Interview: J.M. Sidorova
I first learned of J.M. Sidorova’s The Witch of Prague because we share a love for the famed Unicorn Tapestries, a set of unicorn tapestries woven more than 500 years ago, depicting a medieval unicorn hunt. In Sidorova’s novel, the tapestries give magical powers to Alica, a typist in Cold War Czechoslovakia. When Tommy, an intern at newly founded Homeward Books, described the novel to me at this year’s Readercon, I knew I had to read it. I’m so glad I did.
The Witch of Prague is the very first title from Homeward Books, a new small press for “weird, brave, complex stories [that] defy the constraints of genre.” The novel is historical speculative fiction that speaks to our time, dealing with the rise of fascism, corruption, political violence, and protest. It is a coming-of-age story that is also mythical and mysterious. It’s a love story that describes sexual intimidation and violence in addition to sexual awakenings. Its heroine, Alica, is spunky, ambitious, and prickly. She’s smart even as she stumbles.
I had the joy of chatting with Sidorova by email about the process of writing The Witch of Prague, from finding the voice of her heroine to weaving research and family history into the epic story.
—Marguerite Sheffer
Marguerite Sheffer: We see the journey of The Witch of Prague’s heroine, Alica, as she first accomplishes her “dream” of becoming a typist in Cold War Czechoslovakia, despite her dyslexia, under the tutelage of a mysterious older woman. She then gains power and influence beyond what she initially imagines possible. How did you develop Alica as a central character? How did you land on her voice?
J.M. Sidorova: From the very beginning, I wanted Alica to drive the narrative. There could be no story beyond what she was capable of, but at the same time I already had planned some nonnegotiable things that had to happen to her. This proved to be a challenge: like auditioning for the role when the actors are still ghostly and semi formed. One thing I was working hard to avoid was making her like me just by virtue of writing in my knee-jerk responses. She had to be unlike me because I am incapable of what she needs to be capable of; I would have been a drag on her. Her voice is also not my voice, and since it is a first-person point of view, her writing style, if you will, is not my writing style. Again, I had to be very watchful early on so as not to slip into my voice. She actually shares some biographical details with my mother, but she is not like my mother either.
MS: This novel brilliantly weaves several threads (pun intended): some of your own family history, Cold War history, female sexuality, fairy tales, and very real magic. How did you land on these themes, and what surprises or challenges came up as you wove them together?
JMS: At inception it was a mentor/pupil story—an “old hag” the mentor, a lone young girl the pupil. This was the material from my mom’s young adulthood. And this, the old hag/young girl, is already the stuff fairy tales are made of, so it was easy to channel them in. And sexuality can easily be a text/subtext whenever you have an old lady and a young girl match wits and powers, even in fairy tales. Right?
Probably because of the connection to my mom, the whole project time-traveled to the whereabouts of the mid-twentieth century and just lodged itself there. It is funny how there are these self-imposed constraints, and then you have to work hard to satisfy them.
I needed my main characters to move within a state’s power structures and I needed a time of conflict, but I did not want to make up an imaginary world—I am a sucker for the “desert of the real” (as Morpheus had called it), though I can’t help dusting it with a bit of magic. At one point I considered setting the novel in the time around the Cuban missile crisis in the US. Didn’t go with that, for better or worse (next time, maybe?). In the end, it was Czechoslovakia, 1967-68. The Russian invasion and that particular historic moment held a special significance to me already. Again, once you make your choice, the time and place shape the narrative. I wrote the main draft of the novel way before 2022, but sadly, everything that has happened since has brought a whole other level of relevance to the period of the Cold War history described in the novel.
MS: From the outset of the novel, Soviet politics are compared to fairy tales and magical narratives. Alica imagines the “magical threads, like nerve fibers” that connect the Central Committee of the Communist Party to “every nook and cranny of the country…But then because of this magic[,] there [i]s a price to pay. People bec[o]me sleepy and slow like an enchanted kingdom.” I don’t want to give away much of the ending, but this parallel continues to marvelous effect. How did fairy tales help you understand or convey the political realities (or unrealities)?
JMS: I think one term that helps to unpack it here is magical thinking. It can be argued that a totalitarian society cannot hold together without magical thinking. From the get go, built into the communist ideology, for example, was the expectation that an average citizen passionately and intensely channels the ideology in their everyday life, becomes purely and exclusively an ideological creature. I mean, all life long, not just in the public sphere, but all the way to the kitchen, the bedroom. They must see and experience the whole world in a limited palette, with a limited vocabulary (a brilliant realization of this is in a 1930s novel by Andrei Platonov, called The Foundation Pit. I highly recommend it; it is a very unsettling read. But this expectation is an organic impossibility. No one can live like this their whole life, nor should they be expected or forced to, yet to imply that it is possible at all is magical thinking and as unreal as forcing magical threads into every brain. Then of course, at a certain point of its life span, any authoritarian or totalitarian state, in its fight to deform reality, can’t help but make claims that are nothing short of magic and require magical thinking to believe in. A notorious example is the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster (“nothing to see here, no radiation”),but plenty of other examples are everywhere, right? Facts disappearing, turning into other facts. How can one understand this political reality without invoking fairy tales and magic?
