AD:  What were your favorite cartoons and comics as a kid?  What really planted the bug in you to want to start drawing?

Josh Cicci:  I can’t recall the exact age, but when I was about 6 or 7ish I cut the tips of my two middle fingers off on a family camping trip (funny story, you had taught me earlier in the week or so what the middle fingers mean, when we found a carved-wooden middle-finger by meme’s shed).

I was practicing them and shoving them in between the crux of a flimsy wooden folding stool, and boom. So while I was laid-up my grandmother whom we called “Meme,” brought me some Carl Barks drawn Uncle Scrooge/Donald Duck comic books. This began a love-affair with 3 things, cartoons, the Barks/Disney style in particular, comic books as literature, and ducks. Then I stumbled upon Hanna Barbera cartoons. That was it for me, the Flintstones, Yogi Bear, loved Quick-Draw-McGraw (he lived in the desert like me!), Scooby-Doo was awesome stressful dramatic television theatre. The progression was natural classic Looney-Tunes/Warner Brothers, then the Jay Ward stuff like Rocky & Bullwinkle, Dudley & Snidley, Prof. Peabody, a lot of my humor comes from that stuff. Soon after that it was Marvel & DC comic books. But Charles Schultz, Walt Kelly, Bill Waterson, Robert Crumb, MAD Magazine,  I could name drop for hours. I find cartoons to be a very safe and comforting aesthetic.

AD:  How old were you when drawing was something you HAD to do rather than wanted to do?

JC:  Well in one way I suppose since other people knew I could draw. As a kid I was encouraged to draw, for fun, but also distraction. I drew as a defense mechanism, not just in a heavy psychological sense, but also literally. I went to some pretty rough public schools in CT and NY, so along with my humor I used my artistic abilities to keep from having to fight. Young men are extremely primal animals so you must quickly identify how you are useful to the pack, it is this that makes kids targets or not, anyway I drew to amuse them. I could not only make the joke about the teacher but I could draw him/her in a compromising position. The down-side to being a dog with a trick is having to do the trick. I’d get to be a vending machine. What always struck me, even by like 2nd grade was kids would take an awesome drawing of Daffy Duck by Chuck Jones and tell me to draw it exactly. Like this:

“Can you draw this?”

“Probably.”

“Do it.”

“But you already have that picture.”

*crickets*.

As for it being a chore, or job, luckily I haven’t been in that place yet. I still love it, I leave all my deadlines for the last minute, sadly that’s my m.o. but I still love it. In some ways I wish a jock would walk up to me now in a diner and have me draw the Raider’s logo for him.

AD:  Did you ever take art classes?

JC:  None formally. Just in public school like the rest of us. I took a cartooning class at Pima Community College when I was just out of high school. I took it because it was taught by a local cartoonist named Joe Forkan, who now teaches at CSU Fullerton, he had a strip in the Tucson Weekly called ‘Staggering Heights”, it was really cool. After like the second day he asked why I was taking the class with my skill set, I had a strip in the Pima Aztec at the time, I said I wanted to meet him and have permission to sit and doodle for 2 hours a day, I was still looking for ways to avoid adulthood. He introduced me to Max Cannon, creator of the hilarious “Red Meat”, and gave me an A for the class and I just hung out and drew. That was about it. Otherwise I studied along peers and masters—friends and family such as yourself.  I had friends named Chris Berritta & Aubrey Taylor in 5th/6th grade we did comic books together, I admired their styles. After high school I hung with a lot of Tucson graffiti writers alongside my good friend Jerry Wagner, all a huge influence.

AD:  Your work has a very playful, almost child-like quality to it.  Is this intentional?

JC:  In as much as it is what I mean to do. Otherwise, it’s just the style I see things in. I don’t see a landscape or a still-life, I see bears wearing shirts, and very bright colors. And again cartoons and comic books have been very integral to my life and development. I think that’s what society as a whole doesn’t get about hobbies. Individually we all understand that people need a non-work task that they enjoy getting lost in, but as a whole culture we make assumptions about these hobbies. Comic-book “nerds” (see I’m doing it, but we’re nerds, gamers are geeks, there are so many distinctions) didn’t wake up one day and say I am going to spend hours and dollars on this thing now, like checking out a new TV show. We are invested in this medium from a long time back. It reminds us of both the joy of our childhoods and the pain. Those child-like, bright, loud cartoons provided the foot-powered Mystery Machine out of there. Now they provide the time machine back.

AD:  You have a comic strip called “The Prickly Pair”.  Can you tell us where that is published at and how it came to be?  How many years has it been running?

JC:  “The Prickly Pair” (which is a play on words, here in the Sonoran Desert we call the common “paddle-cactus” the prickly pear because of the little pink fruit that blooms on them) runs in the Tubac Villager and just celebrated one year in December. The Villager’s publisher is Joseph Birkett, he has been a dear friend of mine for almost 15 years. He is a very talented artist who has served not only as an influence on my work but also as a mentor in most aspects of my art. His mother Maggie Milinovitch publishes the Connection out of Arivaca AZ, where I also learned many things from artist C. Hues whose work is phenomenal. Joe also published the Connection for a time, I had done covers for it and comics here and there, stuff I want to get online eventually. So he asked me last year to do it, and we did it all official like and he pays me, so I’ve been grateful he nudged me into it. He’s always been very encouraging. The Villager will be putting the archive of 2010 on their website soon.

