Lightspeed Magazine Issue 36

by Eleanor Arnason

  Well, the story that you read when John and I went to the New York Review of Science Fiction reading series was “The Barn at the End of Our Term,” which is about US presidents being resurrected as horses. I mean, it’s about the US presidents; is there any politics in that at all?

  No, and that one especially not, I think. It’s funny. I wish that I could say that I had written it during this election cycle and that it’s a great allegory about Romney and Barack or something. I think I was really just thinking about how everyone sort of assumes that when we die, we’re going to get an answer one way or the other? Well, there will be something or there will be nothing. That’s when many people have just kind of like really sweet naive faith that then things will make sense. Or that, one way or the other, that we’ll get some kind of answer. And I read Kevin Brockmeir, do you guys know him? I love his stuff. And he wrote that gorgeous spec fiction book, A Brief History of the Dead, and what I liked about it was that everybody dies and goes to this kind of antechamber world where they’re just scratching their heads and they’re even more confused what the nature of reality is, what they’re doing there, how their histories are going to affect the future in this weird place, so I think that was sort of the impulse. I was thinking about what a demotion it would feel like to someone who was a president to find themselves in this weird stable in some Kentucky afterlife, and the really human impulse, I think, to take your past, whatever it is, and try to use that to make sense of your present, and just the failure of that project in this particular afterlife.

  When you read that story, I thought it was really funny. You said that when it was published, you felt like you had shown up to a party and you were the only one wearing a costume.

  Yeah, I really did. I still do a little bit. But that appeared in the Granta anthology for the Best of Young American Novelists. And I will say that’s a pretty scary ante, isn’t it? They were like, this is what we’re going to call the collection, so give us a story. That’s the scariest ante in the world.

  You weren’t even technically a novelist at that point.

  No, I wasn’t even a novelist. You guys met me at—that was when I felt the most like the Bernie Madoff of fiction, was at that moment when we met. I was like, well, I’ve defrauded everyone, I’m not even a novelist, the story that’s going forward that’s going to represent me to the world is this one about a bunch of presidents reincarnated as horses. That was a shameful time.

  Most of the time when people meet us, that’s basically the lowest point in their lives.

  [Laughter] Is that your True Hollywood story, everything in black and white? David and John are always in black and white. There’s always a really sad minor key chord being played when they’re around.

  So are there any interesting behind-the-scenes stories about how you came up with any of the pieces in the book?

  So there’s one, “The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979.” I don’t even know if this is so interesting, but I had read this essay by André Aciman called “Arbitrage” and I was just thinking about that feeling that I think is, I hope, pretty universal, that your life has been knocked off the rails, or that there’s sort of an incremental but widening gap between where you are and where you think you ought to be. That terrible kind of inertia where you’re like, I got knocked a little off course and I can’t correct for it, and I’m not going to be able to realign with the path that I thought was my life, kind of a feeling. For whatever reason, the way my brain chose to … the image that it found for this was this boy who’s haunted by the notion that there’s this flock of seagulls—I was probably listening to that terrible band; well, they’re not that terrible, the Flock of Seagulls—they’re these cosmic scavengers and they fly into the future and they’re just willy-nilly stealing little bits of people’s futures and brining them back to feather this nest in the present. I was thinking, just the way he would pull a vertebrae out of a spine or something and then one kind of your future changes shape, or it’s deformed. Sort of that butterfly in Africa, where it’s deformed in a way that’s irrecoverable. So I thought that was kind of a scary idea. I was talking to my brother and telling him the idea for this story and I was like, what could the seagulls bring back from the future that would really—or what would the boy imagine they’re bringing back from the future that would alter a life permanently in a really catastrophic way? He was like, “Hmm, ladies’ birth control pills.” And I was like, “I don’t think that’s gonna go.” The one that I think I like the best, remember when Three 6 Mafia won the Grammy? He was like, “What if they bring Three 6 Mafia’s Grammy?” Sometimes I wish you could write the parody of whatever you’re writing. It’d probably be better in some ways, you know?

  So it sounds like maybe other people are a big part of your creative process, that you bounce ideas off your friends and siblings and stuff like that?

  I just like to tell people what I’m up to so I can watch their faces change and then hear them be like, “I’ll buy you a beer.” I think my siblings are, because they veto stuff all the time. I had a good friend who helped me with a lot of the stories in this collection on this go-around. But I sort of try to keep it tight for awhile, because I think, do you guys find that?, that there’s usually a vulnerable stage where it can be harmful to, you know, sometimes I think if you let people read stuff too early, that can deform the thing that you’re making in some ways.

  Speaking of vetoing ideas, I swear, were you the one who told this story where you had this great idea for a story and you described it to friends and they said, “Karen. That’s the plot of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective”?

  That happens all the time. That’s like when I plagiarized Bunnicula in my own book. That happens all the time. It’s really scary. That was my mom. I was like, “What if there was a kidnapper but they’re holding a dog hostage?” She was like, “that is definitely, definitely a Jim Carrey movie.” My brother also made me really mad once. I was telling him about Swamplandia! and these two story lines and how they were going to intersect. And without looking up from his sandwich, he’s like, “Yeah, that’s like Big Bird Goes Home. Remember it’s like half on Sesame Street and half in the real world?” And I was like, “Fuck you, dude.” It hit really close to home. Did I just borrow the narrative model of Big Bird Goes Home? And arguably, I did.

