Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology (44 page)

ROBB: That's really, really cool and unique, I like that.  

LIVIUS: That being said, since you're not recommending students read some writers, who were your influences? 

STEPHEN: Stephen King is probably my big influence. Joe Lansdale is a huge influence, just because when you ask Joe Lansdale what genre does he write, he'll say the Joe Lansdale and I think, "Wow, I'd love to have the Stephen Jones genre," or really the Stephen Graham Jones genre, I guess. Yeah, I'm so jealous that they can do that. Gerald Vizenor, an American Indian writer, an Anishinaabe guy, he is one of my heroes, he's just really talented and real intelligent. I like Sherman Alexie's stuff a lot. Phillip K. Dick is my idol, Vonnegut is what I would aspire too if I could even begin to aspire but I'll be able to write like Vonnegut. Nabokov, I respect Nabokov so much. He had such an intellect, it just blows me away. At the same time, C.J. Box, he's a detective writer, a mystery writer, I guess, and he's able to put stuff on the page in a way in which I cannot put the book down and I so wish I had that talent, you know. Every time I write, I'm trying to write like C.J. Box, I think.

One writer that people don't read anymore, very much, is Charles McCarry, he had a series of spy novels, the Paul Christopher novels, I don't know, six or seven of them, and that guy, he was like Stanislaw Lem kind of smart but he had Dan Brown sense of story, and he was the complete package. I say nobody reads him anymore, they were probably reading him like crazy back when he was publishing back in the 70s and 80s, back when I was reading only horror, I wasn't reading anything but horror, or Conan, so I missed out on his stuff when it was happening but I'm glad I found it afterwards. Also, can I mention also Louise Erdrich, she's been a huge influence on me, especially
Love Medicine
, but the way she was able to dilate
Love Medicine
in that whole series of books, which I don't even know how high it's got now, but
Love Medicine
to me is one of those truly magical books we've got, and I hold every one of the endings for my novels up against that, to see is it even in the arena of getting close to that, you know. 

LIVIUS: You mentioned Joe Lansdale. Lansdale does really have his own way. 

STEPHEN: He really does, man, and he has like a laughter in his stories, that he's not afraid to pull to that rug out from under you, either, to make you split your head open on the floor, he's really kind of magic. He's got a lot of confidence; too, I think that helps tremendously. 

ROBB: Going back to the beginning of the world, how did you get started in writing? 

STEPHEN: I guess I figured out I could write in maybe the fourth grade. I read
Where the Red Fern Grows
, it took me four checkout periods because I was not at all a quick reader, and I kept having to go back to figure out what was going on and everything. At the end of it, and I'm sure you have read it, at the end there's an axe head stuck in a tree and there's a rusted lantern hanging from it, and that's like the closing image, and I hope I'm not spoiling it for everybody. There's also a werewolf, I’ll add that, so people should be expecting stuff. I remember when I was in fourth grade, I thought, I could do that. I could stick an axe head in a tree and hang a lantern on it; I had a sense that I knew how to do that. And then, all through my various stupid stuff I did for the next ten or fifteen years, I always knew that I could write, that I probably would write, but I never planned on it, I never planned on going to college, I just was going lease a tractor and get a trailer and be a custom farmer and that was my big dream.

I did some writing in high school, I didn't go to much high school, but the writing I did was these long, long notes, apologies notes, I would write to girls and leave under their windshield wipers I could so I could get back into the fun. I think that's the purest form of writing, because if it's not compelling and it's not rhetorically powerful, then you're out in cold, man, then you don't know what you're doing. Then I went to school, I was a philosophy major. The only reason I went to college was I wanted to take this girl, I wanted to go out with her but she was untouchable, but then I found out she needed a ride to the SATs and I thought this was my chance because I had a truck. So, I called her up, I said, "Let's go take them SATs together." And she said, "Sure." And so I took the SATs not paying attention but apparently I did pretty good on then and my mom, behind my back, submitted them to schools so I ended up going to school for my first year as an Archeology major because I wanted to be Indiana Jones, but that fell through pretty quickly, then I became a philosophy major which I loved, but then I was in World Lit, a second semester Freshman, I guess, and I was nineteen years old. In a big old lecture hall, a big class, and I forget what book we were talking about, but the police came in and got me out and I thought, "Here we go again", because I was always having various law troubles. They pulled me out and where they delivered me was the hospital. It was stupidly surprising.

