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Thanks to Keith Taylor's email, I'm not aware of Jean-Marie Gustavo Le Clezio (apologies for the lack of accents, I am not skilled enough to figure out how to add them), and the fact that he's the first French author since Chinese-born Frenchman Gao Xingjian was honored in 2000 to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Certainly not an emerging writer, though one that I'm obviously woefully behind in my own reading of.

After a few months of nobody really noticing we'd closed up shop, Dan Green finally put type to screen to officially announce that the LBC has closed up shop.  He has his thoughts on why the idea didn't seem to blossom as many originally hoped it would, and, as is typical when Dan ruminates on something for a bit, they are interesting and worthy of your reading time.  Ed Champion also chimed in with his thoughts, using the incident to bring up his own thoughts on the litblog in general, and how and why community works.

Dan might be right in his thought that by selecting Kate Atkinson's Case Histories, a fairly well reviewed author being published by Little, Brown, the LBC came out of the gate allowing readers to question their stated mission (in a nutshell, helping expose books from lesser known authors and lesser known publishers).  The original Read This! post certainly was one of the most discussed, at least via the comments section, and from what I can recall, in terms of links at other sites as well.  If that's the case, it's truly too bad as later selections included Steve Stern's The Angel of Forgetfulness, Kirstin Allio's Garner, Jean-Philippe Toissant's Television (translated by Jordan Stump), Michael Martone's Michael Martone, Sam Savage's Firmin, Ngugi wa Thiog'o's Wizard of the Crow, Alan Deniro's Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead: Stories, Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown, and Matthew Eck's The Farther Shore.

There is also the possibility we all became too busy with our own blogs and literary endeavors to do the LBC justice, though a look even only back to the Summer 2007 sessions show a great variety and in-depth looks at the titles nominated that quarter (Sharpe's Jamestown, Nicola Griffith's Always, and Katherine Weber's Triangle), but maybe that was just one big last ditch effort made by many of the LBC members to see if they could re-energize both themselves and their readers.  I'm not sure, I can only say as one of those whose recent non-LBC endeavors has been pointed out a few times in the 'got too busy' category, I was and am extremely sorry to see the idea go by the wayside.

October 31, 2005, I became a member, and posted about how excited I was about being asked to join - that excitement in being involved with the names both on the last active list, and those that had moved on, never wavered.  They are still the sites that I find myself visiting most frequently these days and hope that you all who read this are as well.

If I had to guess, myself, as to the reasons, I'd guess that there were many factors, including those mentioned by others, as well, perhaps, as the fact that we were trying to get 20 members to see things the same way - not read each title the same way, but to have the same desires in posting about the titles - both at the LBC site and our own various sites - to do interviews, to set up roundtables, to involve local area booksellers, etc. 

i think Scott McLemee is probably right - there will be other experiments of this nature - I think the massive scale projects that Colleen Mondor has run at Chasing Ray are a fine example, as are the thought provoking e-roundtables that Ed Champion has set up and hosted at Filthy Habits.  I think, as Scott mentions, Critical Mass is indeed another such experiment - one that I believe has gotten beyond its own rocky start and has of late, given more reason to be seen as a beneficial counterpart to other litblogs, than the anti-blog that it could have been seen as very early on.  While there still may not be a presiding voice there, there seems to be a more efficient means of monitoring what gets posted put in place.

So, now I'll have to find my new titles the way I did pre-April 2005 - read all of the litblogs individually (and again, hit the LBC one last time and see who's listed there and hit the links) - and not just those that I was fortunate to have joined up with for a couple of years in the LBC, but the many others out there linked to off to the left, and then the many those fine folks link to as well.

Book Review 2007-015
The Farther Shore by Matthew Eck
2007 by Milkweed, 192 pages

While Matthew Eck served in the U.S. Army, during the mid-90's, in both Somalia and Haiti, he doesn't specify exactly where his protagonist, Joshua Stantz, and his five 'battle buddies' are serving beyond coastal Africa.  As the novel progresses, and the situations and fates that befell these young men occur, it becomes clear that it was a conscious decision on Eck's part to not refer to a specific recent war or conflict too closely - that he was writing more about modern warfare, and to an extent, even more generally, about the day to day battles each of us encounters.

The novel begins with Stantz and his fellow soldiers on top of a building in a city being run ragged by warlords.  They are recon - letting even more soldiers know how close they are coming to hitting thier targets when bombing the city - the thought process being if the U.S. and U.N. drop enough tonnage of explosives in the area, the warlords will let peaceful times back into daily lives for the citizens of the area.

An incident in the very beginning of the book, involving the deaths of two local children, puts these young men in a completely different path, that of trying to find their way out of the city safely.  The incident is loud and their location now known, they are no longer safe.

Eck's writing is spare, and while I don't think for a minute the book would ever be categorized as a thriller, The Farther Shore truly is a page turner.  As the first chapter ends, Eck writes:

"The bombing seemed to be subsiding.  I wondered whether the grand strategy would really work.  Maybe you really could scare a city into submission.  We'll just wait here, I thought, and they'll come for us soon enough.  The night was giving way to daylight, to a full-fledged Sunday morning.

My ears hummed and my head felt heavy.  I leaned forward and rested my head in my hands.  So this was what combat is like, to engage the enemy and fire your weapon.  I felt renewed in the world, alive and well.  The heat of my sickness was gone, replaced by a sensation of light and power.  I leaned further forward, smiling."

There is this lack of moralizing throughout Eck's writing.  Stantz and his men really aren't portrayed as heroes, and, in fact, at times one might even lean in the other direction.  As the men realize that "they'll come for us soon enough" isn't going to happen and begin to attempt to find their way out of the city, the real action begins.

Eck captures Stantz' travels in all their perspiration filled, heat-spurred dizzyness. Where there is certainly a physical toll in being constantly on the move, carrying everything they have with them, extreme heat and lack of sleep - listening in on the conversations and thoughts of Stantz and the others, Eck makes it clear that the mental toll is even more strenuous.  Not everybody makes it out alive, there is confusion, and death, and disorientation, and Eck confidently places his readers right alongside these men in their journey. 

4.5 stars

To read what the nominator of this title had to say, visit the LBC here.  Then be sure to visit the site and the sites of the various LBC members the week of December 10 as they discuss the title and get author Matthew Eck involved as well.

I'm a bit behind on this, but do wander over to the LBC and review this week's postings - Nicola Griffith's Always is discussed via a fantastic roundtable, links to other sites discussing it, a couple of thought provoking posts from Nicola herself and a podcast interview with her.

The new Read This! selection is up.  You'll have to wander over there to find out what it is though.

Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead by Alan DeNiro
2006 by Small Beer Press  208 pages
1931520178
(Galley copy supplied by Small Beer Press)

In his debut collection, Alan DeNiro has put together sixteen of his stories, showing a wide range of interests and genres.  The stories lead towards the fantastic, or science fiction, or alternative history, or, you see the dilemma of reviewing this title?  DeNiro does a really nice job of not allowing his work to be pigeon-holed, and it seems only fitting that it has been published by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant at Small Beer Press. 

