by ed. Pela Via
ROBB: That’s good. It’s tough with a short story to just talk a little bit about it. Actually, in reading Steve Erickson’s forward to the anthology, I really like that he said your narrator utters the anthology’s most dangerous sentence: “I’ve been good my whole life.” And the more I read that foreword—a couple times recently—and the more I thought about it, the more I was like, “Yeah, he’s really right about that!” That’s kind of a cool little insight he had.
CRAIG: That had me dancing on air. Steve Erickson is a writer I’ve, to say the very least, looked up to for pretty much all my adult life after college. I have books of his he signed to me 20-plus years ago. You want a list of things I’d take from a burning building, I’ve got signed Rubicon Beach, Days Between Stations, Tours of the Black Clock, all when they came out. I had Tours before it came out. Yeah, I used to go stalk him. So, that’s a real honor to have that come from him. I consider him the invisible giant. I think he’s honestly the greatest living American writer that we have, and he’s got the least amount of recognition. I was dancing on air. Still am, actually, after that intro.
LIVIUS: Over these past interviews, we’ve had occasion to talk to several authors who participated in some of the numerous writing intensives that you’ve taught. And they’ve, across the board, kind of credited you with helping them hone their craft. What do you personally get out of teaching other, younger, aspiring authors, or up-and-coming authors, a little more about the writing craft?
CRAIG: What I get out of it is a fire under my ass. As you may have gathered, I’m not the most prolific writer. It’s kind of daunting following Stephen Graham Jones, who probably just finished a novel as we started talking. It always amazes me how ferociously every one of my students just dives headlong into the work and the assignments. Every one of them is more prolific than I am; I can say that with fair confidence. So for me to put an assignment out or a lecture or whatnot, and have people attack it so fiercely and so quickly, really lights a fire under me. Not that it’s led to more productivity, but the fire is there, trust me.
ROBB: Talking a little bit about your writing, I’ve read The Contortionist’s Handbook and Dermaphoria several times, and one of the things that I picked up on, and I’m sure you’ve gotten this question before, there seems that there may be a cameo appearance of John Vincent in Dermaphoria. Is that true or not, or is that something that you leave up to the imagination of the reader?
CRAIG: I’d like to say that I can neither confirm nor deny, just to be funny. I have a strange relationship with the Handbook, but regardless of how I feel about it, it’s why the three of us are talking. It’s kind of my nod, but the more I read of certain writers, I like this idea of sort of an enclosed universe where—Chris Baer does this a lot in his short fiction—the idea of having the book co-exist in this authorial universe. So having John Vincent pop up is a fun way to weave those things together. And his appearance in Dermaphoria is appropriate. And he will likewise have one in this third book I’m working on. It opens up with my main character going through a name change, and that’s pretty much the extent of that, and he briefly mentions a redheaded man he meets near the courthouse. If you know the Handbook, you know that’s John Vincent.
ROBB: Regardless of how the author feels about it, I think it’s a nice treat for a dedicated fan who’s read multiple things that someone’s written to have that familiarity and stuff like that. So I always get geeked-out on those types of little minor appearances and stuff like that.
CRAIG: I’m a sucker for all that stuff: any sort of, we call them Easter eggs, now. When I was growing up they were sort of a Cracker Jack prize. When you found some sort of hidden code or cipher or symbol buried somewhere that really didn’t affect the story, it didn’t change the meaning of anything, it just added a layer of discovery that just made it more engaging. So, I try to do more and more of that as I move on.
ROBB: I think that mystery has a lot to do with it. Having just enough of that subtle hint that it might be this person is, for me, even just kind of tastier in a way.
CRAIG: And you sort of have to be in the know to pick up on that clue. And again, it adds to a feeling of discovery when it’s something that you found on your own and you’re privy to.
LIVIUS: In keeping with The Contortionist’s Handbook and Dermaphoria, both of the rights to the movies have been purchased. Do you have any thoughts on that? Do you have any news?
