Mourning Goats

#16 Joe Lansdale

2011-05-15T00:00:00.001-04:00

20 Questions with Mourning Goats

INTERVIEW SIXTEEN

Another Mourning Goats interviewee, Paul Tremblay, told me about Joe Lansdale and after looking through his collection, I knew that he would be a fantastic author to pass along to you readers. His new book Devil Red was released today, and I'm happy to share his answers below with you all! Also, check out his website for a lot of free short stories to start your day off!

1. What comes to mind when you hear, "Mourning Goats?"

A goat at a funeral, near a barbacue stand.

2. You just had a new novel released on March 15th, Devil Red, what are you most excited about, with this book?

I love Hap and Leonard, and this one's different. The guys are going through some stuff, and though there are some odd elements in this one, it's a very down to earth book about them, especially Hap.

3. I saw you were just at World Horror Con, how was it? How was hanging out with fellow Mourning Goats interview, Paul Tremblay?

It was fine. We had barbacued goat.

4. What can you tell us about the new 1930's novel you're working on, Edge of Dark Water?

I don't want to talk too much about it, but I will say it has elements of crime and mystery and adventure and coming of age, and it has a slight inflence from Homer's Odyssey.

5. Can you explain your term, Mojo storytelling, for us?

It's actually my webmaster, Lou Bank's term. But it means someone who writes with a kind of dark magic. Nice. I'll accept it.

6. How did you get started writing?

With a pen and paper. Drum roll. Actually, that's it. I started writing as a kid. Always wanted to do it. Loved storytelling. Comics are my earliest influences, along with storytelling, and then books and films.

7. Many of your fans may not know that you've also written for animated series, including Batman and Superman, do you see yourself doing a lot more of these? How did you get into that genre?

I would have loved to have done more, but the series went away. Maybe something else in the future. Last year there was a Jonah Hex short that appeared and got a lot of attention. Thomas Jane was the voice of Hex.

8. When I think of an author, I don't think of someone that has multiple belts in martial arts, do you think your discipline there bleeds over into your writing routine?

Yep, it does. Discipline. Confidence. Dedication. It works in writing too.

9. How proud are you of your son, Keith, who has written the screenplay for Christmas With the Dead? What do you think about him following in your footsteps, in regards to writing?

Very proud. Both of my kids are quite talented.

10. What's it like working with your new publisher, Mulholland Books, a division of Little Brown, do you see a lot of differences from Knopf?

So far, so good. I think they are more media savvy, the internet, that sort of thing. They seem very focused and aware that it's a new century and there are new sheriff's in town. Knopf was great, but I sort of felt I was spinning my wheels a bit. Sometimes you just need change.

11. You said that Night they Missed the Horror Show changed your life, can you tell us more about that?

Suddenly people knew the story, and knew who I was, and then they read my other work. It was a game changer, along with other things. But it was part of it. A couple years before THE MAGIC WAGON got me attention, as did a story titled "Tight Little Stitches In A Dead Man's Back", but "Night.." was a real game changer, and is even an influence on writers to this day. Amazing.

12. Over the years have you seen a difference in your tours? Are they getting bigger? Have they evolved?

You know, tours aren't what they used to be. There's no media going on. No newspapers and television and radio like before, or very little of it. Used to be tons of interviews. The crowds stay about the same, actually. Good in most places, but not growing. Sales are growing however, and that seems to be through Amazon. There are so many people out there touring, so many things asking for people's time, that though they are important, they aren't what they used to be.

13. What do you think about the large following in Italy? Why do you think that is?

Tours there are huge. I can't explain it actually, but it's nice. Lots of newspapers, television and radio. Like early tours here.

14. I've interviewed a lot of authors that have married other authors, academics, editors, etc. What's it like being married to a writer and editor?

Karen is not truly a writer. She can do it, and has on occasions, but she doesn't have any desire to be published. She can edit as well, and has. She does a lot of proofing for me, that kind of thing. But she has only touched on writing. A few articles, cowriting stories, coediting. She can finish something I can't, but she's not inspired to write. It works out really well, actually.

15. I love what you said in the observer about noir, how "it is so like a sucking gunshot wound that, to keep from hanging yourself from a shower rod, you have to laugh at it, make fun of it" can you go a little more in depth on this? How do you make fun of something so rough, especially in story?

Everything has a humorous side. You have to look for it. Remember Twain's quote: There's no humor in heaven." Which means all things humorous have to do with the sadness or pain of humans.

16. The adaptation of your short story, Christmas With The Dead, is set to start filming in Nacogdoches in June, how did this come about and what are you most excited about it?

The University wanted a better script than they had had in the past, and I wanted to make a film. We made a kind of union. More money. Keith's script based on my story. I brought in a couple of actors and a director who had experience, and we were off to the races. Films June 2, full feature.

17. I read somewhere that you said that ebooks are the new paperback, where do you think literature is going, in regards to the publishing world?

Books will still be published, but will be more of a luxury item. E books are the new paper back. It's just that simple.

18. How long do you see your Hap & Leonard series going?

Impossible to say. As long as I feel the urge. Right now, I'm thinking two to four more. But you never know.

19. What's the most important advice that you've received about writing?

I had to figure most of it out on my own, but sitting your ass in a chair and writing and reading is the most important. William F. Nolan told me to diversify. I did. It worked for me.

20. What's next for Joe Lansdale?

Finishing EDGE OF DARK WATER and the film, CHRISTMAS WITH THE DEAD.

Thank you!

Goat

#15 Bob Thurber

2011-05-01T00:12:00.007-04:00

20 Questions With Mourning Goats

INTERVIEW FIFTEEN

Bob Thurber

Another Mourning Goats interviewee introduced me to Bob Thurber, and I want to thank you, Vincent Louis Carrella, because Mr. Thurber was not only a fantastic interview, but a fantastic writer. Please go pick up his new book, Paperboy, and find his stories online.

1. What comes to mind when you hear, "Mourning Goats?"

A dead shepherd being nuzzled by cold noses.

2.Your first novel ‘Paperboy: A Dysfunctional Novel’ is being published today (May 1st). What can you tell us about it? And why does it say that it's a "dysfunctional novel?"

It’s an odd book. Engaging. And a page turner, I’m told. But definitely odd. In one sense it’s simply a coming-of-age novel narrated from the viewpoint of an anxious 14 year-old boy, Jack Fisher, a paperboy, and one of two children to a single-mother. The story takes place in the summer of 1969, the summer of the moon landing, pretty near the conclusion of that decade’s social and cultural turmoil. So in that sense it is somewhat of a period piece, an attempt at recapturing the general atmosphere and feel of that strange time.

Being 14, Jack’s immaturity and confusion naturally inhibit his focus, his use of language, and the text plays on that, on his ability or inabilities to tell a ‘proper’ story. Being a child, he’s unable to fully grasp his situation, and is at times childishly inept in communicating his thoughts and observations. But he makes the effort. He is sometimes too candid, too focused. At other times he seems callow and insensitive. So he’s somewhat of an unreliable narrator, though he is never insincere.

The dysfunction part applies not just to the story, its people and their actions –some severe dysfunction there -- but also to the form of the book, its presentation. The novel’s 260 pages are made up of 157 chapters, most of which are exceedingly brief. The longest being only four or five pages; many chapters are only a page. What I tell people is it’s actually an 800 page novel with all the boring parts edited out. And though the narrator is a child, this is strictly an adult book, and its content is not at all suitable for children.

A novel composed of fragments isn’t anything new. I initially chose the design or arrangement for the edginess that it brings, but also for ‘reader relief.’ There’s an uncomfortable jitteriness that mirrors the subject matter, which could possibly overwhelm a reader if not for the breaks, the air in between. Many of the chapters are poignant, powerful. These jagged shards, without the breathing space, would be harder to bear, though there are also parts that are humorous, droll, even absurdly comic.

I’m not a literary highbrow, but some years ago I labeled this sort of raucous, uneven style of writing as stroboscopic fiction because, in my view, it assaults a reader’s senses, engaging him or her to read onward, but changing as it progresses, intermittently distorting one’s focus much like a strobe light does.

3. On your homepage it says you wrote every day for 20 years before attempting to publish; what made you wait?

I never looked at it like I was waiting for anything. It was rather simple. I worked at writing every day. And I was pretty focused on that, always reading good work along with some book about how to write. Some of the books had exercises, and I’d try my hand at some of them. My ideas about writing weren’t very complicated. I was just trying to learn to work from inside myself. But I wasn’t expecting anything to happen. I sort of just stumbled along day after day.

Basically, I didn’t see any end to my training. I still don’t. I’m still learning. I’ve developed good skills and good habits as a result of writing every day. By making it a priority, never making excuses. I would write when I was dead tired, when I was sick with a fever, barely able to get out of bed. I wrote before weddings, after funerals, on holidays. It was a daily requirement, not forced but self imposed. But I never really had any specific goals. I wasn’t ambitious then and I’m not ambitious now. I still don’t submit very often. I’m better about sending my work out now, but for twenty years or so I didn’t care about publishing at all.

It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Being more or less a closet writer all those years. I mean I did a lot of things besides write. I had remarried, so I had a wife, a house, a family, two children whom we decided to school at home. I ran a business for a about ten years. Overall I was a pretty normal, stable, happy guy.

Few people even knew that I wrote, and I didn’t talk about it, so I wasn’t trying to prove anything to anyone. And I rarely shared my work with anyone except my wife. Once in a while she would mention to someone that I was a writer and afterwards I’d say, Please don’t do that. Because it frequently led to questions about what I wrote, had I published, what I was working on, etc, and I’ve always felt awkward talking about my work. Did I mention I find interviews unsettling, almost painful?

4. While, you didn't try to publish for 20 years, it sounds like you've done alright, publishing over 200 stories and receiving over 40 awards and citations since. Did you ever think that it would happen like it has or was this always the plan?

Not at all. When I was nineteen, the plan was more conventional -- apply for a grant, a loan, somehow get into a local college and study towards a journalism degree. Back then I wanted to write only nonfiction, magazine articles, essays, things of that nature. I really had no interest in writing fiction.

A couple of years later, after my marriage fizzled, I regrouped. I had no money, no car, and no time for college, so I went the self-study route. I made good use of the public libraries. I focused on reading and improving my critical skills, concentrating on the fundamentals, the principles and ideals that support a piece of engaging prose. I began reading more fiction, mostly short stories, and I became intrigued by the whole psychology of fiction, storytelling, its appeal, the dream-like effect on a reader, what I call the mechanisms that operate not on the page but in the mind of a reader.

That’s really what led me to writing fiction, playing at creating simple mechanisms of my own, constructing little tinker toys you wind up and observe, gauge their effect, make adjustments to, then wind up again. But I never considered it anything more than playful exercise.

Many of the stories that eventually received an award or some praise were written ten or fifteen years prior, during my apprentice period, but they sat around for years because I had no desire to try and publish. I didn’t think most of them were very good. My wife loved a few of them, so for a while I did consider submitting my work under a pseudonym. Testing the waters, so to speak. But I never got around to doing that. I just kept writing, filing the work away. Sometimes I still regret not having used a pseudonym.

5. It seems as though you're almost proud that you've never attended a writing class; what are your thoughts on being taught how to write? Have you thought of teaching?

No, I take no pride whatsoever in my lack of a formal education. But it’s an odd fact, I think. So I mention it on my web site sort of as a disclaimer. I’m practicing without a license. Without any degrees in anything. I’m a self-taught hack.

And I wouldn’t make a very good teacher. I lack the patience. When I helped home school my children, it wasn’t in the role of instructor. More as a concerned guide. A director of their studies.

I think it’s important to point out that I didn’t develop entirely on my own. I received a lot of instruction in writing indirectly, from reading and rereading the works of many good writers, and from digesting a couple hundred books (no joke) on the mechanics, the technique, the necessary components, beginning with sentence structure, word connotation, all that. But how I write and the kind of things I generally write about have been equally influenced by numerous books on psychology, spirituality, and studies of human behavior.

6. I've met your agent Jack Scovil a few times. How do you think having an agent changes things? Do you recommend it?

When I first sent my manuscript to Jack, he read it one night, then called me the next day to say he loved it. Rare breed, that man. They simply don’t make agents like Jack Scovil anymore. I’m very fortunate to have him representing my work.

Seeing as most of the larger publishing houses still require submissions though a literary agent, representation remains a necessary requirement in that regard. But if you don’t have an agent, there are plenty of fine independent houses, big and small, that will work with you directly.

7. Which of your awards do you hold in highest regard?

All of them. And I’m dead serious. I never expected to win a single contest, so every prize, every award, or anytime my name appeared among the list of finalists, it was a very special honor. I’m not being self-effacing, either. I always submitted what I considered to be solid work, but very often when I received notification, my first thought was, ‘well, maybe they made a mistake, or the judge got my name mixed up with someone else’s story.’ I’d express that notion to my wife and she’d say, ‘What the hell is wrong with you.’

8. You are publishing with Casperian Books for your new novel. How was it working with them?

Fine bunch of people. Knowledgeable and helpful every step of the way. Moving through the process was a new experience for me, working from manuscript to galleys. I learned a great deal about a good many things. The one small issue we butted heads on, and only for a short time, was the suggestion I change the subtitle from “A Dysfunctional Novel” to “A Novel of Dysfunction,” which of course is not the same thing.

Overall, I’m deeply indebted to Casperian for their willingness to publish Paperboy and make the book available to readers. All the ‘big houses’ passed on it. I understand reading is subjective, but I was shocked that not one of them got behind it.

From a selfish angle, a creative perspective, as an unknown writer hoping to reach a wider audience, and also from a hungry but finicky reader’s view -- because this is exactly the kind of book I’d buy and read – from that viewpoint I think it’s a shame that one of the larger publishers didn’t embrace this book. It’s solid work. Honest work. So I hope it does really well and earns Casperian a nice return on their investment.

9. You've had a lot of work published in e-zines. Was this on purpose, or are you more comfortable with a digital format? What do you think of e-publishing these days?

A friend of mine, who also happens to be my nephew, really likes the idea that selections of my work will be floating around on internet servers, available long after I’m gone. He’s a lot younger than me, and more in tune with the digital revolution. When he expressed his thoughts to me I understood the endurance of the digital format. The staying power. But beyond that I’ve never had any preference about how my work is shared. I still prefer ink and paper, the feel of pages, and the weight of a physical book in my hands. But I do an equal amount of reading online these days, so...

10. You've had a lot of luck with flash fiction, what was it like moving on to write a novel?

I like working in tight spaces, composing within certain word limits. Conciseness is generally a good thing, and in my reading I’ve always been drawn to minimalist writing. Of course minimalism and conciseness alone won’t cut it; you still need to present a story, some meaningful consequence, create adequate emotional intensity that’ll have a lasting effect upon the reader, or at least allude to one.

When I was working on Paperboy, I didn’t assign myself actual word limits, but I tried to keep each chapter, and each section as short and focused as possible, always trying to heap as much emotional weight upon the text as it could bear.

11. You have a daily notebook that you write in. How does it influence your other writing, and when did you start doing that? Why?

I started keeping a regular notebook when I was about fourteen. I did it merely to help clear my head. I scribbled a lot of junk, doodled, wrote song lyrics, did all that teenage angst stuff. But I didn’t get serious about writing in it, making daily entries until I was eighteen or so. I think everyone should keep a journal or a daily diary. Personally, I found it highly therapeutic making notes to myself, composing letters that I didn’t have to send. Excellent exercise, all of that. For a few years the notebook was my only requirement as a writer. It’s still my sketch pad, where I start, where I work things out, loosen up my mind, etc. I’ve never actually sat down to write a story. I more or less discover them in my notebook, often by degree. Then I’ll pull that section of text out. Often, I find I’m simply connecting two or three entries. After I’ve extracted them into a new file, I try to develop them, bringing in new entries, reworking it all to function together. So the notebook remains my primary tool of composition.

12. Did you save the 20 years of prose you wrote in a drawer somewhere? What do you think will happen in the future with it? Do you want to eventually re-work it and get it out there, or keep it hidden?

I used to work on a typewriter, a monstrous Olivetti, which I used to feed with a roll of paper, a continuous sheet. I set up a spool behind the machine so I wouldn’t have to stop every time I completed a page. So over the years I’ve accumulated ribbons of typed pages, along with single sheets, which are all stored in bins and boxes, along with my handwritten notebooks from those years. But I’d say most of that writing is worthless. Once I switched to a computer the storage problem became a lot easier. But to answer your question: no, I seldom ever go back and review any of that old stuff, and I’ve never had any desire to try and rework any of it.

13. I love how you said that when entering literary contests you were "gambling on your work." Do you think that a lot of people gamble too early, and lose too much to hit the casinos again?

Some years ago my wife and I went on a cruise through the lower parts of Alaska. The ship had a small casino. That was the first time I played blackjack for money. I had trained and practiced quite a bit on a computer blackjack game so I knew what I was doing. And I did pretty good. I came out ahead. But what struck me afterwards was how nonchalant I was about wagering twenty or thirty, sometimes more on a single hand. After the cruise I decided I should bet on my work, enter more contests. The fees were less than a single wager at blackjack. The logic was just so simple, I couldn’t refute it. So that’s what I did for a couple of years: gamble on the stories I had written and filed away.

14. Another Mourning Goats interviewee told me about your work, Vincent Louis Carrella; how did you two get connected?

That’s a wonderfully odd relationship in the sense I feel that I’ve grown rather close to Vincent, though I’ve never met him in person. I’m looking forward to the day we actually sit down together. He’s a fine man, a generous man, and a richly talented writer. There’s a purity and a sincerity about him and his work that is rather rare. He’s written many stories that I admire, and a few that I absolutely adore, along with an excellent novel. (Mourning Goats interview with Vincent) He and I connected through a mutual friend, Andrew Wilson, who is a brilliant man. Both gentleman have given me a tremendous amount of help and support over the years. I’m indebted to them both.

Vincent at: http://www.serpentbox.com/

Andrew at: http://alwwritingindustries.wordpress.com/

15. Paperboy is being published on May 1st, and you're already close to handing in your next novel. Can you tell us anything about it?

The title is April Fish, and it’s about a young fool who marries a nice girl, but the wrong girl. There’s a lot more to it, of course. That manuscript is almost ready to hand off. So I could go on and on. But I’ve learned that it’s generally a bad idea to talk about a work in progress, story or novel. Hopefully “April Fish” finds a publisher, then you can invite me back, and I’ll talk your ear off.

16. I remember hearing about MicroFiction.net years ago, can you tell us about your involvement, and what happened?

MicroFiction was my idea, my brainchild – a paying market for concise fictions, published online with a yearly print anthology -- and I still think it was a solid idea. I contacted some good people, and put together a small group of professionals whose sensibilities I respected. I put up the money, which was a lump sum of cash I’d accumulated from winning a few contests.

We considered small fictions, works of 800 words or less. So we were a rather high paying market, offering $25 per story, which works out to be about 15 cents a word. I managed the site, redirected submissions. Paid the writers we published. Our editorial board consisted of a small group of talented individuals (writers, teachers, other professionals) who, for various reasons, preferred to remain anonymous. At least for the early stages. Some people didn’t like that about us. I was informed about various discussions in workshops and forums, mean spirited remarks about who was behind MicroFiction.net, why the mystery, all that. My name was listed on the masthead, but no one else’s. In time we received a few seriously nasty notes from writers demanding answers. It was weird, like we were some kind of covert operation out to undermine the literary world. Some people made statements along the lines of “I don’t submit to magazines with undisclosed editorial boards.” Silly. Total nonsense, really. I was willing to ignore the flack. But a few key members of the board sort of took offense at the backlash. They were all busy people, volunteering their time, so they resigned and went back to their own busy lives. The few that remained felt abandoned and so we decided to disperse. I still consider it a terrible shame. I thought it was an excellent idea. But I couldn’t keep going all by myself.

17. You said that you had three novels started before Paperboy, do you think you'll go back to them? Can you tell us anything about them?

Prior to Paperboy, I made three attempts at writing a novel but they all lost steam. None reached a state close to completion. At that time I had the wrong ideas about what a novel should and shouldn’t be. So in that sense all those early efforts were misdirected and somewhat insincere. With Paperboy, I took a simpler, more direct approach. Once I had a complete draft, I simply broke it down then rewrote fanatically. There’s no fat on the book. The thing is pretty lean.

18. I feel like you wrote for 20 years, saved it all, and are now taking the knowledge that you've gained over the years to edit the stories in to publishable material. Is that's what's happening, or are you writing a lot of new shorts?

Though all of my short fictions and novel chapters originate in my notebook, they get pulled out rather early, as soon as I’ve spotted something genuine. So I’m always pulling out something new, storing it away. But the majority of the entries remain in the notebook, and that’s really the end of them. I seldom go fishing through old notebooks looking for anything.

19. What advice do you have for all of the writers out there? Write every day for 20 years?

Yes. Every day. Absolutely. Without excuses, for as many years as it takes. Keep a notebook, and every day ‘Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart’ as Longfellow advised. Don’t wait for inspiration. Just write, then rewrite. I’m not a good example for anyone to follow. I had to write well over a million words before I felt confident in my own voice.

20. What are you working on now, that you'd like to share with the readers?

Well, as I said, I have to complete April Fish, which is essentially done, though not ready to hand off. I still need to edit, let it rest a while, then reedit. Then I have a couple of other projects lined up, also novels. But I’m constantly distracting myself, spending hours developing short pieces I find in my notebook. So from day to day I’m focused on one project or another. Some weeks are more productive than others, but often I’m just revising, putting one thing away then taking out another. Henry Miller once said, ‘When you can’t create, you can nail down.’ Something like that. So there’s always something to nail down, flush out, revise or edit. Years ago I wrote a poem that begins “There is the work so you go back to it.” And that’s pretty much what I do, what I keep doing. Picture a bumble bee in a huge meadow, jumping from one blossom to another. That’s how I feel some days.

In closing, I want to thank you, sir. I deeply appreciate your taking time to do this interview and help spread the word about Paperboy.

Thank you!

Goat

#14 Donald Ray Pollock

2011-04-15T00:00:00.006-04:00

20 Questions With Mourning Goats

INTERVIEW FOURTEEN

Donald Ray Pollock

I was introduced to Don by the Chuck Palahniuk website, a few years ago and have never been the same. He writes in a way that you don't grasp until after you're done reading, and once you do, you have a smile on your face that takes time to fade. He's not only an amazing author, but a great guy. Enjoy interview fourteen!

1. What do you think of when you hear the term, Mourning Goats?

I think of a man I use to work with at the paper mill. His name is Charley, but everyone called him "Goat" because he had a well-groomed van dyke beard. He used to come to work very hungover at times, which reminds me of the "mourning" aspect of your question.

2. You just sold your novel, The Devil All The Time, to Doubleday, so what can you tell us about it? When can we expect it out?

The Devil All The Time is set mostly in Ohio and West Virginia during the 1950's and 1960's. Picture a tough, upright young man, a pair of serial killers, a corrupt sheriff, dirty preachers, religion, lust, revenge, death, the often smudged line between good and evil, etc. The dust jacket art is fantastic; as my friend Chris Tusa said, it's sort of a cross between Faulkner and Orwell. The Devil All The Time will be published on July 12, 2011.

3. I heard about your story collection, Knockemstiff, from Chuck Palahnuik. Any idea how it got in his hands, and what it meant for the book?

Sure, the book was placed in Chuck's hands by my editor at Doubleday, Gerry Howard, who is also Chuck's editor. I think a lot of things in publishing work this way. Of course, having Chuck's endorsement helped the sales tremendously. He's a damn nice guy, that's all there is to it.

3. What was it like going back to school after 28 years? Do you think being a big reader made it any easier?

Well, I started attending college in 1988, which was, thank God, before computers began taking over (Did you know that scientists are now saying that they will be able to build a robot that's smarter than humans within thirty years? If that happens, we're screwed, though I guess it's inevitable that we will destroy ourselves, right?) Anyway, I probably did much better in school at age 35 than I ever would have at 19 or 20. For one thing, I was sober by then, I'd already been married a couple of times, and I had a lot of the horse-shit out of the way.

Being a big reader will help make just about anything easier. It's hard to believe there are people enrolled in college these days who have never read a book on their own. It would be nice if, instead of lowering the standards of college classes so that people who are practically illiterate can pass, we could create more jobs for our citizens who, let's face it, aren't cut out for higher education. Sorry, but I'm one of those people who believe that grades one through eight should be nothing but lots of reading, writing, and math, along with phys. ed. Get back to the basics and quit fucking with new-fangled approaches or state tests. Make it tougher on students, not easier. And figure out something to do with those who can't cut it or won't try. But then what do I know? I was a high school dropout.

