INTERVIEW: Tara Campbell (City of Dancing Gargoyles)
City of Dancing Gargoyles
Tara Campbell
Santa Fe Writers Project
Interview by Lauren C. Johnson
Tara Campbell’s new novel, City of Dancing Gargoyles (Santa Fe Writers Project, 2024), begins with a haunting question: “What is the point of a creature created for rain when there is no more rain?” The creature contemplating this question is a gargoyle named E who resides on a long-abandoned cathedral in the drought-wrecked American West of the 22nd century.
E is a first-person protagonist in City of Dancing Gargoyles. This odyssey, a nominee for the 2025 Philip K. Dick Award, takes readers on a quest for water across improbable cities and towns where knives bind instead of cut, oak trees are armed with guns, and fences shift positions nightly, making it impossible to demarcate land and property. While E and a fellow gargoyle companion, M, traverse this wild landscape, they encounter fellow climate refugees, Dolores Baker, and her mother, Rose. Realizing how much they need each other for survival, the quartet travels together in search of stability, companionship, and a place to call home.
I interviewed Campbell for The Racket when she released Cabinet of Wrath: A Doll Collecion in August 2021. I was eager to continue our conversation, especially about bringing inanimate objects to life through fiction. My debut novel, The West Façade, forthcoming from SFWP in March 2026, also features sentient gargoyles and statues, though my book re-imagines the medieval past rather than the distant future.
Campbell and I connected to discuss writing climate change stories, crafting and researching settings, the power of fictional friendships, and our favorite, the pleasures of writing from the perspective of non-human protagonists, particularly gargoyles.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Lauren C. Johnson: I admire how you skillfully approach pressing themes like climate change and displacement through characters and places that, at first glance, appear fantastical, whimsical, and definitely humorous. Can you describe how you experienced writing about climate change as you drafted this novel?
Tara Campbell: Recently I’ve found myself in the unexpected position of being on climate change panels at conferences, and I’m still figuring out how I feel about it. I say unexpected because I didn’t set out thinking I was writing about climate change. I was just looking at the current state of extreme weather events and doing some research to extrapolate where our current environmental fuckery denialism would put us at some point in the future.
Writing about climate change used to be the province of nonfiction or speculative fiction, but the more people encounter the effects of heatwaves, flooding, drought, hurricanes and tornadoes, etc, the more it’s going to permeate work of all genres, present or the future.
T.C. Boyle’s 2023 novel Blue Skies is a great example of this: it’s set in near future Florida beset by flooding, but the focus is on human relationships, denial, and folly. The main characters aren’t scientists or climate experts, just everyday people adapting to these cataclysmic changes–with varying degrees of success.
At this point it’s clear we can’t rely on the political or economic will to reduce emissions, so we’re all going to have to start thinking about adaptation rather than prevention. Some wealthy folks are constructing bunkers (the “Husk family” bunker chapter in my novel), but the rest of us are going to have to search for safety and comfort however we can, and forge alliances where we can, and that’s what this book wound up being about.
LCJ: What can writing from the perspective of gargoyles and non-human characters teach us about climate change?
TC: We humans are excellent at centering ourselves, to the detriment of–well, everything else. As we were going back and forth on edits, my editor Adam al-Sirgany said he was detecting an overarching theme of fairness in my book. I wasn’t aware of it, but I think he’s right, and now I realize that’s actually one of my core beliefs that comes through in a lot of my work. I feel like I was raised with fairness, not forced into restrictive family or gender roles or societal roles, and I have an immediate anger reaction when I see other people who aren’t allowed a similar freedom.
As pertains to non-human characters, I think humans have unfairly wrested control away from other living beings on the planet, so I write from a general position of wanting to listen to anyone else at this point. It’s also not the worst thing when rapacious humans get taken down a peg. I suppose it’s me envisioning a restoration of balance–just in an unusual way.
LCJ: I love the way you portray friendship in your novel, particularly the friendship between E and Dolores. Is writing about friendship a way to resist or cope with dystopian realities?
TC: I feel like that's the one thing we have control over, and it's the one thing we can do to shape whatever is going on in our world. So, for me, that was the central conflict: will [E and Dolores] make this connection? It’s that hierarchy of needs—once they meet their basic safety requirements, friendship and connection are essential. That's what people are looking for. So, for me, that was the story's center, more so than what is causing these strange phenomena.
I know it was a risk to only obliquely address what's causing all these bizarre events, but that wasn't the book's main concern. The main question was whether these characters would find any stability and community. That's the arc I wanted to explore.
LCJ: I love that so much. How did you experience writing a friendship between a human and a gargoyle? I mean, I want to be friends with a gargoyle.
TC: I approach a lot of my fiction by thinking about what a normal person would do when confronted with extraordinary circumstances? Yes, I love the weird phenomena, but those are just the side quest elements for me. The actual story is about human relationships and how we react when facing unprecedented scenarios.
The cities came about independently, but once I started thinking about how to wrap them into a narrative, the human story was the center of the architecture, bringing them all together.
LCJ: You know me; I also love to write about statues. I find them beautiful and scary in a way that intrigues me. So naturally, I adore E and M. How did you go about developing their interiorities in a way that felt true to how a gargoyle might experience the world? What was the most challenging part about writing from a gargoyle’s perspective? What was your favorite part?
TC: I know, right? Why are statues and gargoyles so fascinating? It’s not exactly the uncanny valley, where part of the attraction lies in being repelled. Maybe it’s that statues can look real enough to start moving at any moment, and when they don’t, we feel like there’s something latent there, and we’re just not seeing it.
I’ve long been fascinated with gargoyles–I think it’s the drama of their impossible shapes and lives. These toothy, horned, clawed creatures could be doing so many more interesting things, but because they’re frozen, we get to imagine their ferocity from a place of safety.