The story “Salting the Map”, to me, comes as close to defining the collection as a whole as anything I could come up with.  In the story, the protagonist works for Originpoint, a vintage cartography firm, and is given a task, to make up names and include them on a big map they are working on.  The reasoning behind it, to determine if there are any spies within the corporation passing along information to other cartography companies.  In doing so, he’s forced to take a strong look at what is real and what is not real, and how the two intertwine.

This happens throughout the collection, for the reader.  Is it possible that the Byzantines have been in hiding in Western Pennsylvania for centuries?  Has anybody ever been hired to assassinate a manuscript?  When is the last time somebody held up a market store with a crossbow?

While the ideas seem on the very least to be on the verge of crazy, DeNiro sells them.  He just lays everything out and the reader goes along willingly, eventually losing the need or interest to question the possibilities.  And to me, that’s the sign of a really excellent writer of fiction.

4 stars

The Cottagers by Marshall N. Klimasewiski
2006 by Norton  317 pages
9780393060775
(Review copy supplied by Norton for LBC)

The Cottagers surprised me by being more a novel of suspense than anything else, though when it started off, it appeared that it was going to be about relationships.  It starts off with two couples, friends from their collegiate days, getting together for a vacation in a small tourist village on the west coast of Canada.  It’s apparent right from the beginning that they’ve not been in each other’s company for a few years at least, allowing for some awkwardness.

Klimasewiski immediately introduces another character, a local teenager, Cyrus.  In fact, he’s in the trees watching as one of the two couples, Nicholas and Samina, along with their young girl, Hilda, get out of their car.  He’s actually stunned to find that Samina notices his presence – not something any other tourists have done to date.  To add to the awkwardness between the couples, Nicholas has insinuated to Lauren (of Greg and Lauren) that something is at least slightly amiss in his relationship with Samina, asking her to pay some attention to Samina and let him know what she thinks.

The story takes a leap forward when Greg takes Nicholas to a park he’s found, and kept to himself for weeks, and the two split up as Greg walks off alone.  Nicholas is not seen again, going missing.  This creates that suspense, though it’s an odd suspense.  Pretty early on after Nicholas goes missing, the reader is sure who is responsible, but this is not verified until near the very end of the novel, and it is the introspection towards the various relationships that Klimasewiski concentrates on the rest of the way through.

There is some really nice writing done by Klimasewiski, and the story certainly moves forward.  However, there was something just strong enough to continually pull my attention away from this work.  At times there were actions between characters that just didn’t seem to match their personalities – an argument between Lauren and Samina for instance, seems to go from 0 to 60 way too fast.  There is also a Constable who almost seems to have been added to the story to add a bit of oddity to the story, though his presence does allow for some learning by the reader about Samina.

So, a good effort and again, some really nice writing and some interesting characters, but in the end, the plot seemed a little too constructed for my tastes – not all that rare for a debut novel.  I will look at Klimasewiski’s next one for sure though, there’s definitely talent behind that keyboard.

3.5 stars

Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! by Mark Binelli

2006 by Dalkey Archive Press  353 pages

9781564784452

(Review copy supplied by Dalkey Archive Press)

Mark Binelli’s debut novel, Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!, must be considered an ambitious piece of work.  Binelli has taken a pair of men in Sacco and Vanzetti, who were sentenced to death as anarchists, and re-imagined their lives as a slapstick comedy team, akin to Abbott and Costello, or The Marx Brothers.  In doing so, he pieces this imagined life of theirs in various forms.  There are movie reviews, historical references, footnotes, interviews with each man, and the list goes on.

If anything detracts from this book, it might be just that – that the list goes on, and in doing so, in trying to give each of these stylistic choices a fair shot, Binelli allows the novel to go on a bit longer than necessary.  To me there was a bit of repetition in the second half of the book that stemmed from this situation.

On the flip side though, Binelli does an incredible job of making each specific type of section be unique to the others.  When he kicks into interviews of the characters, it’s written like a fine interview.  When he does the historical references, it reads as if straight from a journalist, and so on.  The sections work very well independent of each other, while still pulling together to a cohesive novel.

And going back to his imagination – the idea to have Sacco and Vanzetti be a slapstick team is nearly pure genius.  Aside from the pure surprise of it, there’s also the underlying fact that many slapstick teams appear to be running on anarchy most of the time.  With Sacco and Vanzetti, the big routines involved knives and the sharpening of them.  This would frequently lead to knives being tossed or thrown, through scenes of various narrow misses.  And, as with most purveyors of physical comedy, they felt the need to top themselves each new time out, getting more and more knives and wilder and wilder scenes to use them as their movie careers moved forward.

I’ll be keeping an eye out for Binelli’s next work, his efforts in this debut certainly deserve that much.

3.5 stars

The following is an interview with Alan DeNiro, author of two chapbooks of poetry:  The Black Hare and Atari Ecologues, as well as a collection of short stories, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead (Small Beer Press, 2006).

Dan:

Thank you, Alan, for taking some time from your schedule to answer some questions.

Alan:

No problem!

Dan:

You attended Catholic school for 12 years – I’m assuming 1st grade through graduation.  Have you determined if, and if yes, how, those years may have had an effect on the way you write?

Alan:

Yes – a huge effect.  It gave me a cosmology and belief system to work with, and later, work against to an extent.  I still feel “culturally Catholic” in spirit, in a lot of the ways I approach looking at aesthetic issues of politics (e.g., the storytelling of the saints’ lives).  I also have written a lot about people grappling with religious experiences – and there are no easy answers to such things.  Growing up, I really did believe.

Dan:

You received you BA in English from College of Wooster and then your MFA in Poetry from the University of Virginia.  Did you go right from Wooster to the MFA program, or was there any time spent out of school in between?

Alan:

I went straight through.  Definitely a different experience than most of my colleagues, who were generally older.

Dan:

Your most recent published book is a collection of stories, and per your website, you’ve published many more than are included in this book.  Did you also take any fiction classes during your MFA program, or just poetry?

Alan:

No, but I took a literature class with Deborah Eisenberg in my second year of the program, and that had a huge, huge impact on me and what kind of fiction I’d write eventually.  It was a class where we all got together in a big room in that house that she was renting while she taught at UVA – and there had to have been about 40 people in the class, just crammed into this living room-type-area – and talked about short stories that we were assigned.  We’d go sentence by sentence.  Digging into the craft that way, and the larger themes of stories like “Sonny’s blues” and Gogol’s “The Overcoat” was just an incredible experience.  She really showed me, in a way I hadn’t seen before, how the short story can be this incandescent art form…which is obviously embodied in the stories that she writes as well.

Dan:

You published a couple of chapbooks of poetry?  Were those through contests, or publishers that you noted having something in common with their previous catalogues?  How did the two books come about?

Alan:

The Black Hare came about through this wonderful little press in Chicago called A Small Garlic Press.  It was great working with them.  (The book is the first third of my graduate thesis, a book length poem called “Hinterlands.”)  Atari Ecologues was a sequence I decided to publish myself.  Nothing fancy – but I was pretty happy the way it turned out.  So no, no contests.

Dan:

With Kelly and Gavin at Small Beer Press, it appears from reading some blogs, etc. that you are not just in a Publisher/Author relationship, but that these folks are your friends as well.  Is that something you would recommend to other authors (and publishers) in the future, or are there issues and decisions that might tax a friendship if it’s not a real solid one?

