Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology (39 page)

ROBB: Blackstone Audio released both books as regular audiobooks but also,
Dermaphoria
as an iOS accessory app. I don’t even have a question here, I just want to say, I was listening to that a little bit on a drive from Vermont to D.C. recently, and I was like, “Man, they found the perfect voice for this!” And only afterwards did I realize that it was actually your voice. Do you feel like you have a good voice for it?

CRAIG: [laughs] I’ve never liked my voice; I’ve always thought I sound like Wallace Shawn channeling Bobcat Goldthwait. It’s something I’ve never been comfortable with. With the
Dermaphoria
recording, I was listening after the first day, I was listening to some of the bits of it and I asked Andrew, the engineer, what effects he was using, and he said he wasn’t using any. And I said, “That was not me!” And he explained the condenser mic and how it’s picking up everything, all of the midtones out of my chest, and I just want a condenser mic welded to my chest, so I could sound like that. “What’s the problem, officer?” No one’s going to fuck with you if you sound like that all of the time. I’ve gotten used to it, I’ve gotten more comfortable with the sound of it, just because I have to. When I read, if I do a reading in public, I always take time to take a few deep breaths, do a shot of whiskey, and listen to some Johnny Cash while I look over my notes. That seems to get me into the right headspace. But I’m just waking up now, so I’m kind of scattered and tightly wound.

LIVIUS: Can you tell us how you first got started writing?

CRAIG: No, I have no idea. I’ve been doing it since I was very young and anti-social. I would stay in at recess in grade school and write stories on paper. I don’t know where the impulse came from, but I’ve always had it.

ROBB: So, Craig, you touched on this a little, earlier, and at least one of the other authors that we talked to during these interviews mentioned that they’d like to see you do more short fiction. How do you feel about writing short fiction?

CRAIG: I haven’t written much short fiction since college. You know, creative writing, you do a lot of short fiction, at least as an undergrad. There’s not time to do novels. I did a lot of short fiction throughout my 20s and such. But since I started writing again 12, 15 years ago after stopping, I’ve pretty much done the novels. I’ve always said that a master clocksmith is not a good watchmaker. They’re two different disciplines, so I don’t think one is just simply a shorter version of the other. That said, I’m trying to do more short fiction, just in an effort to write more. If you’ve ever played a game of Scrabble with me, you’ll know why it takes me so long to write. I think I overthink things, to my own detriment. 

ROBB: Do you want to talk a little bit about what you’re currently working on?

CRAIG: Well, there’s this third novel that I’m starting to call
Godspeed, Jr.
[Robb laughs] Going to ditch the title
Saint Heretic
. I think I know what I’m going to call it, but in the meantime I’m taking a breather. I’ve got people waiting on it, I know, but I need to reboot my brain. So I just finished a short piece and I’ve started another one. Finished a short piece I sent to Stephen Jones the other day called “Chicken Wire” about a washed-up, almost-famous sort of has-been rock star living out in the middle of nowhere driving a taxi. So it’s not noir; it’s not my usual fare at all. It’s actually kind of lighthearted and sweet to a degree, and people might be kind of surprised. And I’m working on a short piece right now called “Drone” about the subject of drones, the robotic military aircraft. There have been an alarming number of these things that have malfunctioned and just kind of gone off on their own. We don’t hear a lot about this, as you might imagine. But it happens. It’s another desert story. I came back from the desert, my mind kind of on fire, so it’s another story set in the desert. And then I’ll get back to what used to be titled
Saint Heretic
. 

LIVIUS: Can you tell us what some of your early writing influences were? Who were you reading early on who helped kind of define what you wanted to do? 

CRAIG: Hmm. The first person to really just knock me out of orbit, in terms of the sort of stasis I was in, was Italo Calvino. I read
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
, and it completely upended my ideas of what fiction could do. Stylistically: the pulps, obviously. But more than that, I think early college reading: T.C. Boyle and later on of course Seth Morgan. Getting an idea of what’s possible with language, that you can make the words as engaging as the storyline. People wonder why I read books more than once, and my response—wholly unsarcastically—is, “Why do you watch a movie more than once or listen to a song more than once?” Just because you know what’s going to happen doesn’t mean that the process itself can’t be engaging. And looking at the real wordsmiths, the people that could do really amazing things with language, are the reasons I reread books. 