CRAIG: Both of them have been recently re-optioned. Both companies have been buying more time. Beyond that, I go back and forth as far as what I think is going to happen. Part of me, I know there’s nothing I can do, it’s completely out of my hands, I should take the money and take care of business, and focus on what I’m writing and look forward. And there are parts of me that sometimes, it’s like I’m just looking at the Hollywood meat thresher coming right at me, you know? Grain thresher. Whatever cuts up meat or grain, it’s coming at me or my work, and I get really frustrated, and I’ll have the occasional rant or tantrum, and then I’ll get back to my zen mentality of just letting it pass and focusing on the work. So as not to dance around the subject, people keep hammering me about Channing Tatum. And I’ll be really honest, I have no problem with Channing Tatum at all. I don’t know him enough to have an opinion about him. All I do know is that historically that we have plenty of actors that have overcome the low expectations set by their bone structure, shall we say, who have gone on to become taken very seriously. Is that grammatically correct? “Gone on to become taken very seriously?” [laughs] Anyway, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp come to mind. Angelina Jolie. Whatever you may think of them off-screen, the fact is, they hold their own on camera. So, my hunch is that Channing Tatum is getting to do the kind of stuff that his agent and manager all but forbade him to do early in his career, until he was proven bankable. So, I’m not worried about him. I have misgivings about the script and the studio asked my opinion. I gave them my opinion. I have yet to ever hear from them again, as I pretty much expected. So, my fingers are crossed.
LIVIUS: As geeked as I get when I hear a favorite book is going to made into a movie, there’s always that kind of inevitable, you know, you feel it’s going to be a letdown because so many movies don’t hold up. I’m just glad when authors get paid a little extra something for it getting turned into a movie. That’s really where my thankfulness for that comes in.
CRAIG: Yeah, I tend to agree with you on that. I’m waiting for that payday.
ROBB: In Dermaphoria and Contortionist’s Handbook, your characters give some very, very convincing details about their professions: a chemist in Dermaphoria and the document forger thing in Contortionist’s Handbook. What’s your process for doing research? It seems like you have some really, really well-detailed stuff. So, do you think it’s really important for a story, that kind of deep research?
CRAIG: I think so. It depends on what you’re doing. If you’re writing a story that involves details about something you’re not familiar with, if your main character is a private detective and a plumber, you should probably do some homework on both and not make it up as you go. To that end, I did pretty much the same amount for both of those first two novels. I included less of it in Dermaphoria than I did in the Handbook. Two reasons. One, I just, I really want to lean more on storytelling than factoids and trivia to engage a reader. Secondly, the Handbook, the voice of the Handbook, necessitated more research being in the story. John Vincent being sort of an OCD cokehead, he’s going to tell you everything he does. If you’ve ever met someone like this, and I’ve met a few . . . like, the greatest car-detailer I’ve ever known, was this kind of meticulous, just, almost psychotic in his attention to detail. Unfortunately he would also tell you everything he did to trick your car out, you had to listen to him. And John Vincent was one of these guys with the lack of social skills that just sort of wants to hook the reader and explain everything that he did. So, part of it was necessitated by John Vincent’s narrative voice. So I did a lot of research for b
oth, and I think it’s important to do research if you’re going to be out of your depth. At the same time, most of what I did in the Handbook, at least half of the facts that he throws out there, I made up. But I made them up after doing a lot of research and really understanding the discipline very, very well.
ROBB: Blackstone Audio released both books as regular audiobooks but also, Dermaphoria as an iOS accessory app. I don’t even have a question here, I just want to say, I was listening to that a little bit on a drive from Vermont to D.C. recently, and I was like, “Man, they found the perfect voice for this!” And only afterwards did I realize that it was actually your voice. Do you feel like you have a good voice for it?
