Interview of Bronte-Marie by Freya Bennett
Imagine a world where gods can be challenged, magic refuses to follow the rules, and love blossoms in the spaces you least expect. That’s the world Bronte‑Marie Wesson invites you into with The Ascension of Souls. For her, fantasy isn’t just storytelling, it’s a way to escape, to feel alive, and to dream bigger than the everyday allows. We chat about queer joy, the women reshaping fantasy, and the gentle nudge from her wife that finally turned years of half-formed ideas into a fully realised epic.
Hi Bronte-Marie! How are you, and where are you writing from today?
Greetings! I am writing from my very comfortable couch, while my wife works away in the kitchen and a cat idly grooms my arm. I am doing as well as one can be in such a situation, which is to say that I’m great.
What draws you to high fantasy, and what do you think makes this genre so compelling for readers today?
I have always been drawn to high fantasy because I think there’s something hugely impressive about watching authors craft entire worlds from their own imagination. The scope of the worlds I grew up reading was just totally entrancing to an introverted little escapist who read her way from one end of the library to the other and then eventually all the way back. The concept that someone like Tolkien figured out linguistics for an imagined language simply to flesh out a world for his own pleasure was delightful to little eleven-year-old Bronte-Marie. I was attempting to create those worlds from the moment I realised that was an option. High fantasy has some grandeur to its scope and some intensity to the craft behind it. I think that works like a lure for readers because you know that for a book to fall into the genre there is likely to be quite an intricate world behind it.
That and dragons. I don’t know a high fantasy reader who doesn’t love a dragon. Something about watching Daenerys Targaryen become the Mother of Dragons as a kid really changed me.
Your story features characters Luminara and Rianthran, whose bond defies the rules of their world. How do you approach weaving themes of love, power, and destiny into a fantasy setting?
Luminara and Rianthran are reflective of my wife and me. We were people who met while living on opposite sides of the world, quite literally, who defied all things to make life work together. I think having such a grand love story within my own life has given me an interesting grasp of how far people will truly go for one another, as my wife entirely uprooting herself to live down here in Australia was never something I could anticipate. I do not know how we found each other if not for destiny’s intervention. Many people would just call it luck. I’m a little bit more of a romantic. I’m not sure that there’s a singular omniscient god living above us in the heavens, but I do believe that perhaps there could be something pulling at all the invisible strings that join one person to the next, and I think that’s very apparent in the book.
In Luminara and Rianthran’s world, gods are certainly spoken of, but they’re nebulous beings who have not intervened directly in the workings of humanity in a very long time. They fundamentally changed the world while they were active but have not otherwise been seen. I also grew up within a church and found myself deeply fascinated by ancient concepts of destiny and prophecy. I think that’s a very common human experience, especially if you are queer growing up within a religious institution that does not necessarily make you feel welcome. From there, it’s not hard to inspect how my interest expanded into the inclusion of power dynamics between nobility and the common folk, as well as how religion has been weaponised by empires throughout all of history to create a sense of moral disparity that allows them to go after their neighbours.
How have people throughout history negotiated such heavy burdens? How has love persisted, despite all that they have been forced to go through? And in what form can culture persist, when there is an active interest in tearing it to pieces? I could go on forever.
You’ve credited your wife with encouraging you to write fully formed books. How has your personal life shaped your storytelling, and what role does your support system play in your creative process?
I wouldn’t be writing if it wasn’t for my wife. Once upon a time, a very long time ago, we were kids who met on an MSN roleplaying group reserved for the exceptionally nerdy Pokémon fans who wished to write and were fascinated with the world. We’ve always run scenes together, originally online (as we were long distance) but also in real life. We work like scene partners working through variations of dialogue that we like, and we’ll often do this a half-dozen times before settling on one solid amalgamation of the lot to immortalize in long form. She is just as talented as I am, I just like pulling all the threads into a bigger tapestry.
If I didn’t have her, half of these stories I’ve thought about would never have become fully fleshed-out worlds and narratives. I will also say that without my mother, I wouldn’t have been able to meet multiple writing deadlines in my life as when I was stuck neck-deep in an awful job clawing for a few hundred words a day, it was her who made sure that I felt I could quit my day job without totally imploding. My Mama has tried to provide for me at every turn where my writing is involved, and I give her credit wherever I can.
Fantasy literature is experiencing a boom, especially with women as both creators and readers. Why do you think this genre resonates so strongly right now, and how do you see your work contributing to that landscape?
I think it’s evident that fantasy and science-fiction is currently in a boom because people long for an escape from the world that we’re in. People are looking at the news and finding themselves overstimulated, overwhelmed and entirely unsure of what they can do to make the world a better place when everything seems so much greater in scope than they are. I’ve certainly felt it. That sense of creeping despair that crawls into the back of your mind when it’s one horrible atrocity after the next on the news.
“If I wanted to read about this world, I’d go read the news,” was a common saying thrown about my section. People consider fantasy literature a further escape than contemporary literature, even if speculative fiction is just as reflective of the world in which the writer lives. I hope that when people read my work, they see a reflection of the world that incites action within them. I want my books to be an escape, but I would also like them to be invigorating about what we can do to better the world as individuals.
I also hope that the queer community feels affirmed by finding fantasy worlds in which diverse, complex queer identities are common and beloved in the narrative. Often the queerness within my books is not that which can be quantified by labels, and I always found that so rare to see when I was growing up. Our identities need not be marketable, they must simply be.
Video games, like the 1990s Legend of Zelda, have inspired your work. How do elements from games influence your worldbuilding, characters, or approach to storytelling?
The Ocarina of Time was one of my formative experiences with fantasy growing up and one I have continued to ponder into my adulthood, as one does when they revisit media that they did not perhaps understand the depth of as a child. I think fantasy video games are an interesting study of the genre because they often spell out far less in the narrative than novels do. They leave things to the imagination. If you want to put together every detail of how the world building feeds into the narrative, you often have to interpret from codexes and implication rather than having your hand held every step of the way.
That might sound like I am thinking a bit too much about what is objectively a game built for children, but if you look at just about any Dark Souls game, you’ll see a broader example of what I’m discussing. I think Ocarina of Time originally caught my interest because my imagination was left to interpolate and fill in gaps that weren’t fleshed out in the immediate narrative, which lead directly to some of the setting of The Ascension of Souls. Sometimes you just gotta work out those questions in your own way.
Finally, for readers who are picking up The Ascension of Souls for the first time, what do you hope they take away from Luminara’s journey and the story’s exploration of destiny and prophecy?
The message of my books will always be that we should never stop fighting for the things we consider fundamentally important to us. Be that love or community or independence, apathy does nothing but serve to divorce us from what makes us human.
Also, fuck destiny. Any magical authority who thinks they’re going to tell you what you’re going to do with your life should be summarily punted into the sun.