Alan:

What I do recommend is finding a community, of some sort, in which to nurture one’s writing and reading, and going from there.  For me it was Wiscon, the feminist science fiction convention held in Madison every Memorial Day weekend.  The genre zine culture really flourished there (still does), and my wife and I met some dear, dear friends there.  And will continue to!  Then:  what happens?  Maybe publishing venues, maybe not.  But more important than that is having compatriots.  The best advice (not that I’m not still learning tons) I can give to a writer starting out is not to “play the angles” when going to a writing conference of convention.  If you start treating other writers or editors as something other than people, as opposed to career stepladders, then you’re fucked, even if you somehow manage to “get ahead”, whatever that means.  Because in the ende, you’ll never be happy that way.  Just be yourself.

Dan:

You are married to another writer, correct?  How does that work for the two of you?  Separate offices – share an office, but write at different times?  Are you each other’s first readers?

Alan:

It’s great – we actually met at a 6 week SF/F writing workshop called Clarion – and we are definitely each other’s first readers.  Our stuff is pretty different in sensibility, so we each can look at each other’s stuff from a “slant” perspective, which is incredibly helpful.  I feel lucky to be able to read Kristin’s stories in their earlier incarnations;  they are great.  We each have separate writing spaces, but we go out to a coffee shop and work together when we can.

Dan:

You’ve been blogging since 2002 – is there an overriding purpose to your blogging?  Is it meant to be a journal – a record of your thoughts – a place to promote your work – or anything else specifically?  Or just a little more procrastination?

Alan:

Well, it started as a parody of a blog.  Go to my categories and read the posts under “Evening and Quail”.  Those were my fictional roommates.  It was fun for a few months, then I wrote myself in a corner and it kind of mutated into a blog blog.  It’s now a little bit of everything, skimming the line between a journal of thoughts, news about my life and writing life, and finally ruminations about literature and politics.  I can’t say it’s any one thing.  Some months I blog a lot and others, not so much.  But I think the form is malleable enough to accommodate those different interests.

Dan:

I understand you are a big Garrison Keillor fan?

Alan:

Ha!  Seriously, I’ve been tough on my blog on some of the things he’s said.  But that, I have to admit, is partially mitigated by the fact that he’s opened an indie bookstore in St. Paul, Common Good Books.  That part of town desperately, desperately needs one (Micawber’s, which is amazing, is pretty much on the other end of the city.)

Dan:

What thoughts come to mind when the name Kevin McHale is mentioned?  And, do you miss Flip Saunders at all?

Alan:

I’m glad I get to talk about the Timberwolves – I so wish he was fired.  I can’t even take any joy in the draft this year, because I just know he’s going to screw it up somehow; or rather (unless we magically get pick #1 or 2), a top 10 pick really isn’t going to change the team’s caliber.  The team is saddled with miserable contracts.  I wish at this point (and it kills me to say this) that we’d trade KG and start over – what’s left to lose? – but Taylor and McHale have said no way, and I sadly believe them.  They are nothing if not stubborn.  Really, a comedy of errors.

Flip shouldn’t have been fired;  I think he landed in a good place and, after 10 years with the Timberwolves, it might have been time for a change anyway.  But, really, his situation was handled really poorly, which is no surprise really.

To the rest of the people reading this besides the 5 who know what the heck I’m talking about, or care, I say thank you.

Dan:

Then there’s music – in a bold move (one that I’d agree with), you stated that White Lion’s “Wait” should be viewed as a heavily overlooked pop gem.  Did you take much crap over that statement? 

Alan:

No one’s yet given me shit about my love of “Wait,” so that’s good.  Well, maybe my wife?

Dan:

I think a real tribute to your writing is the very wide variance in the types of literary journals that have published your work.  Is there a particular journal that you’ve not been published in yet that would just absolutely make your day to get an acceptance from?

Alan:

Not really, but I would love more general consumer magazines to publish fiction.  A special fiction issue of Model Railroading or Nintendo Power would be awesome.  I’m totally serious.

Dan:

I know they’re all your babies, but do you have one or two stories that you sit back and think to yourself, ‘Wow, I wrote that’?

Alan:

Oh yeah, but usually it involves stories that are pretty weird that really haven’t seen the light of day yet.  I have this one science fiction story that I haven’t been able to finish yet where a man kidnaps a sentient desk.  Cue:  “Wow, I wrote that?”

Dan:

You have a new work, a poem, that is in excess of one hundred pages in length.  Is this out being shopped for a book deal anywhere?

Alan:

I think “poetry book deal” is an oxymoron.  But I really haven’t sent it to contests either.  Which (as might be evident from my previous answer about the chapbooks) I’m not a huge fan of.  I think at some point I’m going to release it free on the Internets with a Creative Commons license that would allow anyone to sample from it, as long as there’s attribution.  Just to give people more than one way to read the poem; if they want to treat it as a mammoth language-carcass to pick through, that’s fine by me.

Dan:

Lastly, if you were a character in “Fahrenheit 451,” what work(s) would you memorize for posterity?

Alan:

Probably a poem or two by J.H. Prynne, who (this year, anyway) is my favorite poet.

Dan:

Thanks again, Alan, for taking some time to answer these questions.

Alan:

Thank you, Dan!

SHORT STORY MONTH

This story was originally published in Fortean Bureau, and as this has recently been included in Alan DeNiro's Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead.  As this is the current Litblog Co-op Read This! selection, my post on it can be found over here.

Continue visiting the LBC this week for more looks at individual stories by other LBC members, as well as guest blogging from DeNiro and an interview from myself and a podcast from Carolyn "Pinky" Kellogg.

The following is an interview with Marshall N. Klimasewiski, author of The Cottagers (Norton, 2005).  He currently is a Writer-in-Residence at Washington University in St. Louis.

Dan:

Thank you Marshall, for taking some time out of this near the end of the semester craze to answer some questions.

Marshall:

My pleasure.  Thanks for the questions.

Dan:

Were you a big reader as a youngster?  Is there an incident from your youth that you recall that might have been the spark towards your becoming a writer?

Marshall:

I wasn’t a big reader, compared to other writer friends I have.  I always had deep attachments to certain books—that old, red-covered volume of Winnie-the-Pooh first, then The Lorax, then From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler—but I don’t think I read especially widely, for a kid.  But yes, I also had a third grade teacher who gave us an assignment to write a story, and who then typed up and mimeographed the story I turned in, passed it out to the class, and read it aloud.  I’ve always said I decided I’d be a writer at that moment, while her voice enunciated my sentences, and I think it’s really true, even though I went through long stretches of my youth neither writing nor reading much.  It was as if I’d secured a future that didn’t require my present—as if I’d decided I would be a doctor when I grew up.  But then I did only apply to undergraduate colleges that offered creative writing as a major, and not surprisingly, I arrived at mine (Carnegie Mellon) a truly awful writer.  I still remember a couple of my teachers there having a good, long laugh together, one day when I was a senior on the verge of graduating, about just how bad I was when they first saw me—they could recall in detail my early poems and stories, and quoting them still brought tears to their eyes.

Dan:

Besides reading and writing, what aspects of pop culture (if any) grab much of your attention?  For instance, growing up in Harford, CT, were you by chance a Whalers fan?