4. You said in another interview that you write from around 6 am to 11 am; is that still how you work, or did things change when you started writing the novel?

Well, I worked mostly mornings on The Devil All The Time until the last four or five months, and then I switched to nights, from around 7 or 8 pm until 2-3 am. I like the idea of doing my work in the morning, of getting something done first thing so I don't have to fret about it all day, but I probably write a little better at night. Still, the main thing is to make the attempt every day.

5. It sounds like you're a voracious reader; anything recently that's blown your mind?

Believe me, I don't read that much. I try to read two books per week. I know that sounds like a lot to some people these days, but it's not, not if you want to be a writer anyway. Or anything else for that matter. I've got friends who read much more than I do. Think of all the hours the average citizen spends watching TV or playing video games or talking on their cell phone or handing their Facebook "commitments." Don't get me wrong, I can become as strung out on that junk as the next person, but it's not a good way to spend a major portion of your life (and I realize others would argue that reading isn't a good way either).

Except for Fred Venturini’s novel, The Samaritan, the best fiction books I’ve read recently are all new story collections: From the Darkness Under Our Feet by Patrick Michael Finn, One Last Good Time by Michael Kardos and Volt by Alan Heathcock. Great non-fiction books I've read in the last couple of months include Gulag by Anne Applebaum, Fraser's Penguins by Fen Montaigne and King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild. I’m looking forward to reading the new memoirs by Mark Richards and Andre Dubus III.

6. Are you planning on focusing more on novels now that one is under the belt or do you think you'll go back and forth between novels and shorts?

I'm not sure yet. I have a new novel started (just barely), so that's pretty much all I'll be working on for next 18 months or so, and that's as far as I want to plan ahead. I'm not one of those people who can work on several different things at once.

7. In a lot of interviews, it sounds like you started writing because you had a mid-life crisis; do you think that's it, or do you think you just made the decision to go after something you knew you had in you?

Well, I think I just refer to that time as a "mid-life crisis" because I don't know what else to call it. But it wasn't like I was going to blow my brains out if I didn't change careers. If I'd waited, oh, just a few more months when I was going through that deal before I started writing, I would probably still be working at the paper mill and be happy with it.

8. Your story reminds me a lot of Craig Clevenger's; he wanted to be a writer, quit his job, and went for it. What do you wish you would have known before you quit?

Nothing. If I had known some of the things I discovered later on--such as the difficulty of landing a decent teaching job, what such a job entails (hard work!) if you do it right, the cost of health insurance, etc.--there's a very good chance I would not have left the paper mill. I had a good job there.

9. You've said that you were 45 when you decided you wanted to learn to write. Do you think people learn how to write or are they born to write?

I definitely believe you can learn to write. Why not? Hell, you learn to be a plumber or drive a truck or be a lawyer, don't you? Granted, it takes longer to become a good writer than, say, a grill cook, but it's still a learned activity to a great degree. Certainly talent in involved, but it mostly comes down to hard work, like anything else. You can be the most talented writer in the world, but if you don't do the work, you might as well be whacking the heads off chickens in a processing plant.

10. One of my favorite pieces of advice that you give is that a person must learn to sit in the chair if he wants to be a writer. What's another big one for you?

You must read a lot if you really want to be a writer. If you don't love books and love to read, you'll never be a very good writer. And don't just read the type of stuff you like or aspire to write yourself. Read the classics, read poetry, read history. With the American library system, being ignorant or illiterate is inexcusable today, totally a matter of laziness and poor parenting and too much cable TV and "social networking." Texting your pal to tell him/her you're taking the trash out or just left the grocery store is not only insane behavior--at the very least either a sign of egomania or complete helplessness/co-dependency--but is time wasted. Those minutes add up. Do you want to go to your grave knowing that you spent a substantial chunk of your life tweeting?

11. With Knockemstiff, you did your first book tour--did you like it? What would you like to see happen with The Devil All The Time as far as touring goes?

Even though I'm one of those people who has a hard time getting up in front of an audience and reading, I loved most of it. It's very hard for a shy person to stay stuck away in a room months or even years and then suddenly emerge and go out and read in front of a group. Still, it was a great experience, and I'm grateful for it. I met a lot of wonderful people. As for the tour for The Devil All The Time, the most I can hope for is that people like the book, and we sell a lot of copies.

12. How has the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship helped you finish your new book?

The PEN/Bingham did just what it's supposed to do--gave me the free time to work on a novel. Going to New York and receiving that award has to be up there in the six or seven best days of my life so far.

13. I have read that you wanted to teach. What made you go after that, and how has it been so far?

Though I'm probably shooting myself in the foot by admitting this, I have come to the conclusion in the last couple of years that I'm not a very capable teacher. To be good in the classroom, you have to at least think that you know what you're talking about, and I don't have that confidence. Perhaps it's because I started too late, I don't know. I don't think I'm bad with short gigs, like a week-long workshop or something like that, but I run out of new things to say after a few classes.

14. You have a website and a blog, but I didn't see a Facebook page. Did I miss it? What are your thoughts on social media these days?

Actually, I'm still trying to figure that out. I was on Facebook for a few months and then dropped off when it started taking up too much time and space in my head. I have a very addictive/compulsive personality, and I found myself messing with FB when I should have been writing (believe me, sometimes I will do anything to keep from writing) or reading or exercising or anything else. Not only that, but I believe people need a certain degree of privacy and quiet time, whether they realize it or not. But now I’m back on FB, as of last week. Believe me, I understand that it’s a great "marketing" tool, and also a great way to find people (and organize revolutions!). Still, I have to admit that I’m one of those dinosaurs who sometimes pines for the days of snail mail and typewriters and rotary phones.

15. I enjoyed reading your blog, but has the experience of quitting the mill, writing the book, going to school, and changing your life been all smiles? What were some of the struggles that you want to remember?

I really can't say I had any "struggles." I had a lot of rejections, and I spent a lot of time staring at the wall in the attic, but I'd be hesitant to call that sort of thing a struggle. Since I tend to compare my life with the lives of people who have it worse (not better), I see myself as very, very lucky. You have to understand that most of my "struggles" took place before I began writing, in the years before I got sober.

16. Drinking and writing go hand in hand, and you haven't had a sip since 1986. Do you think you'd be where you are today if you hadn't made the decision to quit?

If I hadn't stopped drinking in 1986, I would have been dead by 1990 or so. I still think about that, about how lucky I was to have that little moment of clarity one sick, hungover morning when so many people around me just kept on using until they died or ended up completely wasted.

17. You remind me of a darker Raymond Carver, maybe in the way you see the people that you write about. Was he a big influence and/or who is??

Of course, I read Carver's stories, and I think his spare prose style has been a big influence, but as far as subject matter/tone, etc., I've probably gotten the most from the Southern writers--Barry Hannah, Flannery O'Conner, William Gay, Tennessee Williams, Larry Brown, Faulkner, Harry Crews. But right now my favorite fiction writers are J.F. Powers and Muriel Sparks and William Maxwell.

18. What do you think Ms. Herman, at Ohio State University, meant for your writing career?

As I've said many times, I'd probably still be working at the paper mill if it wasn't for Michelle. She published my first story in The Journal and encouraged me to apply for grad school. She's been great to me and many other students at OSU.

19. Knockemstiff had a rather high print run for a short story collection. How did that come about? Did it make you nervous at all?

I have no idea how they calculated the number of copies to print. Actually, I don't even recall how many copies were printed. The main thing I was concerned with was that they not lose any money on me. I figured if they didn't lose any money, well, maybe they would be willing to take another chance on me. The same with The Devil All The Time.

20. What does Don Pollock have planned for 2011?

I live a very quiet, small-town life for the most part. I get up and work a while, then try to get some exercise and read and that's about it. Last night I went to a high school basketball game; tonight I'll probably watch a movie; tomorrow morning I'll go to church (St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Chillicothe, Ohio) with my wife. Except for doing a book tour this summer, I'll probably just keep plugging away at the new novel.

Thank you!

Goat

#13 Lidia Yuknavitch

2011-04-01T00:00:00.005-04:00

20 Questions with Mourning Goats

INTERVIEW THIRTEEN

Lidia Yuknavitch

Lidia's editor contacted me in February asking if I would do an interview for her upcoming book, The Chronology of Water. I didn't think too much of it because I'd never heard of Lidia at that point, I'm not too interested in memoir, and up until then, have picked all my authors personally...then I read the book. In all seriousness, I want to thank her editor for introducing me to this amazing author. Go buy her new book today and enjoy the interview, I know I did!

1. What comes to mind when you hear, "Mourning Goats?"

I picture many sad goats, also Jesus. There was still a lot of unfortunate goat slaughter around his time, as people tried to decide who and what to pray to. I suspect there may have been goat support groups and therapy. Underground goat havens. Goats who drank to ease the pain. I don't know what the goats thought of Jesus, but I bet they identified with him a little.

2. To tell you the truth, I read Chelsea Cain's introduction to the book, and said, out loud, "bullshit," after reading it, I agree with every word she wrote. How do you pack so much physical emotion in to such short pieces of non-fiction?

Wow...THANK YOU!!! That makes me laugh--what you said--I might have thought that when I read her introduction too! But I think the answer to your question is that I tried to make the body the point of view. Rather than a psychology or personality. I tried to write by and through a corporeal experience -- to keep the body up front -- to keep everything we feel through our bodies the point of the story. The swimming metaphor helped me to do that. You know? In a lot of memoir or nonfiction I feel like the body recedes and the personality or psyche gets big. I tried to make the body big.

3. You are another Mourning Goats interviewee out of the Chelsea Cain, Chuck Palahniuk, and Monica Drake writing group, what is it about this group that is pouring out great books?

Very fine wine. Almost exclusively Pinot Noir, because of Chelsea. Joking aside (though there really is something great about wine), I am humbled every single week by the fact that I get to sit in a room with the most amazing writers on the planet. It's not just that they are ALL titans of mind and spirit and talent (Cheryl Strayed, Suzy Vitello, Erin Leonard, Diana Jordan, Mary Wysong). We all not only take extreme pleasure in writing but in the idea that, as Monica Drake says, "writing is a living practice." We live it together -- the good bad and ugly -- we respect that writing is like a primary relationship -- we push and pull and love one another on the page with as much intimacy and seriousness and love as you would a person. And as Chelsea says, sometimes we cry in the bathroom.

4. I love your quote, "I believe in art the way other people believe in god," can you go a little deeper in to this? Is writing a spiritual experience to you?

Boy howdy. It's an altered state. When I listen to people I respect talk about god or faith or ecstatic states, I think yep, I get that, only not about god. Shhhhh. All the times in my life when I was ready to hang it up? Art was there. Music or painting or books or plays -- something to believe in greater than yourself. Something to give you hope and inspire you to do good in the world. Something so beautiful and life altering you almost can't stand it. Artists who sacrificed themselves over and over again to bring it to you. Art gives me a moral compass. Rules to live by. How to be compassionate. How to value beauty. How to understand my "worth" in the world with regard to giving of myself, rather than to myself. I don't exactly pray to art, but I can sit in a roomful of Rothkos or Bacons or Joan Mitchell paintings and bawl my eyes out just from what it opens up in my chest. I can pass out from a Beckett play. I can orgasm from a Kathy Acker book. Ecstatic states.

5. Your blog is very politically inspired, is this just a hobby, or something that you do outside of the blogosphere?

I'm not very bloggy. I'm too sporadic to be hip like real blogsters. But since it's a space you can inhabit however you want, I use it when things piss me off or chafe ... ha. The only way in which I'm political is that I think we are uber responsible these days for educating ourselves, participating in civil discourse, asking good questions, and actively engaging each other in communities that stretch beyond the self so that our own society doesn't cave in to unbridled power or uneducated moronity. We live in kind of dangerous times in terms of power and moronity, if you know what I mean. It's easy to become too passive -- to become a media viewer from the comfort of one's home. I'm still thinking about what to "do" amidst the current zeitgeist besides make art. Though I'll say for the record that making art is a political act even when it's not.

6. I saw that your new book, The Chronology of Water, has a book trailer, what do you think of it, and book trailers in general? Is it a way to intrigue non-book readers?

I love it!! It's fantastic!! Everyone! Go immediately to

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq_KktMWq1I

Ha. My husband Andy Mingo made that film/book trailer. So I'm quite fond of it. But it's also just a kick ass little movie. And yes, the Oregon ocean is very freezing in November. To answer your question, I like book trailers. I understand why it makes authors cranky to have to produce "media" in addition to writing books, but I also understand that the gaps between modes of artistic production are closing, so inter media or multi media forms are exciting to me. Books merging with music or visual art -- that's always excited me. I've collaborated on projects that emphasize those mergings. I'm for it.

7. It says on your website that you became a writer in 1986 and the first story in, The Chronology of Water, with the same title, is a piece focused on your daughter, is this the story that made you consider yourself a writer?

Probably. The event of my daughter's death is what cracked me open as a person, and what came out after I regained my wits and emotions, was writing. And when I wrote that story, something got reflected back to me that didn't depend on the outside world's judgements or rejections. My own intelligence and creativity. That's all. For some of us, that's a profound moment. To claim an intellect or creative impulse -- to embrace it -- to say "mine" without shame or apology -- to stand up. By the way, when I wrote that short story, I was in Diana Abu Jaber's creative writing class at UO. She said, "Um, Lidia, I think this might be a book." That was 20 years ago.

I'm slow.

8. Hawthorne Books sent me out a copy of The Chronology of Water, and a postcard with a picture of the cover on it. Is it true that they are doing a cover and a "censored" cover? What do you think the response to it will be?

Yes there is a version with a "belly band" that covers up a naked breast with an in focus nipple on the cover. I wrote an essay about that called "About a Boob, or, The Hermeneutics of a Woman's Body" over at the Rumpus. It's been a little odyssey, actually, for both me and the publisher, Rhonda Hughes at Hawthorne Books. I have very strong opinions about what is culturally, commercially, and literarily "sanctioned" in terms of the female body and its representation, and what is considered troublesome or problematic. Talk about hypocrisy. But the book's main metaphor is swimming. So there is a woman in water on the cover. And for anyone with itchies about that, there is a swank charcoal gray belly band. Removable.

9. Our first interview on the site was with Stephen Elliott, Editor-in-Chief at therumpus.net, who have picked The Chronology of Water for their book of the month in March, how did the come to be?

Cheryl Strayed forwarded it as her selection when asked by The Rumpus. The folks at the Rumpus, Stephen, Isaac, and a woman named Julie Greicius, have been incredibly kind and generous to me.

10. You don't write just memoir, you have books of short stories, a book of criticism, and you have a novel coming out, The Small Backs of Children, next year; which was your favorite to write? Why?

I'm not sure I have a favorite, though fiction is my heartbeat I guess. I love the form of fiction writing -- and by that I mean less than conventional fiction writing, because I am a language and form junkie. I like to play in fiction. Like paint. Or music. I'm not sure "memoir" is the best description for what I did in COW...it's more of a body story. Wish there was such a category -- Whitman would be happy. I suppose what I love most about writing is the poetics of it. Swimming in language is like swimming in a very, very large pool. or the ocean. I will say this, COW nearly did me in emotionally. But then so did The Small Backs of Children.

The most FUN I've ever had writing a book is one I just finished -- a novel called Dora: A Head Case. Crazy fun. Like laugh out loud fun.

11. With the authors I've interviewed, it seems as though one theme is the same for them all, their life is non-stop, action packed. Married, teaching, running Chiasmus Press, writing, doing readings, how do you do it?

Pharmaceuticals. Swimming. Meditation. Active sex life. These things give me balance.

12. The story, Ecstatic State, is about dating your now husband, Andy, do you think that a support system at home is important when one of your occupations is centered around being alone?

HUGELY. I have a writing room and both Andy and my son Miles understand its sacred status. Miles grew up understanding "mamma is writing right now" as a normal part of our household. He's very respectful about it--even tells other people not to bother me. But the other side of that is that I can hear them and smell them and feel them on the other side of the door. Always. An the animal in me needs that too. To have the Mingo and Miles near me even in my solitude.

I'm lucky too because I can write in furious speed flashes. I could never write away from Miles and Andy, which I think is not the case with other writers...my "alone" is self induced. Probably a keen trick I picked up from childhood -- creating alone worlds to survive no matter what is going on "around" me.

13. The Chronology of Water is coming out on the kindle, today (April 1st, 2011), what do you think about e-publishing and the move to digital?

Well I think it's exciting, because I'm a person who is always excited by new forms that are triggered in the ZOOM of our world, but right this second I guess it goes without saying it's a bit of a bummer for the artist/writer. On the other hand, the books I've written have never made a ton of money, and I didn't write any of them with money in mind, so perhaps I won't miss it. Like I said before up top, multi media modes are pretty exciting to me. I'm waiting for the nano technology where we won't even have techno objects to hold. It'll all be "in us." Cyborg nation.

14. Amazon's description of your book starts out, "this is not your mother's memoir," which I love, and agree with, what pushed you to write these stories down?

Chuck Palahniuk dared me. True story.

15. What do you think is the most difficult part of running Chiasmus Media? (Also, EPIC website!)

Not enough money to hire helpers. Not being able to publish a zillion astonishingly unique writers. Not enough people who want to read books that require a brain or that make your brains have cerebral sex...but it's nice to be small and "in the pocket," too...

16. Where do you see publishing going? Do you see it expanding into more of a mixed media?

I guess you can tell from my answers that I'd say YEP. A good example is Jaded Ibis Press, run by the wicked cool Debra Di Blasi in Seattle. Also, when chiasmus comes out of hiatus in the fall, watch for something beyond textual. Like I said, that doesn't bother me. But we do need to come up with structural models for production, distribution, and the divisions of labor and compensation that make sense...

17. It looks like you're doing some touring in the coming months, are you excited about it? What have your tours in the past consisted of?

I'm hella excited! Also terrified! HA. I've never had "tours" in the past. I've only worked my ass off on my own to beg people to come let me read. My dear friend Lance Olsen and I have done fairly well at making our own bling together. We've read together wonderously in the past in SF and Seattle and Portland -- had great fun making it all up. But it's exhausting. Lance and I also invented a terrific writer's conference here in Portland called The Writer's Edge that has generated a ton of enthusiasm and created a tribe of thrilled innovative writers. Lance is the Managing Editor of Fiction Collective Two. So what I'm saying is, we've had to make ourselves up in terms of readings and performances. But why whine? It's from the ground up. Or underground. Or counter-culture.

This mini-tour I'm doing in Seattle/Chicago/NYC/LA/SF/Colorado...brand new for me. But I am psyched. Some of the events are performances, and I have a background in performance art so I'm tickled about that. Like the plastic swimming pools we'll have on hand when I perform with Cris Mazza and Davis Schneidermann in Chicago.

18. What's your favorite part about teaching writing and literature? I would think that talking about writing every day would be the best job in the world.

Yes, that's cool. What you say. But I think my favorite part is running into the student...well hell, I really don't think of the people I work with as students any more -- just people -- running into the person who has a secret. And their secret is, they are brilliant. And they are just beginning to let their secret out. And you get to be there for the start of that...the opening moment...and you get to usher them toward their own light. It takes my breath away. The people whose paths I've been lucky enough to cross blow the top of my head off.

19. What is the best advice you've received, or want to give, or both, to the writers reading this interview?

Be who you are, don't let anyone tell you there's only one way to do things, and for the love of goats, don't stop. Ever.

20. What's next for Lidia Yuknavitch?

Trying to seduce someone into buying the Dora: A Head Case novel and finishing a new novel I'm currently tit-high in called Virgin, based on Joan of Arc. And loving the people I love as hard as I can in this hard world. THANK YOU FOR LETTING ME TALK TO YOU!

Thank you!

Goat

#12 John Langan

2011-03-15T00:00:00.006-04:00

20 Questions with Mourning Goats

INTERVIEW TWELVE

John Langan

Paul Tremblay told me about John Langan a few months ago and after reading his interview here, as well as his books, I trust Paul's judgment; I was right in doing so. Enjoy the interview of an up-and-comer that I'm sure you'll be hearing a lot more about, soon.

1. What comes to mind when you hear, "Mourning Goats?"

A small herd of goats—maybe five or six—gathered near the grassy top of a modest mountain. Their coats are almost comically long; their horns, undersized; the expression on their faces one of disaffection—indeed, they look like a talented child’s approximation of a goat. At the very summit of the mountain, a grey stone box, its surface cracked, the cracks seemed with hardy lichen, rests. The goats range nearer and farther from the box, but there is a certain distance they will not venture any closer to it, just as there is another distance they will not stray any further. Ask one of the men or women who live in the village at the foot of the mountain about these animals, the stone box, and he or she will tell you that these are the Mourning Goats. The man or woman will not contradict you when you state that their mourning must be connected to the box, but when you try to explore the matter further, ask if the box is a tomb, or a monument, or maybe an altar, he or she will refuse to answer you. It is not good to speak of such things, you will be told, and that is all you will be told. If you insist on hiking the mountain to examine the goats and their charge, you will see a look of panic flash across the face of the man or woman with whom you are speaking, but he or she will not stop you.

2. You're a teacher at SUNY New Paltz, a story writer, novelist, non-fiction writer, father, husband, and practice karate-- that was tiring just to type out; how do you do it?

Well, I had to drop karate because my knees couldn’t take it, anymore, and I only teach part-time at SUNY New Paltz, which helps my schedule (if not my bank account). Aside from that, it’s a balancing act. I suppose it’s gotten a little easier in the last couple of years, as my son has reached school age, but even so, it’s a matter of prioritizing. As just one example: I used to try to do a lot more non-fiction—book reviews, especially—than I do now; that’s because I realized the number of book reviews I was writing was taking too much time away from my fiction writing, which was what I most wanted to focus on. Life is fluid, so you have to be prepared to accommodate that.

3. How has working with Night Shade Books been? Do you see a lot of differences when working with different publishers as well as different genres of writing?

All things considered, I’ve been very fortunate in the publishers I’ve worked with. Prime, who did my collection, Mr. Gaunt and other Uneasy Encounters, made sure that the book went out to a huge number of review outlets, as a result of which, I received reviews from publications such as The San Francisco Chronicle, The L.A. Times, and The Washington Post. Night Shade took a novel, House of Windows, that the genre folks thought was too literary and the literary folks thought was too genre, and produced a lovely book. When the hardcover didn’t sell as well as they wanted, they went back to the drawing board and redesigned the trade paperback edition, which has done somewhat better.

Having worked with only two publishers, I’m not sure I’m qualified to make any kind of broad statement about publishing. In terms of working in different genres, the only other genre in which I’ve published has been the non-fiction/academic one, and there, I’ve been very fortunate in terms of finding a number of editors who have been receptive to what I’ve wanted to write about.

4. As an academic, what are your thoughts on teaching writing, and learning how to write: do you believe it's something that is taught, something that is just there, or something else?

I guess I’d have to say, “Yes.” There’s no denying that some people have that facility with language and storytelling that we stuff under the name talent. At the same time, no matter that raw ability, there’s always more that can be done to refine it, not to mention, to develop the discipline required to sit down at the page every day until the story or poem is done.

A lot of this, I’m absolutely certain, has to do with how much and how well you’ve read. We learn through imitation, and if you have that nascent ability with language and storytelling (which I suspect is far more widespread than we might think), then you want to allow yourself the maximum number of examples to learn from. I know that writing workshops are very popular and certainly, they can be useful, but I’d suggest that it may be as, if not more, useful for a beginning writer to engage in a program of intensive reading, take a year or two and just soak yourself in the written word.

5. I feel like most of my favorite authors have had very interesting jobs, any you'd like to share? Do you think that these experiences have shaped the way your writing has gone? Why?

My job experiences have been a tad less colorful: aside from teaching since the mid-nineties, the majority of my past work-experience has been in eye-care: in my younger years, I worked for both optometrists and ophthalmologists. These were useful jobs, not because of anything to do with their specialty so much as because they brought me into contact with a wide variety of people, both in terms of my co-workers and the patients who came into the different offices. (Now that I think about it, teaching at a state university these past years has done the same thing.) It’s very useful for a writer to be exposed to as wide a range of people as is possible, since they are the raw material from which you will make your art. That and stories: the more people you meet, the more stories you hear, and what writer doesn’t love stories?