I get influence from different writers for different reasons. It’s not necessarily always about their writing style. Sometimes it’s the tone, or that writer’s work ethic, or it’s their subject. I may not like the style at all, but the subject and the places they’re going I’m really drawn to. So the older I get, the more I write and the more I read, the less one single influence looms above the rest. Chris Baer was a big influence before I met him. [laughs] That came out wrong. You know what, don’t edit that. Anything I can needle him with to get him to stick his head above the gopher hole and say something to the world is okay. He still is. But more than the style alone, reading a lot of his short fiction and seeing this really profound degree of empathy he has. And that’s hard to explain unless you’ve read a lot of his short stuff, which most people haven’t. Sometimes I wonder how the guy can remember basic day-to-day things, you know, where he parked his car and such. When I read his short fiction, there’s such a degree of empathy going on that must make it hard to function, I’d think. John O’Brien, my favorite of his are
Leaving Las Vegas
and
Stripper Lessons
. I can’t describe them. He was a remarkable writer, and the loss is ours, his suicide. 

I spent the bulk of my career trying to equal two things, two brief passages: one was the electrotherapy scene on Chief Bromden in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, that hallucinatory passage, and Chapter 19 of
Tours of the Black Clock
. Doris Lessing’s
Briefing for a Descent Into Hell
. Can’t describe that when you have to read it to know how it affected me. Been reading a lot of the southern gothic folks lately: William Gay, especially. I like Cormac McCarthy, I
love
William Gay. William Gay is wholly underrated and wholly brilliant. He’s very restrained yet very lyrical at the same time. Mike Hogan, his first novel, especially,
Man Out of Time
just knocked me backward. I’ll keep going if I don’t stop there. . . . 

LIVIUS: Of you fellow contributors in
Warmed and Bound
, can you give us a few of the authors that you expect we’re going to see some big things from?

CRAIG: I’m still going to take the Fifth on that one. Because no matter what . . . . You know, I think this Stephen Graham Jones guy is going to go places; I think he’s an up-and-coming voice we should pay more attention to. Ha! How’s that?
Ha!
[laughs] Honestly, a lot of these people are former students of mine, and whatever they’ve said in credit to me, I gotta just step back, because at this point I’ve got nothing to do with it anymore. Everyone seems to have taken flight without me just fine. They’re all, like I said, extremely prolific. Richard Thomas, pretty much every other day, says, “I’ve got a new short story here.” So yeah, I’m going to take the Fifth but at the same time give props to them all. I can’t win with that question. Nice try, though.

ROBB: Is there anything you’re looking forward to reading that’s coming up soon?

CRAIG: Right now I’m reading
Zazen
by Vanessa Veselka. That one I’m really enjoying. I’m still wading through
Infinite Jest
. And Murakami. I’m kind of caught up in what I’m currently reading and still need to read. I haven’t even looked at the book horizon. If Steve Erickson’s got a new book coming up, I’ll stop whatever I’m doing to read that. And
Godspeed
, of course. 

ROBB: Is there anything else you’d like to talk about that we haven’t mentioned yet?

CRAIG: I want to give big, big pimpage to my buddy Rob Roberge, who I met years ago. I read his first novel—and I’ve told him this, so this will sound cruel—but I said this to him: “I remember enjoying it, but I don’t remember it specifically.” And I was reading his other stuff recently, and my jaw just hit the floor. My first question was, “Lord, who broke
your
heart, buddy?” Even though he’s been happily married for a very long time, there’s just such a rawness to what he’s doing.

You guys have been talking about the women in noir and the “boys club” question, so I should make sure I mention Sara Gran and Megan Abbott. I don’t have an answer for the question about the lack of women in the anthology. I wrote something on The Velvet the other day about this same issue, and ultimately it comes down to me not knowing. But I think it’s really important we keep asking. And I’m glad you guys are putting it out there; it needs to be brought up. Because, let’s be honest, if you want to talk about noir and the dark, ugly injustice of the godless universe, I think straight white men are probably the least-qualified to write about it. Let’s be real here. We’ve spent the least amount of time on the business end of the injustice of life. So it’s our loss, not having more women in the mix, definitely. 