AD:  Recently you had a booth at the Street Fair in Tucson where you sold original pieces of art and prints.  Was this the first time you have done this sort of thing?  What did you learn from the whole experience?

JC:  This was the very first time yes. I had only been painting on this scale for a little more than a year. But yeah we had never done a craft fair before. I feel that my style of art is conducive to that environment. It is simple and child-like, and “cute” so I don’t have any delusions in regards to what I make and who my potential audience is. I have good artist-friends in the Tucson community and I might balk at the idea of them setting up in a church parking lot, some art is to be appreciated in a gallery some on a 7 year olds bathroom wall. My wife Andrea was a whirlwind, just got everything going all along the way. She runs my website, and conducts business, which I could never do, and she pretty much learned from top to bottom how to facilitate a booth at a craft fair, so now we can do that. I learned that you can’t take anything personally. I didn’t hear any negative comments, but I did have something very precious to me in bins on 4th avenue for sale, so that is a little chapping.

AD:  As I know very well, growing up in our family was a series of comedic duels to see who was funnier than the other.   I remember you being naturally comical and quick of wit.  Do you think this was the stepping stone for you to get into stand-up and improvisational comedy?

JC:  Absolutely. No doubt. I was only trying to get my grandfather/father/and uncles to laugh from the time I could speak, especially hanging around the restaurant in Elmira around all of them. I loved to see my mother and grandmothers laugh. I liked making you laugh, and Jerica was a particularly good “get” especially early on. I was always blessed to be around funny people that appreciated the humor in life. Individually and as a family we have faced a lot of tragedy and always managed to laugh at it all.

AD:  You have performed with some heavy hitters of comedy.  Can you tell us about the highlights of those experiences and what you took away from them that affected the way you looked at not only comedy, but about the craft of collaboration?

JC:  Well that is an interesting dichotomy, I perform both stand-up comedy and improvisational comedy. stand-up is a very solitary experience. You succeed or fail on your own. If I get up and tell jokes that I wrote and no one laughs I can only blame myself. If I am doing improv with 2 or 3 other people there is a lot of trust and reliance happening. When I ask “is that an elephant in your pocket?” and you say no, the scene is dead and it doesn’t matter how confidant I am, without your help we will fail. As far as the big names I’ve performed with, every time it was an amazing experience. Lewis Black in particular had great words for all of us, thanking us for being brave enough to do college-comedy. He was gracious when he declined to come to the party, he said “I’m too old for that shit,” but Demetri Martin and David Cross (comedians love to name drop it’s all we have) both came and hung out with us, both very great to talk to. Bobby Moynihan who I met when he was in the UCB touring company and is now a featured player on SNL, is a fantastic guy, see comedians of any kind are very competitive people yet we all know what it’s like to be heckled or to “bomb” so while we keep a safe distance we have a kindred spirit. That is why any comedian that has “made-it,” if they don’t turn into a total jerk from all the fame, they are really cool people, they realize how lucky they are, and someone like Lewis Black knows that no matter how well I do opening up for him I’m not a threat to him. But I love to collaborate on stage. Yeah I’ve performed on the bill with some “names” but the best people I have worked with no one knows yet. I performed with Comedy Corner at the University of Arizona for years (they are the longest running sketch comedy college group in the country) and I always tried to encourage the new incoming kids. I’ve had directors chide me for being too easy, I would’ve let anyone in the group, because you don’t get funny staying home watching Scary Movie 3 and telling jokes to your cat. I’ve met so many kids who say “but my friends thought that was funny,” and your mom thinks you are very handsome. You haven’t learned you’re funny until you make a drunk a-hole who is mad the bar turned off the game for an open-mic comedy night, laugh. Then you know.

AD:  Who have been your biggest comedic influences?  Who would you love to do improve with that you have not already?

JC:  Wow, well my personal hero is Bill Murray. I don’t know that I’d like to perform with him, I’d hate for either of us to dislike each other. Otherwise I’d love to do improv with Tina Fey or Rachel Dratch, but honestly I’d just love to be able to perform with the people I did years ago. I don’t want to name their names because I would leave people out and feel like a jerk. But I have friends at Second City, Improv Olympic, the Groundlings. I have very good buddies who have a group call The Guys From The Internet (“they’re already in your house!”), I have performed with all of them, some of them for years, and I would love a chance to play with them again. As for influences like I said earlier on both sides of my family I had people who really appreciated good comedy, and they let me watch whatever from an early age, so I absorbed everything, I figured if it could make my grandfather laugh, it was funny and I should remember it. I wouldn’t have the comedic timing/style I have if not for the following: Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Peter Sellers, Steve Martin, Monty Python, the Not Ready For Prime-Time Players, the Peanuts and Daffy Duck.

AD:  Music has been a large part of your life and I know that you have participated in some bands and written some songs.  Could you delve into these adventures for us?  Do you still perform?