But when I thought about them as actual living beings, that idea of mindless ferocity vanished. I didn’t think of them as monsters; I thought about what they would need to survive and how they would get it. And because they’d been created in conjunction with water, they’d need that first and foremost. So it wasn’t a matter of “How can we wreak the most havoc and destruction?” but “How can we work together to keep from drying out?” I suppose they went from the thing to be feared to the thing that had something to fear. Life made them vulnerable, like all of us.
LCJ: On the topic of sentient objects, were you thinking about the current AI boom and definitions of sentience when you wrote City of Dancing Gargoyles?
TC: Oh, interesting, no I wasn’t actually thinking about that. I’m a huge AI skeptic. Sure, it has its purposes, but we’re using it for so many inane things at the moment. For me, writing sentient objects comes from a place of imagination and play, childlike wonder. Yes, I am an eternal child.
LCJ: City of Dancing Gargoyles takes place throughout the American West. California’s Plumas National Forest is the City of the Floating Wolves, and Mount Shasta is the City of Gun-Toting Trees. The descriptions of the alchemically transformed cities feel true to the actual places as we know them today. I’m curious: how did you land on the locations for these transformed cities? Did you visit or research these locations as you wrote?
TC: I’m a child of the Pacific Northwest: born and raised in Alaska, [and spent] college and the first two years of work living in Oregon. I remember becoming increasingly sad as I drove East to take a job because everything seemed to be getting smaller as I went: trees, mountains, animals. When I moved back West a year and a half ago (this time Seattle), I was gobsmacked by the size of the trees–no need to drive hours to see sequoias, they’re just being casually massive around the lake right in my own neighborhood. It still makes me smile.
But when I realized I had to set this book in the Southwest, because of the importance of water–or lack thereof–I started researching, including a dive into the history of the Colorado River Compact. Most of the research didn’t make it into the book directly, but it did inform the stressors on the water supply, and how people would fight over it. I also spent quite a lot of time on Google Maps figuring out possible locations for these cities, because I hadn’t originally written the stories with particular locations in mind. I wound up saving routes showing the travel paths of the various characters in my story, kind of like a modern version of the map in a fantasy novel.
I wanted to visit the cities while writing, but it didn’t work out that way. Looks like I’ll get my first look at Joshua Tree National Park this spring, though, and I’m looking forward to that!
LCJ: This must come up all the time in your fiction classes— how do you write about a place you’ve never visited?
TC: Google Maps has been an incredible resource with the street view feature. Dropping in and looking around made writing about the Southwest possible, in conjunction with having lived in the West previously and having visited my brother in California multiple times.
There's an old newspaper article from around 1950 that also helped me—I only have a copy of a clipping now, so I don’t know exactly when or where it came out. It's about my dad when he made news as the first African American to fly a jet in the Air Force. In the article, described his test flights in the desert scrublands, noting details like the cacti flipping by below him. It was striking how one of the things that stood out to him, in the midst of this highly technical experience, was the landscape. I always think about that description when I'm writing the desert.
LCJ: I felt unsettled by the questions these stories asked about themes like labor, shame, illusions of safety, wealth, and the cost of acting entirely in one’s self-interest.
This passage from the “City of Praying Devils” was especially poignant:
“So where are the angels?”
“Our host looks out over the courtyard. ‘Your kind asked too much of them. They didn’t survive.’”
Did you write the cities stories specifically to explore certain themes, or did the themes emerge as you wrote?
TC: For me, the themes usually come later, after I figure out what these objects do and why. For example, one of the prompts I was using gave me the words “glaring” and “chocolates.” Glaring is looking + intensity, but the intensity can have various flavors: anger, imperiousness, fear, disdain, maybe even curiosity. I had to figure out which one or combination an inanimate object would feel, and I figured the chocolates would be feeling vulnerable because they’re edible, plus pissed off that they can’t move to defend themselves. And I imagined a glare that could telegraph that, but in a way that would make the humans cognizant of their role in this cycle of creation and destruction of a sentient being, thus making us ask ourselves how we feel about that, because inflicting cognitive dissonance would be their only way of getting us to stop.
So, yeah, the emotional complication came out of the chocolates’ need to defend themselves without being able to move. What gets us to deny our physical urges? What kind of pressures cause us to act in ways that don’t immediately gratify? These questions came up organically as I considered the plight of the poor sentient chocolate just trying to make it through another day.
LCJ: City of Dancing Gargoyles is an undeniably fun book. After all, who doesn’t love a valley filled with swearing dinosaurs? Why were you drawn to humor when tackling such big, existential themes? When writing humor, how or when do you know it’s effective?
TC: I think it’s just how I was raised. I was the last of five children, and I had the advantage of listening to and learning from my older siblings, who are all smart and funny and talented in various fields. In particular, my brother Shawn is the ultimate oddball, in the best way. His humor is dry, deadpan, and goofy all at the same time. We shared a childhood bedroom for 14 years, so a lot of my off-kilter humor comes from him.
This may sound odd, but I think growing up playing music also helped. Part of comedy is pacing and timing, and we all learned those things playing in school and university bands, and I think I’ve carried that sense of rhythm into my writing as well.
I think the reason humor so often creeps into my work is captured by that old adage about laughing to keep from crying. We’re being so comically stupid about our social, economic, and climate futures, like, surreally stupid, that sometimes the comic and surreal is the only way to address it.
LCJ: If you had to live in any of your cities, which one would you choose and why?
TC: No question: the City of Leaping Libraries. Of course, I’d have to be the one living in the library rather than the one ducking it. Can you imagine–you’re always surrounded by books, no need for a car, and you get to have dinner in a different neighborhood each night? How is that not heaven?
