Jennifer Stevenson’s raunchy, funny, and disturbing first novel, Trash Sex Magic, is full of bewitching weirdness. Set in fictional Berne, Illinois, on the Fox River near Saint Charles, it’s stuffed with all three titular aspects. The heroines, mother and daughter Gelia and Raedawn Somershoe, live in a trailer, as do most of their neighbors. Still foxy at 60, Gelia has an irresistible sexual power over the men of the area, as does Raedawn. They also have a supernatural sexual connection with their surroundings–including a 60-foot tree that happens to be one of Raedawn’s lovers.
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Stevenson dreamed up the premise for Trash, which started out as “a lame horror novel,” while sitting in a jury room 18 years ago. She’d recently seen Coal Miner’s Daughter and read Carolyn Chute’s novel The Beans of Egypt, Maine, and scrappy stories of rural poverty were rattling around in her head. She started to wonder what would happen if someone like her mother, whom she describes as “a very 50s housewife” with “immense personal charisma,” were able to live free of social convention. “She had enough vitality for five women and she could sell shoes to snakes,” she says of Carol Dornfeld Stevenson. “But she’d been brought up to believe that a woman could do very little with her life. That seemed wrong. I made up a character who could take those powers and run with them without worrying about what other people would think. And then I made up another one, because one is hardly enough.”
Stevenson, a sci-fi and fantasy buff since she was 12, doesn’t like the idea of “magic tenure”–the presumption that the longer the white beard or pointy hat, the better the magician. Her Somershoe women have no formal magical training; they’re flying by the seat of their pants. Living on the edge of society, they know they’re in the minority: their tree can be cut down, their land taken away, their kids put in foster homes. “Harry Potter and J.R.R. Tolkien show only upper-crust magicians,” Stevenson says. “I wanted to write a book about workaday magic practiced by the underclass, how magic empowers them and wrecks them at the same time. In effect the book is a bit of a rant about social class in fantasy.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Robert Drea.