Marshall:

Ah, the Whalers—you couldn’t avoid them.  And in my youth, coaches Calhoun and Auriemma hadn’t yet arrived so UCONN basketball was nothing, making the Whalers all we had to cling to.  I was (and remain) a huge sports fan, though hockey wasn’t a favorite.  Last summer a writer for The New York Times traveled around Connecticut, interviewing people and visiting sports bars, trying to trace out the border where Yankee territory gave way to Red Sox nation, and my town was right on that line.  Because my family was full of Red Sox fans (well, mostly—my mom had a crush on Mickey Mantle), I became a dire Yankee fan.  I had a poster of Thurman Munson in my bedroom (and his was my first experience of death).  I remain one, too.  Sorry.  Though with how much better your Tigers have been lately I have nothing to be sorry about.  I do love pop music, too—sometimes write while listening to it.

Dan:

Your debut novel, The Cottagers, came out last year.  How much reviewing attention did it receive?  Was it about what you expected, or a surprising amount (in either direction)?

Marshall:

It was really distressing at first, because there was virtually no attention at all for many weeks.  It had gotten a decent PW review, and a not-great one from Kirkus, but when it was out, nothing.  After about two months the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch reviewed it, and at about three months, within maybe a two week span, there were better reviews from Esquire, The LA Times, and then the Sunday NY Times.  That all came as a huge relief, because I had already resigned myself to having put out one of those books (I’d had friends with them) that slip between the cracks and simply disappear.  And frankly, in the end, that was as much review attention as I’d hoped for with a novel like mine.  My son was born the same week the novel came out, and that really helped:  all through those quiet months, I simply didn’t have the time or energy to bathetically obsess over my utter anonymity the way I surely would have without him.

Dan:

I noticed that the NY Times listed it as an Editor’s Choice – did you (or your agent perhaps) notice any bump in sales after that announcement?  Or for any reviews for that matter, be they print or online?

Marshall:

You know, I just don’t know how to keep track of sales well enough to tell things like that.  And I love my agent, but she’s not really the type to track a book that way either (which I don’t mind).  But I do know that Norton called to say they would put out the paperback of the novel about two days after the NY Times review, and I hadn’t heard from them at all in many weeks at that point.  It was a two-book deal, but before that little clutch of reviews I wonder if they might have canceled the second book (much less a paperback of the novel).  Or maybe I’m just being a paranoid author.

Dan:

What is your take on the reduction in newspaper book pages across the country these days?

Marshall:

Sadness and dismay.  The usual.  They’re my favorite part of any paper (well, maybe the sports pages).  And I’ve lived in places—Portland, for instance—where they contribute beautifully toward creating a thriving local book culture.  The success of outlets like Amazon and Borders set against that trend seems so odd to me.  And what about all these book clubs and reading groups?  Where will they find their books, and why isn’t their proliferation keeping those sections popular?  But of course I fear—like everyone—we may be seeing the final days of newspapers in general.

Dan:

Even though the book flap and blurbs announce it as such, I was still surprised by the level of suspense felt while reading The Cottagers.  Did you fully intend to write this particular novel when you started out, or did it develop into the suspense driven drama through the writing?

Marshall:

No, I’ve never fully intended anything I’ve written.  I’m definitely a driving-at-night sort of writer:  can only see as far as the cast of the headlights.  And I didn’t intend to write a suspenseful book, although I agree with everything others have said on the LBC site:  I love suspense, though it’s never enough on its own for me, and its promise is never what will get me to a book.  But you know, I’m glad to hear that mine is suspenseful, and I’m still a little surprised when people find it particularly so since of course there’s only brief (and limited) doubt about who killed poor Nicholas.  Happily surprised, since suspense was never a high priority for me while writing.

Dan:

You were out and about doing some readings, I know you were invited to read in the Zell Visiting Writers Series at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.  Do you like to give readings?  Do you have any preference for their locations when you do give them?  Bookstores, universities, libraries, or bars even?

Marshall:

I sometimes like to have given a reading.  There’s so much more adrenalin involved there than at the desk, and it’s great when you feel like you’ve actually spoken aloud what you heard in your head.  I guess I do like giving readings, although I feel like it has so little to do with writing (I’m more an alone-under-lamplight than aloud-and-together lover of literature, as consumer as well as producer).  And I’ve enjoyed the very different feel of reading in a bar as opposed to a university hall or a library—I like that range—but I don’t know that I have a preference.  It was great being at Michigan, though—so many warm people there, among the faculty and students, both.

Dan:

You’ve also published many short stories, including seeing them in such journals as Ploughshares, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker.  Do you prefer writing novels to short stories, or vice versa?  What, to you, are the biggest similarities and the biggest differences in sitting down to each?

Marshall:

So far, I seem to like writing both equally well (or dislike them equally, more often).  For me, the main technical difference is simply plot—you can get away with so little of it in a story, of course, and I’m not a writer who naturally thinks in well-plotted structures.  It’s something I usually have to impose.  But on a more impressionistic level, the big difference for me is simply that once I get past a certain number of pages and parallel promises waiting to be kept, I can’t hold a whole novel in my head at once.  I can’t sit down at the desk and hold it at arm’s length and reconsider the entire weave before getting my fingers wrapped up in the two or three threads at hand that day—the way I work on a story.  And I find that very difficult, especially since when I write novels, for some reason, I’ve always been drawn to material that involves the juxtaposition and association of fairly disparate elements—connections that feel as if they won’t be made outside of a novel version of the world—but my sense of composition, frankly, isn’t always up to pulling off such a collage.  So The Cottagers was the fourth novel I started and got a good distance into, and all three of the others essentially died by falling into pieces that couldn’t be satisfactorily stitched together.  The various points of view in The Cottagers allowed me to work that way still, to some extent, but at least this time all the people were in the same setting, encountering one another and the same events, etc.

Dan:

Your work has also been included in Best American Short Stories, I believe the first time was in 1992 for the story "Jun Hee."  What extra bit of satisfaction do you feel as the author of a story that gets included in such an anthology?

Marshall:

The only time.  Oh, I was so young, Dan—25 when that happened (that was also the story that was in The New Yorker) and just a year out of an MFA program.  You know, I thought:  well here I am.  Look at me.  Move over, Cheever.  I wasn’t stupid enough not to know I was lucky, and I was immensely satisfied, but truthfully, it wasn’t good for my writing.  It was too much too soon, and I had just been lucky with that story.  Lucky in two ways:  it was a better story than anything else I’d written then, but also there is simply so much luck built into all the layers of the publishing world, in my experience—only a few years later I remember re-reading that story and being appalled.  It wasn’t good at all, and certainly hadn’t deserved that level of validation.  I’m including it in my collection, but I had to revise it a lot to do that, and even so, I’ll include it there not so much because I still think well of it as because I feel like that collection is, for better or worse, something of a record of my development as a writer.  But for a good couple of years after that success (still the high point of “exposure” for me as a writer, as perhaps it always will be), I couldn’t write anything without comparing it to “Jun Hee” or thinking about whether my editor at The New Yorker (who has long since moved on) would like it, and so I didn’t write much.  All the time I wasted thinking of that silly story as a benchmark of some kind.  But I probably wouldn’t have written much good fiction in those years in any case (I really was still figuring too much out), and those credits still look kind of nice in an author’s note.