  What do you think about endings? Some of the Amazon reviews, they feel like your endings aren’t resolved to their satisfaction. Is that something that you think about?

  Can I tell you a funny story about endings really fast? I had this story in The New Yorker about these boys who land on a glacier and my grandfather read this story of mine and then he called me and he was like, “Pretty good story. Pretty crazy. And those sneaky bastards, you gotta buy the magazine to find out how it ends.” And I was like, “No, Poppa, that is the end.” There was this long silence and he was like, “What kind of ending is that?” So I can sympathize with those reviewers. I can understand the frustration where sometimes you want a different kind of answer. I try to find an image that gathers up some of the questions in the story. I think that’s always more interesting than to pretend: Is he gonna kiss the girl? Did they find the gold? Whatever the animating questions were, if you hit on a turn of phrase or an image where you can strike those resonances, that’s when I feel most comfortable about exiting a story, kind of on a plateau. For whatever reason, I really do love ambivalent endings. I was just talking about this with a friend. She does these paintings and she always has “Untitled” and then she’ll put a title in parentheses, which I was telling her was kind of passive aggressive. And she’s like “Yeah, it is.” But in her argument, it’s similar to why I think that feels often like the right place to exit a story. Because she doesn’t like it when a viewer sees her painting and reads the title and decides that they got it, that they got it and they can just move on. That they’re like, “OK, so that was the message.” Or like you were saying, “That was the political statement, so check!”, chec
k on the box. She was like, “I really want them to be haunted, or I want it to have a life in their body that continues even when they’ve moved on, when they’re not standing in front of it anymore.” And I would sort of agree. I think some of my favorite endings, nothing is resolved, but there’s a feeling that things are opening out. Or that something has been gonged inside of you. You are now going to be haunted by those same questions or that character’s state or whatever.

  I took a creative writing class at USC with T.C. Boyle, and he has this story I love called “Tooth and Claw” where in the very last scene, a character steps into a room that may or may not contain a dangerous feline. So you don’t know if he dies and he said he went to an elementary school and they had read the story and they all complained about the ending. And he said, “If you don’t like that ending, you can just add one sentence: ‘And then I died.’”

  I sort of love that. I teach too, and I’ll get student manuscripts that are Hunter S. Thompson style, where the scale is weird. We’ve got three pages of a dinner and then on the last page the house catches ablaze in one paragraph, or it’s like triple homicide. I’m like, “My goodness!” I think that’s not the real ending, right? That isn’t actually the resolution.

  I can think of one story of yours that has a very definite conclusion. You have a story that goes, “Once there were a bunch of unicorns, and a flood came.”

  I must have said that at some point, that those were the first stories I wrote. It would always be some stable, peaceful context, some, like, valley of magical bears or something, and then a comet would hit them. I really don’t think it’s gotten so much more sophisticated. It’s sad. It’s so funny that you bring that up because I was just having lunch with a friend. She has a nine-year-old niece and we were talking about this nine-year-old’s idea of a plot. I was like, “Gosh, I should borrow a page from her playbook,” because it sounded so clear. She was like, “Let’s play ‘writer.’ Do you wanna do ‘princess marries prince?’ Do you wanna do ‘rich person falls in love with poor person?’ Do you wanna do ‘war?’” I do want to do all of those plots. It sounds so liberating. One of the nice things about literary writers doing genre sometimes. If there are genre conventions, it’s so fun, like what you were asking about horror. Like the scarecrow story, it was so fun for me to write that particular story because you know how the rules work. In a horror story, there’s going to be something gone awry, it’s mysterious, someone is complicit. In this case, it’s one bully who has been scapegoated by his friends and he sort of becomes the scarecrow and the strange substitution. But also there’s a trajectory of escalating dread. You can follow that. You can hold on to that. You have an exoskeleton. Genre can give you, well, a skeleton, it doesn’t even have to be an exoskeleton.

  Since we’re science fiction fans, we like exoskeletons.

  That was such a good cartoon. Did you guys ever see that? Exosquad?

  Uh, yeah.

  It’s fine if you didn’t! It’s fine if you didn’t. I went even further and you guys didn’t follow me there. It’s sad. That’s why I had to keep it quiet in high school.

  This is an important question: You said in an interview that you had done so much research on alligator wrestling that you felt like you could take on an actual alligator; so, if an alligator were to attack right now, how would you fight it?

  Oh, what would I do? Oh my god. Well, I think I lied when I said that. I would scream. I would scream like a woman and stand on the table. The trick is that if you can get their jaws closed, the musculature of their jaw, by some weird evolutionary fluke, can come down with the force of a guillotine but they can’t open it again. So you can hold it shut with a scrunchie. What if we get all these lawsuits by people who say, “That’s not true”?

  “Karen Russell fan mauled in freak alligator-wrestling accident.”

