Joanne Renaud, who earned a BFA in illustration from Art Center College of Design, has been drawing and painting as long as she can remember.  She went to college in a variety of places, including Northern Ireland and Southern California, and enjoys history, comics, children’s books, and cheesy fantasy movies from the ’80s. She currently works as a freelance illustrator.  Her clients include Simon & Schuster, Random House, Houghton Mifflin, Macmillan-McGraw Hill, Harcourt Inc., Zaner Bloser, Astonishing Adventures Magazine, and Trillium Publishing.   She is art director of Dark Valentine. View her work at:www.joannerenaud.com

Are you old enough to have seen the original Star Wars trilogy in the theatre? If so, what are your memories of it?

Both my brother and sister were huge Star Wars geeks, so I remember reading the scripts to the first two movies as soon as I could read. (I especially loved looking at Ralph McQuarrie’s concept art.) I wasn’t old enough to see the first two films in the theater, but I did see “Return of the Jedi,” and Jabba SCARED THE CRAP out of me. But the Ewoks bored me even then.

But I think even when I was little I was disappointed Princess Leia didn’t dress up in a space gown and go to a space ball and schmooze with the space big shots. I liked her Bespin pantsuit in “Empire,” but it would have been nice to see the more glamorous side of life in a Galaxy Far, Far Away.

Cats or Dogs?

Cats, definitely! Even if they only sniff your finger when you point and they’re useless at scaring intruders. They’re fluffy and adorable (well, most cats anyway) and IMO cleaning up after them is not as disgusting as cleaning up after dogs.

I find H.P. Lovecraft’s pro-cat screed “Cats and Dogs” to be pretty funny, especially considering that my cats are hardly the type to have been worshipped by Egyptians. While very cute, they’re not particularly clever or graceful. In fact, they are both rather stupid, and they tend to fall off things.

What’s the best vacation you’ve ever taken, and why?

Wow, that’s a tough question! I’d say my favorite vacation to date would be when I went to Spain in 2005. It was out of my usual comfort zone of places I usually travel to (i.e. the UK, Ireland or France), so it was a blast. The food was delicious, the people were super nice and the palaces and museums I saw (the Alhambra, the Prado) knocked my socks off.

There was also the random little adventures that happened that made it really wonderful. On our last night in Seville, me and my friend heard some music out of our hotel window– we saw the lights, the crowds and the baroque pageantry– and we ran down to go see. It was the feast-day of Maria Auxiliadora, and a crowd of young men were bearing this ornate float piled with flowers through the streets, surrounded by children with candles. It was like something out of a dream.

I did the sketch the next morning, and painted it when I came back to the States.

What inspires your artwork?

I’m sorry to say I don’t do as much sketching for fun as I used to, since I’m working as an illustrator now. No matter how much you love your work, it’s still work!

However, I am generally most inspired by my favorite artists– past and present– like Gainsborough, Nell Brinkley, and Mucha (sure, everyone loves Mucha, but he did a lot of quality work, asides from the usual biscuit ads you see). I also love a lot of modern illustrators like Trina Schart Hyman, George Barr, Miguel Sanjulian, Valerie Valusek, and many others. I’m also inspired by a good vintage cover illustration, old and new comics, and my favorite TV shows.

What are your favorite TV shows?

Funny you should ask! I’m very sad “The Tudors” has ended, even though it could be very silly and was by no means accurate. But I loved how campy and bodice-ripping it could be. Speaking of camp, I’m also looking forward to the prequel episodes and second season of “Spartacus: Blood and Sand.” John Hannah and Lucy Lawless played two of the most compelling characters I’ve seen on TV in a long time.

I’m also a big fan of “Mad Men,” “Burn Notice,” and most shows on USA these days. Their shows are well populated with men who look great in modern slim-cut suits, and I’m a sucker for that. My favorite older shows include “Quantum Leap” and “The Twilight Zone.” There was some fantastic writing in those shows, and some nice production design too– which is especially impressive to me, given how limited their budgets were.