CRAIG: [laughs] I’ve never liked my voice; I’ve always thought I sound like Wallace Shawn channeling Bobcat Goldthwait. It’s something I’ve never been comfortable with. With the Dermaphoria recording, I was listening after the first day, I was listening to some of the bits of it and I asked Andrew, the engineer, what effects he was using, and he said he wasn’t using any. And I said, “That was not me!” And he explained the condenser mic and how it’s picking up everything, all of the midtones out of my chest, and I just want a condenser mic welded to my chest, so I could sound like that. “What’s the problem, officer?” No one’s going to fuck with you if you sound like that all of the time. I’ve gotten used to it, I’ve gotten more comfortable with the sound of it, just because I have to. When I read, if I do a reading in public, I always take time to take a few deep breaths, do a shot of whiskey, and listen to some Johnny Cash while I look over my notes. That seems to get me into the right headspace. But I’m just waking up now, so I’m kind of scattered and tightly wound.
LIVIUS: Can you tell us how you first got started writing?
CRAIG: No, I have no idea. I’ve been doing it since I was very young and anti-social. I would stay in at recess in grade school and write stories on paper. I don’t know where the impulse came from, but I’ve always had it.
ROBB: So, Craig, you touched on this a little, earlier, and at least one of the other authors that we talked to during these interviews mentioned that they’d like to see you do more short fiction. How do you feel about writing short fiction?
CRAIG: I haven’t written much short fiction since college. You know, creative writing, you do a lot of short fiction, at least as an undergrad. There’s not time to do novels. I did a lot of short fiction throughout my 20s and such. But since I started writing again 12, 15 years ago after stopping, I’ve pretty much done the novels. I’ve always said that a master clocksmith is not a good watchmaker. They’re two different disciplines, so I don’t think one is just simply a shorter version of the other. That said, I’m trying to do more short fiction, just in an effort to write more. If you’ve ever played a game of Scrabble with me, you’ll know why it takes me so long to write. I think I overthink things, to my own detriment.
ROBB: Do you want to talk a little bit about what you’re currently working on?
CRAIG: Well, there’s this third novel that I’m starting to call Godspeed, Jr. [Robb laughs] Going to ditch the title Saint Heretic. I think I know what I’m going to call it, but in the meantime I’m taking a breather. I’ve got people waiting on it, I know, but I need to reboot my brain. So I just finished a short piece and I’ve started another one. Finished a short piece I sent to Stephen Jones the other day called “Chicken Wire” about a washed-up, almost-famous sort of has-been rock star living out in the middle of nowhere driving a taxi. So it’s not noir; it’s not my usual fare at all. It’s actually kind of lighthearted and sweet to a degree, and people might be kind of surprised. And I’m working on a short piece right now called “Drone” about the subject of drones, the robotic military aircraft. There have been an alarming number of these things that have malfunctioned and just kind of gone off on their own. We don’t hear a lot about this, as you might imagine. But it happens. It’s another desert story. I came back from the desert, my mind kind of on fire, so it’s another story set in the desert. And then I’ll get back to what used to be titled Saint Heretic.
LIVIUS: Can you tell us what some of your early writing influences were? Who were you reading early on who helped kind of define what you wanted to do?
CRAIG: Hmm. The first person to really just knock me out of orbit, in terms of the sort of stasis I was in, was Italo Calvino. I read If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and it completely upended my ideas of what fiction could do. Stylistically: the pulps, obviously. But more than that, I think early college reading: T.C. Boyle and later on of course Seth Morgan. Getting an idea of what’s possible with language, that you can make the words as engaging as the storyline. People wonder why I read books more than once, and my response—wholly unsarcastically—is, “Why do you watch a movie more than once or listen to a song more than once?” Just because you know what’s going to happen doesn’t mean that the process itself can’t be engaging. And looking at the real wordsmiths, the people that could do really amazing things with language, are the reasons I reread books.