6. The first short story you had published, “On Skua Island,” was an 11 or 12 thousand word piece, which is quite long for a short story. How did you get it in to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction? What did it feel like to have such a big piece taken by such a big magazine so early?

Yes, “On Skua Island” falls under that nebulous heading known as “novelette:” too long for a short story, too short for a novella. I submitted it to F&SF because they were one of the few magazines willing to look at such long fiction unsolicited. (They still are.) I sent it to them the old-fashioned way, via snail-mail, and was astonished to receive a check and contract from Gordon Van Gelder within about a month. I can still remember standing at the mailbox at the end of the driveway in my bathrobe, tearing open the envelope. As I’m sure you can imagine, it was a big boost to the ego of a fledgling horror writer to have a story accepted by the magazine that had published Stephen King. In addition, Gordon did a good deal to promote the story in the months leading up to its publication. It was a little overwhelming; I had started at the top, not expecting to succeed there, and suddenly, I had and there I was. It’s the reason I advise beginning writers to aim for the heights: the worst that can happen is that you receive a rejection letter, the best is that you find yourself in a position of tremendous advantage.

7. You've been teaching reading and writing for over fifteen years. What's your favorite part, least favorite part?

I’ve loved the diversity of students teaching at a public university has brought me into contact with, and I’ve loved having the chance to expose them to a wide variety of literary texts. As a writer, there’s no surer way to make sure you maintain contact with the classics than by teaching them on a regular basis. I think I’ve benefited from returning to texts like “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” and Heart of Darkness and The Turn of the Screw as many times as my teaching has made me.

What don’t I like? Grading can be a bit of a drag, especially when you have a student who hasn’t taken the assignment seriously, and so has wasted their time and yours.

8. In one interview you discussed that comics are slowly moving in to academia; do you see this as a shift in what is considered literary?

Well, to split hairs, I see this as a shift in what modes of writing are considered worthy of academic attention; from what I’ve been able to tell, however, there hasn’t been much of a shift in the topics that are considered suitable for academic notice. What I mean is, a comic such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which addresses the Holocaust and the vexed relationship between a father and son, treats subjects that are already considered literary; while a comic such as Eric Powell’s The Goon, which engages the history of pulp fiction conventions in a raucous and innovative fashion, is by and large still deemed beyond the pale.

9. What's it like being a judge for the Shirley Jackson Awards? What does being a judge entail?

Being a juror for the first three years of the Shirley Jackson award was a great privilege. No surprise, the job entailed a lot of reading, not just the books that publishers would mail you, but whatever you could seek out that might qualify. I was quite pleased with the shortlists we arrived at: if you wanted a cross-section of some of the best horror and dark fiction being written today, you could do a lot worse than use those lists as a guide.

10. You're co-editing a monster anthology called Creatures with another Mourning Goat interviewee, Paul Tremblay. What's it like working with him; are you working on anything with any other authors right now?

Paul has been a real pleasure to work with; he’s uber-organized, conscientious, and professional. To the extent that Creatures succeeds, it’s because of the weeks and weeks of hard work that he’s put into it. At some point in the future, Paul and I are supposed to collaborate on what’s going to be a terrific short story or novelette; Laird Barron and I are also kicking around the idea of doing a story together.

11. In one of your Facebook posts you wrote that your son, David, was waiting to read the beginning of his first chapter book. Was this a book he wrote, or a book he wanted to read to you? Either way, what are your thoughts on your kids getting into the literary world?

This was a book that David wanted to read to my wife and I; the title escapes me, now, but it had something to do with the labyrinth. Since that time, though, he has begun work on his own book, The Dictionary of Monsters. Yes, apples, trees, and all that. My older son, Nick, has flirted with film-making at various points in his life; in fact, he was the one who shot and edited the trailer for my first novel, House of Windows. He’s also written several screenplays for a cartoon series that would be great, if only he could find someone to take an interest in it.

On the one hand, there’s no denying the excitement you feel as a parent when your kid is doing what you do; there’s a kind of validation to it that is hard to describe and very gratifying. On the other hand, kids have to find their own identities, which means that they’re likely going to wind up doing something different than what you do, the same way you chose to do something different from what your parents did. That said, there’s no doubt that, whatever my boys choose to do, a facility with reading and writing can only help them.

12. You're a two-time International Horror Guild Award finalist for short fiction and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters was nominated for the 2009 Bram Stoker Award. Do you find short fiction easier than novels? Which is your favorite medium to write and why?

Well, short fiction can provide more immediate gratification (relatively speaking) than novel-length projects, both in terms of the speed with which you can finish it and in which it can be published. Right from the start, though, my work tended towards the longer end of the spectrum, long-novelette/short novella, so moving up to the novel felt like more of a natural progression than it might have had I been writing short short stories. (Indeed, writing shorter stuff is something I’m still working on.) At this point, I haven’t completed enough novels to compare writing them to writing stories of any length with any kind of certainty, but I’m a sucker for a good novella. At about a hundred pages, you have the freedom to develop your characters and the situation confronting them in some depth, but you haven’t completely sacrificed the concision of effect.

13. I saw that you went to World of Fantasy last year: what did you think of it? Do you think that these kinds of events are important to aspiring writers?

Since I was completely left off the programming, an omission that wasn’t confirmed until I was standing in the convention hotel, trying to find my name somewhere on the schedule, this past World Fantasy was not among the best I’ve ever attended. I suppose that extra free time did allow to me to spend a little more time with friends I don’t get to see that often, such as Nick Mamatas, which was good, and to make the acquaintance of a number of writers I knew only through their work, such as Gary Braunbeck, which was also nice.

The usefulness of these events depends, I think, on the individual writer. I didn’t attend my first convention until I’d had three stories published in F&SF, two of which, as you’ve noted, had been nominated for an award. As a result, I received a very kind reception from the people I talked to, and found the convention experience, on the whole, an encouraging one. Had I gone before I had anything published, I’m not sure how I would have felt. Based on my observations, the genre community tends to be fairly welcoming; however, the younger me, who was even more prone to self-doubt than the older me, might very well have been overwhelmed by meeting real writers who were actually writing, and that might have done me more harm than good.

14. Do you think that making a good horror is about making a monster that you detest as well as sympathize with?

I think good horror is more about making characters with whom the reader will sympathize. A good monster is nice, but if those it threatens aren’t compelling, then you get a kind of slaughter-fantasy that doesn’t seem particularly interesting to me. That said, a good monster combined with good characters is pretty hard to beat.

15. You have a facebook page, blog, and twitter account; do you think that social media is important for literature, authors, and the future of the written word?

With a few, Thomas Pynchonesque exceptions, I don’t think you can avoid social media at this point. Some writers, such as Jeff Vandermeer, have employed it brilliantly to their careers’ advantages; I would not lump myself in with them. I’m not sure what the implications of social media will be for the future of the written word; to be honest, from what I’ve seen, it strikes me as a danger to a lot of writers, a great time-suck into which a lot of the energy that should be going to your fiction gets drained. There’s also the danger in presuming that, because you have a certain number of facebook friends, or twitter followers, or what have you, you have achieved something, that whatever flame wars you’ve spearheaded count for something in your life as a writer. I’m all for people expressing themselves online, and I’ve no doubt a number of worthy conversations have happened there, but fiction writers write fiction. That’s what they do. If you’re spending all your time online, you may be doing a lot of things, but writing fiction is not one of them.

16. Your 10 year anniversary is coming up this year (congratulations!): is your wife your first reader and what's it like being married to a fellow academic?

Thanks! In many ways, it’s hard to believe it’s been that length of time. My wife used to be my first reader—actually, it would be more accurate to say she was my first listener: once I’d written one or two thousand words, I would read it to her, and she would tell me what she thought. And she was honest, ruthlessly so. My wife understands narrative mechanics in a more deep and profound way than anyone else I’ve ever met; I probably learned more from the years we spent doing that than I had in all my writing classes up to then. After our son was born, though, it became much more difficult to maintain that kind of process, and it fell by the wayside; though I still have thoughts of returning to it, someday.

Certainly, the nice thing about being married to a fellow academic is that there’s a level of understanding between the two of us that is deep and immediate; we don’t have to explain or justify things to one another the way we might if we worked very different jobs. At the same time, our areas of study are sufficiently different for us to preserve some sense of our own identities.

17. What are some of the most recent things you've read-- shorts, novels, whatever--that have knocked your socks off?

This year, I shied away from compiling any kind of “year’s best” list because I’m aware that there’s a great deal of fiction that I either haven’t read yet or that’s slipped completely underneath my radar. That admission out of the way, the books published this past year that absolutely blew my doors in were Laird Barron’s Occultation and Paul Tremblay’s In the Mean Time, both collections of short fiction.

With his first book, The Imago Sequence (2007), Laird seemed to arrive on the horror scene fully-formed, his plots a demonstration of the continuing vitality of what I guess you could call the cosmic horror tradition, his language a decanting of Cormac McCarthy, Wallace Stevens, and Roger Zelazny. Occultation consolidates the gains of the previous book while expanding Laird’s range; I’m especially fond of his long stories, “The Broadsword” and “Mysterium Tremendum,” but there isn’t a clunker in the bunch. Laird could stop writing today and the achievement of his first two books would be sufficient to rank him with the major horror writers of the last century.

Paul’s first collection, Compositions for the Young and Old (2004, rev. 2005), marked him as a writer to watch, and the stories he’s published since that time have shown a learning curve so steep it’s pretty much vertical. In the last half a dozen, seven years, he’s written stories such as “There’s No Light Between Floors” and “It’s Against the Law to Feed the Ducks” and “The Teacher” that have vaulted him to the forefront of contemporary horror writers. For a good couple of years, now, I’ve been saying that when Paul’s next collection came out, it was going to be a major event, and there’s no other way to describe In the Mean Time.

I’d also like to mention a collection I’m in the middle of, Livia Llewellyn’s Engines of Desire, which is new this year. Livia’s stories are a fierce, uncompromising blend of the erotic and the horrifying, and her book is not to be missed.

18. As I'm sure you know, a lot of our readers are aspiring young writers. What piece of advice do you wish you received when you started putting words down?

That’s a tough one. I think it would have been something like, “Read widely and well, but trust the things you love to be sufficient for your ambitions.”

19. What does your writing routine look like, every day, when the thought hits, morning, night?

I have a small office in the northeast corner of our house, and that’s my preferred place to work. When I’m engaged in writing a new story or working on a novel, I sit at my desk and do my best to produce at least a new page every day. Over the last couple of years, I’ve found myself more able to write in other locations—in my class, when my students are critiquing one another’s work, or at the café at the base of the building that contains my office—so if I have a decent block of time, I’ll try to use it to continue with whatever I’m working on.

20. You're currently working on your second short story collection and your second novel. How are things going? What can you tell us about either/both?

The collection is currently making the rounds at a number of different publishers. It’s called Technicolor and Other Revelations, and includes eight stories, seven of which have been printed in places like John Joseph Adams’s first Living Dead anthology and Ellen Datlow’s Poe anthology, and one of which is brand new. I suppose these stories continue the trend I began in my first collection, which is to say, revisiting the central archetypes of horror narrative and seeing what I can do with them.

My second novel has the working title of The Fisherman, and I’m probably about sixty percent done with it. It’s about a fishing trip to a haunted river. I hope to have it in to my agent come the beginning of summer.

Thank you, John!

Goat

#11 Chelsea Cain

2011-03-01T00:00:00.005-05:00

20 Questions with Mourning Goats

INTERVIEW ELEVEN

Chelsea Cain

Chelsea is awesome. Period. When I read the advanced readers copy of Heartsick, years ago, I couldn't shake the physical descriptions that she described, and now, she's only getting better at making me cringe. Please go pick up her new book, The Night Season (out today), and enjoy the interview!

1. What comes to mind when you hear, "Mourning Goats?"

Sad goats. Specifically, the goat I had as a kid. Her name was Full Moon and I was weaned on her milk. I loved that goat. She got old and sick and my mother wanted to put her out of her misery, so she hired someone to do it. He came by when we weren’t home and shot Full Moon in the head with a shotgun. We came home and she was just lying there dead in her pen. My mother felt terrible about that.   Big guilt. I don’t remember it. I’m not sure if I didn’t see her, or if I just blocked it out. I was in my early twenties by the time my mom finally told me the story. She still felt terrible, after all those years. They buried her in the yard at that house. I went by there about a year ago and they had torn down the old farmhouse and built a mcmansion. But somewhere underneath it all are the bones of my old goat.

2. Fellow Mourning Goats interviewee, Monica Drake, is in a writing workshop with you and Chuck Palahniuk, what are your thoughts on this? Do you think being in a group like this has been a big part of your success?

It certainly helped me with the first book – Heartsick. When I joined the group, I was about 180 pages into Heartsick and I spent a year bringing it in a chapter at a time and rewriting it. I knew nothing about how to write fiction. And that group was like taking a master class. They are all so incredibly smart about writing, and gifted at different aspects of the craft. Of course we are also all nuts, so I think it’s good that we all have somewhere we can go once a week to remind ourselves that we are not alone, and to keep us off the streets so we don’t hurt ourselves. I’ve been in writing groups before and personally I find them really useful. But it depends on you, and it depends on who’s in your group. Find people who make a living writing. Ideally people who have MFAs, and know stuff. People who are serious about it. And meet on neutral ground. Don’t meet at someone’s house. Meet at an office. Find a room at a library. Meet every week. And if it’s the wrong group, disband and find another one. Eventually, you will find your people.

3. What was it like going to number 8 on the New York Times bestseller list with Heartsick? As great as it must have been, was it stressful in any way?

That was up there with the birth of my daughter as a Best Life Moment. Okay, it was better than the birth of my daughter. That is probably a terrible thing to say – but it’s totally true. I was in San Francisco, and my publisher and editor called me from a bar in New York where they were already celebrating. There was lots of shouting. I wanted to go right out and get a tattoo. One, to commemorate the event, and two, because I figured that for the rest of my life people would ask me what I had the number 8 tattooed on my bicep, and that would be an excuse to tell them that I was a NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLING AUTHOR, THANKS FOR ASKING. That night I did a reading in S.F., and no one came. Not a single person! Maybe if I’d gone through with the tattoo…

4. I saw you were thinking about giving out personalized floaty pens on your next book tour, have you done anything like this in the past? How did it go?

I’ve given out all sorts of stuff. “I ‘heart’ Archie/Gretchen” buttons. Severed fingers. Severed hands and feet. Rhinestone heart pins. Jelly-filled people-shaped donuts with pretzel stabbed in them. Temporary tattoos. I’m always looking for novelty items to give away. I guess I’m trying to make my readings an event. A show. On my last tour, I got friends to write murder ballads about Gretchen and perform them at a few of my readings. There are so many authors and so many readings and so many bookstores, it just feels like anything extra helps. If I could tap dance, I would.

5. How does one write humor for The Oregonian, reviews for New York Times, AND horror that leaves the reader in physical pain?

Horror and farce aren’t so different in terms of structure. It’s all about tension and reveal, timing, and the unexpected. People are always so surprised to discover that I’m funny. But I think my thrillers are funny. Dark. But funny. And I think it’s important in a tense and nail-biting narrative to give the reader a break. Maybe not a belly laugh—but the occasional wry smile. Or at least a fleeting smirk.

6. I love the story on your website about wanting to be a firedog as a little girl, I think we all had big dreams as children, were your parents very supportive of the firedog? Being a writer?

My parents told me that I could be anything I wanted. And I swear to you, I really believed that I could be a fire dog. I was four or five by the time I realized that it was pretty much an impossibility to will oneself into becoming a Dalmatian. I guess my parents didn’t want to limit my potential. The only pressure I felt about what to do when I grew up was that I should choose something that would make me happy. My mother thought I should be a stand-up comedian. (I don’t know where she got this – because I was not a funny kid at all.) The only time my dad ever seemed disappointed in me professionally was when I called him up at a low point and told him I wanted to go to law school. By the time we got off the phone he had talked me out of it.

7. I read about the tattoo on your right shoulder, can you tell the readers what it is and what it means?

I have two tattoos. I think you’re talking about the one on my left bicep. It’s a tattoo of a snake. Snakes are my one irrational fear, and I thought that by tattooing one on my arm, I could claim the fear and conquer it. It didn’t work, but it’s a nice tattoo.

8. Which is scarier and why? The worlds that you come up with in your writing, or dropping your little girl off at kindergarten for the first time?

Oh, God – Kindergarten. A friend once told me that dropping your kid off for the first day of kindergarten was like throwing a puppy out the window of a moving car onto the highway. I think that’s a pretty apt description.

9. The advanced readers copy of Heartsick is beautiful, it's a white cover with a bloody hand smudge grabbing the book, what happened to that cover? Did you love it? Maybe this can be transferred to the movie poster?

Thanks! That is a great galley. They thought it was too gory for the general public. But there’s a Japanese edition of Heartsick that used the design. It’s tiny and square and completely cute in that particular Japanese way, and yet also blood spattered and disturbed. Naturally, I love it.

10. I read in an interview that you were planning on continuing to write humor books, under a pseudonym, can you give us any info on this? Are you working on anything?

I’d like to do one in the future at some point. I miss those books. I loved the collaboration with the illustrator. Writing is such a solitary gig. There’s interaction. You work with an agent, an editor, marketing people, and then when it’s out in the world, there are readers and media people. But mostly it’s you pulling threads of ideas out your nose and trying to knit something out of them. I love working with an illustrator throughout the creative process. We inspire one another. There’s an energy to that that is absolutely thrilling. As soon as I think of an idea—and find three months of free time—I’ll get right on that.

11. You wrote your first book, Dharma Girl, and got it published in your early twenties, what do you feel has changed the most in your writing since then?

My advance for Dharma Girl was $1000. My advances now have a lot more zeros. It’s just completely different. My whole approach is different. I am part of something much larger, and there is more pressure, and I feel more responsibility. This is my career, not a side project. I wrote Dharma Girl by instinct. It’s all gut. I am much more purposeful and thoughtful about my writing now. I guess that comes with practice. Along with bad eyesight and cynicism.

12. Again, with Dharma Girl, you say on your website that it is your favorite, why?

Dharma Girl is the story of my return to the hippie commune where I spent my early childhood. It is the book that was burning to get out. It’s youthful and intuitive and reckless and raw, but it will always be my favorite. It’s the book I had in me – the story I had to tell. And it’s such a valentine to my parents and to my early childhood and to my mom (who died a few months before it was published). It’s not my best book. But it has a huge place in my heart.

13. I don't like how everyone focuses around you being a woman (men and women can be equally sick in my mind), what are your thoughts on this kind of attention?

It baffles me. Just last week a woman approached me at an event and asked me, “How can you write these books, as a woman?” She was smiling, just making conversation. But I was completely blind-sided. It’s like asking someone how he can be a doctor as a redhead. It doesn’t compute to me. I think of myself as a thriller writer, not a female thriller writer.

14. For all of our aspiring authors out there, what advice would you give them on writing? What do you wish someone told you when you started out in this career?

My most sage advice is the trickiest: you will never make a living writing, until you learn to write when you don’t want to.

15. Thank you for giving your readers permission to laugh at your books! I think some of the subject matter is so scary and disgusting that laughter is the only thing that makes it okay. What's one of the sickest or most disgusting things you've written that you laughed at?

I’ve always thought that pulling someone’s small intestine out with a crochet hook was pretty funny.

16. Which was more of an influence in starting this series, the Green River Killer or the hormones of pregnancy? I've read you comment on both in other interviews.

I couldn’t have written Heartsick without the influence of both.

17. What have your tours been like? Are there a lot of interesting fans? Any scary stories?

I’m sort of disappointed at the normalcy and sweetness of my fans. I expected more mouth breathers carrying axes. But the vast majority of my readers are quite upstanding. I do get the occasional creepy email or letter from people who like my books for, shall we say, the wrong reasons.

18. I read an interview from the early 2000's and it seems like you never saw these books coming, was writing this series out of left field for you? A happy accident?

That first book was out of left field. I’d always loved reading thrillers and watching cop shows on TV. I had that idea for the first book, and halfway through writing it, I came up with the idea of writing a series because I had so many ideas for the characters and didn’t want to cram everything into one novel. But I had no idea how huge they would be. I still pinch myself. I am covered with bruises from all the pinching.

19. What's next for Chelsea Cain? Can you tell us anything about your next project?

The Night Season (book four in the series) comes out March 1, and I’m working on book five.   Gretchen moves off stage for most of The Night Season, so Archie and Susan and Henry have some room to grow as characters. There’s a new serial killer on the loose, and Portland is threatened by massive flooding. There is so much water in this book that I had to start looking up synonyms. I ran out of ways to describe wet. It’s a good old-fashioned heart-stopper of a thriller. Less gore, and more action. Lots of fun to write. It’s also a good entry point to the series. I wanted to write a book that people could read without having to read all the other books leading up to it. But that would still be satisfying to loyal readers of the series. Is that convincing enough? Have you ordered a copy?   Please order a copy. I’ll tap dance…

20. Heartsick, Sweetheart, and Evil at Heart are your last three novels, are you going to miss heart in the title of your new book, due in March, The Night Season?

Not at all. I have a list of hundreds of heart titles they are each sillier than the last. I’m excited to have some freedom. Talk to me in a few books. I’ll be back to “Heartburn.”

Thank you Chelsea!
Goat

#10 Wendy Dale

2011-02-15T00:00:00.003-05:00

20 Questions with Mourning Goats

INTERVIEW TEN

Wendy Dale

Wendy just started working at an animal rescue organization as a filmmaker/translator but even while surrounded by 24 lions, she took the time to answer our questions. As always, in the presence of the bizarre, she shines through. Please read the fantastic interview below and learn about a great author as well as a great person.

1. What comes to mind when you hear, “Mourning Goats?”

I think it’s pretty obvious. You’re referring to the famous Sanskrit parable in which Shiva leaves his goats unattended all night and later comes to regret it, the moral being that it’s not worth crying over lost goat’s milk.

2. I hear Internet connectivity is less than common in Bolivia, where are you connecting from today?

Ah, but there’s where you’re wrong. People tend to think that Bolivia is a backward country stuck back in the adobe age. First thing you should know: I have a pet cat, not a llama. Besides, Bolivians have really embraced new technology. Within a block of my house, there are three cafes offering high-speed Internet connection for less than fifty cents an hour. Not to mention that nearly all of my Bolivian friends have a FaceBook page. Around here, it’s even pretty common to see women in traditional dress (bowler hat and all) reach into the rainbow shawls on their backs and pull out a cell phone. Granted, they usually answer in their native tongue Aymara.

Though in all honesty, I’ve been here for five years now—and I still don’t know what an iPhone is.

3. Which do you prefer, fiction or non-fiction, in both reading and writing?

I will always love fiction. Even in writing non-fiction, I always rely on novel-writing techniques. Maybe it’s true that reality is stranger than what lies in any author’s imagination, but I still think it takes fiction to truly explain our world to us.

4. If I remember correctly, you are the reason fellow Mourning Goats interviewee, Craig Clevenger, got his book The Contortionist’s Handbook, in the hands of Chuck Palahniuk, how did this come to be?

It’s a long story that began when I came across a three-paragraph excerpt of The Contortionist’s Handbook on Amazon and knew I had to have the novel. I got to the last page and was simply blown away.

I’d never written to an author before and I had a lot of false illusions about the kind of life they led. I imagined Craig to be wealthy and famous, figured he was probably dating a supermodel. But when he emailed me back, it turned out he worked at Borders. I’ll never forget his comment: “There’s nothing worse than watching a person pick up your book, look it over, and then put it back on the shelf.” He added, “Writers are the only people who get royalty statements and eviction notices on the same day.”

This was devastating news, especially since my own book was slated to be published in a matter of weeks. At the time, George Bush was just starting to launch his war on Iraq and I felt helpless to do anything about what I felt to be a grave injustice. So I set out to right another wrong: the fact that a genius author could barely afford his own rent—his indie publisher hadn’t even given him an advance. And if I recall correctly, his first print run was just 2,000 copies. Or maybe it was 4,000.

It occurred to me that the only difference between Chuck Palahniuk and Craig Clevenger was that Chuck had lucked into a movie deal and had gotten tons of exposure for his book. While Chuck was busy brushing shoulders with Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter, Craig spent his evenings working in a bar. My idea was this: If I could tap into Chuck’s audience, letting them know about The Contortionist’s Handbook, maybe Craig’s luck would change.

