You talked about using storytelling to comfort children there.
Yes. Boy, you’ve done your research well. The fact is that I didn’t speak much Spanish, but I found that I have a little bit of a Pied Piper sort of presence sometimes among children, and I was able just with the tiniest bit of toys or sticks or stones and making animal noises, I was almost always able to bring the children together and to engage with them. I was staying one night in a house that only had one door. It was in the farthest highland place that we were going on this trip, and about nine o’clock at night the lights in the town went off, the entire lights of the whole little mountainside village went off, and one of the Americans said, “Oh, they may be cutting the power in order to attack the town at night. We all better go inside our homes.” I was staying with a minister whose wife had been killed and had left him with three children, and when the guns went off, the children came and nestled under my arms, like little chickadees coming for safety, to a person who didn’t have any Spanish and certainly didn’t know what to do if somebody burst through the door with a gun, and I just started singing and rocking and making funny noises, and indeed it was some sort of gun episode, outside in the street outside our house. Nobody was hurt, eventually everything was silenced. I never did find out what it was, but I felt that I was able, at least in that moment, to give comfort in the way that I could, by singing and being a lunatic.
I think it’s really interesting that you said that your parents didn’t really let you watch TV and that The Wizard of Oz was basically the only TV that you were allowed to watch, that it was like Christmas that it was on TV once a year and you were allowed to watch it.
Well, the story as you put it out is a little extreme. We actually were allowed to watch TV, but not much. We had to vote as a family of seven children which half hour the TV was going to be on every week. We could watch it every week, we just couldn’t watch it all that regularly. But, yes, you’re right, once a year my parents relented, they gave up their harshness and their restrictions and they said, “Oh, The Wizard of Oz is a great family film, every child should see it.” It was part of our annual festival, it was in the liturgical calendar, really: There was Christmas, there was Easter, there was The Wizard of Oz. [ … ] Because of that, I think the story of Oz got into me, I don’t say more deeply than it did to other people of my generation, who didn’t live in the video mesmorama in which children and adults live now, but it certainly did get in deep to me as the first instance of a filmic impression. This was one of the few stories that I got through the movies first, and then went back and started trying to find the books afterwards.
I saw that your father wrote a humor column. What kind of effect did that have on you?
Yes, you might say he was a kind of early and localized Garrison Keillor, not with the kind of extended metaphor with which Garrison Keillor has been working for forty years or so, but he collected funny stories from around town and told them in a column that ran four days a week in our local newspaper. He was also a stringer attached to Time and Newsweek and the New York Times to report on any news that was happening out of upstate New York—the Albany area where I was born and where I was raised. So I grew up thinking, “Oh! I don’t think too much of my father, I don’t like him, he’s a bore, I’m going to do anything other than what he does in my life, I’m going to be a different person than he is,” but my whole life I’ve been a writer, exactly the way he has, and incidentally so too are three of my brothers writers, so despite the fact that we thought what he did was not terribly interesting, we must have been raised in that hothouse atmosphere of love for words, love of story, and love of sharing whatever it was that was good by writing about it.
What do you think about that, being raised with such limited access to television? What kind of effect did that have on you? I know you have kids now. I can’t even imagine trying to limit kids’ access to the Internet and so on today. What do you think of that sort of approach of limiting children’s access to media?
I think it’s a lost cause, and I think it’s important to lose it. That is to say, I think it’s important to try, and I think you’re going to lose. Our children are now fifteen, thirteen, and eleven, and we won the battle for ten years in a row. From the time they came to us, they’re all adopted, until they were about eleven, and then, in the last couple of years, as they’ve come up into high school and middle school, we’ve pretty much lost a good part of the battle, they are on screens an awful lot of the time, but not all the time. I still collect the iPad, the iPod, the phone, and the computers every night around eight thirty, quarter to nine, and that’s it ’til the next morning. They are supposed to read, and most of them do, the older one does homework, and the younger two read every night. They are not being raised in the world in which I was raised, and I couldn’t raise them there even if I wanted because it doesn’t exist anymore. I’ve had to relax a little bit and remind myself they need to be able to be functional in the world in which they find themselves. Just as I’ve found a way to be functional in my own [ … ] universe.
I saw on your Facebook page that you went to a symposium on dystopias last May. What was that and what things were discussed there?