ROBB: Did you happen to listen to Caleb Ross’s interview? He was talking about how he first met Stephen Graham Jones and how he first met you, and both of them involved lying to you. [laughs]

CRAIG: I did not know this. That’s so cute. Here’s one. I was a huge fan of
Kiss Me, Judas
, of course, and I’d finished writing the
Handbook
. This was back, more than 10 years ago, give or take, and do a web search for Chris Baer, or Will Christopher, as he was, or is, and I wouldn’t find much, other than he’s from Memphis, lived in northern California and Colorado and whatnot, but not much else. So, I was living in Santa Barbara at the time. There was this coffee shop down the street from my apartment where, one of the few human beings I saw on a fairly regular basis was the guy at this coffee shop. I’d pretty much locked myself up for a couple of years to work on the
Handbook
. It had come out, I got a job at the bookstore, so I was on my way to work one day and I stopped by the coffee shop, and the owner knew I’d had this book come out, and he’d read it and he said, “So are you a fan of Will Christopher Baer, then?” I said, “Absolutely, yeah, I love him.” He goes, “That’s funny, I thought you might like him. He used to work here.” And I went, “Excuse me?” It turns out Chris and I had been living about eight blocks from each other. And so I passed a copy of the
Handbook
to the owner to pass on to Chris. Chris and I end up corresponding via e-mail over the course of a few weeks. Turns out he’s working at the local independent paper down in Santa Barbara,
The Independent
—the focus group came up with that one. . . . We finally agreed to meet. He said he’s going to interview me for the paper, “but we should just hang out anyway.” We met at a little Mexican restaurant/bar, and it was just weird. Both sat down: boots, jeans, black shirts, sleeves rolled up, tattoos, drove the same car, and our birthdays were a week apart. It was a little weird. And kind of amusing. So yeah, that’s that story. And then he moved to Memphis. 

And Vincent Carrella I met while I was bartending. I had a standing rule whenever I bartend that my coworkers do not tell anyone that I’ve written books because I just don’t want to have people thrusting, you know, fan fiction at me. Because it’s happened. But I heard Vincent talking to a buddy of his about his book, and I could glean from the conversation—because I’m a bartender and we hear
everything
—that he was legit. So I started talking to him about it, and that’s how I met Vincent Carrella and how he came into the mix. Lot of random stuff.

I was staying down in Bolivia with Wendy Dale and her boyfriend. Wendy was the first person who actually first sent my book to The Cult and got it into Dennis Widmer’s and Chuck Palahniuk’s hands. So it’s just one great big North Beach in the ’60s . . . no it’s not. [laughs]

LIVIUS: If there’s one bit of advice you could offer to aspiring writers, what would it be?

CRAIG: Easy. Write every story like it’s your last. I have a list of writing advice things I’ve put up before, but first and foremost, write every story like you’re on your deathbed. Don’t think about your career or your portfolio. Don’t save the good stuff for a later thing. Just make it do-or-die. Make every one matter like it’s your last, final deathbed shot at getting a story down. Just put everything into every single one. That’s my advice. 

Chris Baer is very good at coming up with names: Ryder Fell and Phineas Poe and whatnot. I’ve tried to work on it, but I’ll just never be that . . . I used random name generators; they just don’t work as well. One of my prized reference volumes is a Manhattan White Pages. You’ve got just about every ethnicity on the planet crammed together. That, and a baby-naming book, and you’re good to go. 

ROBB: I just assumed that since you had that whole big section in
Contortionist’s
about finding names that are kind of under the radar, that that’s actually something you used when naming your characters.

CRAIG: Actually, that’s one of the things that I completely made up. I have no idea what the criteria are for picking a name if you are faking a name. But yeah, I pulled that one out of thin air. I’m waiting for someone to get caught trying to do something based on something they learned, because they screwed up, thinking it was all factually accurate, and therefore sue me and get some PR out there. Because there’s no better PR than being sued.