It was a crazy idea. Still, I needed to go through with it, partly because Craig and I had begun to correspond via email, but mostly out of a need to believe that it truly was possible to achieve some sort of fairness in this world.

I sent Craig’s book to the guy who ran Chuck’s website, and nothing happened for months. When I bugged him about this, he brushed me off with a comment about receiving lots of books and being all-so-busy at the moment.

Four months later, I got an email from Craig. He had included a link and a single line of text: “I could kiss you right now.”

There wasn’t any hidden sexual message there — Craig and I have never been more than good friends. But when I clicked on the link, I was led to an audio file, Chuck Palahniuk himself talking about Craig’s book, something along the lines of “This is the best fucking book I have read in five, no make that ten years.”

The rest is history, as they say. To be totally honest, I’ve never been prouder of anything else I’ve achieved. That was the day I felt I actually did something truly noteworthy.

To end this long story, let me just add that Craig and I have remained incredibly close over the past seven years. In fact, last March he visited me in Bolivia, crashing for three months at my place as he worked on his latest novel.

5. Where have your siblings and parents ended up? With everything I’ve read in your book and on your site, I can only guess everyone is scattered all over the world.

I come from a family of nomads. It’s always been complicated explaining to friends about my travel plans for the holidays. When I get asked where home is, I usually respond, , “I don’t know yet. I’ll have to ask my parents.”

Ten years ago, when my parents were figuring out where to go next, fate stepped in — in the form of a travel guidebook. My mother came across the line “the city of the eternal spring” and uprooted the family to Cochabamba, Bolivia — without even having visited the place first.

This probably gives you the wrong impression of who they are. My mother loves floral print dresses and my dad buys his sneakers at Wal-Mart. In fact, they recently moved to a suburb of Albuquerque where my mother is a reservations agent for Southwest and my dad runs a home business, selling mineral samples over the internet. His site is www.dalerocks.com, which I love — my dad really does rock.

As for my siblings: Catherine runs a nursery school in Manhattan, Richard is a prison guard in Arizona, and Heather lives in Abu Dhabi — to be honest, I still haven’t quite figured out what she’s doing there. I imagine she must have gotten her hands on a guidebook.

6. You wrote employee newsletters for an aerospace company for a while, what was that like and how did you get into it?

I learned about the position from a posting on the job board at UCLA (I was in college at the time). My only writing experience up to that point was editing a student newsmagazine, but I bluffed my way through an interview.

I hated the job, but I was just twenty years old, was earning good money, and got to think of myself as a “professional writer,” even if the majority of my day consisted of informing employees what they could expect for lunch that day in the cafeteria.

7. You are an emmy nominated writer for The New Adventures of Mother Goose, do you think you’ll do anything like this again?

Do you mean write about Mother Goose again? To be honest, I don’t have any plans to do so in the immediate future. Though I do work on film scripts from time to time.

8. You currently live in Bolivia, what do you like most about living there, least?

Cochabamba is a city of a million people with breathtaking colonial architecture, a near-perfect climate, and tons of great places to eat. I live in a two-story house with 30-foot-high ceilings, exposed brick walls, and wood floors — and my monthly rent is less than what many people in the States spend on a gourmet, five-course meal.

If I had one complaint, it would be that I still don’t know what an iPhone is.

9. Your agent for Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals was Stephanie Lee, is she also your agent for fiction? What’s it been like working with her?

Stephanie has been a friend, mentor, and therapist to me. Plus, how cool is it to have an agent with tattoos and pink hair? She has represented all of my works thus far. Sadly, she left the business a year ago. I haven’t yet looked for her replacement, mostly because I haven’t yet finished the proposal for my newest book.

10. Are you going to be focusing on fiction now, or do you think you’ll ever go back to another travel book?

I don’t know that I’ll write about my travels again. But my latest project is a memoir, the story of seven years I spent living in a Mexican barrio in Los Angeles, titled American Wetback: An Immigrant in My Own Country.

11. Your book, Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals, was laugh out loud funny to me, especially the way you portray your Mother, with lines like, "Your father has become a jalapeno-chili-pepper farmer in Honduras." Is she as funny as your portray her or is it more of a situational humor?

I wish I could take credit for great writing when it comes to describing my mother, but the truth is that I simply followed her around with a notebook, jotting down everything she said. I was born to strange parents, something I hated as a child, but a fact that has turned out to be a huge plus for my writing career. I still remember an early comment from an editor after reading Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals: “That family is a goldmine.”

12. Can you tell us about your memoir classes on mediabistro.com? Do you think you’ll be doing more?

This year I tried my hand at teaching for the first time, and it’s been amazing watching other writers advance in their work. I really believe in writers helping out other writers — especially in an era in which publishers are more and more reluctant to publish books without an obvious commercial angle.

However, teaching has also been a huge drain on my time. Just today, I swore I’d never do it again — until I opened up my email in-box to find that my students had pitched in to send me an Amazon gift certificate for $180. That really got to me.

13. On your facebook page you mentioned that you voted this year in Bolivia, what was that like?

It was kind of fun, actually. I think the poll workers assumed I was lost at first — I was the only blue-eyed girl in the place. (Here I’m also considered blonde, even though any red-blooded American would label me a brunette.) What followed doesn’t exactly make for a gripping story: I picked up a ballot, marked a few X’s, and deposited my slip into the appropriate box.

I voted for Evo Morales, who is making history as Bolivia’s first indigenous president — a man surrounded by controversy. I liken what is happening here to the Civil Rights movement in the States, but in a way the evolution in Bolivia is even more profound. This is a country that has been defined by centuries by a strict class system like nothing most Americans can even conceive of, and it’s exciting to watch the process of change, history taking place right in front of me.

14. I’m guessing that voting there means you are a full-fledged Bolivian citizen now, yes? Any thoughts on coming back to the states? Anywhere else?

I’m not a citizen, just a permanent resident. I’ve lived here for almost five years and while I’ve ventured outside the country — I spent three months in Argentina, took a quick trip to Chile, and lived in the Peruvian jungle for two months — I haven’t been back to the States.

When it comes to figuring out my future, I refer you to a quote from my first book: “For a brief while, I considered the possibility of becoming a ‘planner’ instead of (what would the opposite be? Oh yes...) a ‘fun person.’ ” In other words, I have no idea what comes next.

15. What did you think of film school in Cochabamba? What was it like writing and directing?

I know it sounds weird—I lived in L.A. for eighteen years and didn’t even think of studying film until I arrived in Bolivia. What I like most is that all film is independent here—and there is also a lot of talent.

Though there are a few perils. My first photography teacher spent most of our class time warning us of the dangers of having our cameras stolen. He constantly insisted that the most important skill a director of photography could possess was martial arts training—and forced us to spend hours doing push-ups on our fists.

16. If you got one piece of advice before you started writing Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals as well as your new fiction novels, what would it be?

I refer you to what Craig Clevenger said to me during our first correspondence, the comment about receiving royalty statements and eviction notices at the same time.

However, I’ll add something else, what I always try and drill into my own writing students: The path is filled with rejection—but it’s not impossible. The number-one reason that agents reject proposals is that a book simply isn’t good enough. I’ve met a lot of talented writers who submitted their works without truly polishing them first. You may have sparkling prose and a compelling idea, but if you don’t fully understand the concept of structure, you have no business trying to publish your book.

17. You’ve had a few interesting experiences with prisons, what’s one of your favorite stories? Did I hear that you were in last year for being an, “undocumented foreigner?”

That sure put a damper on my Friday night! I had forgotten to bring along my I.D. and got picked up at a bar in a raid designed to round up illegal foreigners.

In a very strange twist of fate, at the immigration office, I later ran into a friend (a long-haired tattooed musician I never imagined to be working for the government). But he helped me out with all my legal hassles and introduced me around the office. A few weeks later, I’d become buddies with nearly everyone there, and many of my subsequent Saturday nights were spent over cocktails at my house in the company of immigration officials.

18. If I had the money, I would do the Bolivia tour you offer on your website, has anyone taken you up on it yet? What was it like?

On a lark, I decided to offer a tour of Bolivia, but in the end, I never found the time to go through with it. I really need to update my sorely out-of-date website. Though Craig Clevenger did get my unofficial tour. I guess you should ask him what it’s like hanging out with me in Bolivia.

19. On your facebook page, I see that almost all of your family is on facebook, even Grandma Barbara, what do you think of the way that communication is going with social media?

For a nomad like myself, I love how easy it’s become to stay in touch with my friends in out-of-the-way places. Then again, there are a lot of ex-prisoners I’d love to avoid—would you believe it? Even they have a FaceBook page.

That reminds me: When I was hanging out with my immigration buddies, one of them told me about rounding up a Colombian suspected of drug trafficking. The guy’s friends had already been arrested, but he claimed to have no idea who they were. Then my immigration official friend pulled up the Colombian’s FaceBook page, a picture of them all drinking beers together.

20. You have a lot of things on the burner right now, what do you see happening in the next five years for Wendy Dale?

A while back when a friend was struggling over the decision to get married, I told her that it wasn’t such a big deal, that if it didn’t work out, she could always get divorced. “In fact, I’m thinking of getting married too, just so that I can say I’ve had the experience.” I didn’t have a boyfriend then, but I haven’t given up hope. If you know of any viable candidates, let me know.

Thank you!

Goat

#9 Pat Walsh

2011-02-01T00:00:00.006-05:00

20 Questions With Mourning Goats

INTERVIEW NINE

Pat Walsh

Pat Walsh has been the editor of multiple Mourning Goats interviewees and has taken some time away from the slushpile to help us here! And, I'll say that his book on publishing is by far my favorite book on the subject, it's witty and doesn't sugar coat the world of publishing, like most books. Enjoy interview 9, with MR. Pat Walsh!

1. What comes to mind when you hear, “Mourning Goats?”

It’s funny. That’s the most common question that I’m asked about publishing. All I can say is that my thoughts on mourning goats are a matter of public record and I stand behind them.

2. You've had the opportunity to work with a lot of upcoming authors on their first books, what were some of your favorites and why?

As feeble and wussyish (sp?) as it sounds, I don’t have favorites per se. The great thing about working with authors on their first books or at least their first novels is that the experience is always different. I’ve been lucky to work with the likes of Jack Pendarvis, Mike Kun, Craig Clevenger, Stephen Elliott, Michelle Richmond, Michelle Tea, Mark Dunn, Joey Goebel, Amy Koppelman, Samantha Hunt, Elisabeth Hyde, Joe Di Prisco, and Stephen Tunney and many others over the years and it’s been great.

3. Being an editor, how hard is it to write anything? Are you constantly second-guessing yourself?

I’ve written three very different books. One was a rant on my personal annoyances, one was a long, self-deprecating joke, and one was a business narrative co-writer gig. Each book was very different and each had challengers. Do I second guess myself? No, absolutely not. Well…maybe. Definitely sometimes. Or not.

4. I hear you’re currently working on a new book, can you tell us anything about it?

I’m translating the collected works of Ovid into Esperanto limericks.

5. What books are you most excited about that are coming out in 2011 from Macadam/Cage?

Very excited about One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy by Stephen Tunney and Under the Harrow by Mark Dunn, which both came out in December. Upcoming we have a debut by a new author named Julie Trimingham, a new work by Joe Di Prisco and a new work by Robert Kalich.

6. In one interview you said that the fastest acceptance of a manuscript took less than a week, what book was it, and what made it a must have?

Many of our acquisitions took less than a week. One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy did most recently. I don’t think, however, that the speed of acquisition is a true indicator of quality, just good timing.

7. What is your take on e-publishing? Some say it’s going to take the place of “real books,” what do you think?

People want what they want and they want it faster and cheaper. They’re not wrong. Most artistic delivery methods experience disruption and it’s almost always good. From the printing press to “talkies” to radio to digital music. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad. It’s just true so deal with it. If people still want books on paper, it will always be available to them.

8. You took a break from Macadam/Cage from 2005 to 2008, what happened, and why did you go back?

I got fired - but in a good way. Long story obviously but I wanted the management to head the company in a particular direction and they chose another. There were no hard feelings and a few years later, they asked me to come back because things weren’t going the way they had hoped.

9. What are a few of your favorite or strangest submissions you’ve received?

We have a file in the office called “When Hell Freezes Over” that is filled with the strangest and most insane submissions. I never let it leave the office and only staff and interns can see it.

10. You were in the world series of poker, how did you get involved? How did you do?

I wrote a book proposal outlining my plan to take a lot of money from a New York Publishing House and use it to play poker. Penguin bought it and I bought a ticket to the 2005 WSOP. I sucked.

11. What would you consider the most successful book that Macadam/Cage has put out? Why?

In what sense? Most books have had some impact which has made them successful. We’ve had books that enjoyed literary and financial success like the Time Traveler’s Wife and The Contortionist’s Handbook and Ella Minnow Pea. We’ve had books that launched many writers’ careers.

12. You have to have one of the best jobs in the world, after the San Francisco Chronicle, how did you get started as an editor?

I do love my work and would do it until the day I die, if that’s possible. But it’s been a very difficult few years. I lucked into the job, really. I was supposed to be M/C’s first author but my book sucked and the Publisher needed help reading the submissions. Before long I had business cards and I let the book die a merciful death, unseen by anyone’s eyes.

13. Macadam/Cage is responsible for a few of the authors we’re going to be interviewing here at Mourning Goats, can you remember what was going through your head when you read Craig Clevenger’s first novel (The Contortionist’s Handbook) or Joey Goebel’s (The Anomalies)?

Craig’s book was an immediate revelation and I wanted it immediately. I received nothing but enthusiasm from the Publisher and we bought it very quickly. Joey’s book was sent in the slush and I also immediately fell in love with the damn thing. The Anomalies is a very special book in that it was lighthearted but deeply moving. His later works have been more literary and show the amazing talent he has.

14. What’s the most common mistake that you are seeing in submissions at Macadam/Cage?

Dear Ms. Walsh…

15. There were a lot of money issues at Macadam/Cage over the past few years, how are things looking now?

Things are still very tough and the future is always uncertain. It has been a very long slog and there have been many casualties along the way, most notably our relationships with some of our authors. We are still working our way out of a financial pit and it’s very hard. But things are getting a little bit better every day so we just have to hold on.

16. What does a normal day in the life of Pat Walsh look like?

It begins (and ends) with two and one half hours of personal grooming. The morning is dedicated to berating the interns. The afternoon is spent drinking my lunch. And the evening is devoted to Dancing with the Stars. Actually, my day is triage. Dealing with whatever problems arise between sunset and sunrise. I mercilessly chase money owed to us. And I shamelessly promote books via email and telephone.

17. 78 Reasons Why Your Book Will Never Be Published and 14 Reasons Why It Just Might, is a blunt book on publishing, do you think more wannabe writers need this kind of wake-up call?

I didn’t write it for wannabe writers. I wrote the book for writers who keep getting rejected. I never thought all 78 reasons applied to any one person. I hope it would give writers a brief glimpse into the failings of the publishing industry and the mistakes, sometimes minor ones, which lead to rejection.

18. I’ve read a lot of interviews from authors being published by Macadam/Cage, and they speak very highly of the press, what makes Macadam/Cage different?

We took chances on a lot of writers that New York had dismissed or ignored and writers are, by and large, very loyal. I’ve always thought that our Publisher, David Poindexter, was the thing that made our house special. But I was wrong. He’s actually a prick. (Just kidding). David poured millions into the idea that great books can find an audience regardless of marketing bias, publishing trends, and profit and loss statements.

19. I read somewhere that you write fiction as well, are you currently working on anything?

I don’t write fiction. I’m sure I have a novel inside me but I’m also sure I have some sort of malignant tumor inside me too. The two are locked in a race to kill me.

20. Your book gives some of the best writing advice I’ve ever read, for those that haven’t read it, what advice would you like to pass on to them?

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. In other words, buy new debut fiction. Don’t stick to buying writers you already know from used book stores. Ask your local bookseller for a recommendation and read new authors. And if you like them, don’t keep it to yourself.

#8 Joey Goebel

2011-01-15T00:00:00.002-05:00

20 Questions With Mourning Goats

INTERVIEW EIGHT

Joey Goebel

What can I say about Joey? Torture the Artist is on my list of top five books for writers and the guy that wrote it, is awesome. He's a short story writer, novelist, singer, songwriter, and an all around great guy. I'm excited for you all to read the second interview of 2011!

1. What comes to mind when you hear, “Mourning Goats?”

I picture some gnarly young billy goats at a funeral home—Dave Coulier types. You know, sophisticated and petite, but with a little extra torque in the squat-thrusting department. One of them arrives and signs in at the guest book on the little podium with the pull-string lamp and thinks, “It never fails—no one signs their address in these things. They only sign their name, even though it clearly asks for the name and address. Screw it, I’m signing my name and address. That’s what it asks for, so why shouldn’t I?” So then this goat walks inside and licks some asses and gets his ass licked, and he goes over to one of the sitting areas where the family has set up a computer slideshow of the recently deceased goat as a child, with his family, dressed as Brian Austin Green for Halloween, etcetera, etcetera, what will be will be. But then Lyle starts thinking, “Ah, man. That might make me look self-important—like I think I’m special in some old-fashioned way—the way I decided to be the first one to put my address, while so many others just signed their names.” So he goes back and eats the entire guest book and leaves.

2. One of my favorite stories of yours is The Phallic Artist, from a now defunct journal, Cellar Door, did you write that during the same time you wrote Torture the Artist? I felt like they were connected in a lot of ways.

I wrote it not long after I finished Torture the Artist, and you’re right; the theme of The Phallic Artist is identical to that of Torture. The story behind that is that someone at the publishing house asked me to write a companion piece to Torture the Artist, such as a short story that could be placed somewhere in order to spread the word about the book. I got the idea from a friend who was in a figure drawing class in college. He would call me up almost every night and share with me his acute anxiety over having to draw a nude male model. He was seriously considering leaving the drawing blank at the crotch area. To comfort him, I said, “Who knows—maybe because you’re so worried about this, your heightened emotions will come through when you draw dicks, and maybe you’ll be so good at drawing them that you will have found your calling.” I could see him screaming to the heavens: “Damn this gift I’ve been given!” He ended up getting through it without any trauma, and I got a story out of it. I don’t know what happened with getting it published, but a couple of years later I eventually placed the storymyself when Cellar Door asked for a piece. It was then made into a short film by Lucky Rabbit Films out of Austin.

3. I saw that Pat Walsh was your editor for The Anomalies, he’s lined up to do an interview for Mourning Goats, what can you say about him, before he’s in for the 20 questions? Also, editors in general, what have they done for you?

Pat is very intelligent and has a great sense of humor. Not only is he intelligent in terms of the writing side of publishing, but also the business side of publishing. There was a long stretch of time—I guess from The Anomalies on through Torture the Artist—that I talked to him far more than I talked to any of my closest friends. I loved talking to him. He was good at making me feel good—which I think is a good trait for an editor. We had a lot of laughs. I remember the one time he did not laugh is when I made fun of California for electing Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor. (I had to say something as it was nice to see another state embarrassing itself.) He took that one hard. He didn’t see any humor in that. What have editors done for me? Well, in Pat’s case, he got my novel-writing career started by reading my query letter and then asking for my manuscript. In general, I think editors are helpful for the author’s morale. The relationship with editors isn’t exactly what I’d thought it be; there haven’t been any in-depth series of letters about the writing itself, like with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins. Usually with editors, I talk more about business than the books themselves. I always enjoy talking to them.

4. I love the line you wrote, “Get mad at something and make it better through writing.” What did you get mad about for each of your books?

For The Anomalies, I got mad at how predictable everyone was. With so many people, you know what they’re all about without them even opening their mouth. Their appearance is their mold and everything about them fits into that mold. And as a result, so many people are basically the same, because they so often “look the part” and vice versa. (“Haven’t we met before?” I would find myself thinking.) For Torture the Artist, I got mad at how utterly stupid and talentless the entertainers of the 21st century had become. I was—and still am—gobsmacked at what passes for entertainment. And for Commonwealth, I got mad that American voters not once but twice elected a man into office who did not represent their economic interests. All the contradictions stared us in the face: a common man who was a member of one of the most elite families in the country, the more masculine choice who was also a cheerleader. All I can do is barf, and the barf comes out in book form. “Goebel” is slang for vomit in German, which I’ve been made aware of repeatedly when I tour over there.

5. Do you write every day? Every week? What does the writing process look like, for you?I do write every week, normally Monday through Friday.

I’m still trying to find the best process. Sometimes I do it according to time: As long as I put in approximately seven to eight hours a day into my book (as well as in book-related tasks, like answering e-mails or going through my notes), then I’ll be satisfied. Or lately, I’ve been doing it by quota: six pages a day. This is in an attempt to get the first draft done for my new novel. It’s a triumph psychologically to finish the first draft, which I find to be the most difficult.

6. In Torture the Artist, you described something beautiful and horrible rolled into one, what do you think about where entertainment is going these days? Should we start some experiments, see what we can create?

Entertainment is as ghastly as ever. It’s gotten worse since I wrote Torture the Artist. My views on this topic can best be expressed in a song I wrote for my new recording project (which I’m calling Nervous People). The song is called “Bodies Writhing (the American Music Awards)”: Bodies on the TV, dancin’ up a stormCallin’ themselves artists, I’m callin’ it pornI can hear the message, rubbin’ it’s way through:You were awful slutty, now I’ll have to outslut you
Yes, sweeheart I see you, yes, you’re all grown upMaybe someday we’ll forget your Mickey Mouse ClubYes, I said I see you, you’re bringin’ sexy backSubstituting lust for the talent that you lackChorus—Looks like they’ve made love obsolete Where once there was warmth, there’s only heat And bodies writhingThis is what it’s come to: Ga Ga Boom Boom PowBaby caveman orgies make that future soundNo imagination, but man, they sure can moveLooks like they’re thinking anything but thinking ought to do
Repeat chorus.Bridge: Touch my body, won’t you touch my body?Repeat chorus and bathe. I don’t think any experiments would succeed. The best we can hope for is that the occasional work of true originality and imagination will reach mainstream audiences. LOST would be an example. I am a full-blown LOST fanatic. From a writing standpoint, I’ve never seen a show that’s so ambitious. And the different narrative techniques they used throughout the six seasons always impressed me.

7. You were awarded Romania’s Ovid Festival Prize in 2009. How did an author from Kentucky win this? What did it entail?

My novels were published in Romanian, and the judges noticed, I guess. And the reason I was published in Romanian is because I was published in German by Diogenes, the largest independent publisher in Europe. They are well-connected all over the globe, and they handle my foreign rights, so that’s how I ended up getting published in all the various countries. To receive the award, I got a trip to Romania, and I brought my wife with me. We were right on the Black Sea in a town called Neptun that was formerly a resort for the communist higher-ups. I attended some conferences and went to readings, and it culminated with the awards ceremony. I tore it up, author-style. The whole trip was surreal for me, and the prize money allowed me to focus solely on writing and doing water colors of ear lobes for several months.

8. With that, it seems that you have a huge following in Europe, do you think America will catch up?

Well, check this out: ELLE Magazine in Romania made my book one of their book club picks, and so I did an event in Bucharest, Romania, where all these young Romanian ladies were gathered to discuss my book. My wife and I got a kick out of that, especially since it took place in a high-end furniture store. I’ve never read ELLE, but I would imagine the American version of ELLE doesn’t offer much page-time for authors or books. Who would want to read about books when we can read about which cast member of CSI: New York Angeles has the best set of abdominal muscles or learn about how great Kate Hudson’s fallopian tubes are? So from what I’ve observed, authors aren’t as marginalized by the media in Europe. Let me put it this way: If America “catches up” as you put it, I’d be surprised, unless I come up with some good plots for lonely vampire wolves.

9. You’ve been doing some freelance work this past year, how did it go? Anything you’re particularly proud of?

It went well. It’s sad how much more money I could make writing an article about Michael Jackson than I could being an educator. I liked the Michael Jackson piece because it made me feel like I was a part of this big news story, rather than just an observer. DIE ZEIT contacted me, like, the Thursday after he died, and I had to have it turned in by Monday. They wanted a younger American’s take on what he meant to pop culture. I discovered that with my ability to get published in the German papers and magazines, freelance work is relatively easy money, but what I don’t like about it is that it took away from my creative writing time.

10. You did your MFA in a low-residency program, after you’d already been published, what did you think of the program, and why go back after tasting success?