  They just have a Goody elastic [hair-tie] and they’re like, “It didn’t work, though.” Their horror as the gator easily opens its jaw and bites their hand. Yeah, I wonder what I would do if it came in right now. See? Remember when you would study so hard for your European AP exam and then, who knows what any of those battles were? I think that’s how I feel about alligator wrestling.

  A while back you mentioned humor in your stories. A lot of your stories, they do have really funny lines in them. And I guess I was just wondering, are you sort of laughing to yourself as you’re writing the stories?

  Wouldn’t that be terrifying? No, of course not. How scary would that be if I was just sitting alone laughing in a room? [Laughing] That’s the path of madness. Nobody wants that. I heard that Flannery O’Connor cracked herself up, which I like to picture too. It’s funny, you know, I don’t think—somehow I think the new collection is a little more sedate in some ways, humor-wise, I think just because some of the stories commit to darkness in a different way. There’s a lot more earnest darkness here maybe.

  You do also have “Dougbert Shackleton’s Rules for Antarctic Tailgating.”

  I was glad to have that one in there. Even though I think it’s a story about underdogs, and I’m sure it’s the underdog of the collection. It’s truly such a ridiculous story. You know when I did laugh? The end line is something like, “We munch and munch and da da da da da.” I was just laughing with my friend. He was like, “that’s the end line of the story, we munch and munch? The most extraneous kind of thought.” I used to love those kinds of epics, too, like Antarctic epics. Ken Sharp is a writer who I love a lot and he’ll do a very straight kind of a version of this tale. Where some explorers motivated by ego, and whatever hubristic forces motivated those explorers, in addition to a kind of hope to discover new territories etc., etc. That kind of willful blindness that led them to be drinking tea on the ice floes. And I was just thinking about the men in my family and their love of these underdog sports teams. Like if they love a team, my brother is a hockey fan in Miami and he loves the Panthers. The perversity of that, I just think that says a lot about my brother, this perverse and really undying loyalty. There’s so many kinds of dark looks at that in this collection, that kind of optimism. Like this is going to be our team’s season. Or this is going to be the year that we have a bumper crop of wheat on our Nebraska farm. Or I’m going to be a hero in these ways. I just thought it would be nice to have a lighter—the density of that story is a little lighter than some of the other ones.

  The premise, I guess, we should say just for people who haven’t read it, is that they are fans who go down to the South Pole to root for different kinds of marine life and the main character roots for the krill. And the krill never win this contest against the baleen whales.

  No, they never will. Yeah, it’s the Food Chain Games. But you know, there are franchises that are just not going to win for you. I just liked that idea of putting yourself at incredible personal risk, just casting your lot with this microscopic loser creature, that’s just like the world’s oldest loser.

  I really think I’m not that funny of a person. I go for a 70/30 ratio. I just keep throwing stuff out there. 70/30, that’s pretty good. And in writing, I think, even less so. It’s really hard. Have you guys had that experience? Sometimes if you read someone who’s really trying to be funny, it feels like being tickled. It feels violent and kind of aggressive.

  Ok, well, I wasn’t going to bring this up, but we asked for questions online, questions we should ask you. And somebody on twitter wanted us to ask you if you’re ticklish.

  I am really ticklish. Are you guys going to attack me outside of the building? Is there gonna … I swear to god, if some masked tickler tickles me now I’ll be so upset. If some man in a dirty Elmo costume comes up in the atrium and tries to tickle me, I’ll be like, “Fuck you, John. God damn it.”

  That was the one question.

  That was the only question anybody asked?

  Yeah. Is that a reference to anything or is that just totally random?

  No, I’m telling you, that’s what’s going to happen. Someone’s plot
ting a cruel attack. No, I’m super ticklish. It’s really embarrassing at those airport checkpoints. Everyone is just, “Go ahead. Just fricking go ahead. You’re scaring us.” I can’t believe that’s the only question. I’m sad. Nobody wanted to know about the ratio of fantastic to naturalistic detail, or … ?

  To be fair, we don’t actually get all that many responses when we say, “Hey we’re going to interview so and so. What questions do you want us to ask?” We don’t get a whole lot of people offering up questions. Or certainly not good ones. It’s very infrequently that they actually make it on to the show. One thing I wanted to ask you about was, just trying to research you, I couldn’t find any website or blog or twitter or anything like that. Do you have any online presence?

  Nope. Isn’t that wonderful? I’m sort of so socially anxious generally that the idea of maintaining a twitter anything, I can’t. I’m also like 90 years old secretly, so I can’t even use that language. Did anyone tweet or retweet about me? I just don’t even really know what’s going on over there.

  Is there a way for people to send you fan mail? Do you get fan mail?

  If you send it to Random House, then you can. But don’t; people don’t have to do that. They’ve got better things going. They should write their real moms or something.

  So, Karen, thanks for giving us so much time for the interview.

  Thank you, it was so fun. I can’t wait to see you at another critically low moment in my confidence in life. Really, thank you. This was super fun.

  The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is hosted by:

  John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed (and its sister magazine, Nightmare), is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, Epic: Legends of Fantasy, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a six-time finalist for the Hugo Award and four-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.