MS: What other texts were you reading (or thinking back to) when writing The Witch of Prague? What books and stories is this one in conversation with?
JMS: Great question! I can go in several directions with this one, but let’s just talk about the unicorn stories, as they have come to us from the Middle Ages. The more you think about them, the less sense they make. If it is about chastity and innocence being rewarded by an otherworldly beast, or if the beast stands for love itself, a higher love, then why slay the beast? And why is it a beast in the first place? There is a gruesome scene in T. H. White’s The Once and Future King that serves up this incongruity to an unforgettable effect. I suppose one could say the slaying part may be symbolically pointing to the same sentiment as when someone says, I slayed that interview! But still. I can’t remember now where I read it that we should not try to make sense of medieval symbolism; it is an archeological layer cake and needn’t be consistent. People used the same icons for meanings that were important to them at their cultural moment. Some medieval—let’s use this word—creators abstracted and spiritualized the heck out of the unicorn myth, while others loaded it with carnality; a unicorn is an enduring meme-shell, that’s all. And as such, it endures still—but isn’t that the magic? Leonard Cohen turned the myth into the lyrics about a unicorn as a victim of a woman scorned. Samuel R. Delany has a short story where a unicorn appears as a beastly brute with dried dung stuck in his tail, and Tanith Lee has a dreamy, delicate fable where a certain supernatural being lives through reiterations of a unicorn myth as a man in a unicorn hunt, then a maiden in a virgin sacrifice to a unicorn, and finally as a unicorn. There is a rainbows-and-whites unicorn that is supposed to appeal to little girls, and there is Ridley Scott’s unicorn in the original Blade Runner, merely a sign that maybe your plight has been briefly noted by a benevolent higher…something? I’d like to think I am in conversation with most of these interpretations. Well, maybe except the stuffed toy unicorns.
Marguerite Sheffer: In the novel’s afterword, you share that “not until I read the comprehensive, coffee-table-book-sized The Unicorn Tapestries, by Margaret B. Freeman, did I learn about certain details of the tapestries’ scenes that I could not see before. Believe it or not—these details fit incredibly well into my already-written narrative, as if they were meant to.” Can you say more about your personal history with the tapestries, and how they made their way into the novel?
JMS: I am delighted we share the fascination! For reasons I will not spell out (spoiler danger!), I needed a wall hanging for the story. Again, this is at the inception stage, so I turned to “auditioning” the wall hangings, so to speak. And here I was, reading a Wikipedia article about the Unicorn Tapestries.
OMG, I said. This is it!
The ambiguity, the paradox, the mystery of the partially missing panel, plus the whole mythology it brings in—it is a gushing fire hydrant of narrative potential! My next reaction was somebody must have written them into a story already. And I looked, and at least at the time, to my knowledge, it was surprisingly sparse. I mean, the imagery was relatively widespread (there is a panel hanging in Hogwarts, for one), and the unicorn myth itself is ubiquitous, but no one seemed to have made the tapestry a character in its own right, with all its baggage, so to speak. So I went, sign me up! And from there on, once you let the presence so immensely into your story, it has its pull; it begins to make the weather.
MS: I’m an avid reader and writer of speculative historical fiction, and I find myself drawn to this genre because it can feel like a wonderful escape from current turmoil but also helps me make sense of the present moment in new ways. Did you find when writing that you were confronting our current realities? If so, how?
JMS: Oh yes, we share this passion! For me, living in history is not exactly an escape from the present, but rather a way to extend one’s lifespan. Not physically of course, but virtually. They say memories make the self, and when you dive into history deep enough to get to visceral details, you almost feel like you’re expanding the self because you absorb someone else’s memories. As for the feeling that what was once thought history is now invading the present, yes, it is here all right, and you are confronting it. But history does not repeat itself verbatim. In 1968, when Prague Spring was cut short by the Soviet invasion, there was this race between a truth and a lie about what was happening, a race that was in some ways literal and physical: who gets to the central radio first to broadcast their story. I had elements of these events incorporated into the novel. And in the novel’s case, the truth won. There was a finality to this victory, and once the truth was out on the radio waves, it could not be erased. You heard it, and you knew, and there was no going back. The sad part is, in the current reality, truth and lie no longer fight like this, do they?
For a while now, this song has been playing in my head. It was written in the seventies or so by Vladimir Vysotsky, who was sort of a Russian equivalent of Leonard Cohen: a consummate poet who also made his poems into songs. The song is titled “A Fable about Truth and Lie.” In it, cunning Lie lures naïve Truth into her lair for a sleepover, and when gullible Truth falls asleep like a baby, Lie steals her clothes (and does a couple of other, more objectionable things), dons them, and skips town. Ever since, Truth can’t prove to anyone she is the truth, and she is kicked and spat on, cussed out and character-assassinated, charged with crimes and misdemeanors. The song is meant to sound folksy, the lyrics are low-brow and, together with the tune and tempo, convey a certain half-complacency, half-complicity. The wink and irony are there, but subtly so. If you strip them of their clothes, the bard sings at one point, can you even tell the difference?