I went back after being published because I wanted the security of having a master’s degree so that I could get a “real” job. When it comes to my books, I never know from one year to the next how much money I’m going to make, so getting an MFA was something I decided to do when I knew that I would be getting married and eventually reproducing. So basically, it was the decision of rational guy being uncertain of his financial future. Oh—and I wanted to enrich myself intellectually. I was more than pleased with the program. I chose Spalding University, which is in Louisville. The workload was daunting, but I thrived under all the deadlines, and these deadlines helped me write Commonwealth, probably the longest book I’ll ever write. It was actually such a positive experience that I found it disconcerting. I kept thinking, “Why is this going so well?” The teachers were wise and my classmates were supportive. Some people say that the problem with these MFA programs is that they churn out batches of writers who all write the same way, and that they are therefore institutions breeding conformity. But you hear that argument so often that I think it’s just become something that people think they are supposed to say, kind of like when people say that Kanye West is a musical genius.

11. I read on a German site, that you’re teaching now, what books are you using with your students? Any of your own?

I teach English 101 and 102, so they mostly have to read textbooks. However, I make it a point to have them read one novel, and one of their essays is supposed to be about that novel. I make them a list of novels that are either classics or ones that I think they’d like. I also usually pick short ones, for obvious reasons. One semester, I assigned only five novels, so that we could have five in-depth discussions about some of my favorite novels. These novels were: Cat’s Cradle, The Metamorphosis, The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Stranger. It amazes me when someone doesn’t like any one of these books.

12. What’s happening with the Torture the Artist movie, with Lucky Rabbit Films?

I don’t have much to report. The producers have optioned the film rights a third time, and they are very much interested in making the film a reality. They flew to Kentucky to meet me and my wife. I liked them, and I patiently await to see what they do with the book.

13. Last year you wrote, “The song is so bad that while I was listening to it, it made me dislike life,” in reference to an Owl City song, topping the charts. I laughed out loud, or lol’d as the kids are saying, when I read that, any new songs you particularly hate or would like to rip apart?

I LOVE this question. I had forgotten that line, which I used on ye ol’ Facebook, I believe. Since you’ve brought it to my attention, I think I’ll make a place for it in my new novel, so thanks. There are so many new songs that I hate, and you might think, “Why do you listen to them, then?” But I think it’s good to be aware of them. It’s kind of like checking the pulse of youth culture, to see how much longer it will be before the world dies off. So every once in a while, in the car, I’ll listen to the pop stations, and I also watch the big music award shows, and I’ll sit there in a state of pure wonder, saying to myself, “This is REAL. This is not a Saturday Night Live skit. This is not meant to be a joke. And people LIKE it.” A perfect example would be the Black Eyed Peas updated version of “I Had the Time of My Life.” Okay, that in itself is stupid enough (Can’t you hear them pitching it to the record execs—“Yo, we wanna take that Dirty Dancing song and make it our own.”) But then—after Will I Am and Fergie struggle out the chorus, they inexplicably start saying “dirty bit” as the song falls apart into a techno atrocity. It is SO BAD. And then—this was at the aforementioned American Music Awards—when it was over, Will I Am yelled, “Welcome to the future.” So here is the future, everyone: the song from Dirty Dancing and the repetition of the words “dirty bit”…the complete absence of creativity or originality…And have you seen how they dress? My twelve-month-old niece has a cooler fashion sense than the Black Eyed Peas. They look like idiots. A couple of more observations from the American Music Awards: When certain buxom chanteuses like Katy Perry and Rihanna came out wearing dresses that actually covered themselves, I announced to my wife, “That dress is coming off within thirty seconds.” And I was right… You know those background dancers who basically just straddle things and writhe on the floor? I always think about how they have parents: “Hey, Mom! Be sure to watch me on the American Music Awards tonight. I’ll be dryhumping Ne-Yo’s thigh. Be sure to tell all your friends.” Why the hell hasn’t Justin Bieber’s voice changed yet? Isn’t he going on 18 by now? Does he have some sort of developmental problem? Is he a castrato? Sidenote: My sister always comments about how Justin Bieber gives her the creeps, which I think is hilarious, and I kind of see what she means. And two more songs that I’d like to address: Bruno Mars has a hit song called “Just the Way You Are.” Why?! You know that he or someone in his camp HAD to know the title was already taken by Billy Joel. I think it was an arrogant choice to call the song that. I mean, how did it even happen? Was he listening to the radio and heard the BillyJoel song and say, “Hmm. Since I can’t come up with an original idea, I’ll just take that chorus word-for-word but change everything else about the song.” Bruno’s song is melodramatic, with a melody that I would call “obvious,” and “easy” lyrics. There isn’t a tenth of the melodic appeal of the Billy Joel song. (And don’t get me started on how Billy Joel is always considered “uncool.”) And Ke$ha has a lyric in her song that says “we’re dancing like we’re dumb.” Finally, a 21st century performer who sings the truth.

14. When you wrote Torture the Artist, you said that you had a much darker ending in mind, before meeting your wife, where did you originally see it going?

I think I was going to have the Harlan character just wither away in his hotel room. Strangely, even with the way I ended up writing it, I’ve had a lot of readers and interviewers comment on what a sad, bleak ending it is. But it’s supposed to be happy.

15. You wrote four screenplays earlier in your career, do you ever think about turning any of the three left into novels (The Anomalies was a screenplay before being published as a novel)?

No, because they’re low-brow comedies, and anyone who still reads novels in the 21st century would not be interested in reading stupid comedies. Here were the titles: FRANKY DANDELION, THE SCHOOL OF WHATNOT, and GIRL HUNT. I’ve written several more since I became a novelist, and I plan to continue writing them. For me, screenplays are much, much easier than novels.

16. When you send out books to fans, I’ve seen on more than one occasion that you send out old pictures of teen idols, what’s the story behind this and do you still do it? (I personally got Bruce Springstien and Rob Lowe)

Ha! You fared better than most. Just yesterday I sent out C. Thomas Howell and Rachel Ward. My sister was a teenager in the 1980’s, and she would buy the Teen Bop magazines, and I’m assuming they still have magazines like this—each page would simply be a photo of a teen idol, everyone from the cast of the Breakfast Club to Andrew McCarthy to El Debarge to Scott Valentine. My sister would cut her favorites out and cover an entire bedroom wall with them, and because I wanted to be just like my big sister, I did the same thing, even though it was probably inappropriate for a six-year-old boy to have his walls plastered with pictures of Judd Nelson and Patrick Duffy. (I also really liked female soap opera stars of the ‘80s and had an album full of pictures of Emma Samms and Finola Hughes and Felicia from General Hospital. I was a weird little dude, even back then.) So my sister saved these old magazines. What people get in the mail from me are the pictures of celebrities that my sister and I didn’t deem wall-worthy. Yes, I still do it, though my supply is nearly depleted. I do it just because I like the idea of sending something extra, and because people tend to get a kick out of it. There’s no meaning or message behind it.

17. You said to a fan on your facebook page that the newest book, Commonwealth, took, “so long and was so much work that it made me start to hate writing,” can you go into more detail for us? What do you mean by that?

Oh, I meant exactly what I said. That book exhausted me. I know that it is a privilege to be a published author, but one big hardship of being an author rather than having a regular, nine-to-five job is that the work never really ends. You might be away from your computer, but you can’t get your brain to stop tinkering with a certain plot point. So with Commonwealth, I’d go to bed, but after I turned out the lights, I would think, “Well, I’m lying here doing nothing. The lights are out and it’s quiet so I have no distractions. This would be an ideal time to have my brain work out some details on the book—just until I fall asleep. And then, of course, the sleep wouldn’t come. So, yes, writing is an art form, or a craft, but I also think of it as work, and just like with anything, if you work on the same thing so hard for so long, it will leave you soured on that particular type of work. But I took some time off from writing novels. I worked on screenplays and the freelance articles. And now I’m deep into my fourth novel, but I’m sleeping well and trying not to completely give myself over to the book.

18. In November, you had a short story come out that you described as, “Mad Libs meets Choose Your Own Adventure meets 21st century marketing,” what can you tell us about it?

Strange career development: Mercedes needed an author to write a story, one which requires the person at the computer to enter information, so that the story becomes interactive. Because of my following in Germany, I was offered the gig. It’s surprisingly dark and surreal for a story on a Mercedes site.

19. If you had to give one piece of advice to aspiring writers about life, not writing, what would it be?

I think the single best piece of advice I could give them would be for them to protect their health. This is something I’ve only recently learned myself. For instance, I’ve learned that exercising thirty minutes a day can help me sleep better at night. The older I get, the more I realize how if you don’t have good health, you don’t have much of anything. Since I’ve started taking better care of myself in way of diet and exercise, I’ve noticed that writing isn’t as exruciating.

20. You were working on a new book this year, what can you tell us about it? Do you have a title yet?

It’s set in high school and it’s in first person point of view. This one has some really nice words! Nouns, verbs, a couple of prepositions—the whole deal, y’all. It’s funny and sad and might be described as a geek fantasy. No title yet. I have two of the three words of the title selected. The third one keeps eluding me. Maybe “goat” will do.

#7 Craig Clevenger

2011-01-01T00:00:00.017-05:00

20 Questions with Mourning Goats

INTERVIEW SEVEN

Craig Clevenger

As he inscribed in one of my books, years ago, "You've been there since the beginning," and it's for good reason. His first book, The Contortionist's Handbook, introduced us, his second book, Dermaphoria, secured his place on our bookshelves, and now he's at work on his third novel, which we're all salivating for. I'm proud to say Craig Clevenger is Mourning Goats first interview of 2011!

1. What comes to mind when you hear, “Mourning Goats?”

I’ve never heard a mourning goat, so I don’t know. If I have, I didn’t know they were in mourning.

“Mourning” hits me as a verb in this case, so it sounds like a band. Like “Flogging Molly,” maybe. But definitely the act of mourning , some person or persons are mourning their deceased goats. So what makes these goats so significant? What kind of people hold goats in such high regard? Maybe they’re a tribe of itinerant herders, and that all their goats are dead means there’s some maurading predator that’s begun to wreak havoc on their way of life. Questions come to mind, which make for stories.

2. As an author, what do you think taught you the most about writing, and why? Education? Experience? Writing?

Reading and writing. Reading always came first. And I then learned by doing, by writing, making mistakes and learning from them, and ultimately cultivating a regular writing habit. College writing workshops were a major part of my education, but the ceiling for what you can learn from workshops is lower than most people think. Workshops get you out of your own head, and they teach you to see your work from a cold perspective.

But there comes a point where you realize you could run yourself ragged trying to account for all of the criticism that comes your way. You could transcribe Nabokov and pass it through a workshop and it’s going to bleed red ink from all the feedback. It’s important to gain what you can from the input, but it’s equally important to know when criticisms are made just for the sake of speaking up in class. When you can identify that point—when the criticism ceases to be helpful—you’re done.

Experience is important, but it’s a mistake to think a writer needs to actively seek or have some kind of adventure to write about. Birth, death, falling in love, etc., happen in the blandest parts of suburbia or remote countryside as much as anywhere else. Observation is critical; without it, experience is meaningless.

3. When Dermaphoria came out, you said that you thought you would lose some fans because it’s completely different than your first novel, The Contortionist’s Handbook, while I don’t believe this was the case, what are your thoughts on your current project?

The current project is a big change of direction for me. It’s not a neo-noir novel like my first two.One reader described an early chapter as magical-realist, but that chapter is from one of three distinct story threads, so it’s not a reflection of the entire book. Two of those story threads are written in the third person, whereas my first two novels were both entirely first-person narratives.

I want to be a different writer with each book. I’m not interested in “pushing the envelope” or being “transgressive.” But I do want each book I write to exceed the previous one. While I’d like to have a steady but growing audience, I don’t want to write the same thing, or in the same style, over and over.

4. Bolivia, what’s the best story that came out of your stay there (not fiction)? What was it like living with author, Wendy Dale?

What few stories I do have are on my web site. I called the travel diary “Dispatches from Interzone,” but it’s only three or four entries. I didn’t get out much except for groceries or coffee. The whole point of going to Bolivia was so I could stretch out my last royalty payment. My Spanish is crude, at best; I had no wifi in the house; the dvd player on my laptop was busted; I only knew Wendy and her boyfriend; I was in a virtual writing lockdown for three months, and it was the most productive I’ve been in years. Living with Wendy Dale was cool. She’s a night owl, just like me. And she’s extremely hard working with her writing. We rarely interacted, except for once a week at the kitchen table where we’d shoot the shit into the wee hours with her boyfriend. The three of us called the place, La Casa Vampiro.

5. You’ve done a few classes over at the cult, have you thought of taking teaching further? Have you been approached?

When the Cult first offered me a teaching gig, I was reluctant. I’m always learning, and didn’t think I had anything to add to the existing repertoire of creative writing “how to” books, classes and web sites.

The classes have been a success, overall. I just wrapped up my latest one, and I’ve got a standing offer to teach again. We’ll see.

6. In the past you described your writing process as, “going in the pit,” does this happen with every piece you work on? Was it different with your new piece?

“The Pit.” That’s my colorful way of saying I have a dedicated place to work, and I tune out distractions, turn off my phone and email. Ideally, anyway. It’s been tougher with this new one. Aside from my time in Bolivia, I’ve seldom had a dedicated space to work on this new one. The last few years since “Dermaphoria” have been up and down. I’ve moved several times. Lots of couch-surfing, and the lack of stability makes it hard to get lost in a writing project.

7. The last interview I read of yours, it said that you were looking for an agent, have you found one yet?

Not yet. I’ve had a few inquiries about the synopsis and sample chapters, but I’m still working on this rewrite, so nobody’s seen the finished manuscript.

8. With your new book, you holed up in a hotel with Chris Baer (Will Christopher Baer) at the beginning; do you still share your writing with him? Are there any plans for another meeting with the windows blacked out?

Chris and I have talked on and off about doing a screenplay together, either feature-length or some sort of serialized tv-drama. Aside from that, we correspond semi-regularly—a one or two-week email volley every five or six months—but otherwise never talk writing. We’ll convene again at some point in our virtual fallout shelter with a big-ass whiteboard, our laptops, a library and a coffee maker. No telling what we’ll emerge with or how long it’ll take.

9. You have one of the coolest tattoos I’ve ever seen, the Sisyphus tattoo. What others do you have that you want to share? What do they mean to you?

They all mean different things. Among the more significant is the six-fingered handprint I had tattooed on my left wrist after I completed a draft of my first novel. I haven’t had any since then, except for a little color or detail added here and there. It’s been several years since I’ve had enough cash to indulge in more ink, but I am by no means finished. My left sleeve is more or less done; my right is still empty below the elbow.

The Sisyphus tattoo you mentioned, it’s a reminder of the daily office grind I’d been at for fifteen years or so that I gave up to pursue writing. It gives me some perspective when I think about the money I could have accumulated in the last ten years, had I stayed in the business world. I have a heart on my inner-left forearm; it’s anatomically realistic, but it’s been sutured together. It followed a rough period years back, and it’s an illustration of putting my life back together. Then there’s the traditional Virgin of Guadalupe on my right shoulder, but instead of the Virgin Mary icon, it’s Alice from the original woodcut illustrations of “Alice in Wonderland.” The closest thing I have to any real ethnic identity is my Catholic upbringing, so I wanted to acknowledge that. But being a fallen non-believer, replacing the image with a fairy tale more accurately reflected my beliefs.

10. How much research goes into your books? I know that you read through psychiatric books and art forgery books for The Contortionist’s Handbook and Dermaphoria, what kind of books are you looking into for Saint Heretic?

It’s unlikely that “Saint Heretic” will remain the title of this one, for a number of reasons. We’ll see. Anyway, the nature of the Handbook’s narrator, John Vincent, required the story to be laden with the minutiae of his criminal life. I wrote it to sound like someone talking to themselves while seriously coked-up, so the recitation of trivia was part of the voice. But I’m doing less and less research as time goes on, because I want to engage the reader with the story instead of hooking them with random factoids. Looking back, I would have written that book very, very differently.

With “Dermaphoria,” some research was of course necessary, but I wasn’t interested in tittlating readers with a how-to on crystal meth or LSD manufacture. More importantly, the story wasn’t about drugs, it was about human touch, connection and identity.

And now there’s this third novel, maybe “Saint Heretic,” maybe not. There’s no criminal enterprise in this one, as with the first two. It’s all just things happening, the characters and what they say and do.

Ultimately, I enjoy the analogue outlining process more than the research. Like having a map of the Mojave Desert on my wall when I wrote DpH, with photographs from a road trip tacked around it. Or sometimes I’ll find a magazine picture of someone who matches my mental image of a character and I’ll clip that out. Or spreading out pages from blank calendars to mark events in the story, to make certain there aren’t any misfires in chronology between the backstory and present narrative, or that I’m correctly citing an event from a character’s past. I love letting the proces take up physical space around me, as long as I’ve got a dedicated work space. It lets me physically immerse myself in the story as well as mentally.

11. I just read your short story, Mercury, on my kindle, what do you think about e-books? Good/Bad/Indifferent?

I don’t know where to begin with this one. I’ve committed to writing a piece about my whole take on e-books and the future of publishing (this stemmed from my last writing class, after a similar question from one of my students). I don’t think they’re good or bad; they’re simply the next wave. I can think of a score of practical uses for an e-reader, such as for traveling or if I were a law student. But I love books. I love paper and ink and binding and holding one in my hands. I like the artifact of the thing, the way it soaks up its own history as it gets shelfworn, re-read, lost, stolen, sold, lent out and damaged. I love the saying, “a room without books is like a body without a soul.”

I don’t have an opinion about ebooks as much as I have an opinion about the starry-eyed incredulity of the publishing industry toward the advent of ebooks. I started to write a more detailed response to this, and I stopped myself when it hit the four-page mark.

12. You seem to almost play games with your books, like when John Dolan Vincent visited in Dermaphoria, are there plans to keep these visits going?

Dermaphoria’s narrator, Eric Ashworth, is seriously paranoid. His pattern recognition filters have been blown wide open, so he sees signals, messages and threats everywhere. The story reflects that, in its own set of cues and signals buried within the text. Eric is convinced the chirping crickets he hears at night are transmitting signals and ratting him out. If you follow the Morse code as relayed by Eric in the narrative, they dots and dashes of the chirping crickets spell out “chirp, chirp, chirp.” Part of that was meant to layer the novel, to have all of these hidden things be discoveries the reader makes with subsequent readings. The crickets chirping, the dog barking, the bug bites on his arms, the names of characters and code names for labs, all of these are pieces of Eric’s paranoia manifested in the story. The appearance of John Vincent was part of that, yes, but also a way of playing a game, of nodding to readers of the first book, to see if they could catch that. And to be honest, after narrating a whole novel from Vincent’s point of view, it was fun describing him from the outside, as a total stranger. Yeah, he’ll be back in the third novel. Maybe.

Someday I want to do an entire novel like this, a single block of narrative game-playing like Calvino’s “If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler” or “The Castle of Crossed Destinies.” I have lots of ideas for the kinds of games I’d like to play, but they all have to take a back seat to character and story.

13. If I remember right, wasn’t Wendy Dale a big part of jumpstarting your career? What went down?

Wendy Dale is responsible for Chuck Palahniuk reading my first novel. Actually, Dennis Widmyer, the webmaster for chuckpalahniuk.net, passed it onto Palahniuk, but Wendy sent it to Dennis. We’d never even met, she just thought the book deserved some exposure. We corresponded after that, met a few times while she was living in L.A., (the first time was during Palahniuk’s “Diary” tour), and we’ve kept in touch ever since. But with Wendy getting it to Palahniuk, yeah, things got a jumpstart. More than just an Amazon spike while he was touring, he gave me a slow-burn longevity. And given how unprolific I am, slow burn is a good thing. Indeed, I owe Wendy Dale, bigtime. So on that note, everyone, buy her book, “Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals.”

14. You’ve had a lot of different jobs since your first book, are you still working in the bars or are you doing something else? How does that affect your writing?

Most of my jobs have been bar tending, with one stint working at a bookstore, plus the occasional teaching gig. The jobs don’t really affect my writing, but they’re good for my mental health. Too many days with the windows blocked out, staring at a notebook and talking to sock puppets... that’s not good for my sanity. Bar tending keeps me in touch with humanity. The trick is, as every writer knows, to balance the necessity of work while carving out time to write. Which I’m not doing right now. I’ve pushed everything aside so I can finish this re-write and start circulating this manuscript.

15. Now that you’re stateside, what’s a day in the life of Craig, look like?

I haven’t had a typical day in months. I’ve moved twice since I got back, so haven’t been able to establish a routine. I just finished putting my library back into storage, and I’m living on a friend’s couch right now. The dust is settling and I’m pulling out of my funk; I’ve been hitting the gym in my friend’s condo complex and indulging in the odd vegetable or two. I shrank down to “The Machinist” level of weight while in Bolivia, and putting the pounds back on has been a bitch. But I’m eating and exercising, and the hard work of moving is done, at least for now. I got some recent feedback on the first chapters of the novel, and I’ve returned to it in earnest. My ideal routine is getting up and working on the novel, first thing for a few hours. Lunchtime means food, email, whatever business needs to be addressed. Evenings are for other writing projects, and I’ve got plenty. My focus and drive vanished after I returned home, but they’re coming back.

16. In an earlier interview about Dermaphoria, you said that you did around 20 drafts to get it down, now that you’ve got the first draft of your new book down, do you think it will take the same? How do you think your process has changed?

I wrote this book almost entirely longhand this time around, re-working each page as I wrote it. There isn’t a set of linear footprints telling me exactly how many drafts I’ve done; some parts have been re-written more than others, in multiple iterations until I had a finished working draft. This forced me to slow down and think about each line more carefully. I’m letting the prose breathe a lot more this time around, rather than firing the reader out of a cannon (the way I opened my first two). I typically have two or three notepads laid out, or use distinct pages from a notebook. On the first, I rough out a line, over and over, shuffling my word choices until I have it right. Sometimes it works immediately, other times it takes me half a page. Once I have it, I transcribe it to a fresh page, go back to the first and tackle the next line. When the second page has a full, finished paragraph, I cut through that. Polishing every line one by one and then compiling them into a single paragraph creates what I call the Liberace effect. All of these perfect little sentences sparkle, and all that effort backfires. The paragraph sounds too much like writing because the prose overpowers the story. So I have to grind down the edges a bit, make those lines work together instead of clamor for the spotlight and derail the flow of the story.

I still work on my dialogue separately. Instead of extracting the dialogue from the chapter after I’ve written, or writing it after the narrative prose, I’m writing each chapter’s dialogue first, this time around. This way I’m certain to have the characters—their words and actions—driving each chapter of the story, instead of having them pulled along by the narration. No phonetic spelling this time, except for “y’all” and “ain’t.” But no “wanna” or “gotta” or anything like that. This means choosing my characters’ words more carefully, which means making their voices more distinct, the characters more nuanced. Same with similes and metaphors. I’m stripping those back to as few as I possibly can, which forces me to describe things more precisely in the first place, rather than leaning on a comparison to something else to back up whatever image I’m trying to convey.

There’s other things I’m sure I’m forgetting, but the biggest change over the years has been working longhand. I like paper and ink, the tactile sensation of physically writing instead of a cursor on a screen. This makes me slow down and think more carefully about what I’m doing, and that’s how I get happily lost in the process.

I don’t put foil on my windows anymore, but I still stash or hide any clocks in my workspace. It’s easier to fall down the creative rabbit hole if I’m not aware of time passing. I still outline rigorously, mapping out every beat of the story in as much detail as I can.

My process will likely never stop evolving. Complacency is hazardous to creative work.

17. You’ve given a lot of great recommendations over the years, do you have any books you’ve been reading recently that you love, or has the current book taken all focus?

“Kockroach,” by Tyler Knox (William Lashner) wasn’t exactly a recent read, but it’s one of the few I can think of over the last few years I forced on everyone I could. Daniel Woodrell’s “Winter’s Bone” was brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Subdued but powerful writing, all in service of a very simple story. That’s the kind of wordsmithing I aspire to do. I met Woodrell recently, and I was shaking like a schoolgirl. I just couldn’t stop gushing. He took it in humble stride. Harry Crews, too. There’s this fat anthology of his that’s been staring at me from my bookshelf for ages. I finally cracked it open, and it’s been my companion during my couch-surfing of late. Old Micky Spillane. And John Ridley. Now there’s a solid noir writer, and truly underrated, in my opinion. Jennifer Egan’s “The Keep” was easily the highlight of my reading in Bolivia.

