by ed. Pela Via
Stephen Graham Jones: These are just a lot of the people I grew up with. And, I’ve been through that workman’s comp machine, and it’s rusty and hates you and spits you out much worse than you were before, so I guess I was kind of digging into that some, yeah. Though I guess this story kind of cued up in my head as a riff on that Robert Frost poem, which is all famous and taught and canonical, but I’ve never seen the difference in it and a Ratt song, really, where Stephen Pearcy’s singing about how hung he is or something (though I could be thinking of interviews for that particular bit, I suppose). So I kind of wanted to write a version of it that I could understand. And then of course there was a poker game and beer drinking, suddenly — neither of which I know jack about either, so had to feel through, like with the poem — and dancers making house calls, and a birthing class, and maybe that’s the relevance: I remember when I went through that birthing class, there were a lot of no-shows, so the teacher let me take home like eighteen deli sandwiches, which was so, so great, because I was so, so broke at the time.
Tim Beverstock: The Weight of Consciousness started out as an idea called Diminished Returns. I wanted to write a story where each section used half the words of the previous one (500,250,125,50,25 etc) and have the narrative told retrospectively via a series of answer phone messages. While this idea didn’t translate over to the final story, the sense of timing remained by using the six paragraphs to break up a 24 hour period. Keeping the sentences clipped, the descriptions precise, and using an equal amount of words in each paragraph helped create a sense of weight in the build up to the end (hence the story title).
Bob Pastorella: “Practice” is based on true events that happened to me several years ago. Everyone knows ‘that girl’; the girl who is so normal and sweet on the outside, yet inside she is boiling over with crazy. You end up caring for her even though you know you should walk away. No, you should run away, but you don’t, because we all have this altruistic instinct that makes us believe no matter how messed up someone is, we can help them, so we try, without a clue as to what we really should do to help. For all we know, we could be doing more damage than good. Then the worst thing happens, you fall in love with her. How do you love someone who is so self destructive? I wanted to get that sense of helplessness out of Marcus, that he really didn’t know what to do to help Shelly. I also wanted to show that no matter how well we think we know someone, what we’re seeing is merely the tip of the iceberg.
Richard Thomas: It started with a discussion I had with the editor, Pela Via. I had a couple stories sitting around, showed them to her, and in the end we decided to write something brand new. I wanted to give her the opportunity to tell me exactly what she wanted, and craft a story just for her, and this anthology. I’ve been a big fan of Nietzsche for a long time. I recently discovered a quote of his and it drove the story. It’s where I got the title “Say Yes to Pleasure.” Here’s the quote:”Did you ever say yes to a pleasure? Oh my friends, then you also said yes to all pain. All things are linked, entwined, in love with one another.” That got me started on the idea of love and hate being so close to each other, how we have to love, we have to care, in order to hate something or someone. Otherwise, we just don’t care, we ignore the situation, or person, and move on with our lives. It got me thinking about how we can’t choose the people we fall in love with, so what if there was a tragedy, and the man who caused the horrific accident ended up falling for the victim, the woman. How would that play out? Would that secret hold, would it ever be revealed? Wouldn’t it just EAT AWAY at you? In the end, something had to give, something had to break. And it did.
Edward J Rathke: Hm, I wrote this story almost two years ago, which is longer than I thought, but, time being what it is–persistent–it tends to get away from me, so a lot of the impetus to write it and the inspiration behind it may be wholly fabricated by now, but I’ll try. At the time I wrote it, I was manic, writing ten shorts a week, easy, just flying on the keyboard, and, I thought, getting better with each passing word. This was kind of the peak of that creative burst, I think, if I remember correctly. It was the story I was most proud of, anycase, and ended up being rejected a dozen times before Pela snatched it up. I was trying to achieve what I’m still always trying to achieve: beauty. Aesthetics, really, are the most important thing for me when it comes to writing, and, more than that, it’s typically about a singular image that I need to get down just right. For this story, the first sentence I wrote–though it never appears in it–was, ‘The sky was on fire and everyone hid,’ and the rest just kind of came from that. Though I’m constantly failing, never reaching the bar I set, I like to think I’m getting closer. So the goal was to create something beautiful, though this was happening at a time when I was being, say, a bit reckless with my love, to put it a certain way. So, the nature of the story, the infidelity and sorrow of it, I think that’s some of the reality of my life that accidentally found its way to the page and took over, as it always sort of does. So special meaning? Maybe a way to process what my mother calls my immense desire for unavailable women.
Nik Korpon: I wasn’t really trying to accomplish anything with the story, other than shifting the reader’s perception every couple hundred words. I thought it’d be cool to have a real short story that’s constantly changing shape. And I always seem to be writing love stories, so there’s that. The genesis of This Will All End Well was from a story I heard on NPR, actually, with a guy who fought in World War II. It was winter and they were clearing out bunkers, just burning them down. He came across a Nazi with a broken back lying in the top bunk, begging not to let him die in the fire. The guy pulled him off the bed and dragged him up the steps, all with a broken spine, and left him in the middle of the field for his countrymen to find him. I kept seeing that image of his feet smacking on the concrete steps, his vertebrae grinding against each other.
