In Convo with Stephen Graham Jones

Mackenzie Kiera – How many years have you been teaching?

Stephen Graham Jones – Sixteen, I guess. Started in 2000, at Texas Tech University. I had no experience, a lot of nerves, and a good pearl-snap shirt. Turns out those three’ll get you through most situations. They did me, anyway. I’m still teaching, just, now, I understand that a big part of it’s me learning from the students.

MK – Think you’ll ever ‘bleed Colorado?’ or does the South have a different draw for you?

SGJ – I keep thinking I need to write a Colorado novel, yeah. Just need to be sure I have a good and real feel for it. Which is a trick, in Colorado, since so many people who live here aren’t from here. But, I mean—maybe that’s the “it” of it, right? It’s not about walking into a room of ten people who live in Colorado and saying that two of them have a “Colorado” voice or outlook, since they were born here and came up here. I think the way to do Colorado right is to let all ten people in that room be Colorado.

MK – How long have you been writing? When did you first feel that pull to write?

SGJ – My first story was published in 1996, I guess. Twenty years ago already, wow. That pull to get things down on the page, though, that would probably be in my freshman comp class. That was where I kind of started figuring things out, it felt like. Not at all saying I’ve got things all figured out, but that’s probably about where it starts for me, with a professor reading what I turned in and telling me it wasn’t really what the assignment was, but still, it’s kind of all right. There’s something there. I should keep moving that direction, maybe.

MK – Any more werewolves for the future?

SGJ – Definitely. I mean, to read and watch and dream about, always. Just watched a new-to-me werewolf movie today. And I’ll for sure keep writing werewolf stories. I wouldn’t doubt if I do them in a novel again, too. Even, say, a couple of follow-up novels to Mongrels, should I get the greenlight.

MK – What’s next? Mummies, right? Wrong?

SGJ – Mummies never really crest in popcult, do they? I think it’s because we can’t figure if they’re zombies in wrappings, or what. Next, though, I hope that’s werewolves. Back in 2002, the zombie took over from the vampire, and I don’t think the vampire’s ready yet to be the top creature. Werewolves, though, they haven’t really dominated the media landscape since the eighties, I’d say. And the stories you get with werewolves, they’re more vital now than ever. We need to be engaging narratives that remind us that not only are we animal inside, but we’re an animal that plugs into a bigger system.

MK – Any authors you were ever obsessed with? (Or currently)  Why?

SGJ – For a few years now, I read anything CJ Box writes. His most recent, Off the Grid, blew me away. And so have the rest. I don’t know about ‘obsessed,’ though. I mean, until you see me drawing his face on a paper plate then using yarn to wear it over my own face, let’s just say I’m an avid reader.

MK – Any books you prefer to read more for craft than the story?  Vice Versa?

SGJ – Every once and again I get engaged with a novel that I realize isn’t going to do anything surprising story-wise, so, if I’m to get anything from it, I’m going to have to extract technique from it. Sometimes as model, sometimes as cautionary tale. But I’ve never gone back to any of those to read them again, either. More like, getting what technique I can, that’s trying to salvage something good from the read. I’ll always look for story first, though. Those novels, I’ll go back to them over and over.

MK – Mongrels was originally a short story titled ‘Doc’ in After The People Lights Have Gone Off. Was that planned? Have any of your other books started out as short stories?

SGJ – Only one’s done that, and it’s not published, as I don’t think it’s good enough yet. But, yeah, after I wrote “Doc’s Story” it kept kind of padding around in my head, until I had to just get the rest of it down on the page. Never really had a novel sneak up on me like that. Was kind of cool.

MK – Are all werewolves wary of the snow? Are there any that have figured a way around the foot-print issue? What do beach werewolves do?

SGJ – I’ve got a story about a beach werewolf. “Wolf Island,” over at Juked.com. I think a werewolf could maybe make it all right on the beach, though. Run close enough to the water, and the sand’s not firm enough to leave a really crisp print. And the water comes and takes it away anyway. Snow wolves, though, yeah, that’s a problem. I don’t like the idea of werewolves traveling by tree, really, so they’re definitely going to leave prints. Best bet? Stay super-remote, like, way high up in the backcountry. And maybe even stick to well-used game trails, so the elk can thunder through, erase evidence of your passage. Except they’ll smell you and panic. I don’t know. Snow, it’s forever tricky for werewolves. It’s not like you can wear stilts, or boots, or swing on vines.

MK – You wrote this in 14-16 days, yes? How long did it take you to get it to the shelves? I guess what I’m asking is, how long did the whole process take, to bring this book from cub to wolf?