18. Channing Tatum. On one side, I’m pumped that it’s going to become a movie, on the other, I’m terrified. What are your thoughts? Are you going to have any input?

I’m optimistic about Channing Tatum. Plenty before him have overcome the low expectations set by their bone structure. Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp both come to mind. Both could have easily been typecast as pretty boys, but both have gained credibility and respect as actors over the years. Now that Tatum’s firmly established himself as bankable, as someone who’s not only a box office draw but who can open a movie, I think it’s entirely possible he’s looking to take the risks he was warned against early in his career. Yeah, I have high hopes for him. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that my high hopes are in vain if the Handbook film goes forward with the current script. No manner of casting could save this thing from certain disaster. The script is full of gunplay, fist fights and at least one car crash… loads of violence that has no basis in the story. It completely whitewashes Vincent’s drug habit. Most of the original characters in the novel are gone; most of the characters in the script have no basis in the novel (especially the midget mob boss named Hugo). It’s full of racist stereotypes and the treatment of Keara is appalling (she’s a bipolar stripper whom the audience first meets when she’s having a meltdown during her dancing shift… yeah, she’s taking her clothes off and crying in front of a roomful of men). To say nothing of the unrealistic settings (such as the combination strip joint and casino in Vegas where Keara works), the atrocious, tinny dialogue and the misguided happy ending. Seriously, it’s awful. The studio asked for my input, I gave it to them, and haven’t heard anything but a brief email response since then.

IMDB says Dustin Hoffman attached, but it doesn’t name the part and I haven’t seen it confirmed elsewhere. I’m hoping now that Tatum is also producing the film, he’ll have some say in the script and perhaps pull it away from the straight-to-streaming trash bin it’s so destined for. As far as I’m concerned, Channing Tatum is the film’s only hope.

19. If you were to get any piece of advice before you left your corporate job to write The Contortionist’s Handbook, what would you tell yourself?

Get an agent.

20. Where do you see yourself as an author in the next 10, 20 years? Do you have any specific goals you want to hit?

I suck at the future. I rarely see beyond the next year. My eyes are usually right on the path at my feet. All that concerns me now is getting this rewrite finished, making up my mind about the title and getting it out to agents. Then writing another book.

Thank you!

Goat

#6 Paul Tremblay

2010-12-15T00:00:00.032-05:00

20 Questions with Mourning Goats

INTERVIEW SIX

Paul Tremblay

I didn't know of Paul before In The Mean Time came out, but after reading it on my trusty Kindle, I want to read everything he's done. First up, The Little Sleep! He's also working on a project with Stephen Graham Jones that I'm excited to see. Anyway, enough with my excitement, here's another great interview with a great writer!

1. What comes to mind when you hear, “Mourning Goats?”

Oddly enough, I do not think of a farm animal that may or may not provide cheese depending
upon its mood. I do not think of a farm animal that may or may not be in the service of Satan.
Instead, I instantly think of a literary blog/interview website!

2. With two novels, two short story collections, and two novellas published, you’ve seen many different sides of publishing, what do you think is the hardest to break in to? How did you do it?

Certainly, the big NYC publishers remain the most difficult to break into. How did I do it? Stubborn
persistence, some talent, and a whole lot of luck, I guess. In 2003 I finished writing a quirky-
comedy novel called PHOBIA. I managed to get pre-blurbs (for lack of a better term) from two
amazingly talented and gracious writers: Poppy Z. Brite and Stewart O’Nan. Then I spent two
plus years collecting over 200 agent rejects. Most of the rejects went something like: “This is
funny and original, but we don’t know who we can sell this to.” I finally got my book on the desk
of Stephen Barbara, pretty much by accident. I’d sent a query to another agent who no longer
worked at the agency, but Stephen got the email and wanted to take a look. He understood the
book, suggested some revisions (his suggestions were spot on) and he took me on as a client. Of
course, we didn’t sell the novel (the publishers said the same thing the other agents said: “Funny,
original, but we don’t know who we can sell this to.”), but Stephen stuck with me. The sap.

3. I feel like being a writer isn’t anywhere near as lonely as it used to be, since we now have blogs, social media, websites, etc. It’s much easier to reach out to anyone. What do you like/dislike about this new accessibility?

The relatively new accessibility is my lifeline, frankly. So many of my good friends, and favorite
writers and lit reviewers/bloggers are not geographically close to me. My being able to keep in
touch with them so easily and frequently is not only a boon to my own work but to my sanity.
Being able to have online corners and crannies where the struggle is shared is supremely
important. At least it is, to me.

What I dislike is the exponentially expanding crush social media/information/sites that make it
more difficult to figure out where a writer should be spending her/his time wisely. I dislike the glut
of self-proclaimed genre experts (any genre, pick a genre) some of whom do more harm than
good, in terms of their disseminating wrong or biased information (in regards to what’s happening
in the genre(s)). Don’t get me wrong, with book coverage all but disappearing from print media
outlets, book bloggers/reviewers are vital in filling that void. I guess what I’m saying is I wish more
of the online folk were less interested in star f*cking, less interested in personal agendas, and
were more interested in promoting diverse, healthy, inclusive genres and literature in general.

4. You are an advisor for the Shirley Jackson awards, what does that entail?

A few years ago (and with the help of a whole slew of folks behind and in front of the scenes) F.
Brett Cox, JoAnn Cox, John Langan, Sarah Langan, and myself established the awards with the
blessing of the Shirley Jackson estate. For the first two years, I was a juror. Since leaving the
jury, I’ve assisted the administrator (JoAnn) and also served as an advisor. An advisor simply
keeps an eye and ear out for works that would potentially be a good fit for the award, and sends
those should-read-work-X suggestions to the jurors.

5. Thank you for In The Mean Time, it was brilliant, do you think short stories are easier or harder than novels?

Thank you! They may be harder to do well. Still, it’s hard for me to compare the forms, to
compare writing a 70,000 word novel to a 6,000 word short story. They are, obviously, different
beasts. My first attempts at novel writing were pretty flawed: I was a short story writer trying to
write a novel. Which meant that most of my early attempts at novels were loose, plotless, and
lacking some narrative drive. With The Little Sleep (and the novels after), I wrote a ten-page plot
synopsis before writing the novel, which I’ve found tremendously helpful.

But now that I have a handful of novels under my belt, writing short stories are more of a
challenge than they were pre-novels. A challenge, if nothing else, to keep the word counts
manageable: ie out of the dreaded novelette/novella range.

6. You’ve said that you didn’t start seriously writing until 2000, while relatively new to it all, you’re doing great, how do you explain your success?

Well, thanks. The why of whatever success (your mileage may vary on the definition of that word)
I’ve had breaks down in exact percentages:

--62.3% the kind help from other editors/writers and in the early-early going, friends and family
who were and are willing to read my stuff and offer feedback and criticism.

--10% chronically overactive imagination

--11.1% pessimism and negativeness

--0.3% talent

--16.3% my own damn hard work.

Man, I hope that adds up to 100%.

I don’t know. It’s hard for me to think about. The questions at either end of the pole—“Why does
my stuff get read?” and “Why doesn’t my stuff get read/bought more?”—tend to scare/freak me
out, so I try not to dwell on either for too long.

7. Being a writer and working in a high school...are you scared for the future of literature?

Communication? Language in general? LOL...

I’m not really concerned about the future of language/communication as it’s always been
evolving/changing.

If by the future of literature you mean publishing, then yeah, I’m scared. Despite my previously
claimed 11.1% of pessimism, I’m trying to remain positive that publishing will not continue to
devolve into a Mad Max world where the mid-list completely disappears, where the only genre
books published will be fad based and feature zombies or steampunk, where big names writers
are the only writers selling books, and where good books are hopelessly lost in a sea of self-
published ebooks.

8. When researching, I kept reading about Phobia, can you tell us about it, and, what’s happening with it?

PHOBIA is about Cam Cleeves, a neurotic dude with a whole host of odd fears: including the fear
of the inability to complete simple tasks. Think Confederacy of Dunces in Boston.

Nothing is happening with it. It’s in the trunk. Maybe some day, it’ll get out there. But I’m not in a
rush. It did it’s job for me, as far as I’m concerned.

9. You are working on a Young Adult novel with fellow Mourning Goats interviewee, Stephen Graham Jones, what has that been like?

Stephen has not been callously trashing my contributions. He has not compared my writing to
the inchoate scratching of a syphilitic Aye Aye. He has not issued any sort of threats, mocking or
otherwise, should I fail to live up to his lofty standards. He certainly has not promised to cut off my
fingers, in sections, one knuckle at a time, for every typo and grammatical mistake I might make
in our manuscript.

*sliding note under the door. HELP ME is written in old ketchup, at least you hope it’s old
ketchup*

Of course, I kid. It has been and continues to be an honor working with Stephen. He’s been
one of my favorite writers for years, and now, he’s a cherished friend who will never beat me in
basketball.

10. What’s your favorite part about teaching? Also, would you consider teaching fiction?

Summer!

Well. I suppose I do enjoy working with kids. I enjoy teaching/telling people something they don’t
know. I like being part of that discovery: the discovery of some new nugget of truth. It’s almost like
writing in a way. A writer’s job should be to tell the truth as how they see it.

I’ve had a few opportunities to teach writing workshops and they were a blast. I would definitely
consider teaching a writing class. But at the same time, I’d be terrified of being exposed as a
fraud.

11. What were the biggest differences you saw at the publishing houses?

At Holt I’ve had multiple editors, publicists, marketing conference calls, and other more sort of
businessy (for lack of a better made up word) responsibilities and pressures. The smaller presses
tend to be a count-on-one-hand number of people show. So bigger reach and power with the big
house, a more personal touch with the smaller presses.

12. You have a master’s degree in mathematics, most writers I know relate math to masochism, how were you drawn to it? Do you feel any connection between mathematics and writing?

As an unambitious kid, I stuck with math because I was good at it. And I more or less followed
that path in college and grad school. Although, I only got into the UVM master’s program because
the dean of the math department fortuitously was moving his office in July of ’93 and he found my
lost application under his desk. Three days later I was in and had a teaching fellowship to boot.

I enjoy the logic and the order of math, particularly calculus. I enjoy the creativity that the higher
levels of math require. I enjoy the funky symbols we get to use too.

I don’t think there is much of a writing connection to math, but perhaps I take an analytical

approach to writing. I’ve never been able to just get a quick rough draft out and then chisel away
at the mess until the final product appears. I plod ahead one sentence at a time, revising as I go,
and I always write in order (by in order, I don’t mean every story I write is linear, far from it. I just
always start at what I think is the beginning of the particular story I’m writing and sally forth until I
type the end, wherever that end might be).

The End. (er, but only the end of the answer to that question!)

13. I just read that the New York Times is going to have an e-book top-seller list starting next year. Do you think this is necessary? Are e-readers a different breed than book readers?

I don’t know if it’s necessary (is anything necessary?), but it’ll be interesting to see if the list
mirrors the hardcopy best sellers list. I’m not sure we can conclude much about an entire group
of people like that (e-readers). I guess if nothing else we can conclude they can afford to buy
a relatively expensive electronic e-reading device of some kind (phone, computer, or separate
device). I do find myself annoyed with the people who give books one star reviews because the
kindle price is too high for their liking; espousing a lame-brained rationale of “oh the authors could
stop this if they really wanted to.” Because yes, that’s how publishing works.

14. The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland are your two published novels can you tell us anything about the third novel, Sleep at the End of the World? The title tells me that it might be true trilogy ender.

Well, it’s a novel that might not ever happen. I’m currently not contracted to write a third Genevich
novel, and I’m not working on it now. If I were to write a third, that would be the title and it would
be the last.

15. You have a very eclectic style, who are some of your biggest influences? Are you reading anything now that you want our readers to know about?

I like to think I have a lot of influences, that everything I read influences me in some way. Writers
I continue go back to for inspiration include Kurt Vonnegut, Aimee Bender, Stephen King, Stewart
O’Nan, Chuck Palahniuk, and Jim Shepard.

Favorite books from 2010 that folks should read: Craig Davidson’s Sarah Court, Aimee Bender’s
The Peculiar Sadness of Lemon Cake, and Laird Barron’s Occultation.

16. In your Velvet interview, I love that you said, “when the writing is going good, I'm writing scared." Can you explain this a little more? Do you feel this often?

I’m scared that I’m not serving the story correctly, that I’m screwing up the plot or character or
voice up. I’m scared that I’ll have nothing important to say. And I write scared that no one will like
it, or worse than no one liking it: it’ll be met with apathy. A reader giving a shrug.

I feel this way whenever I’m writing fiction.

17. Do you write every day? Specific times? What does a normal day look like to Paul Tremblay?

Lately, I’ve fallen into doing most of my writing at night. But I still try and get stuff done at school
if I have a free period. In the spring, when my school schedule calms down a bit, I can get more
stuff done at school. Otherwise, it’s at night, after the kids go to bed. I don’t sleep enough.

18. You’ve started a “mainstream lit novel,” can you tell us anything about it or do you keep that a secret until you’ve completed it?

Yeah, I don’t want to really say anything about it. I’ve written a brief summary, and I’m afraid that
if I say anything, then I’d be honor-bound to write it. I haven’t decided if I’m going to go for it yet.

And I’m afraid if I talk about it here, Stephen will break my toes for admitting that I’m not solely
working on our YA novel all hours of the day.

19. If you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice before undertaking the writing of your first novel, what would it be?

Do you mean my first attempt at a novel? Or my first sold novel? My first sold novel is really like
my 4.5th novel.

For The Little Sleep: I’d tell myself to add zombies and/or sparkly vampires.

For my first ever attempt at a novel: I’d tell myself to relax and that it was okay to screw up, even
okay to fail. Then I would’ve told that handsome bastard to write a plot outline/synopsis before
sitting down to write the novel.

20. Other than the YA novel with Stephen Graham Jones and the mainstream lit novel, what else are you working on now?

Besides anything else I might’ve mentioned above, I’m co-editing with John Langan a reprint
anthology called CREATURE! Thirty Years of Monster Stories. No werewolves, vampires, or
zombies. Monsters.

John has yet to threaten my lovely fingers and toes like Stephen has. Give him time….

Thank you!

Goat

#5 Michael Kun

2010-12-01T00:00:00.012-05:00

20 Questions with Mourning Goats

INTERVIEW FIVE

Michael Kun

I found Michael Kun years ago when his second book, The Locklear Letters, was published, and I'm so happy I did! It's one of the funniest books I've ever read. All of his books have a sense of humor mixed in to them with a view on life that is purely original. Even though he's a lawyer, I will cut him some slack because of his wonderful collection of books, as well as the answers he provided us here. Enjoy!

1. What comes to mind when you hear, “Mourning Goats?”

I think immediately of Mourning Goat and Takei, the wonderful 1960s Saturday morning cartoon series from Japan. As I recall, Takei Yunoshi was an orphan boy who ran away one evening and stumbled upon a sad billy goat (Mourning Goat) by a river. Mourning Goat was also an ophan, and, though a billy goat, he could speak several languages and knew Morse Code. The two became fast friends and traveled the countryside together, eating plants and uncooked fish and solving mysteries along the way. I believe the Harlem Globetrotters appeared in one episode. Of course, I may be mistaken about some of this. Perhaps all.

2. You were the first author at MacAdam Cage to have a three book deal, what did this mean to your career and what was it like working with the press?

The three-book deal with MacAdam Cage came on the heels of The Locklear Letters. The book was getting some attention, largely from BookSense and Amazon, and we were waiting for the book to take off and become an international bestseller so I could quit my job and travel the world, letting people kiss my hand and buy me drinks and cake, as I understand they are wont to do with renowned authors. We're still waiting. Especially for the cake.

I don't remember much about the negotiation other than that MacAdam Cage wanted to lock me up for three books (which sounded great to me since my next three books were nearly complete) and that their draft contract included a term whereby I would receive a huge bonus if one of the three books made it to #1 on the New York Times bestsellers list. I knew that wasn't going to happen, so we renegotiated the contract to provide that I would receive the same enormous bonus if I became the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, which seemed equally plausible. I am proud to say that, to my knowledge, I am the only author to negotiate such a clause with any publisher. And, as a lawyer, I can tell you that the clause is air tight. (Not incidentally, that clause gives me an excuse to eat whatever and whenever I want because I need to keep my weight up. After all, I don't get the bonus if I become the middleweight champion. Just heavyweight. The contract is very explicit on that point.)

I enjoyed my relationship with MacAdam Cage. I know they have fallen on some rough times, as have many publishers, and I hope they pull out of it. My favorite memory of my time with MacAdam Cage was the 2003 Book Expo in Los Angeles, where I live and work. David Poindexter, the publisher, arranged for a dinner for their authors who were attending the Expo. I was there to promote The Locklear Letters, my first book in 13 years, which most of the other authors where too young to have even heard. Among the group at dinner were Audrey Niffeneggar (The Time Traveler's Wife), Craig Clevenger (The Contortionist's Handbook), Mark Dunn (Ella Minnow Pea), and Amanda Eyre Ward (Sleep Toward Heaven). It was a very impressive group, and I've read and enjoyed each of their books since (and recommend them all). The reason I mention it, though, is that there was a spirit of camaraderie among the group that you often don't see among writers. No competitiveness, no back-biting, but the opposite. It felt like a team. Audrey and I have lost touch over the years, though I have enjoyed watching her tremendous success, but Craig, Mark and Amanda became and have remained my friends.

3. You never officially studied writing in college, has it always been a passion of yours? What sparked the first words?

Actually, I did study writing in college, I just didn't major in it. I studied in the writing seminars program at the Johns Hopkins University under Stephen Dixon.

It's actually a funny story how that came about, though, and I apologize in advance in it sounds self-congratulatory. I hadn't intended to take any writing classes at Hopkins, but I wrote a column for the campus newspaper that started receiving a bit of attention. After reading them, Steve tracked me down at my part-time job to invite me to take some of his classes. (My part-time job was working in the kiosk in the student union that sold candy, cigarettes and newspapers. Although I'm not sure I should say "sold" since I don't recall ever actually charging anyone for anything.) I expressed my concern to Steve about the structure of creative writing classes -- I didn't like the idea of being told to write about my grandmother one week, then to write about my dog the next week -- and Steve said, "Listen, you can ignore whatever assignment I give the class and write whatever you want. Just don't tell anyone." Or at least that's how I remember it. So I took classes with Steve for 3 years, wrote whatever I wanted, and got some very helpful feedback from him. His comments were often longer than the stories themselves. Eventually, Steve submitted one of my stories to Daniel Menaker at The New Yorker, and while that story was not accepted, that gave me the belief that someone, somewhere, might want to publish something I'd written.

In any event, not only did I study with Steve, but I'm proud to say I was his favorite student until Rosemary Mahoney came along, but I can't complain about that. She's a better writer than I, and has published a few exceptional books, including Whoredom in Kimmage.

By the way, if your readers aren't familiar with Stephen Dixon, I'd suggest they start with his short story collection, 16 Stories. As you may know, he came thisclose to winning the National Book Award for his novels Frog and Interstate some time ago, but I'm not sure I'd recommend those at first to readers who aren't familiar with Steve or his work.

And if Stephen Dixon should happen to stumble upon this interview, I say, "Hey, Steve. Hope you're enjoying your retirement. Thanks again for your help. And for helping me pad my GPA. And for the nice jacket blurb for The Locklear Letters. In that order."

4. Working full-time and writing a novel is hard, how do you make it happen when your full-time job is being an attorney?

I know you don't want to hear this, but my job, my law firm (Epstein Becker & Green), my clients and my cases come before my writing. I have people counting on me. I have a wife and a daughter, both of whom seem to like me, and we couldn't live for very long on what I make writing. And I have partners and clients who need me to devote my attention and creativity to the matters I'm handling because, in the practice of law, any slip-up or oversight can be costly, particularly in litigation. If I have spare time at night or on the weekends, and if I have the inspiration, I write. If I don't, I don't. Fortunately, to date, that's worked out fine.

5. What is your favorite style to write in? Novels, short stories or non-fiction, and why?

Non-fiction is the easiest for me, particularly the type of non-fiction that I write, which is usually about sports. Writing about pro football for www.washingtonpost.com/theleague is a pleasure because it comes very naturally.

But "easiest" isn't necessarily "favorite," is it? My favorite would be short stories because of the challenge to do something, to affect a reader, in a relatively short space. Not incidentally, there's more room for experimentation and less of a sense of failure if the experiment blows up in your face. If you read my short story collection, Corrections to My Memoirs, you can hear a few of those explosions.

6. I love the piece you wrote on Why Lawyers Write Novels, do you think anything like that could ever happen in the field?

Thanks, Goat. I'm glad you enjoyed the piece. Perhaps you'll include a link so readers will know what you're referring to. The idea that the legal profession needs an overhaul isn't a new or profound one, but I'm sad to say it's unlikely to happen in my lifetime. Simply put, the profession has no incentive to police itself more closely that it already does. Incompetent, dishonest or unethical lawyers only create more work and more profit for the other lawyers. If the good lawyers drove out the bad ones, the good ones would have less work to do, which of course translates to less money. To the extent the legal system is set up to benefit lawyers, it's working perfectly.

7. You proposed to your wife with the dedication page from You Poor Monster, that’s pretty epic, is she your first reader? If not, who is?

I did propose to Amy with the dedication page of You Poor Monster. I gave her a draft of the novel on her birthday and asked her to turn to that page, where it read, "To my wife." She's pretty funny, and I only learned later that she nearly responded, "I didn't know you were married." Now that I think of it, I'm not sure she actually said, "Yes."

My wife is one of my first readers these days, but not the only one. It's not that I don't trust her opinion, but we all know she's so damned lucky to be married to me that she'd never tell me if something stunk. (Please imagine I just winked as I said that.) She's one of the people I asked to take a look at my new book, Everybody Says Hello. The others are my old friends Bert Johnson and Gary Campbell.

Like many writers, I've been very fortunate to have had a number of people who were willing to read my work over the years, and to give me feedback, and I always worry that I've never thanked them enough.

In college, it was Kathryn Rhett, who's gone on to have a career as a poet, memoirist and editor. I believe she's teaching creative writing in Pennsylvania these days. (If she should stumble upon this, I say, "Thanks, Kath.")

When I was in law school and for several years afterward, I relied upon my friend and law school classmate Susan Stevens, without whom I can honestly say that I never would have had a word published. I know if she ever reads this she will accuse me of being dramatic, but it's true. I could pass a polygraph on that. ("Thanks, Sue.")

After that, I relied upon my good friends Andy Bienstock and Gary Campbell to read and comment on my writing. ("Thanks, guys.")

There were also a couple of ex-girlfriends who gave me their thoughts, too, but if you break up with me, you don't get your name mentioned in "Mourning Goats." Sorry, but those are the rules.

8. Do you have time to read for pleasure? What are some recommendations for the readers?

I do have some time to read for pleasure, mostly late at night or when I'm traveling. Unfortunately, I've been suffering from "reader's block" for a while. I buy books with the full intention of reading them, then put them aside if I can't get into them after 10 or 12 pages. It's not the books or the authors. It's me.

That said, I there are two books I've read recently that I recommend.

First is Maile Meloy's short story collection Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It. She's a remarkable writer. Her writing seems so effortless, and she has the rare ability to make you care about a character within a few sentences.

The second is Stephen Elliott's The Adderall Diaries. The book isn't up my alley in any way. I normally steer clear of memoirs, and memoirs about drug use and violence wouldn't usually intrigue me. But Stephen and I used to share an editor, and we've met a few times over the years, so I picked it up just to support another writer. Within a page I was hooked. It's a unique, compelling book, and Stephen's lack of faith in his own memories and willingness to share adventures that most of us would hide forever is admirable.

I also love Mo Willems' Leonardo the Terrible Monster. It's a kids' book that I've read to my daughter Paige far too many times, but never tire of.

9. Have any/all of your books been optioned for movies? Which would you like to see done most? Least?

The Locklear Letters has been optioned for a movie several times. I honestly don't know who has the option these days. There was a brief period of time when Pat O'Brien, Heather Locklear and I were talking about producing the movie together, but that never panned out. I'd still love to see The Locklear Letters turned into a movie, but the one I'd really like to see made into a movie is You Poor Monster. Granted, Charlie Kauffman might need to write the script to keep the two competing narratives going, but I can picture it in my mind. For some reason I always seen Tom Hanks as Shoogey.

