Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology

by ed. Pela Via

  BOOKED: Switching gears to your more literary reading, I recently read, in preparation for this interview, I'll be honest, I read your award winning Last Days, which was absolutely fantastic, by the way. I was very fascinated with the way you portrayed this subculture of, for lack of a better term, amputee fetishists. How did that idea come to you?

  BRIAN: I think it came pretty directly from the Biblical verse that's mentioned in the book, which goes something like "If thy right hand offends thee, then cut if off. If thy left eye offends thee then pluck it out." Maybe the reverse of that. And I just thought, beginning with that, I thought, "What happens if someone takes this seriously?" And that was kind of the beginning of it, I think. I seem to have an interest in amputation that runs through a lot of my work, I'm not quite sure why that is. I try not to think too much about it. But, once I kind of started with that verse. I really felt like, you know, I could build on that and make it more extreme and then start to show the way in which a religion can fracture and go off in weird directions. You have these two different groups, one of whom takes this so seriously that they're just trying to reduce themselves to nothing, and the other of whom is more, kind of, I don't know what, exactly, more restrained in the way they operate.

  BOOKED: Quite honestly, I read this in just over a sitting, and I was trucking along with the story and when you introduced that second faction, I was just blown away at that point. It was a great story up until that point, and then that happened, and I remember sending Robb a text message that said, "You need to read this book, this is fantastic stuff." You definitely hit the mark with that one in my opinion. And in other people's opinions, it won an award.

  BRIAN: Yeah, I was happy with the way that book was received. You know, I originally wrote it so the first part was its own novella, published as kind of a limited edition novella, and then as time went on I felt like there was more of that story to be told, and very slowly this idea of that second cult evolved, and the Paul stuff and all that, just slowly it came together and I realized I had to continue it.

  BOOKED: With all of the stuff you've published and the momentum of your writing career on its own, at least from my perspective, it appears like it could be easy for you to focus on that, so what would you say your drive or motivation is to teach?

  BRIAN: I really enjoy teaching, I find it really satisfying, especially when you see the kind of changes that are happening for a student, there are these moments where, I guess it works kind of like evolution in some ways that there are these moments that feel very slack and then there are these other moments where everything suddenly changes for people. I really like that a lot. And, yeah, I think it's maybe something that I could do, just working on my career without that, but I had two kids pretty young, and I just really needed the teaching at a particular moment. At this point, I don't think it's something I would give up. I find enough satisfaction and I think I'm reasonably good at it, so it seems to work.

  BOOKED: How does the interaction with your students affect your writing, your personal writing, does it have any effect on it at all? I just imagine these situations where you see someone do something unique, something you wouldn't have thought of, and it changes your thoughts on the way something happens.

  BRIAN: I don't think it has all that much of an effect, to be honest. I'm pretty good at compartmentalizing. Every once in a while I'll have an incredibly talented student who will do something that does kind of blow me away and makes me think of things differently, but I think it has more of an effect like reading a writer who is one of your favorite writers can have, where you see something that's amazing and it's not so much that you imitate it but you incorporate aspects of it into a style that's already kind of defined and personalized to be specific to you. So, I don't really steal from my students, I guess is what I'm saying. But at the same time, I can think of, to give you an example, I had a recent student named Brian Conn who published a book that's called The Fixed Stars, which I think is a really brilliant kind of far-future, science fiction book. But it was published by Fiction Collective 2, so it was published as innovative fiction, and it does kind of straddle this divide between innovative fiction or literary fiction and genre fiction, and he does a couple things in that that I think are really, really great. And I probably have, I don't think I've borrowed necessarily from that, but the way he does things changes my sense of what's possible. But I think that happens every time you read a book, and part of the difference between writers is the sequence of the things they read and the things they key on really starts to define their style and opens them up, the way it directs them.

  For me, I think one thing that's important for me, as a writer, is to read really eccentrically, I read in a lot of different directions and I read a lot. And I'm really curious, I don't just go out and read the new Jonathan Franzen novel, and in fact I haven't read the latest one. But, I think if you can kind of just keep your eyes open and try different things, then that can really have a positive effect on you, as a writer, and will open you up, rather than shutting you down.

  BOOKED: How is it that you got started in writing?

  BRIAN: I actually got started when I was really young. My mother got interested in writing when I was a kid, maybe twelve or so, and she published one kind of Mormon science fiction story, and then she was working on another. When she was doing that, I'm the oldest of five kids and she would encourage all of the kids to do something, either write or draw or something so that she could sit down at the computer and write. So, while she was doing that, I was writing as well, and I really found that it was something that gave me a certain amount of satisfaction.