I get influence from different writers for different reasons. It’s not necessarily always about their writing style. Sometimes it’s the tone, or that writer’s work ethic, or it’s their subject. I may not like the style at all, but the subject and the places they’re going I’m really drawn to. So the older I get, the more I write and the more I read, the less one single influence looms above the rest. Chris Baer was a big influence before I met him. [laughs] That came out wrong. You know what, don’t edit that. Anything I can needle him with to get him to stick his head above the gopher hole and say something to the world is okay. He still is. But more than the style alone, reading a lot of his short fiction and seeing this really profound degree of empathy he has. And that’s hard to explain unless you’ve read a lot of his short stuff, which most people haven’t. Sometimes I wonder how the guy can remember basic day-to-day things, you know, where he parked his car and such. When I read his short fiction, there’s such a degree of empathy going on that must make it hard to function, I’d think. John O’Brien, my favorite of his are Leaving Las Vegas and Stripper Lessons. I can’t describe them. He was a remarkable writer, and the loss is ours, his suicide.
I spent the bulk of my career trying to equal two things, two brief passages: one was the electrotherapy scene on Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, that hallucinatory passage, and Chapter 19 of Tours of the Black Clock. Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent Into Hell. Can’t describe that when you have to read it to know how it affected me. Been reading a lot of the southern gothic folks lately: William Gay, especially. I like Cormac McCarthy, I love William Gay. William Gay is wholly underrated and wholly brilliant. He’s very restrained yet very lyrical at the same time. Mike Hogan, his first novel, especially, Man Out of Time just knocked me backward. I’ll keep going if I don’t stop there. . . .
LIVIUS: Of you fellow contributors in Warmed and Bound, can you give us a few of the authors that you expect we’re going to see some big things from?
CRAIG: I’m still going to take the Fifth on that one. Because no matter what . . . . You know, I think this Stephen Graham Jones guy is going to go places; I think he’s an up-and-coming voice we should pay more attention to. Ha! How’s that? Ha! [laughs] Honestly, a lot of these people are former students of mine, and whatever they’ve said in credit to me, I gotta just step back, because at this point I’ve got nothing to do with it anymore. Everyone seems to have taken flight without me just fine. They’re all, like I said, extremely prolific. Richard Thomas, pretty much every other day, says, “I’ve got a new short story here.” So yeah, I’m going to take the Fifth but at the same time give props to them all. I can’t win with that question. Nice try, though.
ROBB: Is there anything you’re looking forward to reading that’s coming up soon?
CRAIG: Right now I’m reading Zazen by Vanessa Veselka. That one I’m really enjoying. I’m still wading through Infinite Jest. And Murakami. I’m kind of cau
ght up in what I’m currently reading and still need to read. I haven’t even looked at the book horizon. If Steve Erickson’s got a new book coming up, I’ll stop whatever I’m doing to read that. And Godspeed, of course.
ROBB: Is there anything else you’d like to talk about that we haven’t mentioned yet?
CRAIG: I want to give big, big pimpage to my buddy Rob Roberge, who I met years ago. I read his first novel—and I’ve told him this, so this will sound cruel—but I said this to him: “I remember enjoying it, but I don’t remember it specifically.” And I was reading his other stuff recently, and my jaw just hit the floor. My first question was, “Lord, who broke your heart, buddy?” Even though he’s been happily married for a very long time, there’s just such a rawness to what he’s doing.
You guys have been talking about the women in noir and the “boys club” question, so I should make sure I mention Sara Gran and Megan Abbott. I don’t have an answer for the question about the lack of women in the anthology. I wrote something on The Velvet the other day about this same issue, and ultimately it comes down to me not knowing. But I think it’s really important we keep asking. And I’m glad you guys are putting it out there; it needs to be brought up. Because, let’s be honest, if you want to talk about noir and the dark, ugly injustice of the godless universe, I think straight white men are probably the least-qualified to write about it. Let’s be real here. We’ve spent the least amount of time on the business end of the injustice of life. So it’s our loss, not having more women in the mix, definitely.