It was run by a group called Children’s Literature New England, which is a group I actually helped to start about twenty-seven years ago. That group had as its aim to enliven the mission of telling people about the significance of literature in the lives of the children. To do that, it used to hold weeklong conferences once a year at which a stellar band of writers and illustrators, teachers and librarians, would come together. We had people like Ursula Le Guin and Maurice Sendak, Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman, just pretty much anybody who was alive and could move across the floor accepted our invitations to come and speak. But as I have gotten older and have pulled back from doing that kind of organizing work in order to raise my own family, the group too has gone through a transition, and last fall we’d been meeting in smaller groups, and we did have a three-day symposium on dystopian fiction. We read some older material, we talked about Tobin Anderson’s work. We talked about The Hunger Games work. Some of the names of the books escape me at the moment. There’s a wonderful new anthology by Datlow and Windling called After. I don’t know if you’ve seen that. I have a story in that. And that’s a whole set of new and original dystopian fiction written for children.
Do you want to tell us about your story from the anthology?
Yes, it’s called “Hw th’Irth Wint Rong by Hapless Joey @ homeskool.guv.” And it is a six-or seven-page story that pays a tip of the hat/homage to Russell Hoban in his famous and wonderful dystopian novel called Riddley Walker. What most characterized that novel is that, in addition to the world being broken, even language was broken. The laws of grammar had all been forgotten. In order to read Riddley Walker, pretty much you have to read it out loud the way you find if you read Shakespeare out loud or Chaucer, who actually realized that your ears are hearing things and understanding it, doing just as much of the work as your eyes are doing. You read Riddley Walker and you read it out loud phonetically like a child learning to read and you remember how every child learning to read is trying to unriddle the universe. I took that plan and I wrote about a boy who was trying to write an essay about what happened to the world. He sees photographs of what the world used to be like when planes flew through the air, and everybody was clean and lawns were cut and everything seemed to be bright-colored, but in the time since he was born, half the world plunged into shadow, my suggestion as to why that happened is that something has gone wrong with that high speed particle collider halfway underneath France and Switzerland and that it generated a particle that began to change the nature of molecules. This is actually built out of a fear of mine of the Large Hadron Collider. People talked about the fact that nobody really knew what was going to happen if two particles collided and made a third particle that had never existed. Well, I always have to have something to worry about when I go to bed. First, it’
s whether or not I’ve flossed correctly, and then it’s whether or not the universe is going to change its nature before I get up and brush my teeth. So that’s really where that story began, it was built out of that anxiety.
You’re best known for writing fantasy but I saw you wrote at least one young adult science fiction novel; I don’t know if there are others. Just what is your relationship with science fiction?
I read science fiction when I was fourteen or fifteen in the way that I read everything. So I read my Robert Heinlein, I read my Isaac Asimov, and I read my Ray Bradbury. There are some science fiction writers I really do admire a huge amount. There’s somebody who writes for teenagers, H. M. Hoover; she wrote with particular literary style that was very appealing to me. I’ve liked some of the work that Doris Lessing … and at the moment names escape me. I admire almost everything of Ursula Le Guin’s.
I hear you’re working on a new novel called Egg and Spoon. You want to tell us about that?
Yes, it’s on a table in the back of my study here. It is, in a little bit of a sense, a dystopian novel. It is set in the past, in roughly 1905 in czarist Russia. And despite the fact that it’s set back then, it’s really a meditation on some things that we are facing right now in our dystopian 2013, which is the threat of climate change, floods, and droughts, and weather that won’t sit in the month in which it belongs, and its implications for human suffering and the human need to begin to find new ways to share resources. I purposely set it in the past so that it won’t be too extreme and too science fiction, and it allows me to dabble in the kinds of things that I like to, but it nonetheless is intended to respond to readers, to young readers, right in the world in which they live. In which we see these storms, and we can worry about things like colony collapse of bees and about drought and about what it’s going to mean if our chain of food supply really is as drastically interrupted and revised as seems to be quite possible even within our lifetimes.
Do you have any idea when it will be released into the wild?
I would like to think that there is still a wild for it to be released into by the time I’m finished, and I would like to say probably fall of 2014.
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.
David Barr Kirtley has published fiction in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Lightspeed, Intergalactic Medicine Show, On Spec, and Cicada, and in anthologies such as New Voices in Science Fiction, Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and The Dragon Done It. Recently he’s contributed stories to several of John Joseph Adams’s anthologies, including The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, and The Way of the Wizard. He’s attended numerous writing workshops, including Clarion, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, James Gunn’s Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and Orson Scott Card’s Writers Bootcamp, and he holds an MFA in screenwriting and fiction from the University of Southern California. He also teaches regularly at Alpha, a Pittsburgh-area science fiction workshop for young writers. He lives in New York.
Artist Gallery: Giuliano Brocani
Artist Spotlight: Giuliano Brocani
Galen Dara
Giuliano Brocani is a designer and illustrator living in Italy. His portfolio and blog are at www.giulianobrocani.com. You can follow him on Twitter @notpill.