SGJ – Yeah, got the first draft of this down in a couple weeks. Then the second draft, that took probably two months. Then the next draft was a few more months—I was incorporating notes and suggestions from agents and editors, which completely made the novel a novel. But, let’s see. I wrote it in January, but what year? Wow. All right, back from my directories. Looks like it was 2014. And it’s 2016 now. So . . . two-plus years, from idea to shelf, I guess. Seems like forever. But I’ve had ones take a lot longer. Demon Theory was more like seven years.

MK – All these characters are so real. So perfect and crazy and cool. It’s the grandfathers that took hold of me, though. Both grandfathers are eccentric and loyal and fierce. Also noticed that Mongrels is dedicated to a ‘Pop.’ Are these grandfathers based on your own? One more than the other?

SGJ – Yeah, Pop was my great-grandfather. He was around a lot until I was . . . twenty, twenty two? I grew up with him telling me stories, each one more outlandish than the next. But I wanted to believe so much that I just did believe. That story about the hammer, in here? That’s Pop’s story. He used to tell that one all the time. Also, I grew up with my grandfather on my mom’s side. He was more like the . . . well, the other grandfather. Don’t want to spoil anything.

MK – Favorite scenes to write? For instance, are you a sucker for action/family/love/scary/chase scenes?

SGJ – Sucker for two kinds of scenes: good fights and tearjerkers. I think, with Mongrels, my favorite pieces to write were the little flash fictions that come between the chapters. Just these self-contained werewolf moments. And, of those, it’s a hard call. I liked them all. But I guess maybe “The Heaven of Werewolves” stands out. I got to put a werewolf in a white nun habit for that one. That’s always been the dream.

Dr. Stephen Graham Jones was raised mostly in Greenwood, Texas. Currently, he teaches English and Creative Writing for the University of Colorado, Boulder and University of California, Riverside-Palm Desert. He is the author of twenty-three novels, the current of which is Mongrels. He’s also had some 250+ stories published. Dr. Jones lives in Boulder, CO with his wife, two teenage kids and some dogs that are, regrettably, not werewolves.

*This interview originally appeared on Dwarf + Giant

In Convo with John Langan

Mackenzie Kiera – The Fisherman is such an intricate book. How long did it take you to write?

John Langan – About twelve years, all told. From the start, there were extended periods when I set the book aside, but it was never far from my thoughts.

MK –  How many phases did it go through?

JL – Really only two: the first, during which I was thinking of it as a long story, probably a novelette, possibly a novella; and the second, during which I was thinking of it as a novel.

MK – Did you always mean to write it with Lottie Schmidt’s story in the middle?

JL – Yes, that was always the plan. In fact, that was where I realized that what I was writing was no longer even a novella, but something much longer.

MK – What books did you read as research for The Fisherman?

JL – Mostly Bob Steuding’s The Last of the Handmade Dams: The Story of the Ashokan Reservoir (1989) and Alf Evers’s The Catskills: From Wilderness to Woodstock (1972). I also made use of a documentary, Deep Water: The True Story of the Ashokan Reservoir (2002), by Tobe Carey, Bobbie Dupree, and Artie Traum. And I kept a copy of Moby Dick close at hand at all times.

MK – I have notes in my copy of The Fisherman of instances where I found references to not only Moby Dick but also to Frankenstein, Jacob’s Ladder (I suppose that’s more of a term than a book) and the myth of the Flying Dutchman. Did you mean to pull at these cords or did it just happen to twist together that way? I could be completely off the mark with this. I just know that ‘Call me Abe’ seems to be an instant throwback to ‘Call me Ishmael.” I suppose the question I’m trying to ask is: why did you choose to blend these tales together?

JL – Yes, the allusions in the book were deliberate, especially the ones to Moby Dick. Ever since I returned to writing weird/horror fiction at the tail-end of the last century, I’ve been engaged in this intermittent project of writing narratives that react in some way to texts in the American literary canon; I borrowed my personal name for them from D.H. Lawrence: “Studies in Classic American Literature.” At the time I began the novel, I’d mostly written in response to Henry James’s work. I’m a big fan of Melville, however, especially Moby Dick, so when I began work on what would become The Fisherman, I thought it might be fun to see what I could do with his work, so to speak. That opening line was intended to signal what I was up to to the reader. From there, as the novel progressed, it developed a centripetal pull of its own that drew in all sorts of other material.

MK – Lottie Schmidt’s story. My God. It has everything. It has a sorcerer, a sleeping princess, a hero and zombies. I loved how you seamlessly invited favorite childhood characters into this book. Can you comment about these characters? Were they always like this, or did they become so?