Dan:

You have a collection, Tyrants, due to be published.  Is there a timeline for that yet?  I read 2006 online somewhere (maybe the WUSTL page) but do not see anything on Amazon about it coming out.

Marshall:

Yes, it’s coming out in February (2008).  Thanks for asking.

Dan:

The Cottagers will be coming out in paperback next month – will you be going back out to support it doing readings and the like?

Marshall:

Well, Norton won’t be sending me out or anything.  I’ll happily go anywhere if I’m invited.

Dan:

You teach at Washington University in St. Louis, making it quite possibly the first writing program with two teachers having been nominated for the LBC Read This! Program (though I’ve not truly researched this), along with Kellie Wells.  How did you come to find yourself teaching in the middle of the country (having grown up in Connecticut)?

Marshall:

You know, the job was available when I was on the market, first of all.  It was a program I was familiar with—I knew they’d had a good MFA going here for years—and I love the work of Stanley Elkin and William Gass.  It was exciting to get to teach in their wake.  When I arrived, there was only one other fiction writer—Charles Newman—who just taught one semester a year.  But I really liked (still like) everyone in the English Department, and I liked that they’d let me teach literature—craft classes—as well as workshops.  So I felt very fortunate to land here.  Since then, yeah, Kellie Wells and Kathryn Davis have joined the program, and they’re both terrific people and good friends in addition to being writers I really admire.  I think we’re all proud that we’ve kept Wash U something of a home for the kind of non-traditional narrative that Elkin and Gass made it known for (though my work is probably the most traditional of the three).  And it’s taken a while, but my wife and I feel ourselves settling into the city, and certain aspects of being Midwesterners, more every year.  The fact that we still pine for places like Boston or Seattle sometimes seems to have less and less to do with any dissatisfaction with Saint Louis.  We like it here.

Dan:

Lastly, Marshall, if you were a character in “Fahrenheit 451,” what work(s) would you memorize for posterity?

Marshall:

Oh—isn’t that nice to think about.  Probably Melville—passages of Moby Dick.  (Bradbury probably has a character in the book quoting Ishmael among the trees?  I haven’t read it since high school.)  And Henry Green.  I think some of those dialogues—from Loving, or Nothing, or Doting—would be weirdly sustaining, with their mix of wit, longing, and existential emptiness (I’ve always found depressing literature the most uplifting).  Aren’t Elizabeth Bowen’s sentences and paragraphs often gorgeous?  I’d try to hold on to all of “In the Ravine” too.

Dan:

Thanks again for taking the time to answer these questions.

Marshall:

Thank you, Dan—very much.

Today begins Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! week.  This novel, written by Mark Binelli and published by Dalkey Archive is being discussed all week over at the Litblog Co-op.  Mark will be there to guest blog on Wednesday and there should be an interview on Thursday and a podcast interview on Friday with the author as well.

Stop over early today and put your entry in to win a copy of the novel and a signed copy of the publicity poster!

And the title has been announced!

Remember to show up at the LBC tomorrow to find out the Spring 2007 Read This! selection!!!!

Remember, it's Wizard of the Crow week over at the Litblog Co-op as we spend the week discussing the READ THIS! selection of the Winter 2006 quarter.  Like many of the LBC members, I truly enjoyed reading this one.  Wander on over and partake in the discussion!

Do your best to win a copy of Stephen Graham Jones' Demon Theory!  Go to the LBC and post a comment about your best/worst/strangest experience at an 80's hair metal band concert. 

I'm betting on a Britny Fox show myself.

The following can also be read over at the Litblog Co-op, as we are discussing Stephen Graham Jones and his novel, Demon Theory over there this week.

The following is an interview with Stephen Graham Jones, author of All the Beautiful Sinners (Rugged Land, 2003), The Bird is Gone:  A Manifesto (FC2, 2003), The Fast Red Road – A Plainsong (FC2, 2000), Bleed Into Me:  A Book of Stories (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), and Demon Theory (MacAdam Cage, 2006).  He’s also published many short stories online, and is currently an Associate Professor of English at Texas Tech University.

Dan Wickett:

Hello, Stephen.  Thank you very much for taking some time out of your writing and teaching schedule to answer some questions.

Stephen Graham Jones:

Man, there’s also my Heroes and 24 and Lost schedule. But the day’s full of hours, near as I can tell.

Dan Wickett:

Out of curiosity, had your heard of the Litblog Co-op prior to your being nominated for this quarter?

Stephen Graham Jones:

Yeah, through Scott’s Slushpile.net, I’d guess. Cool place—I mean, well, both, Slushpile and the Co-op. Really, I think I have a lot of Co-op hats hanging on various deer around the house. Growing up, we’d always pull the Co-op patches off once the hat was trash and use it on our jeans. Cheaper than a Metallica patch, and they look sharp too.

Dan Wickett:

You have a blog of your own at www.stephengrahamjones.com.  Do you find this helps you as a writer at all?  Or is it just a convenient place for fans of your work to keep up one what you’re doing, what you’re reading, watching, etc.?

Stephen Graham Jones:

I wouldn’t say it helps me, and yeah, I can definitely see the dangers of blogging, but, too, I mean, I’ve never been afraid of running out of writing juice, either. I’ve always got some left for fiction. But no, wait, I’m lying. Sure, I can blog and keep up with just an avalanche of email and student work, all that, and still write novels. What I’ve found I can’t hardly do, though, is program and write fiction. Like, web-programming, writing code, a hole I nearly fell all the way into a few years back, when PHP was still young and stealing all the Perl die-hards. For me, writing code, it’s just so, so fun, because there’s always the chance of elegance, if you stick with a line long enough. Problem is, the brain muscles I use to program are the same muscles I use for fiction. And there’s not enough brainpower for both. So I try as hard as I can to stay away from the code anymore. Sometimes it involves lashing myself to the mast, but oh well.

Dan Wickett:

Speaking of what you’re reading – the list goes on and on at your blog.  Fantastic recommendations, wandering all over the literary map in terms of what sections one might find them in a Borders or Barnes and Noble.  How important do you believe reading is for young (and even not so young) writers?  What do you tell your students?

Stephen Graham Jones:

It’s just the garbage in/garbage out trick. If you’re not taking any fiction in, good or bad, then how can you be spitting any back out (good or bad)? I can’t even imagine trying to write without reading. Really, I can hardly write a novel at all if I’m not reading just book after book. Though I have to be very careful to stay away from Vonnegut or Philip K. Dick, as they both shut me down, make me want to go back to manual labor. Or, a non-writing kind of manual labor anyway. Because writing, of course, it’s not all in your head. Not talking about the ‘manual’ act of typing here either, but that, when your fiction’s really working, your whole body’s involved, and then some. Sounds stupid when I say it like that, probably, but you—I—get all jittery, and messed-up. This one novel I wrote, I mean, Hair of the Dog—like the Nazareth album, yeah—it was pretty intense, involved doing bad things and worse things, and, the whole six weeks I was writing it, I was sick the whole time. But I love the product.

