Interview: T.L. Morganfield
- May 5
- 7 min read
By Gary Oswald.
T.L. Morganfield is an American writer of Aztec themed alternate history, fantasy, and AH romance. Her short story Night Bird Soaring was a finalist for the 2009 Sidewise Awards.
Hello and thanks so much for talking to us. First of all, how did you get into Aztec history and mythology and what do you think appeals to you about writing about that culture?
I can trace it all to one class with one specific professor in college, and that was Introduction to the History of the Indigenous Americas with Vincent C. de Baca (whom I’m sorry to see passed away ten years ago now). It was a 100-level survey class, but he taught with such passion, particularly about the Aztecs, that you just couldn’t help but be drawn in. Before that, my exposure to Aztec culture and history had been only from children's media, like Duck Tales, which liked to focus on cities of gold or the Mayan 2012 doomsday theories. This class opened a whole new world to me.
He was a bit of a storyteller and would lean on his lectern and recount the myths to us and tie them in with the history leading up to the Conquest. This class came at an opportune time for me: the semester before my summer at Clarion West. By week four of the workshop, I was struggling to find something to write about and I remembered those myths and decided to use them as a springboard. I wrote two while I was there, and in the final week, John Crowley asked me, “Tell me what you plan to do with these Aztec stories.” The rest, as they say, is history. Aztec culture, and thus its people, are too often demonized and caricatured by media, so I aim to bring out the human story with my work.
'Fugitives of Fate' is an historical romance set in an Aztec Empire which survived the Spanish invasion. Why did you choose to go AH on that rather than writing a purely historical story?
The premise of Fugitives of Fate was inspired by other work I had written, namely the alternate history presented in "Night Bird Soaring" and various other related stories. Most everything I’d written in that universe had taken place far into the future, with all the science fiction trappings, but I’d never tried to write something that took place close to the point of divergence
I wanted to explore who Cuauhtemoc was before the artificial intelligence gained sentience, and how might he have interpreted the near-death experience the initial nanite infection gave him. And what if he encountered La Malinche in those early years and brought her into his confidence, much as Cortes had, because he knew what her role in the Conquest would be? At the time, I was interested in expanding out into some historical romance writing, and this idea gave me the chance to explore that genre’s conventions in an era and culture I already knew well. Originally it was supposed to be a “me” project, but I liked it too much to just let it linger in a drawer. I did shop it around to publishers before settling for self-publishing it; they wanted me to ditch the AH aspects, but the historian in me just couldn’t, since the story couldn’t have happened without the AH elements.
Do you think when it comes to writing about a society like the Aztecs which had such an historically grim end, straight historical novels are much harder to write because of the awareness that any happy ending is temporary?
While I do think that there’s an added level of difficulty inherent with setting something contemporaneous with the Conquest, I don’t think it’s impossible. People did survive such devastating times in real life, and there are stories to be told of triumph over adversity, as well of survival and falling in love under dire circumstances. We can do nothing to stop the end of the world as we know it, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find small, personal happiness during it all. That’s human perseverance.
As well as 'Fugitives of Fate', you also wrote the Sidewise nominated AH short story 'Night Bird Soaring' about an Aztec space programme. What are your feelings on short stories compared to full novels, in terms of the skills needed and your preferences as either a writer or a reader?
I’ve always been a stronger novelist than a short fiction writer; I struggle to write decent short fiction, and I think I would die if I had to write a poem! My story ideas tend to be broad and complex, which doesn’t lend itself well to short fiction, unless you’re very good at it. I wouldn’t count myself among those. “Night Bird Soaring” feels like a fluke to me, since it covers 30 years and yet seems self-contained. My natural impulse is to flesh everything out as far as I can, and yet to me that story feels very complete as-is. I’ve never had the desire to expand Totyoalli’s story beyond that—the universe itself, yes, but not that character’s story. I wish that happened more often!
As a reader, I gravitate more towards novels; I like to settle in for a nice, long story time with slow building stakes, character development, and hard-won payoffs. I want immersion in the world for days or even weeks.
The divergences from our history in 'Night Bird Soaring' and 'Fugitives of Fate' has a very fantastical cause: time travel by AI which is interpreted as divine intervention. Do you think it's possible for the Aztec Empire to be saved by less dramatic changes or were the odds too much?