JC:  Music has been a big part of my life, but mostly as a fan. I have been in some bands, but to be honest only because of my charisma. I can get up in front of people and entertain. I was never in because of any talent. I did teach myself the guitar over the years to entertain myself. I do still perform from time to time because I have very talented friends kind enough to invite me to. I was in a very fun band that enjoyed some fans and local “fame.” We were called the Jack Acid Society which comes from a McCarthy-Era comic book by Pogo creator Walt Kelly. The best joke in the book is “what does the J.A.S. stand-for?” ‘I’ll tell you one thing we won’t stand for much!” We formed just after high school, none of us very good at our instruments, but we did have our “leader” Thoreau Smiley who is and was a fantastic song-writer who seemingly had an endless supply of material. So we played awesome covers but had a lot of original material which impressed folks because of our age. We were “adopted” by a small artist community in the mountains of southern AZ called Arivaca. They just loved us and treated us very well, very encouraging. So we played for hippies, and cowboys and very intense bikers, who just thought we were hilarious. We got payed in drugs a lot, which was fun for a bunch of 20 year old kids. We did get to record on a few occasions. We’ve been “flashed” many times. We used to do covers of classic hip-hop songs seriously years before it ever occurred to signed bands to. I’d get into yelling matches with audience members. We had a very punk-rock vibe due to our attitude and skill sets, but we were playing the Beatles and Bob Dylan and They Might Be Giants. We loved the Violent Femmes, we were very “angsty” but you couldn’t tell until you listened to the words. The music was always “up” and fast, we were bored by what later became “emo-rock,” it was just whiney and boring, fun, fun was the thing. We did a 15 minute musical version of Moby Dick, all original songs, it was a huge local hit. we still get asked to do it. I need to get it online, but all I know how to do is set the VHS tape next to my computer and hope they work it out on their own.

AD:  What music really speaks to the whole experience of your life thus far?  What is your go to tunes when everything just isn’t going your way?

JC:  That is easy, Bob Dylan, hands down. If I am having a personal issue there is a song or album that will help, always. I am just in awe of what he can do and say, and the path his life and career has taken. He wrote Hard Rain when he was 19 years old, it’s just amazing to me, I was trying to figure out how to make Ramen taste better with powdered mustard, so yeah I like Bob. I have seen him live nearly 20 times, 18 I think.

AD:  In recent years you have had some bouts with physical illness that have challenged you and yet, you still keep moving forward?  Does your art help you with this?

JC:  Yes it has. Music/Art/Comedy has kept me from becoming very depressed, which is easy for anyone to do. I don’t care how a person feels about depression, I’ve met people who think it’s a crock, and while I believe in being positive, human beings are prone to sadness. And it’s ironic and kind of strange that this ability to ponder the meaning or meaninglessness of life that makes us depressed to the point of paralysis it is also the reason we create. Literally though I had a lot of free time at home resting, so I just dove into drawing and painting. It has saved me many times.

AD:  How has this huge change in your life changed the way you approach art, music and comedy?

JC:  Twice in the last year and a half I almost died. Not to be overly dramatic, but both times I had doctors look me in the eye and asked how I was alive and did I know that I shouldn’t be awake or breathing, in a coma at best. When I was diagnosed with diabetes my blood-sugar was so high that there was almost no “blood” in my blood, it was just syrup. 5 months before that I had to have 6 pints of blood put in me, I had less than a third of the blood a human needs to not go brain dead. My answer was always “I have too much to do to die, Coma? I should be so lucky, who wouldn’t enjoy a nice nap,” they always just stared, comedy and medicine don’t go together, that was how I realized Scrubs was not a documentary. So these experiences have given me even more gratitude and appreciation for life. I am thankful that I am still able to create and that people enjoy it. That is also why I do these childlike pieces, I like kids, I envy their place in the universe and I think they get it right more often than any adult. Children spend their lives trying to figure out as much as they can about our world and   emotions, and adults spend their lives burying what they have learned, for various reasons. So I try and appreciate life like a child would.

AD:  I have heard around that you are considering writing a memoir that chronicles your journey with Crohn’s Disease and amateur comedy as well as a memoir that outlines your life according to Dylan albums.  Where do you find the time to work all of this in and how far along are you with these projects?  What do you hope to achieve by writing them?

JC:  I don’t have the time, well I didn’t anyway. I was recently laid-off from my day-job in social work, which was sad but a blessing. I hope I will have the time to create. But I have a mind that never stops and I have ADD, so I have a hundred projects going at any minute, which sucks because it takes me forever to finish anything, but now that people are buying my art it compels me to meet deadlines and honor contracts, you know grown-up stuff. I just want to have fun writing them and maybe learn more about myself, and maybe share that with others. I have cousins and a niece that I would like to share my experiences with, I want my own children someday, I look back on all the loved ones I’ve lost and feel like a dumb-ass for not documenting their lives and experiences. We think we’ll be around forever so we don’t turn on the camera or voice-recorder, or even write down stories our grandmothers tell about their lives. So it’s out of the vanity of not wanting to be forgotten that I believe motivates artists to create, that and chicks.

AD:  Do you have any websites or upcoming gigs that folks should know about so they can experience the wonder of Josh Cicci?

JC:  Yes, joshcicci.com is where my site is and purchases can be made there. I do commissions of any kind, I don’t say no, I take it all as an exciting challenge. Josh Cicci Designs has a fan page on Facebook where we give away prints all the time. I perform stand-up almost monthly and am in a new improv group called KLAU! so nothing booked right now but folks in Tucson can check out my Facebook page to get updates of gigs. So even if a person can’t afford to buy a piece they can still drop me a line, I love to talk ideas and always negotiate.

