by Dave Slusher
DS: Between the two of you, you've been doing this for nearly 20 years. There've got to be ups and downs and really good times and really lean tough times—how do you keep your intensity for five or ten years of doing this sort of thing?
CR: Because it's something that we're doing for pleasure in our spare time. We tried a rigid monthly schedule when we had newsstand distribution for a while and it wasn't working because we ended up compromising the way we were approaching the job. So now I put in the magazine that the next issue will be out when it's ready, and that way we keep the freshness and keep the interest. When it didn't work out on the newsstands in England for us, it was a heavy blow, but we still had the day job so it let us bounce back a lot easier. So things will carry on, they might be a bit leaner, but they carry on.
AK: Well, the thing that keeps me going through the bad times and the lulls is the people. Whether they be the readers or the contributors or the artists, I get an awful lot of very positive mail. I get submitters who I've rejected writing me thank you notes, things like that, people just sending me letters of support—'I believe in you, I like what you're doing, keep it coming'—and that's what keeps me going.
DS: Does there ever come a time now when you come home from work and you sit down and you think, ‘Oh God, please, not another bag of mail, oh, what have I done?’ [all laugh]
CR: I think Ann suffers from that more than I do in that respect.
AK: I get about 15 to 20 submissions a day, and I sit down and work on the mail every single night. If I miss a night there's just that much more, and it can be a snowball effect. But it's also the thing I look forward to when I get home every day because there's usually something nice in there.
DS: What would you say are the best and the worst things that you've come to get out of this? Start with the best—what really makes your day when you're doing this as you are?
CR: People pick up the magazine and say, ‘It doesn't look like a science fiction magazine', and I say, ‘That's because it isn't'. People don't know how to cope with it, they just hold it in their hands and look at it. It makes an impression on them, and as Ann said you get the people writing in saying, ‘I'm really looking forward to the new issue’ or, when you've just put one out they're saying, ‘Why does it have to be so long until the next one?’ (Ann chuckles). So it's things like that. You send it out to them and wait for the response—that's just great, it's a buzz.
AK: That's a big high. That's like a shot in the arm when someone says, ‘Thanks, this is great, I love it'.
DS: Now what's the bottom of it, what really drags you down and makes you question your continued sanity for carrying on?
CR: I think it's gone beyond that. We're both well into double figures in terms of the number of issues that we've published, and by this stage we've got enough self-belief in what we're doing. So yes, you might get somebody writing in with an angry letter saying there's not enough British contributors to BBR or something like that, and you think, ‘So what?’ We're doing what *we* believe in, we're being true to ourselves, and there's enough people who *do* like it that we can ... we don't aim to please everybody, anyone who thinks that is missing the point. So long as *someone* has been pleased by something in the magazine—some people might like one story, some people might prefer another—that's fine by me.
AK: I think that probably one of my biggest frustrations is not being able to do more, there's a lot of other things I'd like to do. I'd like to start publishing chapbooks, or limited edition books—I just don't have the time and money at this point. So sometimes that can be frustrating, not being able to advertise as much as I'd like to, or other things, such as full colour covers.
DS: Now, a lot of small press magazines start, and even in the last year I've seen a lot either announce, make calls for submissions and then never put out an issue, put out one issue and fold. Having gone as long as you have, what are you doing differently—is there something special about the two of you that you've been able to maintain it?
CR: It's no different from writers starting out. They're learning how to write, how to submit, how to deal with editors, how to polish their craft. When most small press editors start out they've no experience of assessing manuscripts, laying out a magazine, marketing the product, or anything like that. We're all learning our trade as editors as we go along—we haven't been to university and done degrees in publishing or anything like that. So it's learn as you go along. Some people who try to be editors find that it's not as fun as they thought it was going to be, and get distracted by other interests. It's no different from writers starting out and sending out manuscripts and then we never hear from them again.
AK: I think one of the reasons why I'm still doing it is because I take it very slowly one step at a time. I've seen a lot of magazines that burst out on to the scene first issue and they're absolutely beautiful and they've spent a lot of money on it and that's it, they've run out of steam. I started small and each issue I do gets better and better.
DS: One of the things the small presses are known for and especially the small presses in this genre is that you're pretty friendly to new writers, people at the beginning of their career. Each of you have published a fair number of newer writers—as these people come along do you feel a little proprietary about their success, do you sometimes feel a little jealous with them, ‘That's one of *my* writers there'?
AK: No—I feel *proud*, I don't feel proprietary. When I see a writer who I've seen grow and change and expand as they've gone on their career I just think it's wonderful and I take a great sense of pride in the fact that I published some of their earlier work.
DS: Did you publish Yvonne Navarro's first fiction?
AK: I published a story of hers in the first issue, and it was actually the first story I had ever *bought*, and it so impressed me that I even dreamed about it, and when I wrote her back accepting it, I said, ‘You ought to make this into a novel'. She did make it into a novel and she sold it, she got a three-book deal, and it was just the most wonderful thing in the world for me, and I was *very* happy for her.