I have no interest in seeing The Baseball Uncyclopedia: The Movie. Nor should anyone else.

10. On your website it says you’re currently working on a new book (my favorite title in the list is Everybody Says Hello), what can you tell us about it?

I just finished the final draft of Everybody Says Hello a couple weeks ago. It's a stand-alone Sid Straw epistolary novel. Sid was the main character in The Locklear Letters. In Everybody Says Hello, he relocates to California for a new job after his girlfriend leaves him. I'd like to think that it's every bit as entertaining as The Locklear Letters, but perhaps a bit more poignant. And, candidly, I hope the book finds a nice audience because I'd like to revisit the character every 5 years or so. I could see Sid Straw becoming my Rabbit Angstrom.

11. You have your website, facebook, and email address very accessible to your fans, have you had a lot of interaction since your second book? What do you see has changed since A Thousand Benjamins?

The way authors interact with their readers has changed completely since A Thousand Benjamins came out 20 years ago. Then, if readers wanted to share some thoughts with an author, they'd have to mail a letter to the publisher and hope it got forwarded. Now, they can reach many writers instantaneously through websites or email. I don't know about other writers, but it makes my day to get a kind email from a reader. And I'm more than happy to call in to talk with a book club.

12. We recently interviewed Pat Walsh here at Mourning Goats, and was wondering if he’s still your editor at MacAdam Cage and what your thoughts are about him (be gentle). :-)

Pat hasn't been my editor for a few years. As you may know, he left MacAdam Cage for a while, and I had different editors there for my last two books. Pat's a good guy and was always very supportive of my writing. I just saw him and David Poindexter, the publisher, when I was in San Francisco a few weeks back, and we all had a nice time catching up. Although, now that I think of it, my wallet was missing afterward.

13. Can you tell us a little bit about your uncyclopedias? Did you come up with the idea?

I had wanted to write a baseball book for some time, but none of my ideas were even getting a nibble from publishers. The quirky-obscure-writer-writes-quirky-stuff-about-baseball pitch was going nowhere. Then one night I had the idea of writing a book that would ostensibly debunk some commonly held notions about the game and calling it an "uncyclopedia." Seemed like a fun word that I thought I was making up. And The Baseball Uncyclopedia was born. Then The Football Uncyclopedia. I'm working on The Movie Uncyclopedia with my friends Lou Harry (The High-Impact Infidelity Diet), Theresa Hoiles (Love, Luck and Lore) and Eric Feinstein. Then I'm giving up on this uncyclopedia stuff.

14. I read a review on amazon from a “past girlfriend” that said “Mike wrote two great books -- A Thousand Benjamins and Our Poor Sweet Napoleon -- then stopped writing. He won't talk about it, but he had his heart broken by a girl he went to law school with and just lost the desire to write.” Is there any truth to this? Also, is there anywhere to read Our Poor Sweet Napoleon?

Some of it is true, some of it isn't. And some of it she's just confused about. (And, yes, I can figure out who wrote that review. Terrific woman. Saw her at a book signing in Baltimore a few years back. Glad she's doing well.)

Did I write two great books, A Thousand Benjamins and Our Poor Sweet Napoleon? Yes and no. I wrote them, but they're not great books. I still appreciate all of the kind and generous reviews for A Thousand Benjamins, and I'm truly sorry if I haven't lived up to the predictions of those reviewers, but today it seems very clearly a book written by a young man trying to sound wiser than he really was. As for Our Poor Sweet Napoleon, it was serialized over 36 weeks in The City Paper in Baltimore back in the early 1990s. I reworked it over the course of 10 years or so, and it eventually became You Poor Monster. I'm sure someone somewhere still has the original, serialized version, though God knows why anyone would want to read it now. I certainly don't. It was unwieldy and vain. It was written by a young writer who had let his reviews go to his head.

Did I stop writing for a while after those books? Yes.

Was it because I had my heart broken by a girl I went to law school with and lost the desire to write? No. I did have my heart broken around that time, but not by anyone I went to law school with, and I didn't lose the desire to write. I kept revising Our Poor Sweet Napoleon, but just didn't have much time to write because of my work.

15. You co-authored two books, what was the process like in both of them? How hard was it to agree on topics and/or ideas to put in the book?

You're referring to The Baseball Uncyclopedia and The Football Uncyclopedia. They were both a pleasure to work on, and I rarely butted heads with my co-authors on either. In both cases, we would email each other various sections, then share feedback, until we had a final working draft. From there, we sat down together and did a final edit.

16. You have some very loyal fans, if you read the reviews on Amazon.com, they actually bash the people that have given bad reviews of your books, have you perused the reviews? What are your thoughts?

Over the years I suspect I have seen most, if not all, of those Amazon reviews. Friends email the links to me all the time. There are some very kind ones, which I appreciate. And there are some that are not so kind. There's one reader who posts a venomous, one-star review of each of my books. I honestly don't know why he or she would keep reading anything of mine if he or she dislikes my writing so much. If I don't like a book, I'm not likely to pick up that writer's next book, let alone his next five. I suspect that he or she hasn't read any of them, but that it's someone I've crossed paths with personally or professionally who's using the anonymity of Amazon.com to get even with me. To the extent other readers have been watching my back, I'm touched. And it they want to step up and identify themselves, I'll buy them a drink.

17. I got a lot of your books on my kindle (already had them in hardcover, but the prices were so good I couldn’t pass them up, just read The Locklear Letters, again!) What do you think about the way publishing is going?

It's a very strange time for publishing, isn't it, and it's hard to tell how much of what's happening is a result of the recession, declining interest or technology.

In many ways it's both the best of times and the worst of times to be a writer. If you're looking to get published in the traditional sense -- hardcover books sold in brick-and-mortar stores -- it's the worst of times. It's harder than ever to get a contract, let alone an advance you could live on. But if you just want to write something and share it with the world, it couldn't be easier or cheaper to do it. All you need is computer and a website.

As for e-books and e-readers and the impact they will have, I know no more than anyone else, and my feelings are very mixed. As a reader myself, I haven't purchased an e-reader yet, although I have to admit that I'm more intrigued than ever by iPads, Nooks and Kindles and may eventually give in and buy one, mostly for travel. The reason I haven't done so to date is that I enjoy bookstores too much. The experience of being in a bookstore is often more enjoyable to me than actually reading a book, and I would miss that. Similarly, I would miss the feel of holding a book in my hands. That said, as a writer, I know that e-books will be an important part of my future.

How e-books and e-readers will affect bookstores is another issue. Independent bookstores have been very kind to me over the years, and I've spent more than my fair share of time and money in them. (Two of my favorites off the top of my head -- BookWorks in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Read Between The Lynes in Woodstock, Illinois.) I want to see them continue to flourish, but e-books are a serious threat to them.

I know it's fashionable to trash the big chain bookstores, but I love Barnes & Noble and Borders, too. Not just because they have been very kind to me both nationally and locally, but because I enjoy the experience offered by their stores. No, not the coffee, but the selection and the roominess.

There's room for both the independents and the chains. And for Amazon, too. I know it's fashionable to trash Amazon for its impact on publishing, but I won't do that either. If the idea behind being a writer is to get your words in as many hands as possible, in many ways Amazon is the best thing to happen to writers in decades.

But e-books and e-readers change all of this. If they increase readers and sales, great. If they lead to the end of physical books and brick-and-mortar stores, terrible. If I had to predict the future, I don't see bookstores vanishing. There are too many of us who enjoy the experience of bookstores and of holding a book. But as e-readers inevitably become more popular, I suspect that the business models will change, and bookstores will have a different relationship with e-books.

18. I loved the letters on your website to co-workers, any plans for more? Have any of your co-workers ever realized that they were about them?

Thanks. Maybe you'll provide a link so your readers will see what you're referring to. I was just fooling around, and I enlisted some help in faxing the fake letters to my co-workers remotely so they hopefully wouldn't figure out that they came from me. I don't know if I should be proud or offended that they figured it out immediately. I'm afraid I'm done with the fake letters to co-workers, at least for now. I'm trying to act more like an adult these days.

19. What is the best advice you can give to writers out there?

Write something. Anything. But just write. I can't tell you how many people I've met over the years who have introduced themselves as writers but who haven't written anything. I don't mean that they haven't published anything, but that they haven't written anything. They'll talk your ear off about an idea they have, and two years later they're still talking about the same idea, not having written a word. Don't be that person. Write. If you like it, keep it. If you don't like it, still keep it. You never know if your opinion of it will change.

20. What’s next for Michael Kun? Do you see yourself retiring from law anytime soon to write full-time?

I hope that Everybody Says Hello will be out sometime in 2011 or early 2012. The same for The Movie Uncyclopedia.

I've started work on a new novel called This Means War, but I'm not very far along and will likely have to change the title as I've seen there's a movie coming out soon with that title. I'm leaning toward calling it Ten (More) Commandments. I will probably talk myself out of that by the time you post this interview.

I hope to keep writing about the National Football League for www.thewashingtonpost.com/theleague, if they still want me and if Brett Favre doesn't have me bumped off. I haven't had too many kind things to say about him.

As for retirement, that's not going to happen for a long, long time. Our daughter is 4 years old. If I'm doing my math right, we've got 17 more years of food, clothing and tuition for that kid. But that's fine. She's a great kid, even if she has some odd plans for the future. She's already decided she want to be a writer when she grows up. A writer and an "ice ballerina," whatever that is.

Thank you, Michael!
Goat

#4 Monica Drake

2010-11-15T00:00:00.007-05:00

20 Questions With Mourning Goats
INTERVIEW FOUR
Monica Drake

Monica has a lot going on right now with teaching, a family, a new novel, two films, and a plethora of other exciting activities, but she fit in Mourning Goats, and we're happy she did! I definitely never thought one of our interviews would involve juggling and a vibrator demonstrator, but as you read below, it has!

1. What comes to mind when you hear, “Mourning Goats?”

I ran this question by a friend. She immediately said, “An erection.” I have no idea why. Personally, I think of a mournful bleating, a forlorn field, a gently clanging bell. Maybe the impression falls somewhere in a combination of the two, an erection in a forlorn field, a solemn bleat, a thrill, a bell. Mourning Goats. Rock on.

2. Kristen Wiig, of Saturday Night Live, is planning on starring in and writing the script for Clown Girl's big screen adaptation, where is she in the process and what do you think about it?

I’m excited to see how she interprets it and translates it to the screen. I have no idea where they are in the process right now. Those Hollywood folks don’t keep me updated.

3. You’ve already seen one of your stories go from paper to film, what is it like watching your story? Georgie’s Big Break was just made into a short film by Andy Mingo.

That film is in process right now too, and I think it’s going to be fabulous. Andy Mingo has re-conceived of the story in a mocumentary form. He’s making use of Wordstock, Portland’s literary festival, as a backdrop, and blending the line between truth and fiction. We've got a great line-up of celebrities stepping in for roles, too, including Zia McCabe of the Dandy Warhols, Willy Vlautin of Richmond Fontaine, and Cheslea Cain, thriller New York Times Best Seller author. It’s a great chance to work with creative people I admire, and people who make me happy. I’m thrilled to see the story move into a new form.

4. In Clown Girl, there’s a lot of talk about juggling and balloon tying, can you tell us how the novel grew from a temp job out of college to where it went in your novel?

The clown work I did wasn’t so much a temp job out of college as one of the many jobs I had while in school. I went to Portland State University, an inexpensive commuter college in the city, and I worked the whole time. I never had that experience of dedicating myself to school without carrying one or more jobs on the side.

In college I studied animal behavior, psychology, art history, theater arts. I look at my transcripts now, and see how little focus I had, but how much stone solid enthusiasm. I was a hand-raiser. I was in a movement arts class when somebody needed a clown, and I raised my hand. I got the contact information, and later got the job as one of two or three hired to be a clown at Portland’s “Food Fair,” a corporate event in the convention center where restaurants came together to promote their image. While I was working that first gig, individual companies at the event hired me, so I had a string of clown work.

Later, at other jobs, the clown energy would stay with me. I’d feel it as I worked selling art, and when I made phone calls for telemarketing. I felt it as I carried trays in restaurants and asked customers to follow me, as a hostess. It was all clown work, in one costume or another, on a changing stage. It was a way to see the world. At the same time, I was working on art, painting and drawing and writing stories.

I wanted to capture some of that in Clown Girl, to show what it means to be a creative person in a world that may not always be receptive to the art in question.

5. I enjoyed your book on my kindle. What do you think about e-publishing? Do you think it’s going to take over, or will there always be paper books?

I don’t know anything about e-publishing. Sometimes I read on my computer, but love my books. I’m glad Clown Girl is now an e-book, but I don’t know when or if I’ll start reading novels that way. Was it a good way for you to read?

6. If you look up Monica Drake on youtube, the first two videos are of or about you, then they almost all focus on music or news about Monica and Drake (musicians). What do you think about the access to information on the web? What does it mean for authors and publishing?

It’s amazing to be able to be in touch with readers and writers so easily. I’ve heard from readers in Ireland, Australia, Italy and Thailand. I wouldn’t know my novel made it to those places if readers didn’t send me notes, or friend me on Facebook. I’ve seen pictures of my novel in bookstore windows in far-flung towns. That makes my heart sing. It’s outrageous, in a good way, really. I love it.

7. I love the story you tell about the first time you met with Spanbauer’s writing group at the condemned house, could you tell the readers about this meeting? What was your favorite part about your time with them?

When I first met Tom, he was teaching an evening class set in a grade school. We all sat at tiny chairs, in the grade school library, and talked writing. Then he moved it to his house. He gave out an address, and I signed up. I took the bus, looked for the house. It was dark, winter, and raining, and when I got there the only house had a big orange “condemned” sticker on the front door. The steps had fallen away. It was scary. But I went up and into the yard and around the side of where the steps should be, and knocked on the door, and Tom was there. It was the right house, on a dark and stormy night.

That was the first big hurdle to learning to write—to be brave, and knock on that door, in the dark. It seemed so wrong, and yet so inviting. Those of us who were willing to take that step, I think we were a self-selecting and daring crew.

My favorite part about my time in Tom’s Dangerous Writers workshop was definitely the brandy. The brandy started after the wine, and the wine only started after workshop wrapped up, because we took the work seriously and didn’t drink while we read or commented, but after workshop nobody wanted to go home and Tom’s couch was as a good place as any to sleep.

But wait. Maybe you mean something else. Something more about writing.

In that way what I liked most about Tom’s was the sense of urgency and camaraderie. We were all in this writing thing together, for better or worse. One night Tom held his hand over his big dinner table, and said, “Lets pile up the rejections. Send work out, and we’ll pile’em right here.” And in that way he gave us all permission to fail, with the understanding that if we persisted and let ourselves fail, sooner or later we’d break
through. He said, “Clock in, do your work, eventually you’ll get a raise.” I still imagine that invisible pile of mingled rejection letters, and somehow that’s an image of success in my mind.

8. Did I read right, you’re still doing workshops with Chuck, as well as Chelsea Cain (author of Heartsick)?

Yes, we meet once a week. It’s an honor and a party.

9. You went to the University of Arizona for your MFA, what can you tell us about the experience? Did you enjoy the MFA?

These are questions I still ask myself…Did I enjoy it? At the time, when I was at the University of Arizona, it seemed a hard, alienating, competitive place, where I met some fabulous people. Oddly, I feel closer to those people outside “the program,” than when we were writing and sharing work together on a regular basis.

It was very unlike the workshop situation I’d been in with Tom Spanbauer. What I learned in Tom’s workshop gave me the motivation to start writing and keep going. What I learned in grad school had more to do, perhaps, with how to critique the work of others, and so look more objectively at my own writing.

10. Splatter Art with Painter Boy, is probably one of the funniest/saddest sex stories I’ve read, please tell me that wasn’t based on a real story.

Ha! So glad you got a kick out of it!

11. You are an associate professor at Pacific NW College of Art, what do you teach and do you have any book recommendations from class?

I teach composition and literature to art students.

12. Hawthorne, your publisher for Clown Girl, said that their first print run was 2,000 more than normal for their books, what did you think when you heard that? Also, what are your thoughts on Hawthorne overall?

Hawthorne has been great. They design the most beautiful covers I’ve seen anywhere, really, and they get behind each book they produce. It’s a small operation with a big heart and a genuine love of literature. The company was started with the aim of finding literary work corporate publishing wouldn’t take on. They’ve done a great job of it.

13. You’ve had a lot of success with your short stories (Arizona Commission on the Arts Award, the Alligator Juniper Prize in Fiction, a Millay Colony Fellowship, and were a Tennessee Williams scholar at Sewanee Writers Workshop), what do you have your eye on next?

I’ve just finished another novel. I hope it finds success out there.

14. Your husband, Kassten Alonso, is also a novelist, is there a lot of collaboration here when you’re working on a piece, do you share, what is life like living with another writer?

We both work really hard all the time. Day jobs, night writing, parenting. It’s a lot of work. Sometimes we talk writing. More often, we talk about our lives, our days.

15. You have a young daughter, where do you find the time to write? What’s a typical day look like to Monica Drake?

I'm a mother and a professor, and I have about sixty students each semester. I spend a lot of time thinking about reading other people's work, coaching them along when and as I can.

But I've always been busy, always working, usually more than one job, so I'm used to carrying an idea or a sentence in my head until I find time to write it down. I don't manage to write every day, and certainly not at the same time each day--that kind of writing guide book wisdom assumes a level of luxury, based on time and autonomy.

Instead, I try to balance everything: home remodeling, sheet rocking, child care, grading, riding my bike, writing, workshop, reading, cooking...all of it.

Also, I make things more complicated because I tend to be enthusiastic. I say yes, when invitations sound fun. This coming week I'll be modeling swimsuits in a fashion show, if you can believe that. Today I have a swimsuit fitting, between writing time and when I take my daughter to ballet.

16. I heard you once took a job demonstrating vibrators, care to elaborate?

Ha! Where are you getting this? Actually, I was offered the job, and I took it, but then when I showed up on the first day they said I had to dress better. Dress better? I was in black jeans, a turtle neck. I was in ordinary Portland, Oregon fall clothes. I didn’t want to spend money to make money, even if the amounts under consideration were small all around. I said, “No thanks,” got on my old clunker bike and road home again.

17. Are you still saving Schipperke’s? Any more psychic dogs in your life?

I have one dear rescued Schipperke at my feet right now, Ruben, sleeping soundly.

18. You’ve had a few different agents over the years, do you currently? How have they influenced your writing and publishing?

I’ve had two agents over the past decade, both really top-notch, but at the time neither seemed quite right for selling the work I was writing in particular. That was earlier on in my writing career, especially the first agent, which was a really long time ago. We parted on good terms. I sold Clown Girl myself, instead, then went on to sell foreign rights and movie rights, all un-agented.

I believe Clown Girl proved itself. It’s a small-press book that’s found its way into the big world. Now I have new novel completed, and I’d like to find the right agent to sell the work. For a while I worked selling art. From that experience, I know that a little conviction can go a long way. I’m looking an agent who can speak about my work with conviction, compassion, and love. If there were a match.com to hook writers up with agents, I’d sign on. For now, I’m in conversation with an agent or two. We’ll see what happens.

19. Do you think being a clown earlier in your career helped you move into teaching easier?

Yes, completely. As a teacher, I don’t try to take on the role of having all the answers. Instead my aim is to model a willingness to take risks—risk taking is a clown quality—and to encourage students to feel okay about taking risks, too. I try to let the class be casual, smart, surprising. That’s my goal, anyway.

20. You’re currently working on The Stud Book, can you tell us a little bit about it? Do you have a time frame for when it will be out?

I’ve recently finished this novel, and am the start of looking around for the right match with an agent. It’s an edgy dark comedy. It takes some risks, with broad humor and bawdy scenes, and reaches what I hope is a serious and significant level of content, despite some good times. In some ways, it is similar to clown girl in using an element of physical comedy, but overall its very different. It has an ensemble cast, and a social
conscious I think. We’ll see how readers interpret what I’m trying to do.

Thank you, Monica!
Goat

#3 Vincent Louis Carrella

2010-11-01T00:00:00.001-04:00

20 Questions with Mourning Goats

INTERVIEW THREE

Vincent Louis Carrella

When I read Serpent Box the first time, I finished it with a deeper understanding of being human. It left me with a sense of loss and sadness, but that deep down, it was all going to be okay. This interview did it again. I hope you read over the words slowly and delibrately, I know Vincent did.

1. What comes to mind when you hear, “Mourning Goats?”

The world is a smoldering ash heap. Blackened oak silhouettes on bilge water horizons. There is no daylight and there is no moon. It is neither dark nor light. Everything is still and crackling. Miles and miles of hard pan flats rimmed by cinder cones. Spider web trails of ground-hugging soot. No wind. No ambient buzzing. And then there is the bell. A weak clatter, erratic in the heat waves. Some vague memory of green pastured dairyland, the vague sound of babies. The earth is bleating. The goats stand together, themselves blackened and shaggy like miniature Pleistocene oxen. A copper bell hangs from the neck of the big one, the leader. His horns are spirals of ancient wood. They bleat together sadly for the lost world.

2. You have one of the most beautifully written books I’ve ever read, it feels like you look at every word and perfect it. What is your process? Does it just flow like that or are you a master editor?

I close my eyes tightly and force myself to see. Sometimes I have to press the palms of my hands into my eyes so that the optic nerves are stimulated. I watch to see what happens. I can almost always see a place, and sometimes a person or parts of a person. I watch them to see what they do and I record that like a stenographer. Sometimes it comes easy but most of the time it doesn’t. I struggle for every word and I think that it feels often like I build sentences out of bricks, one word at a time, hearing them together, and listening for an echo of resonance. I will often know the number of syllables for the word I am searching for before I find the word itself. I write words like I imagine a composer might write music. It’s about cadences and feeling and sense. The poet Stanley Kunitz talks about this.

“The struggle is between incantation and sense. There’s always
a song lying under the surface of these poems. It’s an incantation
that wants to take over—it really doesn’t need a language—all it
needs is sounds. The sense has to struggle to assert itself, to mount
the rhythm and become inseparable from it.”

I relate to this idea of incantation and sense. When I heard this I identified with it and it helped me to affirm something I felt but could not articulate. I do a lot of revision and I read everything aloud all the time. It’s always oral. It has to sound right to the ear and feel good moving through my mouth. With Serpent Box I wrote the whole thing long hand and then transferred it to the computer. I like to build things up over time, layer upon layer. I love the revision process. But I am a clumsy surgeon. I chop things up and splice things together like Dr. Frankenstein and then I smooth it all out, or I try to. I am far from a master of anything, let alone editing. I wish that it was like the old days and I had a trusty editor. Cutting things is awful. The first draft of Serpent Box was over 600 pages. I had to cut a lot of material I loved. But I did have an editor on that book. Her name is Marie Estrada. She was wonderful. I owe the whole thing to her, really. I lost her though. She left the business before the book came out and I have not spoken to her since nor have I given her a signed copy. I hope I can see her again before I die. If anybody knows where she is please tell her to get in touch with me.

3. Currently, you’re the director of licensing at Nickelodeon Kids & Family Games Group and director of licensing at MTV Networks, when do you find time to write with such responsibilities? Do you find time?

I don’t. I am hardly writing at all and it’s taking its toll. I do write in the morning, but not for very long (I am writing this now in my precious few morning minutes). I am lucky if I get in an hour a day, which, if I’m lucky, is enough to complete a single paragraph. It’s slow going. When I wrote the first draft of Serpent Box I was unemployed and married. I was very lucky that my wife supported me and the book. This is why I dedicated it to her. But all that has changed. I’m a part-time single father now and I must work a steady job. So time has become the biggest impediment to my work. Still, I squeeze it in. Right now, as I write this, I am sitting on a ferry making its way toward San Francisco just after dawn. This is a lovely way to work and I could see myself taking the trip back and forth for a few hours just to write. There is something about being close to the water that evokes images and emotion. Process changes. It evolves because I evolve. But I have only completed one novel so I don’t think I’m really qualified to talk about process.

4. You have a pretty impressive background in video games, what are some of your favorite highlights from the gaming world?