Dan Wickett:

As for students, you are an Associate Professor in English at Texas Tech University.  I’ve read you said even if you had the sales of a DaVinci Code, you believe you’d continue teaching.  What do you get out of it, or enjoy, to the level that if you didn’t need it for income purposes, you’d still want to have it be a part of your life?

Stephen Graham Jones:

It’s just so great being in the classroom with people who are there to talk about writing, and reading. I mean, I tried not teaching for a while, after grad school—a lot of people ‘try’ that, I know—and found that I missed it so much, being in a room with people afflicted with the same freakishness, the same romantic bent or whatever, the same willingness to put this world on hold, traffic in another. Too, I have a tendency to spin off into my head if left alone too long. So, I mean, students, talking to them once or twice a week, having to articulate the craziness, make it make sense for sentences at a time, it helps.

Dan Wickett:

I’ve only had the pleasure of reading Demon Theory and then Bleed Into Me, but from descriptions of your other works, it appears that Demon Theory is the first of your published writing to not have a heavy influx of Native American characters.  To hit you with multiple questions at once – As a Native American, have you felt any pressure to write of Native Americans, or did you perhaps feel more comfortable writing from that viewpoint earlier in your career?  And do you feel some importance in making sure that there is writing out there about Native Americans that doesn’t resort to falling into what could be seen as standard stereotypes?

Stephen Graham Jones:

Working on my M.A., I remember this one story I wrote and wrote and wrote, mostly called “Navasota Moon.” I don’t remember if it ever got published anywhere, but doubt it. Anyway, working through the drafts of it, a thing hit me—I realized that this guy, this protagonist, first, he was the same protagonist I’d been using for every other one of my stories, which I think we all do, like it or not, but, more important, he was part Indian. And the reason he was was because that was the only kind or type or whatever of person I really knew how to identify with, the only eyeholes I had to look from. Make sense? I think it’s the same as, if you’re a guy, most of your characters, at least early on, are going to be male (too, though, I’ve found that even female writers just starting out default to male characters a lot of the time, which just wholly confuses me). As for pressure to write Indian stuff, yeah, there’s some of that, but it’s not like there’s a body of people out there staring at me trying to keep me in-line, and not like I imagine they’re there either. It’s more like . . .  don’t want to say responsibility, because I don’t at all think that word has anything to do with art. But still, being Indian, you (I), do kind of feel compelled to write against a lot of the stuff that’s out there. To, say, tell an Indian story without feathers and loincloths. To show the reader that Indians are people too, not just illustrations come to life. But no, as to whether it was more comfortable to write Indian stuff when I was younger as opposed to now—Demon Theory was the second novel I ever wrote, just right on the heels of Fast Red Road. And what I was just very consciously doing with Demon Theory was telling a story as opposite from Fast Red Road as I could. Initially, I didn’t want the term “Indian” in it anywhere, though I finally had to put it in, to reference Poltergeist or something. I just wanted to see if I was using the Indian stuff as a crutch, I mean. Or, more pressing, if I was only getting published because I was Indian-writing-Indian, or whether I had the storytelling ability to just wing it all alone, to make it all up. Since Demon Theory, though, since I wrote it, I mean—talking 1999 here—yeah, I guess three of my books have been Indian in subject matter. The same way, I guess, you write Earthling books if you’re, say, from Earth, Martian books if you’re from Mars. It’s just what I know. Even that book I was talking about that made me six-weeks-sick, it’s horror, sure, but the main guy’s Indian too. Pretty much the same character from that “Navasota Moon” story, really. Now that I think about it. Which I never have. Wow.

Dan Wickett:

Bleed Into Me is a short story collection.  The stories are of Native Americans living in the 21st century and it’s all but impossible not to notice the symbol, right there in the title even, of blood.  It’s in many of the stories – physical blood, the idea of blood being passed from father to son, etc.  Did you write these stories with a collection in mind, or were they written over time, along with your other stories, and collected together afterwards?

Stephen Graham Jones:

Yeah, they were collected afterwards. Written over, I don’t know, twelve years? That “Carbon” one anyway, it’s from 95, I think. “Last Success” is 96 or so. “Venison” is that same year. If I had to pick a favorite, though, it’d be “To Run Without Falling,” easy. About ninety-nine percent autobiographical, that one. Some stories hardly feel like lying at all.

Dan Wickett:

You have published a large amount of short fiction, both in print journals and with online journals as well.  When you complete a story, do you send it out to targeted journals based on the writing and story itself?  Do you hold any preference to getting it published in print or online?   If you could see your story in one journal, or magazine, what would it be?

Stephen Graham Jones:

Man, one journal. Used to it was The New Yorker, I suppose. And I’d still like that check, for sure. Right now, though, I think I’m most into the brand of fiction Tin House has been pushing. I mean, Zoetrope and One Story and McSweeney’s, anyway, they’re running quality stuff as well, but the Tin House stories have a bit more edge, for whatever reason. Oh, wait, but all of this doesn’t matter: the mag I most want to be published in, now that I’ve been in Cemetery Dance, that’s easy: Weird Tales. The birthplace of Conan. If I could go back in time, though, then it’d be OMNI. Though too Asimov’s has been running some pretty clean stuff for awhile now, and Fantasy & Science Fiction’s always fun. Nothing against Analog, for sure, and that newish Apex Digest is pretty hot. But you didn’t ask for a grocery list, yeah. Sorry. As for print vs on-line, no, no real preference. Neither’s more valid than the other, I don’t think. As for the advantages of each: on-line stuff doesn’t die when the next issue comes out, and print stuff gets picked more for the anthologies. As for targeting certain mags, I really should, yeah. Trick is, I just write so much that I’ll go months and months just making stories, and forget all about sending them out. Lots of the stuff I publish, I mean, it’s because somebody calls me, asks if I have something they could use? And of course I just always do.

Dan Wickett:

You’ve had your work published by various publishers, including FC2, University of Nebraska Press and MacAdam/Cage.  What differences did you find between publishers in terms of the process of editing, and in terms of publicity and getting the work out there to the readers?

Stephen Graham Jones:

To group them, I’d say FC2 and Nebraska are pretty similar—indie/university presses, so I can be fairly involved in all the editorial decisions, and no, there’s not just a blank check for marketing, though there is a lot of hands-on caring-about-your book stuff, which really and seriously matters, leaves you feeling a lot less lonely. Then there’s MacAdam/Cage and Rugged Land, both kind of maverick publishers but biggish too, with money, though the Cage is becoming more of a mainstay type place, I’d suspect—they’ve had some hits, I mean, are making the right kinds of noise, but are still crazy enough to run stuff like Demon Theory, or that cool-looking Corrections to My Memoirs. Meaning they seem to be at a place where there’s not some COBRA syndicate breathing down their necks, affecting editorial policy, telling them ‘Blockbuster or else, guys.’ But I distract myself here. Yeah, for publicity, for marketing, it’s nice to have a bigger budget, to be working with a bigger publisher. Like with Rugged Land, for ATBS they ran some NYT ads and were pretty free with checks everywhere else, which, coming from an indie background, I thought was kind of like the promised land.