CR: The only book that we've put out as a press was by an English writer called Simon Clark, and he's now managed to get himself a two-book deal. So it's nice to know that the people you're believing in are reaping the benefits, and, hopefully, we've given these people a chance to hone their art by giving them a forum.
DS: Now craft aside—because obviously a newer writer not having been at it you'd be able to see the seams a bit more—but thematically and content-wise what do you see different between an established writer and a newer writer? Does their fiction actually read differently?
CR: It depends on their influences. If you're lucky, you get someone who's not been reading in the genre or paying much attention to what's going on and they're just doing it naturally. Every so often you get someone arrive through the post that you've never heard of before, and they say, ‘I've just been doing some writing, thought you might like to see it', and they burn so brightly it's absolutely fantastic. You know you've got something *different*. Quite often though you find that the more well-known writers write more commercially, because they know what's made them successful, and, obviously, if they're professional they need to pay the bills so they're now working to a more commercial formula. It's very rare certainly in Britain that you'll find the commercial writers will be doing anything that the most appropriate place for it to be published would be in the small press.
AK: What's really interesting is in the next issue I'm putting together almost every single contributor is a new writer, it's either their first, second or third sale. That just happened by accident, I don't go out seeking new writers, and it's wonderful when something like that happens.
DS: What sort of things are on the horizon—are you going to be doing any more of the theme issues in the near future?
AK: Well I'm considering the possibility of doing a music issue, and it's going to be a very loose theme. I did a ‘bug’ issue a c
ouple of years ago, and I guess it came off pretty well. I was inundated with tons and tons of ‘bug revenge’ stories and I don't ever want to be in that situation again. So if I do a theme issue, it'll be more by accident than by design.
DS: And what's in the future for Back Brain Recluse?
CR: We don't have a theme, we just use the previous issue as our benchmark for the next one and try and make it maybe a bit bigger, or maybe work on the design a bit more. We just take each issue as it comes.
DS: Okay, last question. Knowing what you do now, would you do it again?
CR & AK: Yes!
AK: Absolutely.
CR: No question about it, it's great.
Jonathan Lethem Introduction
I interviewed Jonathan Lethem at ArmadilloCon in Austin, Texas. It was the first and only time that I've been to that con or city. I really enjoyed it, but have just never had a chance to go back. This interview was one of a number of “pickup” interviews that I did. Rather than having them planned before I left, as I sometimes do in convention situations, I approached writers during the con to see if they would be willing to do an interview. This approach can be liberating sometimes because it lowers the overhead of getting everything set up. On the other hand, you might spend a lot of energy getting ready for an interview that someone doesn't want to do. In this case, it worked out well. I had already prepared for an interview with him years earlier, when Gun, with Occasional Music was first released. There was some last minute time conflict that I don't even remember, and the interview got cancelled late in the process, after I was already prepared. For this convention, I dusted off the old notes, got a copy of his newest book (which was a collection mostly of stories I had already read) and jumped into the fray.
Lucky for me, he was amenable to the interview. One of the things I like about the science fiction community is how loose it is. I approached the Guest of Honor (which Jonathan Lethem was here) in the hall and, within a few hours, was interviewing him. It didn't hurt that he remembered me from the earlier, aborted interview, but it still amazes me the level of access the rank and file have to the big shots of these conventions.
One of the panels that Lethem did this weekend was a presentation on the films of John Ford. I never got to attend that, but I did manage to work some of that discussion into this interview. I'm a big fan of westerns as a film genre. I am very sad to see them all but disappear in the last few decades. I'm also a fan of the classic movies from the 30's and 40's, which is some of the same material that has informed his writing.
Jonathan Lethem
This interview was recorded at the ArmadilloCon convention in Austin, Texas in October, 1996.
DS: Explain the title of your book The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye for the listeners.
JL: The title comes from a wonderful book by a poet and essayist named Geoffrey O'Brien from a book of his called The Phantom Empire, about films in the American imagination in the 20th century. He writes a real kind of poetic essay prose that's just brilliant, and the section I stole the title from was a description of the films of Fritz Lang. I'm a huge Fritz Lang fan and I think O'Brien got at the essence of what's brilliant about Fritz Lang and what's characteristic of him better than anyone I've ever read. The section is so poetic, and the images are so beautiful, I actually could have taken any one of a number of phrases and made them the title of this book. Lang's work, as O'Brien was pointing out, is very much concerned with enclosures and traps and architectural spaces and man dwarfed by his own kind of constructions and snared in his own nets. Lang's characters are all very much hunted, and that's a real theme running through the stories in this collection. So, “wall of the sky, wall of the eye” sort of caught that mood a little bit.
DS: Now, let's talk about the body of the stories that are in there. These were written over, say, about the last five years or so?