Favorite authors?

Tanith Lee, definitely. She’s so versatile! “The Silver Metal Lover” holds up so well, and I’ve read “Heroine of the World” and her Flat Earth series over and over again.

I also love Clark Ashton Smith– even though he’s better known as H.P. Lovecraft’s buddy, he was an accomplished author himself. His “Zothique” and “Hyperborea” story cycles are really pretty awesome– he does some fabulous world-building in them, and unlike Lovecraft he actually features romance and humor.

Historical novelists like Rafael Sabatini and Gillian Bradshaw are also great. Recently I’ve also gotten into writers who were writing gothic suspense in the 1960s and 1970s, like Naomi Hintze and Ira Levin. Levin’s “The Stepford Wives” and Hintze’s “You’ll Like My Mother” are better known now as kitschy movies starring Katherine Ross and Patty Duke, respectively, but the original novels are taut, excellent thrillers.

Why did you get involved with Dark Valentine Magazine?

All three of us– Katherine, our publisher, Joy Sillesen, our editor, and me– were working on an online pulp magazine called Astonishing Adventures Magazine. When we found out that it was going to be shut down– as the publisher could no longer afford to keep it running– we decided to pool our talents and start our online magazine, this time dedicated to dark fiction of all genres. Our patron saint (so to speak) would be Tanith Lee, our favorite author, and her namesake goddess, Tanit, the Carthaginian goddess of the moon. You wrote quite an amazing story about Tanit for our premiere issue– it was such a pleasure illustrating it for you, and basing the cover on it too!

It’s so strange to think that DV has been around for almost a year. Our new issue is going live the first Friday of March. It has another cover that I painted, based on a great fantasy story called “Swallow the Light” by new author Kristen Davis. We’re also featuring stories by authors John M. Radosta, Mike Chinn and Paul D. Brazill. It’s going to be great!

Stephanie,

I would like to thank you for sending me this wonderful story. I’d like to use it in a future issue of IGMS (probably issue 8 or 9). I know you’ve waited for quite a while for me to sort things out, but hopefully it was worth the wait.

I’ll get back in touch with you when I know exactly when your story will be published. Contracts and payment will come from managing editor Kathleen Bellamy, usually about a week or two before the issue comes out.

We will need to do a little bit of editing (minor line edits), but I’ll run all that by you for your approval before I do anything else.

Thanks,
Edmund R. Schubert
Editor, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show
www.InterGalacticMedicineShow.com

I’m absolutely delighted. Not just because Limbo found a home, but because IGMS is one of my favorite genre publications. I’ve been really honored in that the magazines I tend to love are the ones that love me back.

“Somewhere, Sometime on the Nile” by Stephanie Dray is my favorite of the issue. This story, balancing between character and events, is another time travel tale. The travelers are “time slippers” who inadvertently slide through different times through a location (the Wailing Wall) or an object (an ancient vase or jar). Jerusalem in the story’s present is the center of a peaceful Middle East. This is the result of careful time adjustment by the Elders Council that located Professor Ammar Abdul-Salaam years ago and trained him after his inadvertent slide through time, following the death of his father in a Jerusalem riot. He then found and trained Maryam, a young Palestinian woman who timeslid after the violent death of her own father. The result of the time fix cost Maryam her child, who no longer exists, and now she’s out for revenge. And though the frail old professor is dying, he must stop her, or Jerusalem itself will be erased.

As the professor chases Maryam, we slide back and forth in time through the major events of the characters’ personal histories, against the backdrop of the anguish and horror of events in that region. The story is thus fraught with tension; I wondered while reading it if it was really a book compressed down, for we never know Maryam’s child, for instance, but the scenes, though short, are taut; the situation of a mother denied her child certainly is immediately understandable as a cause for conflict. And so what might well have become a vast and fascinating novel full of colorful people and dramatic events is condensed to a duel between two hurting people, which Dray brings to a very effective close.