MS: I want to zoom in on sex in the novel for a moment. Alica navigates her own growing attraction and desires, unwanted advances (to put it mildly) from powerful men, and also her own sexual power. Her mentor, Pani Agata, coaches her to own her power (sexual and otherwise), saying “I want your confidence and your worth to come from…inside you. Not because a man happened to lay his eyes on you,” while also nudging her to get closer to the same men who threaten her autonomy. Can you tell us about sex and power in the novel?
JMS: Oh, this subject is both huge and sensitive. And requires long-format to give it a proper treatment. But let’s see what I can do here… Before I say anything, let me just say that there are instances of sexual violence in the book that are evil, end of discussion. We are not talking about those. We are talking about other stuff in the book. There is something my mom said recently when we were revisiting the themes from her young adulthood that I had borrowed for the novel. She was referring to the time when she had been nineteen and working in the Ministry of Foreign Trade as a courier. She’d seen and been on the receiving end of unwanted advances, but on that particular occasion, she told me something like: I remember thinking—poor men!
Why, I asked, surprised.
Oh, you know, being ensnared, charmed, wound around a seductress’s finger.
But Mom, I said, what about the power imbalance, the potential for abuse?
Yes, she said, and still.
So, let’s say, there are two dueling male/female sex and power narratives. One places all power squarely with the male and busily institutionalizes it. The other celebrates the kind of female power that cuts through all those institutions that the first one has erected. These narratives come in all shapes and forms but the full range here, I guess, is from the Zeus and Leda, Europa, and et cetera archetype (even if he is not presenting as Zeus when he is Zeus-ing around) to the Artemis and Actaeon archetype. And it can be argued, in life and in stories, these archetypes stalk one another, debate, clash, fight, but sometimes also hang out together. Pani Agata embodies this contradiction, even if you discount her motives, and the whole novel has a lot of these archetypes playing out everywhere at once. Alica, of course, does not want to have anything to do with any of that. She dreams of another way.
MS: Your first novel, Age of Ice, was published by Simon & Schuster. Can you share more about your experience releasing The Witch of Prague with a new small press, Homeward Books?
JMS: I’ve had a great time working with Homeward Books. The team is staffed with smart, talented, and dedicated people who love books and care for the fine art of writing fiction. To have such people discuss your work is a treat in and of itself.
From a writer’s perspective, what is a perfect, dream editor? They ought to be in love with the narrative but not blind to its weaknesses. They should care for the story as one’s own but not try to own it. It is a near-impossible balance of the opposites to pull off, if you think of it. You go into the process not knowing how it will work out with this particular editor, and there is this dance with so many risks to have one’s toes stepped on (or to step on the other’s toes oneself). But then, ideally, at some point, trust builds. Hopefully, you both realize that you both get it. You sync. What made my experience with Homeward so special is that Rachel Sobel and M. Huw Evans, who did, respectively, developmental and line/copy editing, are perfect editors, as far as I am concerned, and I think we’ve built that trust and understanding. Imagine, for example, you sit across your editor, the two of you going over some changes you’ve made. And you two look each other in the eyes and kind of shake your heads with the same mirrored expression, and you, the author, are like, There has appeared a flaw here now, hasn’t it? And the editor goes, Yep, there has. And then you go, But I know how to fix it! And you know how to fix it because the very act of your editor’s reading deeply, tuning into the text’s every nuance, uncovering meta-connections you had not realized were there, has magically turbocharged your creativity as an author. Isn’t it the best?
MARGUERITE SHEFFER is a writer who lives in New Orleans. Her debut short story collection, The Man in the Banana Trees (University of Iowa Press), won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a Finalist for the 2025 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her stories appear in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Epiphany, The Adroit Journal, The Offing, SmokeLong Quarterly, and The Cosmic Background, among other magazines. Find her on Instagram @mlensheffer.
J.M. SIDOROVA is an American biomedical scientist and author of speculative fiction. She grew up in the USSR, Singapore, and West Germany, and spent most of her adult life in the United States. Her literary fantasy novel The Age of Ice (Scribner/Simon & Schuster, 2013) was featured in Locus Magazine’s recommended reading list, and received an honorable mention on Tor.com’s best fiction of 2013 list. J.M. is a graduate of the Clarion West workshop. She began publishing speculative fiction in English with a short story “The Witch, the Tinman, the Flies” (2010, Asimov’s Science Fiction). Her short fiction ranges from historical fantasy to science fiction, and has appeared in Clarkesworld, Abyss and Apex, Giganotosaurus, and other venues. Her stories can also be found in the anthologies Science Fiction by Scientists (Springer, 2016), Welcome to Dystopia (OR books, 2018), and Devil’s Ways (Dragonwell Publishing, 2020). She lives in the Pacific Northwest.