Our cover image this month is your fabulous illustration, Leviathan. Such a visually stunning piece, harrowing and visceral. I noticed it was based on a Concept Art Character of the Week contest (and the winner too, congratulations!). How did you come up with the idea for this piece?
Let me start by saying that I’m really proud to be featured in Lightspeed. I’m an avid sci-fi reader and many authors featured in your magazine have been part of my literary and artistic growth.
This is a hobby to me, which means I don’t have an awful lot of time for my passion, or at least not as much as I’d like, but there are always so many things I want to paint, be it for study or just because I feel like it. I keep some kind of a mental list of things I want to draw sooner or later, and when I look up the current activities on the forum, I always find something to do that’s on my list. An astronaut left to his own devices in space was definitely on that list, so I sketched it down very quickly and I have done nothing else but refining it, following here and there the advice of the forum users. [Link: http://www.giulianobrocani.com/wp/character-of-the-week-278-wip/]
In your biography, you state that you work in advertising and paint for fun. Can you tell us a little about your background, such as how you came into the creative field and what sort of crossover there is between your advertising/design work and your illustration/painting work? Do you ever consider making painting and/or illustrating your career?
I grew up in a family that breathed art. My father and his six brothers all made paintings, sculptures, drawings, even if they were kept busy with their jobs that had nothing to do with art. Art was not particularly encouraged, there were no pressures, it was just … normality. I started working for an advertising company when I was looking for a summer job, as a porter, something for a month or so. I got out of there nineteen years later as art director. I’ve opened a design shop with some friends and here I am. It’s the job I love, but, despite what many young people think, it has nothing to do with art. It is method, technique, problem solving. It’s not art. That’s why I need an art-release-valve, that’s why I spend all my spare time on forums and Photoshop. To be honest, I never thought illustration could be my main profession, but you never know …
You paint mostly in Photoshop, is that correct? I noted you did a few experiments with ArtRage and Painter; do you experiment with other software as well? Do you ever work with traditional mediums? Sketch things out pen on paper, etc.?
First of all, I want to specify that I love traditional painting. I’m crazy about oil painting. My approach to illustrations is nothing else but an attempt at simulating that method, with the advantage that I don’t have to wait for the colour to dry off, clean the brushes, set up the easel …
I’ve used Photoshop since its version 2.5 (!!) so you can imagine how comfortable I feel in that environment. I tried everything out there. I used Painter when it first came out (it was made by Metacreations and it only came for Mac and it was … dunno, a long time ago!) and it was stellar, with its palette to mix colours … wow, it was great! … but it didn’t feel like home to me. Now and then I try to do something with other software, but Photoshop is still my first choice. I am one of the lucky Wacom Inkling early adopters—I bought it specifically to improve my analogue approach. If you ever jot down a sketch on your moleskin, hey presto, with Inkling you already have it in digital format.
Since I started my full-digital adventure, I got rid of all analogue tools. I rarely sketch my drawings in pencil, and when I do, I sketch them in digital. Mine is a process similar to sculpture: I start from undefined shapes that step by step become characters or landscapes. I use PS like a canvas, only a few layers (two or three generally) with just a few settings—I then merge them as soon as possible.
Who are some of the artists that have inspired you? Where do you go to get ideas for your next painting? (And if you ever find yourself stuck on an artistic problem what do you do to get past that?)
This is probably an answer you get a lot of times, but there are too many artists that inspire me. I try to buy all the art books I can la
y my hands on. Spectrum albums are a yearly appointment I can’t miss and then all the “The Art of…” [insert_a_movie_title_here]. Many of them are also artists that are not well known to the public, like Wesley Burt, Marko Djurdjević, and all staff at Massive Black, Inc. If I really had to name one, I’d say the one who really shocked me is Jon Foster. If you look at what he does, you can never be sure whether it’s traditional or digital painting.
More than by individuals, though, I have been influenced by the community. Everything I know today about digital painting comes from forums like CGSociety, ConceptArt.org, CGhub.com. Names like Philip Straub, Jason Manley, Nicholas “Sparth” Bouvier, Marko Djurdjević, and many many more that, with great humility, offer their expertise and advice to everybody. That’s why I actively and constantly participate in the forum: to give back, to reciprocate the favor. There’s no doubt this is a wonderful era for sharing knowledge.
I generally draw to relax. I don’t work on commission, so I rarely face complex artistic problems. My professional experience has taught me, though, how to work with very specific briefs, so I’m quite comfortable in solving issues that seem quite intricate. That’s also why I’m interested in online challenges. If there’s a brief, there’s a solution.
If I can choose, I usually try to push myself out of my comfort zone. For instance I know I need to work hard on anatomy (among other things), so if there’s a challenge that requires the study of a character, I’m quite happy because it’s an opportunity to develop my skills.
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 36 Page 11