Amanda Gowin: This is the first story (that I’m happy with) I’ve written with no definite answers. It’s very linear, but as far as love stories, there are no resolutions. Its genesis was an epiphany about a very strange tree – and by getting the story out of me and into a containable form, I hope it became something beautiful and less frightening.
Nic Young: My story came out of a workshop led by Jack Ketchum, called Writing From The Wound. As you can imagine he placed a great deal of emphasis on getting close to your own traumas and fears. The story I submitted is true. It’s my biggest wound. At the time of writing I was simply trying to follow Ketchum’s instruction to climb into the scary parts of the past and bring something back. It was cathartic. I cut it down a lot while editing for Warmed And Bound, and I think in it’s current form it’s quite focused on how excluded the boy feels.
Chris Deal: In Exile is the story of two people and how they drift apart. Honestly, that’s the oddest path I’ve ever taken to get to a story. Maybe a sentence a day for three weeks, then a little more, then showing it to people who hated it, then someone saw something good inside. Got twisted and rewritten a lot, now it’s here. All I wanted was to have fun with a different voice.
Doc O’Donnell: My story, “If You Love Me”, is one of the most personal, most non-fictional, most confronting stories I’ve ever written. It was one of those ones that was hard to write, not because the story and what I wanted to achieve wasn’t clear, but because it was so close to me and it was difficult to revisit the emotions, the characters. See, I had a crazy, manipulative girlfriend a few years back–didn’t we all?–and I went through a situation very similar to this with her, not to mention a slew of other shitty scenes–I mean, I could probably write a short story collection of the fucked up shit that went on in that relationship, and, I suppose, maybe I will someday. But, as of right now, I think this one is about as much as I can handle. Unlike the protagonist of my story, I don’t have her name scarring my body–not anymore, anyway–but I am missing little bits of flesh over my body. The story, at its heart and soul, is a scary love story. It’s about a man that is at a poin
t so low that he is easily manipulated into proving his love for a girl–a girl he likely shouldn’t be giving his love to, a girl that is, quite clearly, taking that love and using it against him because she’s a horrible little bundle of S&M. The details are raw, uncompromising. I guess, what I really wanted to achieve was that sense of hopelessness. That feeling of knowing you shouldn’t be doing something but, at the same time, knowing you’re going to do it anyway; it’s the mistake you know you’re not meant to be making. And I think we’ve all been there at some point or another. Maybe not with a pyhsical blade to the skin, but, perhaps, you, metaphorically, swallowed that blade and let it damage you from the inside out.
Craig Wallwork: Bruised Flesh is about Jonah, a young man recounting his childhood at the hands of an abusive father. My intention was not to make this mis-lit. I didn’t want Jonah’s story to be Pelzerised or anything, but more a story about a son and father getting to know each other. In the opening paragraph we see Jonah recounting a moment from his childhood when his father purposely injuries him. We don’t why this is until we realise the father has been given a chance to make a lot of money overseas by selling real estate to the elderly. All the father needs is capital to invest. To raise the cash he stages incidents using his son, films them on a video camcorder, and sells them to one of those popular comedy television shows like America’s Funniest Home Video. The father’s motivation behind all this it to provide for his son’s future by making lots of money from the real estate scam, but as the story progresses, the far reaching complications force the two apart. What interested me is the pursuit men undertake to better understand their fathers. My father never abused me, nor did he intentionally injure me for personal gain. For that reason, I am not Jonah. My father was, to the best of his abilities, a decent man. The problem was he was forced into fatherhood. He was not prepared, but battled on, doing the best he could. He was young too, and as such was still living his life while I was crawling through mine with dirty diapers and a snotty nose. When I was old enough to know better,a distance grew between us, awkwardness at times, and the bridge that finally united the gap was the local public house and the rivers of alcohol that ran beneath. He assumed the role of “involved” father more when he had a skin-full, much the same way I found courage when drunk, or love when on ecstasy. Alcohol brought us closer, but as a child, alcohol pulled us apart. The way Jonah finds solace and guidance when his father is muted by a coma, I found the same in mine, save it was not in a hushed hospital room but a polarised world of loud voices, dense cigarette smoke and hops and barely. Bruised Flesh was me committing to paper a story that I had carried for many years. It is a story of longing, of a universal forsaken love that heals but is always bruised by history.
Paul Tremblay: My story “Chance the Dick” is me riffing on the scene that turned out to be the opening chapter to my novel The Little Sleep: A stereotypically beautiful woman walks into a stereotypically dark office of a big city private dick. The fingers on one of her hands were stolen and replaced with someone else’s fingers. In my novel, that scene is a part of a dream/hallucination of a narcoleptic detective. In this story, I play it straight, sort of. Her fingers really are gone. And it goes in kind of wacky places from there. With the story, I was neck deep in my first novel, and I took a little step sideways and was trying to work out some thoughts/questions about noir and the classic PI story, what relevance it has today. That, I wanted to get my weird on with the story too.