I do think that if not for smallpox, they could have held the Spanish off much longer than they did; I’m not sure they could have done so permanently, no more than other Native American groups were able to stave off European invasion long-term. The technological gap feels too great to overcome in enough time. But it is a nice thought experiment. What social, political and technological changes would they have had to implement to not fall?
Cuauhtemoc, of course, asks these same questions himself in Fugitives of Fate, since the death of Hernan Cortes doesn’t preclude more Spanish expeditions from coming. Technological revolution, allyship, variolation of the population against smallpox, and immediately smacking down every attempt by non-natives to gain footholds anywhere in the Americas is his answer to the question, but then he has access to knowledge the historical Cuauhtemoc did not.
Meso-American societies tended to function on different moralities to our current society. In your 'Bone Flower Trilogy', a retelling of the legend of Topiltzin-Quetzalcoatl, you position the incestual relationship in it as positive, based on the way those relationships weren't uncommon in the Toltec nobility. Obviously that's a tricky thing to confront both as a writer and a reader, something that our cultural expectations view as negative but that isn't within the society depicted. How did you handle it and what was the reader feedback to that element?
For those unfamiliar, Topiltzin is a the Toltec priest-king of Tollan who implemented many religious reforms, most notable ending human sacrifice. He angered the gods and to discredit him, they tricked him into sleeping with his sister, Quetzalpetlatl. Nothing is known of Quetzalpetlatl as a person, aside from her name and the mention of her as the instrument of Topiltzin’s downfall, so there was lots of room for playing with who she was. I went through many different iterations of how this element of the myth should be handled, but what I really wanted to avoid was Quetzalpetlatl being a victim. As the protagonist of the trilogy, she needed to be the master of her own destiny, not a puppet for forces beyond her control. Nor did I want her whole story to be reduced to a sexual assault. Any choices made had to be her own.
I also built the story upon a secondary myth, put there specifically to mitigate the incest angle; it would be a spoiler to go too much further into that aspect, but in the end, her romantic feelings for Topiltzin still lead to choices that cause his downfall. Most readers don’t even mention the incest aspect; those that do acknowledge it as an accepted practice within the context of the story. There have been a few scathing one-star reviews that couldn’t get past the first indications that Quetzalpetlatl sees Topiltzin as more than just her brother, but those have been fewer than the positive ones.
Your other major series is the 'Aztec West' series, which depicts the Aztec gods as defeated and imprisoned by the Christian Angel Michael before they escape in the modern day. What was your inspiration behind that setting?
It started while I was reading Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. I had this image in my head of the war god Huitzilopochtli as a gunslinger, no doubt helped along by Michael Whelan’s fantastic illustrations, and I just sat with it for a while, letting it brew until a story grew out of it. That story became "The Hearts of Men", published in Realms of Fantasy; it told the tale of a reborn Mextli/Huitzilopochtli who, with the help of a young boy, seeks redemption for his old, bloodthirsty ways.
It wasn’t initially tied into any of the other universes I had been writing in—I imagined it as an unrelated one-off—but given my natural inclination to dig deeper and expand after the fact, I couldn't leave it along. The more I delved into the why behind his rebirth and his “change of heart”, the more I realized it was a natural continuation of the broader storyline I was setting up with the Bone Flower Trilogy. As for the angels, I’ve always been a fan of angels in fantasy fiction, so setting this post-Conquest was an obvious way to bring them in and open up the potential scope of the universe in general.
Is there any other society that you wish to write about beyond pre-colonial Mexico?
I would be interested in maybe writing something about the Inca and their early civilizations and cosmology, but the sheer amount of research and learning needed to do it any justice is daunting; it took seven years of researching, writing and rewriting to finish Bone Flower. Currently I'm working on something set in the New Mexico territory in 1865, so I'm getting to scratch my historical research itch with that.
What can we expect to see from you next?
I took a 9-year hiatus from writing, but just recently came back to it and have picked up some stuff I had started before. I’m in the early draft stage of a follow-up to Fugitives of Fate, focusing on some side characters and their journey to love. The alternate historical elements are more set-dressing at this time, so more in the vein of historical romance. The other project is an expansion of the Aztec West stories into a broader storyline. To this point, the historical context of the mythology stories like Bone Flower and Aztec West have followed our known historical path—so secret history—but that’s about to change.
Comments