Website: Josh Cicci

Richard Godwin is a London-based writer of dark crime fiction, and his first novel “Apostle Rising” will be released this spring from Black Jackal Books, and it can be ordered here. Richard Godwin’s Website: http://richardgodwin.net

Interviewed by Lynn Alexander for FOC Prate
LA: I will start with the usual items that writers are asked about: current projects, books, the things that need to be promoted and where to find them. Please give me a brief rundown, and then we will focus on “Apostle Rising”, your forthcoming novel, specifically. After that, I hope that you will indulge my curiosity about some other matters. So, to start with an introduction, what is going on with Richard Godwin?
RG: I’m writing various stories as can be seen from the net and other publications.

I have a story I’m particularly fond of in the latest edition of Needle Magazine, ‘Pike N Flytrap’. I also have ‘Face Off’ in Crime Factory Issue # 5.

I’ve been working on some art stories. I’m fascinated by the characters of artists, I think if you aren’t interested in people, all types of people you shouldn’t bother writing.

I’m also conducting some more Chin Wags with some more great writers.

I’ve written a second novel and have started writing poetry again recently. I was recently interviewed for the radio by The Authors Show, which can be heard here

http://www.wnbnetworkwest.com/WnbAuthorsShow-RGodwin.html

LA:  ”Apostle Rising” has been described as a novel that explores “the blurred line between law and lawlessness” and why men kill. Is it fair to say that killing can be looked at in terms of context, two categories- situational/reactive and in rare cases, something sought? Most of us can wrap our minds around situations where people kill because of a situation like self defence or even jealous rage, and understand that these same people would not take a life in another context. But then you have killers who kill for the sake of it, who pursue their victims, who are driven to kill, and that is a very different kind of mindset and one that is not fully understood. This is the kind of killer that your main character needs to understand, right?
But first, do you think that it can be understood, this level of pathology? And how do we go about doing so when it constitutes a behavioral extreme that is so alien to most people? How can we understand something that is so difficult to relate to?

RG: I agree with your basic divide.

We have the husband who comes home and finds his wife in bed with another man and gets his gun.

In France until recently that was viewed as a crime of passion.

Then we have the horror merchants, the serial killers.

I think it is possible to understand their motivation in terms of psychology. Extreme trauma causes splitting within the human psyche, people develop behavioural patterns to offset the emergence of a memory the repression of which their basic survival depends upon.

That is not to say they all end up killers.

The public is fascinated by serial killers because they cross into a realm we do not comprehend but want to.

Explorers of lands with two headed monsters told the tales that gripped us all. Once upon a time. And this appeals to the same part of the human psyche, we are voyeurs at the breakfast table.

And it is also about our own image as the good guy the good wife.

Pariahs in moral conviction.

Go back to the husband. Does he kill because his wife is his property?

OK so you get back from delivering a bunch of string beans to Utah as Frank Zappa sings in ‘Truck Driver Divorce’ and find some ugly looking son of a bitch pooching your home town sweetheart, ain’t that a bitch?

Many cultures wouldn’t see it as a big deal.

It’s inbuilt into the economic structure of dependency and control.

Interestingly, Sparta, that engendered one of the fiercest armies the world has ever seen, was based on a system that discouraged attachment to the mother in male children.

Runts were left in the wilderness to survive and boys were separated from their mothers early and taken into the army where homosexuality was accepted.

Sparta was the only Greek State where lesbianism was permitted and women were allowed to own property.

Going back to the serial killer.

If you look at the extreme level of trauma and how that warps the human psyche then you have an insight a serial killer’s mind.

They are living in what we see as normality and simultaneously living on the outside.

They are compelled to kill.

Often to them their victims are symbols.

The subconscious level of the psyche is symbolic and that is where you can get the chilling sense of dehumanization we feel in these horrific acts.

Religion is heavily loaded with symbol.

And moral judgement.

Maybe there is a key in that juxtaposition as to why it is such an effective military propaganda machine.

I think we can understand it intellectually but not empathize, or at least I hope not.

I think people are interested in what motivates a serial killer because they are alien.

Equally I think we are fascinated by alienation and otherness.

If we can feel in control of the process of discovery.

The popularity of sci fi, of literature and films about aliens belongs to the same interest.

What is out there?

We inhabit a predatory universe.

Serial killers represent a predatory extreme and as such throw light on what normality is.

Now if you change the social context for normality you have some interesting anomalies that cannot be ironed out by some imperialist liberal moral structure.

Leaders sway the public with fairy tales about moral concepts that have little meaning when analyzed against the acts of war.

Is a serial killer committing worse crimes than are committed in wars?

No, but the public focuses on him because he walks among us.

It’s the old fear of invasion.

Who is he?

He ain’t under the bed.

If you think that the Nazis were systematically raping and torturing women in concentration camps, doctors were carrying out castrations of perfectly healthy Jewish males in the name of an empire and medicine, that is a nation in psychosis.

What manipulation needs to take place to make a group or a nation psychotic?

An extension of the same forces that let loose the irrational impulses in an individual the ancient Greeks saw at the Dionysian festivals.

The military one is an analogy that throws light on how the seed of pathology that a killer may bear can be fertilized by propaganda.

There is plenty of material there for analyzing the darker reaches of the human psyche.