Vincent Carrella: The Redemption of Garvey Flint was my first attempt to write a story set within the world of Serpent Box, my debut novel. I had planned on writing a collection of stories that would all connect in some way to the book, but that effort fizzled. Garvey is the black sheep of the Flint family , he’s sort of a prodigal son and the antithesis of his brother Charles, who is a Pentecostal preacher. I was hoping to convey that very powerful connection between brothers and the unconditional nature of brotherly love. As a brother myself I’ve wanted to explore the bond between brothers – one good, one bad , and that heart-aching shame and disappointment that often results from poor decisions.
Pela Via: “Touch” is about intimacy which maybe, in a way, means it’s about sex relative to the belief in God. The story’s relevance to me—I’ve been married forever. 13 years, at age 31. Sex changes its meaning in that much time; people around us get married, get divorced, die, some quick and some slow. “Touch” is a sad story. I’m lucky for the parts that are fictional, for every day I can touch my husband. Lucky, not blessed.
Brandon Tietz: My grandmother on my father’s side had dementia for the last few years before she died. I think a lot of that stuck with me, even though her and I rarely saw each other. Just hearing about it through family members made enough of an impact. So there’s the whole issue of trying to connect with someone who doesn’t know you anymore, and in this character’s particular case, clinging on to things that you’re about to lose. “Fading Glory” addresses those particular struggles.
Bradley Sands: It’s the opening chapter of TV Snorted My Brain, a novel that LegumeMan Books will be publishing next year. It’s about a teenage wannabe anarchist who doesn’t know very much about it. He likes peewee soccer games because he believes them to be perfect examples of total anarchy considering how the players’ parents behave. But his dad died during a riot that happened at a pee wee soccer game. I think I originally wrote it as the scene where that happens. But I changed it for some reason. Probably to have a greater emotional impact. Another riot starts, just like the one that the protagonist’s father was killed during. And he gets really excited because it’s pure anarchy or whatever. But at the end, he experiences a major emotional shift because he goes from having a great time watching the riot to remembering his father and how he died.
Craig Clevenger: “Act of Contrition” was a personal exercise in writing outside my own comfort zone. I wanted to write a story I wouldn’t share with anyone else. As it happened, when they asked me for a story, it was all I had ready to go. So, I made a leap of faith and sent it to the editors.
2.) What preconceptions or themes did you have when deciding to submit your story to The Velvet?
Caleb J Ross: I’ve known a lot of the people associated with The Velvet for a long time. Many of them I’ve worked with and many I’ve had beers with. I had no preconceptions and no thematic direction aside from the type of material I’ve come to know and expect from The Velvet. And I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I don’t know that it would have been possible to write something specifically for Warned & Bound. As corny as it sounds, I think the possibility of Warmed & Bound has existed inside these collected authors for a long time.
Sean Ferguson: The story starts with a guy dying on live television. Its violent, its gruesome and public. There’s an intimacy to it too, standing there completely alone with the whole world watching. He’s isolated as the rest of the studio is in hiding from his attacker. The story just seemed right, with these underlying feelings, and the issues that the story covers.
Anthony David Jacques: I honestly didn’t know what to expect. I knew it would be a lively project sure to attract some great talent, but I was still relatively new to the group. Perusing the final list of authors, I’m not only blown away by the number of authors I respect and admire who submitted work and (obviously) made the cut, I’m humbled to be counted among them.
Gordon Highland Most of my work to date has been very character-focused, and knowing that it might share space with some well-respected authors, even if only my peers from the Velvet community, I wanted to ratchet things up a notch. To go darker, with more action, more disturbing imagery, but also with a certain moral core. So I dialed back my trademark oh-so-clever wordplay and went for a visceral response. It wasn’t until I’d already submitted the story that I recognized its literal “warmed” and “bound” aspects. I swear. The original plan was to attempt a southern gothic tale, but then I remembered I live in effing suburbia and barely know a whi
ppoorwill from a weeping willow.
DeLeon DeMicoli: There weren’t any. Pela reached out and asked if I was working on anything that could be submitted for the anthology. I just finished “Blood Atonement” so I consider it dumb luck that the story matched the anthology’s theme.
Stephen Graham Jones: If I only I ever had preconceptions. I mean, outside the range of ‘this is probably going to win the nobel prize.’ But I’ve gotten kind of calloused to that particular mispreconception. As for themes, though, man. I’ve never thought in terms of themes, not when teaching– my students have all been trained that way, but I’m completely lost in theme-land — and especially never in writing. I mean, you’ve got the story, it’s happening right there under your pen, under your fingertips. Just be honest to it, follow it where it goes, don’t let go until you have to, and then let go all the way. It’s the only thing I know.
