my hands.

Representation of marginalized perspectives is a big part of your work’s ethos. How has your approach evolved over time?

In one way, or at first glance to me, it’s something that has stayed stable, over time, in my writing. Because the books that have stayed with me, from my earliest exposure to them, and that early on I tried to imitate in my own scrawls, were ones that I might now say practiced a radical empathy towards marginalized characters and that sought to centre marginalized perspectives. It’s an old push in fiction.

But to be more specific. I’m kind of ashamed that although I always wrote queer people, at the centre of my work, I haven’t, until Goatskin and Sister Chaos, written the L in the acronym, which is what I am.

I might have to explain here that when we grew up queer in the 70s and 80s, representation was so poor that we – I, but I know it’s often we – threw our hearts into any queer we saw on screen or read in a book. Rather as a woman, reading adventure, early on learnt to easily identify with hulking guys or dashing dudes – there were almost no women to identify with, so gender didn’t matter. I continue to think that inculcated in us a healthy attitude. So, too, as queer persons, we threw ourselves into whatever queerness was popular enough to make it into media. When I was a kid, those letters of the acronym were all me, in a real and present way, I throbbed with feeling and tingled with recognition to any of them.

But now I’m writing sapphic in our sapphic moment in SFF, and that moment is a bit weird to me, when it seems everybody’s writing sapphic, but I get to draw on my own experiences, which is about time.

What was the most surprising lesson you learned from transitioning between historical fiction and your current sword & sorcery work?

I’m scratching my head. I don’t know, I wrote science fiction and fantasy right up until I sidestepped into historical for a decade, and now I’m back. My big lesson that I urge upon people is that the two have a lot of commonalities, in craft as well as in being imaginative fiction that is there to transport you to a different world.

You’ve written deeply about cultural artifacts and poetic traditions. How do you decide when to lean into real-world cultural detail versus fantasy invention?

It gets harder and harder, but I just now spoke of commonalities, and this was a puzzle I faced constantly in historical fiction too.

There is so much I want to convey, to point to, that is historical culture, and that I fear readers are likely to take for invention. Often because it sounds too rad or too admirable for their idea of the past. I invent way, way, way less than you probably think.

But historical fiction was a bastard art of me interacting with the past, and fantasy just a step even more so. Novels ought to be ‘me’ the writer, creatively orchestrating these swirling parts, to her sense and meaning. It’s art first, in a novel or a story, first and last.

What’s the biggest challenge you face when writing characters whose roots are distant from your own experience?

I don’t think I’d ever write people from far different backgrounds to me in a contemporary setting. Mind you, I’m unlikely to write contemporary anyhow – I don’t pay enough attention to the present day to even attempt it.

Writing about the twelfth or thirteenth century? Nobody has a pipeline to that. It can be too confidently stated that humans were humans; but emotions history is there to teach us that emotions, too, change. I’m fascinated by emotions history. For example, there’s a book called Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility by C. Stephen Jaeger. Funnily enough, although it’s about European cases, I drew on that book a fair deal in my Mongol historicals: to understand and portray public emotion and relationships lived out in public, how sincere they still were and why modern people, turned to the private, find hard to see them as sincere. That was a crucial point to get right in my portrayals of thirteenth-century high-profile people with their emotional lives that got recorded. It’s so easy for a modern to misunderstand things like this, behaviours and feelings as they were felt in the past. And we do have resources to learn, to grope our way back. Know your ignorance is the first step, know your modernity.

If you could recommend three Sword & Sorcery works that helped shape your writing, what would they be — and why?

Pastel City. I was steeped in this when young, steeped to the eyeballs. And other Viriconium tales by M. John Harrison, whether they skirt near or further away from Sword & Sorcery. Mood, atmosphere, and the architect of those things, prose style. I lost my head to these books and did a lot of imitation of them as a young writer.

The two Black God tales by C.L. Moore rock my world lately. I came to these late, but they are aspirational for me, as a strand of psychological Sword & Sorcery I don’t see much pursued after Moore. Her style, too, is as evocative in its own way as the Viriconiums, and I’m one who believes that style is an intrinsic part of your substance, of your story: a part to put to work, you’ve got to use the tools in your toolkit.

Samuel Delany’s Nevèrÿon series. Not for direct inspiration, I can’t write like Delany even if I tried, but he did keep Sword & Sorcery bubbling in my head when I had turned, mostly, to science fiction. I was a Delany reader (the books set in space – I declined the more contemporary-feel settings) and when he took up the genre I myself might have forgotten and left in the past, and gave everybody a lesson in what uses you can put that genre to – that’s had a permanent effect on me. You can write highly untraditional Sword & Sorcery. You can load it with ideas. He’s a testament to its potential, and if Delany hadn’t existed, I’d be much less bold. Not that I am remotely as intellectual, but I can still point to him as an excuse if I am accused of being too ideas-forward.

What can readers look forward to next from you after What Rough Beast? — and how do you keep your creative energy fueled between projects?

Next up? I’m in New Edge Sword & Sorcery #8 with a novelette – that’s written. Underway at the moment I have a couple of short stories and sketches towards a third novella.

I try never to be in between projects. I can’t stand it; I flop about uselessly and very shortly hate myself. How do I fuel? For that, I find important, each day, to experience a piece of art that makes me feel emotion. Whatever it is, a book, dvd, if it matters to me, if it enchants me or engages me or moves me, I’ll be recharged for the next day’s work. Without that, if I’m reading something that never fires me up, I’m likely to be flat and a bit blue.

Art Credit

Jimmy Makepeace (@jimmymakepeace.bsky.social) for the NESS#8 cover art, Linnea Sterte (@decassette.bsky.social) for the close-up, and Dan Rempel (https://www.danrempelillustration.com/) for the nude Sister Chaos about to throw a weapon.