People shuffle their newspapers and go to work, distance themselves from the horrors they read about.

And it’s not just a male phenomenon. The idea of the killer has been codified as masculine by a patriarchal power structure and that is embedded in a legal system that is pretty weak historically because the idea of women killers threatens the male psyche too much, too mush inbuilt fear of redundancy. Men at the end of the day never know if their kids are theirs unless they carry out a DNA test.  There are extreme levels of darkness in women. Some mothers hate their children and go about killing them with a slow poisoning psychological approach that ends in a convenient suicide. They renounce Gucci for sackcloth.

Victorian murderesses were routinely let off by courts because the judges simply did not believe women could kill.

The acts of serial killers shock us because we simply cannot comprehend doing something like that.

I think we need to get over our moral narratives, the things we tell ourselves about who we are to analyze this.

Where is it coming from?

Bertolt Brecht said interestingly of Arturo Ui, his character who represents Hitler, of the death of a monster:

‘Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again and always will be.’

Is it nature? Is it come collective recurrence that evolution needs?

Possibly.

I think society needs to look at it and understand why it happens. There may be a prevention.
LA:  Do you think the ability to understand and portray pathology is essential to crime fiction, and is it important that the “killers” be believable?
I think that the most frightening characters are often the ones that seem like they could be your neighbours, the ones that live among us, monsters that look and behave like we do. When you interviewed Matthew Funk, I thought a lot about why they creep me out and I think it goes beyond the fear of what seems likely or probable as opposed to a fear of something that exists in a fantasy realm. I think what creeps me out about the “killer next door” is the element of indifference, the capacity and mental composition, the ability to do something horrific then go to work and cut the grass.
That seems more disturbing, by far, compared to the “lunatic” whose behavior leads to capture.

RG:  I think that crime writing does not have to analyze to this level.

Elmore Leonard, one of my favourite crime writers has great plotting and dialogue and little depth.

James Lee Burke has more character depth.

I think if you look at a writer like James Ellroy he balances the two.

Thomas Harris delves deeper.

The guy next door who you sat and had that coffee with and turns out to be the axe murderer is disturbing.

Maybe you fancied him.

Maybe you projected something of your own need onto him.

But what’s more disturbing?

The fact he killed all those people or you didn’t suss him?

Isn’t that a bit of narcissism?

Maybe that’s why it’s so disturbing.

Did you miss that bit of your own humanity in that swirl of images and thoughts?

What does it say about you?

Easier to focus on him than your need for self-protective insight.

We all want to think we know, we have a suss about things.

Killers do not wear horns on their heads.

What is so disturbing about this?

We use terms like animal and inhuman to convey moral outrage at these crimes instead of learning from them.

We displace our own inner reactions, flickering moments of half feelings onto something horrific.

Look at wars.

Take a good long hard look at war crimes, think of Mai Lai, the rapes that were carried out within an authority structure licensed by politicians, then switch back.

What do you see?

Man survived because he is a killer and our neat liberal moral lifestyles and habits are in conflict with that little red dress.

Man is an unnatural animal.
LA:  Do you think that to a serial killer, their behavior is rational or justified, perhaps due to distortion? In other words, do they find ways to reconcile their behavior with forms of justification that they developed over time? For example, the serial killer that targets prostitutes specifically, they might have had an event or experience that led to the pursuit of this victim profile over another. Is this kind of defining history common when we look at fictional characters?

RG:  I think this is true.

They have had to justify it to themselves with layers of elaborate delusion and lies.

A prostitute killer may have been humiliated by one and so has transferred his rage onto her.

He is trying to purge something.

He lacks the basic ability to process his trauma.

He is battling an inner inadequacy by killing.

It amounts to the urge for power, but at a highly distorted level.

I think it is important to have a defining history otherwise the killer makes no sense.

A crime writer may be trying to do that, make it more accessible.

Serial killers develop their justificatory mechanisms over time to survive.

Dig into someone’s personal history and see what events shaped and scarred them.

You have a snap shot of their psyche.

Killing has a pattern to it.

Society is based on and works through integration, and the serial killer is on the outside of that through means we fail to understand because we belong to the club.

I think artists and writers try to interpret the beyond.

Death is part of the beyond so is murder since it is a means of incurring death and summoning our personal feelings, attachments, value judgements, moral codes.
LA:  How important is it for the author to explore that motivation? When they do so through the eyes of another character, such as through an investigating detective, how important is it to convince the reader that they come equipped? Does aptitude matter?

RG:  Yes aptitude matters.

The Detective has to be credible and have some insight. However the police are using offender profilers more and more because this is a highly specialized dig into a mind with a radically different structure and outlook.

Carl Jung said the best detectives have strong criminal shadows.

We’re back at all the things we like to project onto other people, the bits off us we don’t like.

Exploring motivation is extremely important.

I think one of the greatest authors who ever lived is Dostoyevsky and no one went deeper than him.

A narrative structure is meant to be safe.

From the old stories we listened to until now.

We allow the author to scare us and disorient us enough but always within the suspension of disbelief.

We want to be thrilled and taken into the dark and we seek resolution, because there is none in real life.

Successful popular literature is conservative.