I really enjoyed making games when I was part of a small team that had full creative control. We had a chance back in the 90’s to create worlds that were visually compelling and also somewhat literate. At the time we were aiming for a new kind of story-telling, but after awhile I realized that the old kind of story-telling was really the most effective and most satisfying. Fiction gives the creator the most control. I was always a world builder in my own way. I used to play Dungeons and Dragons when I was a boy. But I soon grew tired of being among the hapless party of adventurers. I wanted to run my own dungeons. I wanted to build the worlds through which the other kids explored. When I became a dungeon master, that was the first time I remember feeling at home doing something. I have a clear memory of that feeling. Authoring an imaginary world that real people would willingly enter. Watching them and listening to them discover the fictional world of my creation. I don’t get to do that anymore – watch people read my stories, but I do occasionally get a nice email or comment like the one you gave me, Goat. But if I had to pick a highlight from my gaming experience it would have to be when I was working on the CD-ROM game Bad Mojo. We came very close to something there. It was an immersive world, and a world that nobody had ever been to before. The world of a cockroach as seen through its eyes. And there was a story. A lousy story, but a story with real people and real lives, and the things you did in the roach-world had an effect on the human side of the story. The people who worked on that game were the best I’ve ever worked with and that was the pinnacle of my interactive gaming career. There are parts of me that want to do it again and as recently as yesterday I saw a compelling text-based ‘game’ experience on the web. I remember playing Multi-User Dungeon’s, or MUDs, back in the early 90’s. It was all user defined and on the fly, text only. There was something compelling about that idea that has yet to come to fruition. The potential for these new technologies to tell good stories has yet to be reached.

5. Who do you believe is the biggest influence of your work, up until now? Another author, friend, family member? Why?

I don’t think it would be fair or honest to single out one person. I think Salinger was the first writer to reach me, but so many writers bled into my DNA. Jack London, Hemingway, Patrick O’Brian, even Stephen King. I was a huge Stephen King fan when I was young and I marveled at his ability to craft a believable world and to hold me there spellbound. But it took Cormac McCarthy to show me what was possible. Until I found his books I was drifting, What he showed me was a living model of what I was learning from John Gardner; which was a real example of how to spin a spell that holds the reader in the story, that sucks the reader into an utterly real and convincing world, and how to use words, language and sentence structure in that musical way I mentioned earlier. But it was more than that. McCarthy is a landscape writer and I am a landscape writer. This is a term I didn’t discover until recently. It was brought to my attention by my dearest and best friend. For McCarthy the land itself is as much a character as any of his protagonists. Take The Road. That desolation was not devoid of character and menace. In every one of his books the land is part of the story. I realized through osmosis that whatever talent I may have springs from that same source. I am a product of the land. That is a strange thing to say from a boy from Long Island. But even Long Island has beauty and trees. We have big skies there too and we have torrential rain. We write so much about human interiors but I think it’s more interesting to erase the boundary between outside and in. I can’t speak for the masses. But for me, the land means something. Trees mean something. Sunlight affects me. A single cloud can make my day. So McCarthy gave me the confidence to write what I always felt about the natural world; which is a fickle character of both terror and beauty. There is no better character than the land around you.

6. Your mother and father divorced when you were five, but it sounds like your father showed you a true appreciation and love for nature, how do you think this shaped your life?

My father’s insistence on being out in the woods was almost an obsession for him. I think it was the place he felt most comfortable, being, as he was, a policeman in a major city. But it also provided him with a free and easy way to entertain his sons. My father is a student of nature but he’s also a consummate observer. He instilled in me the power of observation and an endless curiosity for the strange ways of nature. He knew the names of trees and animals and he was strict about the need for silence in the woods. He didn’t only teach me to see, he taught me to listen. I fell in love with the woods as a boy at least partly because that’s where I could be close to my father, but also because it tapped into my innate curiosity and urge to explore. The woods and the outdoors provided me with a feeling of safety and confidence – which I sorely lacked as a boy. I have turned to nature throughout my life for inspiration and for answers, but also for peace and solace. I think about the natural world much the same way I imagine an American Indian would. I respect it. It humbles me. I feel a certain spiritual harmony with it. But it also terrifies me. I had a recent experience in the wild that has altered my feelings about nature somewhat. I used to believe that in nature I was closer to God but now I am not so sure. God may have made the world but I am no longer convinced He manages it. The wild is just that – wild. And I don’t always feel God there. I feel other things. Darker things. And that’s all I want to say about that.

7. The way you talk of your childhood, insomnia, and where your mind went when you were alone, I would think that your writing would be much darker, how do you explain the crushing beauty that is Serpent Box?

I am flattered by your description, but I don’t see much beauty in Serpent Box. I think it’s a sad story with a lot of dark elements to it. I write dark things all the time, I just don’t publish any of them. Serpent Box was my search for faith. It reflects a certain optimism I have in the world and for human beings. But the underlying current in that story is man’s cruelty to man. What we do to other people who don’t look like us or who threaten our view of life. We know that human beings are capable of horrific acts of violence, yet there is still love and light. I cannot reconcile this. I have my own beliefs about it that I won’t get into here. But it’s all there in the book, I think. And still those beliefs are evolving. Before Serpent Box I was not so sure about God so I asked ‘Is there a God?’ but now that point is clear and I am left with a question I keep coming back to. Who am I? I have always found light and I strive toward the light from the darkness. There are many things I choose not to write about because they are too dark. I choose to write with hope in my heart. I choose not to focus on death and violence. But I won’t ignore those things either. I believe that for every act of evil or cruelty in this world there is an equal act of kindness and love. That’s my philosophical equivalent to Newton’s law. In Serpent Box I tried to include a lot of love because I think there’s a balance and that in the end it all evens out. Though I hope that love does one day conquer all.

8. You once wrote one of my favorite lines about books, “Every great book is a funeral and a celebration.” With this said, what do you think about the way we’re getting our reading material these days, e-books, online, etc.?

Well, I believe in the book. I believe in the bound, physical, tactile experience of books. I believe that holding a book is a kind of magic. That carrying a book around, close to you, imparts a certain feeling. We spend so much time in front of screens. TV screens, movie screens computer screens. We are bombarded with digital data. We are addicted to electrons and tiny windows, and images. Why would we want to increase our exposure to electronic media? Are we not already over-exposed? Is there anybody out there who can make serious a case for more gadgets and devices? So-called “personal” electronics killed the vinyl album and those of us who are old enough to remember them miss them terribly. They gave us so much more to look at and learn about and feel from the musicians. And they were part of our physical space. Vinyl record albums occupied space in our lives. They were handled and touched. We had a relationship with the media that we no longer have. Do we really want to do this to books? All this technology is ostensibly about convenience, but do we really need to carry our entire record collections in our shirt pockets? Do we need all of our books all of the time? Is there not an art to selecting those few things we can carry with us? The tape we’ll bring in the car? The book we’ll choose for the plane? What happened to the joy of serendipity? Books are endowed with life. A human being writes them, a human being designs them and binds them and chooses the paper stock and typeface. There is something inherently missing in an e-book. What good is a soul without a body? We experience an actual book (an a-book) in three dimensions, but really we experience it in four. The fourth dimension is time. Right now I am carrying a copy of The Undiscovered Self by Carl Jung. It sat on my bedside table for a week before I chose to open it. I looked at it for a week. I saw it there from time to time as I was living my life. I read the spine and looked at Jung’s face on the cover. I didn’t know it but it was calling to me. Three days ago I picked it up and put it in the messenger bag I carry to work. It was with me for a few more days, just sitting in my bag where I was able to see it as I fished around for pens and papers. All the while it was speaking to me. Then I opened it and began to read it. I can quickly grab it from my bag whenever I have a few spare moments, whenever I am waiting for a bus or a ferry. When I have to move quickly I can jam it back in. As I am reading it I take out a pencil to make notes in the margins or use a highlighter to mark a phrase I want to come back to. I can bend the corners of the pages if I want to mark them for future reference. This book is with me during a certain time of my life. It will only be with me for a week or so. This weekend I will bring it on the plane when I go to L.A.. This book, and this book alone, will be my companion during the month of October 2010. I will mark the date on the inside cover. In this way this book, an a-book, becomes part of me and part of time. It is unique. Its size, its shape, its cover, its typeface, its pages. It is not some homogenized experience. So there is no case to be made for e-books. The e-book is a scam, a fraud, a great tragedy. They were invented to make corporations more money, not for our comfort and convenience. It’s planned obsolescence. Buy more. Consume more. Milk more money from intellectual property. I refute, rebuke and reject them. To me they are the equivalent of the Real Doll, the surrogate artificial lover. An e-book will never whisper. An e-book will never put out a subtle call from the shelf, or jump out at me from time to time after I’ve read it, enticing me to pick it up again. Book lovers understand what it feels like to be in a roomful of books, to be surrounded by them. A-books, real books, are endowed with the spirits of those who made them and that is not something an e-book can ever do. This is a sort of genocide in my opinion. And we are all complicit in this eradication of something beautiful and yes, klunky, heavy, awkward to hold. But so what? We should be willing to bear the weight of something that we are willing to make a part of us.

9. I heard there was a short story collection in the works, is there any truth to this? Is there anything you can tell us about this, or your current project?

I have been writing short stories since I finished Serpent Box and have what amounts to a collection, but I am not yet sure it stands together as a unified whole. I put them all together recently and thought I had something interesting and unique. But time spoiled that. After letting them sit for a couple months I went back to them and re-read them and lost faith. So now I’m not so sure. I’ve decided that they are not good enough yet, they need a lot more work, so what I’m considering now is whether or not I want to invest the time it will take to not only revise what I have but to write some more. It’s as much work as a novel and I’m thinking maybe I should just write a novel but I am having problems with that as well. I have not been able to arrive at a decision as to which of several ideas to write about. I seem to change my mind every other day. I have two or three things I am passionate about but I don’t want to elaborate on them. Hemingway said that talking about a story in progress is like rubbing the dust off a butterfly’s wings. So I’m going to keep the butterflies to myself for now.

10. On your website, you have letters that you wrote about how Serpent Box came together, where you were at in the book, and your inner-workings. Do you think this kind of freedom to put these out for all to read disappeared after the book was published? Are you still writing these letters, to Andrew, today?

I read this question, I felt the urge to cry. No, I am not writing the letters to Andrew today and maybe that’s part of my problem. Andrew L. Wilson is a brilliant writer and he was my mentor. He gave generously of his wisdom and his time during my darkest hours. He loved me unconditionally and he loved my writing. I could not have written Serpent Box without him. During the past few years we’ve become estranged and I regret that. I could sure use him right now, and maybe that’s why I feel so uncomfortable. I don’t want to ‘use’ him that way without being able to give back and I don’t know that I have anything to give. He wrote a novel that really moved me and gave me the courage to write from my heart. It’s still one of the best books I’ve ever read and yet it’s not been published because the book business is so brutal and cruel. But maybe I will write to Andrew again. I used to write to him without expecting a response and he answered maybe 1 out of 10 of my letters; which was okay by me. I didn’t always need him to respond, I just needed him to be there, because writing is so damn lonely and depressing sometimes. Writers need each other. I know I do. I need other people around me who are reaching for something beyond themselves and trying to find some meaning in this life. Andrew was instrumental in the formation of the final version of Serpent Box. You should interview him.

11. You say that you were not trained as a writer but you learned how to write by reading. What books were your biggest influences?

I’ve mentioned that Cormac McCarthy’s sensibilities and use of language appeal a great deal to me. He creates the most compelling landscapes – both physical and psychological – of any writer I’ve read. All the Pretty Horses was my entrée into McCarthy and I think it was a great place to begin. But Blood Meridian also captured my imagination and, to this day, is the most powerful novel I’ve read. But my favorite McCarthy book is The Crossing, which is the second book in the border trilogy. Like McCarthy, I am also interested in the transition of boys into men. He sees through a different lens of course being of an older generation but at the core I deeply understand his younger characters. I would also say that Call of the Wild was a book that proved instrumental in my thinking and development as a writer. London is also a landscape writer, as is Hemingway. I came to Hemingway late in life. I had always avoided him because I felt that he was too obvious and too popular. I intentionally ignored him because I didn’t want to be influenced by him. The same is true for Faulkner. When I read The Old Man and the Sea however, I understood that I had been missing something that could have helped shaped me as a human being, forget about being inspired as a writer. I looked down my nose at all those books that we were compelled to read in high school, since I was rebellious and anti-establishment as a boy. But that was foolish of me and arrogant. When I look back on it books like Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, Slaughterhouse Five, Siddartha, 1984, Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies and Salinger’s Nine Stories were the very bedrock foundation of my literary soul. Thank you English teachers, everywhere, my writing, the fact that I write at all, I owe to you, Mr. Broza, Mr. Gober, Mrs. Dissen.

12. You once said, “I think I am trying to convince myself that I am sane.” This goes through my head often when I write, maybe writing is the only thing that keeps me sane, do you want to go delve deeper into this thought? You wrote that line eight years ago, what does it mean to you now?

It means more to me now than it ever has before, because I am basically a neurotic who cannot stop thinking, cannot stop the words and images and emotions and ideas from making themselves heard. I write because I don’t know what it means to be alive. And I don’t understand why God made the world, or why He made man this way – so fallible. I don’t understand the behaviors of human beings. Life is a mind-boggling mystery to me and writing helps me to gain just a little bit of insight into what it means to be living and to make some sense of it all. I have said that writing is organized thinking - thought recorded and carefully arranged to create an emotional and intellectual effect. So the mere act of sculpting thoughts, observations and ideas into a cohesive whole helps me to understand the world and to understand myself. I don’t know why it is so, but I know that when I am writing, steadily, I am much less edgy and prone to depression. Writing helps me to organize what I’m feeling but it does much more than that, because journaling accomplishes this same thing. To be clear I am talking about writing stories, fiction, and I am only talking about my own experiences. Writing is very personal and precious. To tap into my subconscious is to tap into the collective subconscious of the world. Thus, when I am writing, as Salinger would say “with all my stars out”, I am communing with mankind, all the living and all the dead. That’s how I see it. Stories are floating through the air like radio waves. Radio waves that are millions of years old are bombarding the earth from other galaxies. I don’t want to get too metaphysical here but there is so much we don’t know, don’t see. Read about string theory and it’ll blow your mind. Alternate planes of existence? Parallel universes? I already know there’s a spirit world. So it makes sense to me that there’s this stream of stuff floating around, the collective experience of man. Archetypes. Funny I’m reading Jung again now. I am fascinated with the collective subconscious. Maybe the voices I hear and the things that I feel are echoes of that. I don’t know. I just know that I feel at home when I’m writing. It feels natural to me and most of the time it feels good.

13. You turned a twelve page short story into a novel, how does this happen? Did you know you were writing a novel when you started?

I started Serpent Box as a short story. I had no intention of writing a novel. But the story garnered some attention when it won the Literal Latte Fiction Award in the year 2000. At the time I was 35 years old but I was a very young writer and all I wanted to do was write some good short stories and work my way up to a novel by the time I was 45. I gave myself 10 years. But an agent saw the story and she convinced me to turn it into a novel. I did that bit by bit. 50 pages here, 20 pages there. I didn’t think I could write a novel. But this story dovetails into your question 19 so why don’t I leave it at that and get into there?

14. What is/was your daily writing routine like? Do you have one?

You ask two questions here. What was my routine like (I assume during Serpent Box) and do I have one now? During Serpent Box I would write every morning from about 8:30am until noon or 1. I’d go to a local café and write in long-hand. I’d do each chapter in long-hand and then transcribe it to the computer. I think I filled 26 notebooks. I would often read a bit before I got started or write a letter. I wrote to Andrew Wilson as a way of warming up and preparing myself for the day’s work ahead. I borrowed that idea from John Steinbeck who wrote a daily letter to his editor Pascal Cavici while working on East of Eden. I thought this was a fine idea and it wound up working very well for me. In this way I would organize my thoughts and pin down what problems I was facing on that given day. What will Jacob do now that Charles is dead? How will Rebecca get to Georgia? Should I bring Hosea Lee into the story so late?

My routine today is much less organized. I don’t have the luxury of unemployment and my days are not my own. I have to squeeze my writing in when I can. Usually I will write on the thirty minute ferry ride between Marin and San Francisco. An hour is not much but it’s enough to keep a story going. I’ve written several stories this way. I am a morning person and have a difficult time writing at night. I wish I was one of those night owl writers, but I can’t focus at all after dark. I do think a ritual and a routine is important, at least for me, so maybe that’s something I should look into starting again.

15. We hear all the time that one should “write what they know,” if this is true, how did Serpent Box come to be? Did you do a lot of research or was this something you were familiar with?

I have a big problem with “write what you know”, because I think it is misinterpreted. I don’t think it necessarily means write about your life as a mailman or theme your story on your background in plumbing. Though any of those could be fascinating in the hands of a good writer. While your background and experience can add a lot to your writing, I take “write what you know” to mean what you know in your heart. What do you believe is true and valuable? I know the world can be cruel and unjust, but I also know it is capable of beauty and grace. That’s my truth. That’s what I know.

But for me, I have a different aphorism I live by: Write what you don’t know. I knew nothing about the rural south. I know nothing about Holiness Pentecostals, or snake-handling, or God. I knew little of what it meant to have so much faith, so much conviction. But I wanted to know these things. Why did these people risk their lives drinking poison? Why do they believe so fervently in the Gospel of Mark? What does the bible really mean? These were questions I needed to answer for myself. So I just read the bible, and I read biblical analysis, and I read first-person accounts about what it’s like to handle serpents, and I read about the Holiness movement and I read about rural Tennessee and Georgia and Appalachian Folklore and I read about the terrible legacy of lynching in America. I looked at old photos and watched some documentaries and then I sat down and wrote. I wouldn’t say I did a lot of research. I did just enough to infuse myself with a spirit and the rest I made up. I didn’t want the book to be accurate, I wanted it to be mythical and rich with feeling. I wanted it to feel like a dream. Dreams contain both concrete truths and ephemeral possibilities. That’s what I did, I recorded my dream.

16. There’s a quote, “I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place,” by Ann Tyler, do you believe that authors live more than one life as a result of their stories?

I can’t speak for all authors. I don’t know what they feel or experience. I don’t talk to a lot of writers. I know that for me it’s not about living more than one life, it’s about projecting myself through a prism so that I can see all my component colors. I don’t need to write to feel like I live more than one life. I feel like I’ve already lived a dozen, which may be one of the reasons why I am so compelled to write, or why my head is so full of vivid images that surely don’t come from this life I’m living now. This jibes with what I was saying earlier. The characters and places I write about don’t feel strange to me. I am not visiting them, I am liberating them. I feel like they’re already inside me. But as a reader, now that’s a different story. I am a reader first, and I became one in order to escape. So Ann Tyler’s quote holds true for me, as a reader. Yet even those people, other author’s characters, when written well, they feel like they are mine too. Sometimes though it is purely vicarious. Take Shantaram. What an incredible journey that was. What an amazing book. I can’t relate to any of those characters but I sure didn’t mind going for that 600 page ride.

17. I’ve noticed that you’re a fantastic photographer; do you think there’s any correlation between the way a writer sees the world and the way everyone else sees it?

I love this question and I thank you for the kind words about my photography. It has always been a passion of mine. I began taking pictures long before I began to write. I think that many writers see deeply, beyond the mere surfaces of things and some writers are like photographers of the soul. I think Don DeLillo is one of those. He has an eye that is just uncanny. He notices every detail of even the most mundane thing and he shows it to us as something not at all mundane. Again, I don’t know how anyone else sees the world. I imagine that writers and photographers and painters and police detectives see it more closely. My father was a policeman and he taught me to look at things closely and to examine everything. He taught me pattern recognition and how to spot things that didn’t belong in a given scene. So from boyhood I was trained to look, though I think it came naturally to me since I’ve always had this ability to find things – watches, money, jewelry. I was born with, as my father would always say, a good game eye. My mother was a photographer and painter and she taught me how to use a 35mm SLR. Photography was very important in our home. The captured image was always something that intrigued me. Photography allows me to save precious moments and to chronicle what I find interesting. It also serves my collector nature. I collect things, physical objects, but I also collect memories. I suppose this is rooted in a fear of losing memory, or of losing time. When I write I often write about memory. Perhaps this is the correlation you’re looking for. I write stories that focus on memories and things that evoke memories. A good writer is like a photographer I think. She composes a photograph of an event, or captures a frozen moment in time and renders it to the reader as a clear image, or series of moving images. But a whereas a photographer aims the lens outward, at the external world, the writer aims his lens inward where the picture is not so clear. But you asked me if I saw a correlation between the way a writer sees the world and the way everyone else sees it. What you’re really asking is if there’s a correlation between how an artist sees the world and how “everyone else” sees it. But I would ask is there really an everyone else? And what is the difference between a person who chooses to express her interpretation of life and the world and a person who does not? What does it mean to be a creator of art? What is art? Why do some of us need to do it while others do not? And, more importantly to me, would we all, given the right encouragement and opportunity, be artists of some kind or another? Is art, and the creative drive, latent in us all? I think it is, to a degree. But how we process what we see, how if effects us and then what we do with those feelings and ideas evoked by our senses, that’s what makes a poet or a sculptor and not a toll collector or a politician.

18. If you could go back ten years and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?

There are so many things I would advise my younger self to change or avoid, but I think one thing I would counsel that young writer to do would be to not focus at all on publication and to not get caught up in the machine of the publishing business. Just write. Write what you want and expect nothing. Be more judicious with your time. Read more. Experiment more. I think that I have gotten sidetracked by things like book marketing and blogs when I should have been writing. I read that Michangelo’s last words were “Draw Antonio, draw. While there is still time.” Antonio was his assistant and he was telling him to just do the work, just do that thing that drove you to create in the first place. Time is so precious. We’re here to write, not Tweet or blog.

19. Do you think Serpent Box would have ever come to fruition without the push of Lane Zachary? Could you tell us about that?

It would never have come to fruition as a novel without Lane. She saw something in me, and in that story that I didn’t see and she pulled it out of me like a stubborn tooth. She took me under her wing and gave me the encouragement I needed to write the book. I would write a little at a time and then show her the results and she would tell me it was good and urge me to write more. While she never guaranteed me publication she did guarantee me serious consideration. I know that if I finished a decent draft of the book that it would be seen and have a shot. But as important as Lane was, Serpent Box owes its existence to many people, all of whom I mention in my acknowledgements. Marie Estrada was a key contributor and champion and Laura Strachan was absolutely critical and in many ways more important than even Lane in that she responded to me during that very dark and difficult time when I was hunting for a new agent. She got the book out there. She got it in front of Marie. So many people are a part of Serpent Box that I feel that singling out one of them is unfair. Terry MacMillan….

20. I feel like you found out a lot about yourself when you toured for Grateful Dead, can you tell us a little bit about what came out of that cross-country tour?

You’re talking about the summer of 1988 when I left New York for California. I think that was *the* defining moment of my life. I needed to break away from everything I knew, and everything I was comfortable with in order to begin to discover who I am. I lived in a constant state of fear and dread in New York and I lacked the courage to be my authentic self. I spent over a month on the road with my two best friends selling tee-shirts at Dead shows in order to eat and buy gasoline. I learned a lot that summer, but the journey is not over. In many ways I am still on that trip, I am still learning who I am. What the Grateful Dead teaches me, through their lyrics and philosophy, is that everything’s going to be alright. Don’t worry so much. Life is a cyclic escalation of joys and plummets into sadness. They remind me to be happy with what I have and to be grateful for it. They remind me that there is a lesson in everything and an answer where you least expect it. They are really an optimistic band. They’re all about hope in the midst of madness and despair. They are about resurrection and redemption. Even their name suggests this. Legend has it that Phil Lesh chose that name at random out of a dictionary of myths and legends. I found that dictionary and I own two copies. The funny thing is that book has led me in all different directions. I’ve used it in my own work time and time again. The Dead are all about these connections, and serendipity, and light at the end of the tunnel. They are also about paying attention and observation. Robert Hunter and John Perry Barlow are overlooked in the pantheon of great lyricists. As much as I love Jerry Garica and Bob Weir and Phil Lesh (and of course Mickey and Bill and PigPen and Keith and Brent) it is Barlow and Hunter I admire most and who keep me connected to the music. They are great poets whose words are as much part of me as Rumi and Whitman. I listen to the Grateful Dead for the music, but they stay in my heart because of the words. Just keep moving, don’t give up, tomorrow is another day, look on the bright side, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, love conquers all, don’t worry be happy. You hang out with these old hippies and the hardcore followers that call themselves the family and you see that these people didn’t have a pot to piss in. They lived one day at a time and there was an odd Zen quality to them. People often disparage hippies but hippies are optimists and humanitarians.