Dan Wickett:

While many authors are not interested in anything but the writing, you seem to relish, to a higher degree at least, the publicity aspect of publishing a book – which, in this day and age is probably a good thing for you.  You’ve created a YouTube promo for Demon Theory (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aVhs-0b5vE), and set yourself up with a MySpace page, among other things.  Is it the aspect of getting to be creative that you enjoy, or is it more that you realize you’ve got to do everything you can to get your books noticed?

Stephen Graham Jones:

Well, cheap answer, but a bit from both pots, I suppose, though it started just with getting my stuff noticed, of course. But then it became really cool just to interact with people, both those who were reading and who weren’t reading my stuff. Just smart people. And too, I’d be lying if I didn’t say it’s fun, that net-thing of culturing a persona, all that. The same way as at a party or wherever you push a certain version of yourself, and don’t tell them about how you still keep all your special rocks in that old Hello Kitty bag. That’s kind of how all this on-line stuff is for me. I’ve got Hello Kitty bags just stacked up all around me here at the keyboard, but don’t ever have to say anything about them. Because I don’t want people stealing my special rocks.

Dan Wickett:

Demon Theory.  Quite a few footnotes in this novel.  I like Vincent Liaguno’s comment (http://unspeakablehorror.com/vince-liaguno/2007/1/21/book-review-demon-theory.html) that they were similar to Pop-Up Videos (from the VH-1 show).  I read each one at the time you referenced it – as if I was being told a story by one prone to rambled wanderings in the conversation or story.  Was this your intention with the footnotes?  For those who became frustrated with them, and the constant need to shuffle their eyes to the bottom of the page – do you believe the text itself, sans footnotes, was a sustainable story and one strong enough to be published without the rest?  Or does that idea not even make sense to you as the footnotes are truly part of the story?

Stephen Graham Jones:

No, it makes sense for sure. I mean, the way I’d always read through Demon Theory was to print it up without the footnotes. Because if that top story doesn’t work independent of the notes, then the book’s a flop. And, too—I think Mike Bracken said this in his review (http://www.toxicuniverse.com/review.php?rid=10006327) — but it was also very important for me that the notes never perturb the top story. That they exist independent of it, but in a way that also deepens it, or riffs off it, whatever. But they could have no bearing on what was happening in the big font. That’d be a dangerous path to try to walk. A tightrope, really. And, talking when or even if to read them, somebody over at the Velvet said that he didn’t even read the footnotes really, just because he didn’t need to—he also grew up with those movies. Which is just supercool, I think, to ignore them like that, to have already internalized them, for them to be unnecessary. I six-hundred percent agree with that reading, maybe even endorse it, and would hope everybody knows the slasher etc. that well, that they can just cruise through the top story. But to get back to the question, yeah, for sure, Pop-Up Video. I even have a story I always call my Pop-Up Video story, that “Screentime” one in the Burroway textbook. Because I was a Pop-Up Video hound, I mean. I wish there were some closed-caption type button I could push on my tv to make everything I watch Pop-Up, really. It just makes perfect sense to me. But, too, I can’t really watch TV, or a DVD, without the subtitles or closed captions on. Because I like to read while I watch. Makes it a whole lot more interactive. I feel less like just a viewer, feel more engaged. But, as for my intention with the footnotes, somebody—oh, Demon Theory’s editor, Jason Wood—he said that they worked for him like a love letter to his childhood. Which is perfectly right, I think. That’s how they are for me as well. But that’s not intent. Intent. Okay, my intent: I wanted to peel back the curtain, show how nothing’s new, that there’s only new arrangements, really. But I wanted, insisted, on doing it in exuberant fashion. Which is to say I wouldn’t or won’t allow any cynicism into it—I’m not meaning to say that it’s all been done, all that’s left is to cannibalize the past, all that, which is a cop-out. I’m meaning—well, it’s in the afterword, I suppose, with Barth and the “Literature of Exhaustion” or whatever. How it’s not at all dirge-like, but exciting, a zero-point energy thing, enough juice in the vacuum of a light bulb to fry all our brains, that kind of stuff. And do I spell ‘vacuum’ wrong there? I’m talking emptiness, or, a fullness that’s equivalent to emptiness. Not Hoovers.

Dan Wickett:

The footnotes wander all over the pop culture map (even including a reference to the television show Manimal (!)), but are mostly geared to the genre of horror films, with 80’s hair metal bands probably ranking number two in terms of number of footnotes.  Did you have to do much research in these areas, or were you already aware of most of the details when you decided to add the footnote?  It also brings up a question we touched on in the LBC roundtable discussion of the book.  It is, after all, a novel.  Fiction that is.  Do you believe the footnotes even had to be true?  That if one looked up the information, that they would have to be able to find it and verify that your footnote was telling the truth?

Stephen Graham Jones:

Yeah, a fair number of the footnotes are just lies. But it’s fiction. It’s fake scholarship. Which isn’t to say I could tag the wrong year onto any of the movies, either. Just because that’d look like a mistake. But yeah, almost everything in there, if I didn’t know it particularly already, I knew of it, anyway, then just had to dig up the specifics wherever. Friends, internet, books, radio, DVDs, etc. And everybody always loves that Manimal’s in there. Cracks me up. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I loved Manimal, and consider it more of a documentary than anything made-up, I just never knew there was this groundswell of hidden Manimal fans out there. Me, I’d like to see Manimal and Automan in a cage match. But, as for the hair metal stuff, yeah, I had to really draw back on a lot of that. Because, for me, it just permeates all of existence, infuses it with meaning and informs its structure, is probably even in the bible somewhere if you (I) look close enough. Any bible that matters, anyway. “The Gospel of Jon, Brett, Vince, and Axl,” yeah. I’d read it. Maybe even write it.

Dan Wickett:

You’re obviously a big music fan – and I admire the fact that you have that list on your site of songs from youth that you can’t state you’re embarrassed to like, including Barry Manilow’s I Write the Songs.  But, do you write with music on?  Is it typically the 80’s hair metal bands, or does it depend on what you’re working on?

Stephen Graham Jones:

Yeah, it’s just impossible – ridiculous, really – for me to try to write without the music just blowing my hair straight back like those old commercials.  So that I’m like just using my Spidey powers to hang onto the keyboard, still try to tap out a story.  Anything less than that dial cranked to 11, too, and bad stuff starts happening to my fiction.  Particularly, my brain gets undistracted enough to start actually thinking about what I’m doing here, storywise.  And as far as I’m concerned, any fiction which operates from mindpower instead of just from basic narrative instinct, that fiction’s just a game, is just craft, will probably have very little heart.  I mean, there’s an eventual place for thinking, sure, but that’s when you come back to the piece, have to trace out the causal logic, the plot, and make sure everything’s locking together nice enough or in some kind of recognizable manner.  But thinking, man, planning, all that, it’s just a half-step and a bad idea away from second-guessing yourself.  Which isn’t at all what writing can be, when it’s really being writing.  As for what I listen to particularly, while writing anyway, it’s stuff that plays well loud.  So, yeah, right now it’s hair metal, but that’s just chance, just what I needed to make the thing I’m writing right now maybe work.  Usually I don’t allow myself any of that while writing, though.  All scattered around my desk and under my desk and balanced in unlikely and unlikelier places are old scratched CDs from other novels I’ve written.  Because that’s always the way I do it – only one CD or playlist per novel.  I won’t listen to anything else while writing that novel, and will change music just to check email or something, and won’t even listen to that CD in the truck or while playing ball or anywhere, just because those songs, that set of songs, they’re only for that novel, are the kind of magic that can’t be wasted on nothing-stuff, which when you’re writing, is everything else.  If that makes anything even remotely like sense.  As for being a music fan, though, I doubt if I qualify.  Unless just listening to the same old stuff all the time can count.  I mean, it’s wide ranging, yeah, from the nasally old country to Rob Zombie and stopping in the middle for Terrance Trent D’Arby and Shalimar, but the music scene just got so fractured, it seems, that unless you’re a critic or something then I don’t know how you can possibly listen to it all.  I mean, give me the Footloose soundtrack and a couple of Bob Seger albums and I’m pretty good to go.  Maybe some Whitesnake, I suppose.  As for what songs I used to write what stuff, I don’t remember so well anymore.  I do remember that “Total Eclipse of the Heart” started off the ATBS CD, and that the Seven Spanish Angels one had two Kid rock songs, and that Hair of the Dog had some Danzig and Rob Zombie, and, I think, Kid Rock (he’s all-purpose).  Fast Red Road, though, man, I remember having a jambox there by my computer, but can’t remember what I played.  Nothing burned, anyway, so it was probably the Skynyrd box set over and over.  I used to listen to that so much that I can’t even listen to it all anymore.  But yeah, Demon Theory.  What’d I listen to then.  Trick with it was I wrote it on two computers – one home, one at work.  I’m pretty sure at work I was listening to Zappa’s Joe’s Garage all day on headphones, mostly just the first disc, which is still a new kind of magic.  At home, though, I think no music, as my computer then would lock up if I tried to listen to a CD and do anything else.  And my trusty jambox by that time had become the music supply for a bathroom way in the back of the house I was living in, so, yeah – no, no, I do remember now:  somehow I had some Bonnie Tyler.  On cassette, I think.  Yeah.  Bonnie Tyler whom I love.  She helped me with Demon Theory.  Her and Supertramp, which I had on permanent loan from a friend.  I just don’t remember the logistics of how.  And, man, that was some hard remembering.  I think my hair’s smoking.  I think if I tried to dig any deeper, I’d be coming up with all my many alien abduction experiences, which I’ve been trying to keep repressed until things were calmer and I could deal with them.

Dan Wickett:

Per your blog, it appears that you are working on another novel.  Anything you can share about it at this time?

Stephen Graham Jones:

Yeah. Ledfeather. Much much much more about it in that guest blog thing I’m doing here tomorrow or the next day.

Dan Wickett:

This past Halloween, you showed up for a book signing at the wrong bookstore wearing a Jason mask and carrying a big rubber knife.  Is this the strangest book signing incident you’ve endured?

Stephen Graham Jones:

Hm. No, probably not. The strangest—well, saddest—was down at BookPeople once, back in like 2000 or something. I was sitting up in the big room alone. It was the night after James Ellroy had been there, I think. Or somebody big. Elmer Kelton? Or can he not be alive anymore? Anyway, nobody knew me, knew about me, then at one point I heard the manager whispering into the PA for all employees in the breakroom to please go up to my room. It was the funniest, most terrible thing. But then at another BookPeople reading, with a lot more people—this was for ATBS, I think—this woman kind of wondered in, and had that look like she was maybe going to start shooting people, or throwing lit cats at them at least, but then she kept pressing me about vomiting in my fiction. I mean, ‘vomiting,’ and how I was using it in my fiction. Not throwing up in my books. Not that that’d be an insult, I suppose. But they were some hard questions to answer, and have made me real sensitive anymore to somebody about to hurl (with)in one of my stories. Let’s see, others, other . . . I know: one night I did a reading to probably two hundred and fifty or three hundred people. Great time, all that. Then the very next night I went to similar sized place and, bam, four people. Craziness. Oh, also, maybe this is the strangest: I was doing a reading at the B&N in my hometown, Midland—this has happened to me twice now, really—and looked up to see one of my great uncles walking through the store, way away from me, kind of eyeing me like Was I really who he thought I might be? Yep. Anyway, afterwards I ran him down in some aisle, and he was just off work that day, I think, because he’d been rattlesnake bit the day before on the foot, but then came back to work or something, finished his shift. But now his boss was making him go to the doctor, maybe. It’s all kind(s) of blurry. The other time something like that happened was here in Lubbock. I was at a podium reading, and this old relative (as in age-old, not that he’d been my relative for a long time) kind of staggered up right in the middle of everything and started talking to me, never realizing, I don’t think, what I was doing, or that the book in my hands was mine, any of that. I guess also, the most awkward reading experience might have been in New Orleans, at a bar, one set up pretty well for readings, like the Warehouse in Tallahassee, but I was one of like six readers or something, following this woman who had a really good following, so the house was packed. Only thing was, when she was finished with her piece, she leaned down to the microphone, let the silence kind of build up, and said, in just the right voice, that anybody who met her behind the building with a receipt for her book, she’d give them a blowjob. Then of course everybody followed her out. And, I mean, what could I offer after that, yeah?

Dan Wickett:

Is it true that you carry around pictures of ex-watermelons in your wallet?

Stephen Graham Jones:

Oh yeah. Suttree. No comment. That’s between me and them. And that paternity case has been taken care of.

Dan Wickett:

Lastly, if you were a character in “Fahrenheit 451,” what work(s) would you memorize for posterity?

Stephen Graham Jones:

VALIS, maybe. Or Love in the Time of Cholera. Catch-22. Deliverance, White Hotel, The Crying of Lot 49. The Magus. The Stand. Love Medicine. A Confederacy of Dunces. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The Wolfen. The Things They Carried and Coover’s Ghost Town and maybe even Gatsby. Lord of the Rings too, of course. And Riddley Walker. The Third Policeman. Lonesome Dove. Bastard out of Carolina. And the screenplays for Twelve Monkeys and Jacob’s Ladder and Lost Highway, and probably James Dickey’s “A Birth” too, and Mona Simpson’s short story “Lawns,” maybe Tobias Wolff’s “Hunters in the Snow” or “Liar.” This story “Wedgewood Blue” by John Vanderslice, I forget where it’s from. A transcript of the X-File’s “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space.’” Strange Stories, Amazing Facts. The Frost Giant’s Daughter. Alexie’s “South by Southwest” story, and maybe “Sineaters” too. The Haunting of Hill House. Everything is Illuminated. The Wolf’s Hour. Jubal Sackett. The Dark Knight Returns. My head would blow up, yeah. Even more, I mean. But then that’d be a story too.

Dan Wickett:

Thanks again, Stephen, for taking the time out for this.

Stephen Graham Jones:

Nothing but fun.

Just as the title suggests -this is a reminder that the Litblog Co-op is in the midst of its quarterly discussions of books.

Last week we discussed Valerie Trueblood's Seven Loves.  This week's discussion on Stephen Graham Jones' Demon Theory kicks off with a roundtable discussion that I'm a part of.  And next week, we discuss this quarter's Read This! selection, Wizard of the Crow.

Read This!  The winter 2007 selection by the Litblog Co-op.  A damn fine read.