LA:  Richard, we have had some candid discussions and I think of you as a person who would understand the spirit of this next question, from the standpoint of curiosity. It might not be an issue for you, or one that you wish to tackle, but it is something I would like to ask a crime writer.
Because of the nature of your writing, what you depict and the kinds of themes that you explore, do you think that people in the “real world” approach you with anxiety or discomfort, women, for example? Obviously “we” are not what we write, we are creating works of fiction, but I wonder if this tendency we have to be curious about writers comes into play when a writer’s work has that element of “sick”? Did you ever make somebody nervous, that you know of?
RG: My personality is very different to what you might imagine from reading my stories on the internet.

The net itself is distorting.

I write fiction.

I am not what I write.

The people I know are intelligent enough to understand I am spinning a yarn.

I know of actors who have played parts of burglars in films and been assaulted in the street by people who do not know the difference between fact and fiction.

The idea that someone would nervous of me because I write crime fiction is fatuous.

It’s like a child’s inability to understand that it’s fake blood in the movies.

The inability to understand the difference between what you write or act and who you are is in itself a pathology.

I am sure we are all capable of making people nervous.

It is certainly not something I set out to do, I try to make those I come into contact with feel comfortable.
LA:  Is sick arousing?

RG:  Not unless you’re sick.

However a cautionary note does pathology define health?

LA: Spoon. Lazarus. Symmetry.

Nice earrings Lynn, they don’t match.

LA: Are you comfortable with eye contact? What part of a face do you find yourself looking at the most, when you are looking closely, if you choose to look closely… for you, is it a choice?

RG:  There are two obvious reasons for you asking this question Lynn, and the mundane one is that photograph of me with sunglasses.

There are others without sunglasses.

To answer your question.

I am extremely comfortable with eye contact.

I tend to look at the eyes when looking at a face and a woman’s mouth.

LA: Why did you start the Chin Wag interviews? What do you enjoy about the interview process?

I’d been wanting to do something for the online writing community and thinking about how to fit it all in.

I am truly grateful and honoured to have met some remarkable men and women, writers I have a huge respect for.

I wanted to do something of my own.

I was having a run one morning when the name Chin Wags At The Slaughterhouse popped into my head and I thought that’s it.

I’m interested in people, that’s why I like interviewing.

I like moving sideways in a conversation as Bill Hayes knows.

LA: What is next for you, now that your novel is done?

The publication of my next novel and writing more.

LA: When did you first call yourself a poet, or describe yourself this way? How did it feel, using the term applied to what you do?

JS: The appellation, “Poet,” is to me an honorific, much in the same manner as a title or an esteemed degree, earned through, as you have said before, “the service of words.”   While for as long as I can remember I held an inward sense of myself as a poet or rather one who creates or transforms, I could not coronate myself like a tyrant.  The term only held legitimacy once it was bestowed by another in recognition of the quality of the work itself and not any mysterious quality in me as a person.  Therefore, I struggled toward the name “Poet” like a mask to inhabit.  The process is long and full of pain and loneliness and doubt and it still continues.  It is also the greatest joy, a dream I strive to live in and maintain and overcome so as to keep discovery anew.

LA: What would you say about how much of your identity it comprises? I know you as a poet, but there is much to know about John Swain, “creator.” What are your other interests, and what might you be interested in exploring in the future? What else are you anxious to try, if anything?

JS: My totality.  While I tend to compartmentalize my life and I believe each individual is necessarily comprised of several, even infinite, aspects, these are part of a unified mind-soul-and-body consciousness that flows in and through each other ultimately toward the expression of reinvention and fulfillment.  There are many varied points along the way to be investigated, broad as the scope of human experience.  Poetry cannot be conceptualized in the economics of everyday life or even in terms of the economics of the other arts, although poetry underlies and animates the fabric of everyday life.  To me, it is as essential as survival.  Poetry is neither hobby nor a part-time job.  Often without remuneration.  Often without laurel or any validation.  Love and devotion is all.

My interests basically consist of the dynamic between that which enables the writing of poems and then decompression from the tension writing causes.  Remote places are good for both. I am interested in learning and travel. Other people’s stories.  A couple drinks.  Friendship and the movement of birds.  Fishing with my dad. My mom and sister’s cooking.  Looseness.  Someday belonging somewhere.

Two recent interests I would like to explore are performance and flash fiction.  Whereas for most of my life I have shied from contact, performance now interests me for its communal aspect and for the transformation actual breath has on the work from the perspective of both reader and audience.  And simply, a chance to meet and interact with other writers.  I don’t know which terrifies me more, reading or fiction, but somehow that is an impulse that has been coincidentally  encouraged, so I might give a go at pratfall and catastrophe.  Poetry is essential in its aims whereas fiction luxuriates in the contours of the particular.  I love hearing and telling stories, so why not write a couple down?

I try to avoid anxiety, though it often specters in so many areas.  Outside of poems, I can’t think of anything I’d anxiously strive for.  I continually attempt to conform the chaos of thought and behavior to the true and warm direction of the heart. To be certain, there is so much I want to see and experience like a scuba dive or a snow leopard or better language skills.  So I will say that I anxiously try to remain open, anxiously try to combat stagnation.

LA: Readers of your work can see certain characteristic elements: Nature, of course. Turbulence. Water and cycling life. A romantic quality-glimpses of women who often appear in near periphery. Cloth, layered or shrouding. Certain things appear throughout, spanning different works. What can you say about some of the “motifs” and recurring elements? Are they deliberate, intentionally placed? What do they mean to you, from the poet’s point of view?