  But you know, after that, in high school I kind of got more interested in the sciences and it was only once I was in college where I met a Welsh poet whose name was Leslie Norris, who ended up being a kind of mentor to me and made me think a lot about language and the way it works, and was really a great teacher but also very good about recommending work to me. He kind of got me off and started, and really was great about encouraging me to just follow my own direction, so when I was doing weird, crazy stuff, and I had other creative writing teachers at the time, this was at Brigham Young university, which is a kind of conservative, religious school, who were telling me "You can't do this, you shouldn't do this," and he was very good at kind of saying "Oh, you're doing this, well you should read J.G. Ballard, and you're doing this, you should read Rushdie or Donald Barthelme," you know, various other people, and really helped me figure out, made me fearless in the stuff I was willing to try, I guess.

  BOOKED: Any other big influences, you can think of, on your writing style?

  BRIAN: You know, Kafka was a huge influence on me, I mean I really admire just the kind of spareness of his style, but also what he manages to do with it. I think, also starting out, Beckett was very important to me. You know, there are other people as well, Ballard was someone who I didn't realize how important he was to me until I read The Collected Stories about a year ago and then started to see things that really had had an effect on me without me knowing. I think that's one thing that's weird about influences, very often you don't realize how you're being influenced until after the fact. The more obvious influences are not always the most important ones.

  BOOKED: You've done several translations of books. How much of an effect does the translator have on the prose when it's moving from one language to another?

  BRIAN: I think you can have a lot of an effect on the prose, I think the thing I always try to do, though, is to be as faithful to what I see as the rhythm and intensity of the work as possible. And, you know, I think as I'm trying to do a translation, I usually will start by doing a sample of five, ten pages and see how it feels, and very quickly I can discover if my own way of interpreting the words really works or not. There are books I would love to translate, that I think are great but for some reason they just don't click with me as a translator and they don't come out right, exactly, and then there are other books that just really d
o.

  BOOKED: We had Axel Taiari, one of the Warmed and Bound contributors, on recently, and he's French, English is a second-language for him, but he writes exclusively in English because he doesn't feel that French words got the message out for him, so that was a really unique thing to hear, that their native tongue doesn't do it for them, but I can see where the same would probably work with translations for other languages, as well, that the lexicon you're working with can't give you the same feeling as what you've started out with.

  BRIAN: It is interesting because different languages have very different, I don't know exactly, factors or something, or different directions in which they move. Beckett, his native language was English and he wrote a lot of his work in French, and so he kind of went the opposite way of Axel. But I think for me, the thing it teaches me, I think as a writer, to do translation is that I am faced with sentences that are arranged in a way that is different than any sentence that I would probably write. There are particularities of the style that are particular to the language, to French, and to the particular author, and having to kind of deal with those, and think about it, and then try to be faithful to those who bring it into English, I think, teaches me certain ways of putting sentences together and thinking about the world that I might not have come across in another way or might not have come across as quickly in another way.

  BOOKED: I noticed that you are a senior editor at Bard College's literary magazine, Conjunctions, and we've been talking to people a lot about editing because, primarily just as readers, editing is just a fascinating concept to us, and the one thing that people have been saying is that: You learn from editing, you know, what not to do. Do you keep editing and your own writing separately or are you learning lessons from the stuff you're editing as well?

  BRIAN: You know, I think you learn lessons sometimes. I mean, I have done editing of various kinds over the years, and it's definitely true, especially if you're going through slush piles and looking at stuff, that very quickly, you see a lot of writing that's kind of scary and bad, but then, also, it's interesting to work with people, to see a story you like that feels like it needs, that something's not quite there about it, and trying to work them, and trying to get the story there is really interesting. And seeing both their resistances and their willingness to try to make the changes is quite interesting, I think.

  BOOKED: A lot of people in this anthology have a novel out, or two, but it seems a lot of them are very much at the beginning of their writing career, and a frustration that we've heard a couple times, I don't know, if it's during the episode or just kind of casually, is that it's difficult to find editors who will actually spend the time with you to take something that has promise and take it to where it could be or could get to.

  BRIAN: I think it used to be the case that that was what being was. That a big part of your job was finding something that had promise and working with it and making into something that was a great book, and so a lot of the great editors, Maxwell Perkins and other people like that, that's really what they did with some writers like Thomas Wolfe, who became major figures, but then I think that part of the problem is just an economic problem. I think that New York editors, and probably almost anywhere, are overworked, and just aren't really given the leeway or the time to be able to do to the degree they could before, so I think it's a problem with the way the book industry has changed. I think it still happens, you know, there's a lot of people, a lot of press, and I think I would put the Warmed and Bound anthology as part of that, I think there are a lot of projects and presses that are done as labors of love, and if they work, great, if they don't work, great, but the people just want to do them because they want to do them, and with those you get more of a sense of editorial care, in terms of trying to make the best it can be and working with the writers, and just making it as successful as possible.