JL: Further back than that. The first was written in ‘89, and the collection's arranged almost exactly in chronological order; there's one cheat where I moved up a story but the first, “The Happy Man", is a sort of unpleasant horror story that I wrote that, for better or worse, was the thing that brought me my first attention. It kind of catapulted me into prominence. It was nominated for a Nebula Award when I was an unknown writer, so it wasn't on the strength of my name at all, it was really people responding to the story. For a long time that was kind of the story that defined my career for people. It's not what I'm completely happy about. It's a strange and kind of awful story, and, nonetheless, it was a given that it would be in the collection. It was still for many people their favorite thing that I've written, and I can't really deny its power. However, it doesn't represent everything that I think I can do, and so in a funny way the rest of the collection forms a sort of long argument about what I committed in “The Happy Man". I feel like every story is a different sort of compensation for the awfulness of that first story.
DS: Like a lot of people, that was the first of your work that I really became aware of your name on. It was, as you say, a very disturbing story, the imagery in it. Tell the people who might not be familiar with it a little about the story.
JL: The gimmick is that the main character has been brought back from death. The cost of this retrieval is that he is going to migrate mentally—he is going to make these mental journeys—to hell. Hell as conceived in the story is an absolutely individual, private experience—everyone has a different one. Every person who has been retrieved from death spends a little mental time in their private version of hell. The story alternates between his sort of real world existence as he tries to hold the tattered remnants of his family life together after this awful experience, and his mental visitations in hell.
DS: And part of the story is that when your mind is in hell, your body operates, but it's kind of like a soulless, sort of by-the-numbers, phoning-it-in type of living.
JL: Yeah, one of the most unpleasant things about the story is that he sticks around while his brain goes to hell. So he's sort of staggering through his family home, you know, perfunctorily eating and drinking and watching TV and his family has to live with this kind of zombie presence. That's probably the most unsettling thing in the whole story.
DS: And the thing that might be more unsettling is the fact that where you try to make a comment on the people that actually do live like this. I mean, there are people that basically live by the numbers.
JL: God, I think that that story or anything else I wrote where I was really trying to make some sort of ham-fisted comment on the way people live would probably be unreadable, but I'm lucky enough that it strikes me in rereading—and it's struck others—it ends up being a kind of parable or grotesque metaphor for a kind of dehumanized suburban rote existence. But you know, when you're writing, you're dealing with the specifics. You have your idea and you have your characters and you're driving at those points, and trying to make them work and make them rich, and if you're pontificating or generalizing it generally pulls the rug out from under the fictional intensity that you're striving for.
DS: It's one of the things now, as a new writer, you wrote this story. Now it wasn't the first of your stories published?
JL: No, I'd published three or four before that. I'm proud of them but nothing that I ended up reprinting in the collection. They were published quietly, in little magazines, small poetry magazines or small fiction magazines and I hadn't really received a lot of feedback or attention for them.
DS: As a new writer, when your first big publication like this receives the kind of acclaim that it did and receives the kind of critical talk, what does that do to you? I mean, at this point you're still just feeling your way around, and you're told you hit it big. It sort of sets the bar high and creates an expectation.
JL: Not that it won the Nobel prize or anything, but it gives you something to react against, for better or worse. I think it's a much more distressing or unnerving experience to have an early hit if you haven't written much else; especially if the
next thing you publish isn't written yet. For me, I had the majority of my first novel written when the story came out and began getting that kind of attention and I had another dozen or so stories in various stages of construction. I wasn't “at sea” the way a writer might be if they'd had a success and suddenly had to match it and they didn't have anything else already in the drawer. I've been lucky that way all along. It took me a little while to break through, and so the down side is that you're frustrated and you're impatient for some attention, and not getting it. The positive end of that is that when you do find some success, your follow-up is right at hand. You've got something else ready. By the time my first book came out, I had two others mostly written, and that blunts the perils of being reviewed enormously—to know “Well, all right, however well or little you like this first one, I've got something else coming along that's just as good or better". You know, it'll all even out.
DS: Now, in the second story that's in the book, “Vanilla Dunk", now, as we're doing this interview there's a lot of controversy over sports stars -with Robby Alomar and others. “Vanilla Dunk” was written four or five years ago and very explicitly deals with a lot of these issues of superstars and what do we value in our sports stars?
JL: Well, the funny thing about “Vanilla Dunk” is that I wrote the story initially out of my frustration at my inability to write a story about rap music, which was really what I was getting at. I ended up sort of transmuting the pop music landscape into the sports landscape. For some reason I was able to get a handle on the material in that milieu. But “Vanilla Dunk” is a character. He's very much Elvis Presley or Brian Bosworth or Vanilla Ice—any one of a number of white entertainment figures—counting sports stars as entertainment figures—who appropriate that kind of black pizzazz and energy and go mainstream with it in a way that black stars rarely are able to. So I was metaphorizing the pop music landscape in the sports thing. Sports is, like a lot of things in American culture, so exaggerated, and the discourse around it is so cartoonish and garish and grotesque that it's pretty impossible to send up. I don't think I managed to satirize it, but maybe I inadvertently captured the flavor a bit. You know, you attempt to exaggerate and you end up right on the nose.