A very interesting and difficult question.  While my writing might be aspirational in content and intention, I would hesitate to ascribe any comprehensive symbolism to word or image.  In my mind, the word, rather than standing in place of object or concept, is literally the object or concept.  Viewing myself as a reader, I find this allows others greater entrance into the poem. I enjoy ideas and welcoming places where one can make the time spent their own rather than sit through someone’s lecture or vacation slideshow.  Somehow an image, whether serene or embattled, belies the circumstance and toil of its reception or creation.  Cloth is as basic as bread and informs the entirety of our endeavors and is human created, an object of beauty in its own right.  Cloth can obscure and form a boundary, that which is desired, body or idea, the sacred place, or it can also protect an intimacy, a value, or a privacy, from a destroying exposure, depending on the context.  When I write the word “water” I am referring to a stream I have touched if that is where the poem is or it could be the water from the showerhead.  It is actual water, not some ideal although the preoccupation of my poetry is uncovering the hidden dimensions water or anything possesses in its living.  Similarly, when I write the word “horse” I am referring to a particular horse not some capital “H” horse.  I believe there is teaching and beauty in its living, a glimpse perhaps of the One who created, an offering to us, a blessing, all living.  I refuse to believe in meaninglessness.  Perhaps meaning is not what one would prefer or expect or rationalize.  However, our sensitivity to pain and capacity for love provides sufficient notice that we are here, and for that we should be grateful and strive to improve our condition through individual work and understanding.

LA: You seem to be everywhere right now, which is wonderful but no doubt requires a lot of hard work. How do you keep the momentum, the energy, and do you worry about it? Do you face periods of dryness, or uncertainty about your interest or discipline?

JS: Yes, I worry.  I face periods of dryness and they scare me more than anything.  It is a challenge to accept the necessity of the fallow.  At some instinctual level, dryness is not a rest, it is a wasting.  There is a fear that the contact is lost and there will be no more poems or more immediately no more sharing and experience.  If it came down to an ultimate choice, I would rather lie down in a field than write about it.  Rimbaud was correct when he said “I is someone else,” but it is nevertheless undeniable that the poet lives in the poem.  If I am not writing, I feel I am not living.  The energy to continue writing is the excitement of sharing a discovery or mutual experience with a friend.  Writing is never separate from life, it is only unseen.  As far as the work being out there, I am only so thrilled to contribute in my tiny way to a larger energy of people struggling to express and create an alternative vision to counter so much of the darkening forces of our time.  I have received such gifts of awareness in immeasurable returns from the art and generosity and vitality of courageous people living today without sponsorship, only with idea and heart.  To me, that is real hope.

LA: Who do you admire? Poets, influences, artists, etc.?

JS: I admire people who find a way to experience their dreams.  Recently, I encountered the visionary art and writing of Walter Anderson, which startled me like a reminder with its pure intensity.  As far as contemporary voices, Stephanie Bryant Anderson and Sophia Argyris are both producing exceptional work with language that is poignant, haunting, and precise.  The photography of Lucien Clergue is a poetry of the physical image, which is disorienting in its tender and violent beauty.

LA: What’s next for you?

Hopefully, a trip somewhere fun.

Interview with John Swain for Full Of Crow by Lynn Alexander.

John Swain also has a chap and ebooks at Full Of Crow:

Burnt Palmistry (chap or ebook) and

The Feathered Masks

Andrew Bowen, editor of Divine Dirt Quarterly and immersed in the Conversion Project, interviewed by Lynn Alexander.

LA: I often start by asking about current projects, books, collections, the “work”. Can you run down some of your projects, such as Divine Dirt Quarterly?

AB: Sure.  I started Divine Dirt Quarterly (DDQ) in the Fall of 2009 because I was just beginning to write theological fiction—that is, fiction that deals with religious issues within a secular context, and found that the work either had too much religion for more secular markets and not enough for the religious markets. DDQ was my offering to folks like me who wanted to explore theological issues through fiction, poetry, art, non-fiction, and even film without fear of censorship.

Apart from that, I currently have a novel under consideration by an agent about a teenager who either hears the voice of the divine or suffers from schizophrenia,  and a novella forthcoming from Rebel Satori Press about a young woman who struggles with both becoming a tattoo artist and her own sexuality. I’m about one or two short story acceptances away from putting together a collection.

LA: Why spirituality as an emphasis? Why do you find yourself committed to the exploration of theological and philosophical questions?

Because the exploration of that which we don’t understand is an innate part of what makes one human. I see religion as the womb of science and arts—the first imaginative and cognitive reach of humanity to explore and try to explain just what the hell is going on. The fact that many religions over time have created walls against reason and creativity is hypocritical. Much of what we view as staples of faith in today’s incarnations of religion—especially the Abrahamic traditions, are due to the interpretations of artists, not necessarily holy writ itself. This capacity and desire to explore the unknown and express the agonies and ecstasies associated with that exploration through the arts is paramount.

LA: At Jello World, J. Lea Lopez asked you about the name “Dirty Prophet” and you explained that prophets are often about change, and dirt appeals to you because you connect it to nature, our origin, our composition.  What could you say about change, what needs to change or should change, what are the problems we have?