Turns out, one of my uncles had been burned over like 90 percent of his body was third degree burns. He was expected to live. There was the best burn unit in our part of the country, our part of the state anyways, was in the town I was in, Lubbock, Texas, and I was the only relative that he had for hundreds of miles around, I guess, and somehow they knew that, I don't know how they knew that. So anyway, they ditch me in the waiting room, and all I had was my spiral and my pen from World Lit, and I was there for three days waiting for him to live or die. I just started doodling around in my notebook and what I started to write down was this other family's story that was there. There was this dad, he was a big old dude, you know, and wasn't seven feet but six and a half feet, I guess. This was right after Halloween and he had been taking his son out trick and treating and he was changing a tire out in the country, he had a flat, and this drunk dude came down the road, weaving, slapped him and drug him for a long ways and then spit him out in a ditch and kept driving, and so this guy was in ICU now, and he kept waking up and fighting and pulling his cords and pushing people away and just trying to live. He ended up dying, but even though he died I was already writing his story down so it was like he didn't die for me. I kept writing and writing and ended up submitting this story to the English class I was in because I hadn't written whatever I was supposed to write, so I asked the teacher, who was writing to get me into witchcraft, too, which was kind of neat, I asked her if I could turn in a story instead.

She said, "Sure", and she liked it, and she submitted it for something and it won some award and I got pulled into creative writing, then my last semester of school there, my councilor, my advisor, he told me if I took one more English class I could have my Creative Writing degree so I did that. Then I put out two applications for graduate school. One was to Philosophy school, and one was to Creative Writing, and Creative Writing got back first, so I went there. Then I burned through my PH.D in two years and went to work at Sears because I never wanted to be a professor, but sure enough I hurt myself pretty good at Sears, and soon as I could stand again I looked for a desk job and found a desk job at a university library, then a job opened up in the English department for a Creative Writing teacher and I applied and got it and, there I am. 

ROBB: That's got to be the best origin story that I've heard in a while.  

LIVIUS: You were recently nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for
The One's that Got Away
, alongside Stephen King, who you mentioned as a writing influence. How was that, for you, to compete with one of your influences? 

STEPHEN: That was great. I competed with him before for a Shirley Jackson Award, we both got trounced, I guess. But this time, of course, he rightfully won, Laird Barron also won, because I know Laird got more votes than I did, 'cause he's a better writer, you know. But you know, King’s
Full Dark, No Stars
, it's a solid collection. When he puts out a collection, everyone notices, as they should, I think, but it was definitely an honor just to have my name up on that list of finalists with him and the other guys was swell. 

ROBB: Totally changing directions, again, I'm sure you've taught your share of aspiring or new authors, but if you could just give them one really quick life lesson that they can learn when they're beginning out, is there anything that you would say? 

STEPHEN: Yeah, actually, Mark Vanderpool at The Cult just hit me up for this exact same advice, "What suggestion would I give to a starting out writer?" I think that suggestion, or that advice would be that you're not as smart as you think you are. Yeah, you've read a lot of books, you've seen a lot of movies, you've got a lot of stuff in your head, you can do amazing things with sentences, but when you try to put your brain on the page, the story becomes you telling people, "Look how smart I am. Look how good I can do sentences. Look how much I know." And that's not the story we want to read. We want to read the story where it's your heart on the page, where you're just thinly veiling that time that you had to go shoot your pet rabbit, but you're dressing it up different, you're trying to disguise yourself. I think those are the stories that we want to read, we don't want to see you being smart and clever, and I say this as someone who used to think he was smart and clever, you know. Now, I know I'm just clueless but pretty lucky sometimes. 