JL -It’s funny: until reading your question, it hadn’t occurred to me how much the central narrative of the book exploits those fairy-tale tropes (even though I make mention of the Grimm brothers in it). Initially, my concern was with creating a backstory that would set up the conditions for the present-day narrative; as I went further into it, though, the backstory became its own wild, elaborate thing. There were moments when I wondered about reigning it in, going for a story that was more restrained, elusive, but I remembered a piece of advice the great writer Jeff Ford had given my friend, Laird Barron, when Laird was writing his first novel. You’re going to be tempted, Ford said, to play it safe, to be understated. Fight that. Go for broke. Make the thing crazy. All right, I decided, that’s what I’ll do, too. The result includes things like the fairy-tale elements you identify. It’s been my experience that my creativity, if you will, is smarter than I am; I’m frequently amazed at what it comes up with.

MK – Would you argue that Death is a character in your book?

JL – Absolutely. But I think that Death is a character in pretty much every narrative—wasn’t it Don Delillo who said, “All plots end in death?”

MK – I feel like this book was a beautiful bridge between horror and literary. Did you set out, thinking that you were going to write a beautiful horror novel? Have you always leaned more towards horror in your work?

JL – I’ve always considered myself a horror writer; even when I was writing more in the vein of mimetic naturalism, in my twenties, my fiction tended towards the kinds of dislocations of character and experience that typify horror fiction. But I should add that I see no (necessary) split between horror and the literary. In my view, literary is an adjective, rather than a category; it’s a measure of the extent to which a narrative succeeds in terms of depth of character, elegance of language, thematic resonance, etc. Anything can be literary; to borrow a term from Henry James, it just depends on the author’s treatment of it.

MK – Were there any books that helped you the most or, had a profound effect on you and your work while you were writing The Fisherman?

JL – Moby Dick was front and center in my mind, but the further into the novel I went, the more I was aware of the influence of things I’d read when I was much younger, the stories of Robert E. Howard, for example. A number of reviews of the book have found traces of Stephen King’s storytelling aesthetic in it, and another interviewer pointed out the presence of King’s Pet Sematary in the novel, all of which now seems blatantly obvious to me, but of which I was not at all conscious during its composition.

MK – The end was so haunting. So perfect. Was that always the plan for Abe? To become a part of both worlds?

JL – Thank you! Yes, I knew that part pretty early on. Abe’s penultimate confrontation, though, was a relatively late addition, inspired by the ending of Laird Barron’s brilliant novella, “Mysterium Tremendum.” I wanted something that would give the last few pages of the book an added heft, and Laird’s story provided an example of how that might be done.

MK – Your other novel is House of Windows and you’ve appeared in ‘Best Horror of the Year’ several times. If someone out there wanted to read more of your work, what would you recommend to said reader?

JL – I’d suggest taking a look at my second collection, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (2013).

MK – Anything else you would like to add?

JL – My third collection of stories, Sefira and Other Betrayals, is forthcoming from Hippocampus Press in early 2017. My first novel, House of Windows, will be released in the spring of 2017 by Diversion Books; it will include a new afterword and a new story set in the titular house.

 *This interview originally appeared on Dwarf + Giant

Joe Hill: Strange Weather

Strange Weather,

a collection of four short novels by Joe Hill, is aptly named because it deals with climates—and not just the obvious ones.

One dictionary definition of climate is: “the weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long period”; but the one I’m looking for is this: “the prevailing trend of public opinion or of another aspect of public life.” 

2017 has seen some strange weather, indeed, and I’m not just talking about the hurricanes in Houston and Puerto Rico and Florida, or the fires in California and Montana (note: these are examples, not comprehensive lists.) I’m talking about more than just the climate-climate; I’m talking about the political climate, the social climate, the global climate. I’m talking about the frightening clown-show (yes, scarier even than the kind of clown horror generated by anyone in the King family) that is the Trump administration; our country’s morbid fascination with guns, and the subsequent epidemic of gun violence; the hateful, bigoted underbelly of our nation, thick and infectious like a layer of gangrene; the global unrest and worldwide fear and threats of terror and war.

This collection is filled with torrential rain, fires that devour, clouds that aren’t clouds, rain that isn’t truly rain. Strange Weather is not lacking in apocalyptic atmospheric conditions, but incredibly enough, the bizarre weather isn’t the scariest element of the book. The weather is more like the vehicle that drives the story, but the true terror lies with the passengers: humanity. Through this novel we, as readers, bear witness to the most terrifying thing of all: what human beings are capable of doing to each other.

It’s as though Hill has included all of his emotions and dismay about the current state of the world in one book—and yet he manages to do this without arrogant commentary, without preaching, without sacrificing story, and with a whole lot of heart. The stories are beautifully told and painfully cathartic to read.

For anyone who’s been watching the events of the nation and world unfold this year saying what the fuck? with increasing levels of panic, disbelief, and despair: this book is for you.*

*This review originally appeared on Dwarf + Giant