  BOOKED: Something you said, actually, that whole response just made me think of, again, a lot of the things we're talking about, well, A) this is a Warmed and Bound themed interview, so we're going to talk about that a lot, but we've talked to 14 of these people in the last couple of weeks, so it's very fresh in my mind, but they're all going through these workshops together where they sit down and they pal up, edit each other's work, so do you think that's a legitimate avenue in the absence of availability of editors, for writers to sit down and try to strengthen each other's stuff?

  BRIAN: Yeah, I think that that can be really useful. It's something, I think, that the workshop that you get in a lot of colleges works around that model, that you have an instructor who is there, who probably knows, in theory, a little bit more than a lot of the other people in the class, but who also is part of the larger discussion that includes other people who are in the classroom, I think it can be useful, I think it depends a lot on who the people are. Obviously, some people are better editors than others, some people have very strong opinions that are just absolutely wrong, but they can also be very convincing, so I think it can be good, and I think it can be good to have those dialogues and conversations, but I also think, for me, the more important thing can be that, eventually, you reach a point where you edit yourself, that you develop enough as a writer and as a thinker to be able to be a self-editor and be skeptical about what you're doing, and I think some writers are able to reach that very quickly and some writers don't.

  BOOKED: We, for example, were very excited about, of the Warmed and Bound anthology, quite a few of the contributors. Who's books do you get excited about when they hit the shelves?

  BRIAN: I think there are a lot of people, there's really a huge range. I'm pretty interested China Miéville is doing right now, I think he's doing really interested things with science fiction. Stephen Graham Jones, who is in the Warmed and Bound anthology, I think is doing some interesting things in terms of moving back and forth between literary fiction and horror fiction so I'm keeping a close eye on what he's doing, so I'm pretty excited about that. I don't know, I'm sure I'm going to offend someone by not mentioning them, so I probably should not say too much, I mean there's just a lot of people I get excited about, still, and that I'm interested in seeing what they're doing.

  BOOKED:This kind of tags along with that, and it's putting you in a tight spot, but I think one of the toughest things for us is trying to find quality stuff that's coming out in a timely fashion, but also kind of across different genres, so is there anything that you see on the horizon that you think people should be, or as a book review podcast, should have on our radar?

  BRIAN: Steve Erickson has a new book with Europa Editions that I just got the proofs for in the mail yesterday, that looks really interesting to me. I get proofs a lot. I'm interested in a lot of stuff that's coming out. In translations, Dalkey Archive Press is doing some really interesting publications of French and other stuff and stuff that is off a lot of people's radars that's pretty good. They do stuff that I think is really amazing sometimes. Open Letter is another translation press that I think is doing interesting things. The thing I'm interested, kind of as a larger issue, is a way the division between genre and literary is potentially collapsing, or becoming more complicated, so I guess when I'm keeping an eye out and looking at things, I'm most interested in books that aren't very stuffy or stodgy in the way they think of those distinctions, that can allow things to happen that are not all that easy to put in categories.

  BOOKED:What are you currently working on?

  BRIAN: I just finished a novel, which is called Immobility, which is coming out with Tor in sometime early in 2012, and it's a kind of weird project because it started when a website asked me to write a fake book description that I would never write. I did that, and then got really interested in actually writing the book. It is a kind of post-apocalyptic, weird space thing that also is pretty philosophical, and I think it'll be pretty interesting to people who like my work, and I think it won't be disappointing, at least I hope not.

  BOOKED: Is there anything that, before we start closing things down, t
hat you'd like to mention that maybe we haven't talked about yet?

  BRIAN: No, I don't think so, we covered a lot of ground.

  BOOKED: We're all over the place sometimes. Brian, would you like to tell people where they can find you?

  BRIAN: Yeah, at www.BrianEvenson.com, that's where you can find me.

  BOOKED:Thanks again for coming on to talking with us. We really appreciate it, and we had a good time talking to you.

  BRIAN: Thanks very much, I had a good time as well.

  Interview Transcript:

  Stephen Graham Jones

  Hosts Robb Olson and Livius Nedin

  Transcript of a live interview produced 8/02/2011 by Booked Podcast

  Audio available at bookedpodcast.com

  ROBB: Your involvement in The Velvet is a bit different than the other authors we've been interviewing for Warmed and Bound. Seeing as you didn't find The Velvet as much as it found you, how do you feel that community has changed over the years?