By Maylin Tu
FROM: The Rumpus

I first met Ryka Aoki through her program The After School, a collaborative workspace for queer people and people of color at Beyond Baroque, a literary arts center in Venice, California. I was struggling to write a personal essay at the time, and the advice she gave me cut to the heart of what I was trying to do.

Aoki is a poet, composer, musician, martial artist, novelist, and teacher. Her second novel, Light from Uncommon Stars, a queer sci-fi epic about aliens, donuts, violin prodigies, and the San Gabriel Valley, was released by Tor Books in September. Light from Uncommon Stars follows Shizuka Satomi who has made a deal with the devil: In order to avoid damnation, she must convince seven violin prodigies to trade in their souls for success. Having already delivered six, she finds a likely candidate in Katrina Nguyen, a young transgender runaway.

In the novel, Aoki has achieved something rare and strange—by turns tender, joyful, brutal, and impish, it speaks to the heart of what it means to be human by invoking the galactic (space aliens) and the infernal (literal hell). It’s delicate, but it also cuts deep.

I spoke to Aoki over the phone about selling your soul to the devil, writing queer, derpy romance for older women, and how to write trauma with just the right amount of spice.

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The Rumpus: What was the inspiration for the book?

Ryka Aoki: The inspiration was being at a crossroads in my writing career and wanting my work to meet more readers and to see if I could settle back in and write a second novel. But this time, really talking about my present-day experiences as a queer trans person of color. Those two seem a little at odds, because on the one hand, I want to write to a larger audience. On the other hand, I’m writing about this very specific group. But I was doing so intentionally. This is almost a proof of concept that humanity is humanity, wherever it’s manifested. We all have our peculiarities. We all have our idiosyncrasies. Read Rest of Interview Here