LIVIUS: Of your fellow contributors in
Warmed and Bound
, who are a couple that you think we're going to see some big things from? 

STEPHEN: Oh, man. I don't know if I should. Let me think who is all in there. Once I say two people, the rest of them hate me, right? I think Brian Evenson's going to go somewhere, but that's an empty statement, because he's already somewhere. 

LIVIUS: Yeah, that Clevenger guy, he's okay, too. 

STEPHEN: I can't pick, I think everybody's doing cool stuff. I don't know. Talent-wise, I think everybody can be somebody; luck-wise, that's a different story. Luck-wise and life-wise, like, if suddenly your life changes and you're living in a different house with a different spouse, then you may not have as much time to write all these stories, you know, you may whisper them into your bottle each night, you know. 

ROBB: What are you currently working on? 

STEPHEN: I just started a, totally not on purpose, ever, I started a comic book script. I want to do, probably, twelve issues, I'm thinking. It's called
Thirteen Rides
. I think the idea just kind of happened in my head when I was Stoker Weekend, I guess, up in Long Island, and I was at a comic panel, they always have a comic and graphic novel panels, and Joe Hill said something, just kind of as an aside, he said, "You know how with comic books, it's was the even numbered pages that get the splash treatment." And I flipped back through my head and thought, of course, that's true but I never really thought about it like that, I never really thought about the grammar and the syntax of how comic books work, I just thought about these great things to digest. And I jacked with comic scripts, before, but I'm really sure they sucked, you know. And so then I thought, I need to live in that grammar for a while, and so lately I've just been reading so many comic books, it's ridiculous. I'm just trying to understand how you go from panel to panel, how much dialogue will go here, and how the dramatic line, the narrative line sync up, and so I've actually taken this kind of milestone, for me, two weeks, sixteen days, to write a little forty or fifty page script, just a twenty-two page comic, the first episode, and it took me that long because I've been writing it over and over and over and over and getting it tighter and tighter and tighter, and I think that's going to come back, and effect or inflect, I don't know, it's going to do something with my fiction, I suspect.

Like, when you start thinking in panels and actions and dialogue, then it's hard to go back to paragraphs and sentences, for me anyways. Which isn't to say I haven't been writing. I have written a little bit of fiction, lately, but the last couple of weeks it's been mostly that comic script. I am 120 pages into a novel, an anthropological thriller. Anthropology, I say I went to school to be an archaeologist, that's still my one true love, I'm always trying to figure out how we stood up and walked, you know, and so I'm writing a novel about why we stood up and walked, of course. What else am I doing, let me think? I think that's it. I've written a couple of stories, recently, The Spider Box, horror stuff, of course. Yeah, that's it. 

LIVIUS: So, you're doing a little bit of writing, what are you looking forward to reading? 

STEPHEN: The book I just got today,
The Raising of Stoney Mayhall
, I believe it's called. I cannot remember the writer's name, either, I should, that's terrible. My friend, Paul Tremblay, he recommended that book really strongly to me a while back, it's a zombie novel, I'm quite excited about that. I also picked up that
Education of Bruno Littlemore
, I remember reading all about it, the papers, the magazines, and I want to read this book, I need to read this book, but it's really a big old thing so I don't know if I have time before the semester starts. And, I guess I have one of those honking big fantasy novels someone hit me up to blurb, so I may look into that as well. I've got various stacks of comics around I'm looking forward to reading. You know, I'm excited about King's new one, that JFK assassination, time travel thing, I hope I have time with that in my semester. His last two big ones I've read them right out of the box. Hopefully I can do that this time. 

LIVIUS: I’m trying to get Robb excited about that so we can review it for the show, but he’s not a King fan.  

ROBB: For various superficial reasons I'm not a big King, not even petty but just not real good reasons. 

STEPHEN: I think petty reasons are the best reasons. I think petty reasons are often why I write, you know, because I want to get back at that sixth grade teacher who told me I wasn't going to amount to anything, you know.