Do you think there are limits on what we can understand?

AB: There was a recent poll conducted by The Pew Forum on the general knowledge of adherents to different religions. Of those polled, atheists and agnostics were the most knowledgeable. In fact, many adherents scored low on facts about their own faith. I don’t believe the subject of religion should be force-fed to anyone, however since it does seem to be a powder keg of animosity and source of diversion in the world, we owe it to ourselves to brush up on some of the issues.

My goal with change is, through creativity and expression, for folks to begin to see the faiths of others in the same light as their own. Faith and religion, after all, share a commonality in that they reach for a mystery that no one, no matter how enlightened their tomes and prophets are, has quite gotten their heads around yet.

I think the limits of our understanding are set up by the barriers we construct. Science is making discoveries at an exponential rate. We might have even found an Earth-like planet. That’s some cool shit! Where religion often fails is that it takes such discoveries as threats to the adherent’s understanding of scripture or even God and so you have people who shut down and refuse to look over the fence they’ve created. But really, if God is as big as they say he is, why would he allow the spark of life to be limited to our tiny, infinitesimal speck in the cosmos?

LA: You are working on a project that involves the exploration of different world religions, one at a time. Can you say more about that, your methods, and what you are hoping to do? And what are your plans for this project?

AB: The initiative is called Project Conversion: Twelve Months of Spiritual Promiscuity. It will launch January 1, 2011, and will chronicle a year in which I convert to one religion every month and document the whole experience via photos, video, and blog. My goal is to be a sacrifice—to be a convert in effigy. People, mostly religious, are often reticent to research or explore other faiths because they fear their own faith will be tested. This problem contributes to the misunderstanding of many religions by people who were uncomfortable , scared, or just too lazy to find out. So I’ll do it for them. Also, reading about a religion will only get you so far. Being a part of the faithful is a tactile and personal experience. This will also give people a chance to see what a marginalized faith—like Sikhism or Wicca, go through as an often misunderstood and discriminated segment of society.

Because I have no background in any of these faiths and often my daily living norms will be challenged, there is sure to be a lot of embarrassing, entertaining, and awkward moments along this journey because my family will have to deal with this project as well.

LA: When you say that it is tempting to decide, do you mean that people find a certain comfort in having difficult questions resolved?

What about situations where people think something is decided, but science or circumstances force them to revisit their conclusions, can the same tendency that brings people comfort and stability also make change difficult?

Do you think these questions can be resolved for you, personally, meaning spiritual questions?

AB: There’s certainly a comfort in at least some sort of knowledge. Most are terrified of the unknown, that’s why most religions typically have a vivid or at least hopeful vision of the afterlife. But I think that the questions that exist now, as in “How did the universe come into being?” present a temptation to go the easy route and say “God did it.” This often closes the door to further exploration. I don’t think it has to be that way. If some divine being (or just a higher, smarter one) did compose the universe, why stop there? Does it really dismantle one’s faith to discover the inner workings of the cosmos?

The only real difference between science and religion is that science isn’t afraid of being wrong. Instead of backtracking or just denying knew evidence or discoveries all together, science clarifies new information through objective testing and then, if sound, rewrites the books without much of a fuss. Many religions don’t embrace change. Christianity cuts us off at Jesus. We recycle Buddha every generation. Muhammad was all she wrote for Islam. But what these people don’t realize is that religion continually aggregates, as we’ve seen with more recent additions like Sikhism, Baha’i, Satanism, and scores of others. The question is, do they have the balls to admit that God might be bigger than their books or their hegemonic concepts of the divine?

Personally, I loathe the idea of settling for something. I’m truly a spiritual whore. Just when I grooving on one faith or philosophy, another walks by in a tiny black dress with a nice ass and there I am hopelessly smitten again. That’s why I think Project Conversion will be great. Everyone will understand that the twelve faiths and I are only friends with benefits.

LA: What are your plans for 2011?

AB: 2011, if everything goes to plan, will shave at least five years off my life. Project Conversion will soak up most of my energy and time, but during the year I hope to have my novel at least represented if not picked up by a publisher. It’s the first book of a series, so if it is picked up I’d naturally start writing the next in the series.  But much of the year will be spent with the project, pimping out my writing and, somewhere in the middle, I might have time to hang out with my kids, attend school, and hit on my wife.

You can check out Divine Dirt Quarterly here, and Project Conversion here.

LA: Could you start by describing Rooster Tree, and your current projects?

WBM: RoosterTree is the name I use when self-publishing comics. There was a time when I was excited about the prospect of bringing my talented friends together as a collective, but it sputtered. Now RoosterTree is an effort in self-reliance, & I branch out from here to work with others.

Currently, I’m passionate about non-fiction. The trampling of rights, gender bias & sexual ignorance, age bias & generational ignorance, these things in particular gall me to no end. I’m compelled to sculpt them into the comics form.

LA: I remember some of our discussions at Outsider Writers, where I first came across you and your work. OWC is a collective of diverse, creative individuals who share a sense that they are apart in many ways from mainstream or established institutions or communities, many are self taught or produce independent zines. There is some agreement that the lines are blurry as far as what constitutes an “outsider” and whether or not such distinctions even matter. To me, “outsider” is not about labels or the spaces we inhabit, but about a state of mind when we approach creativity. I do not like the idea of barriers that keep people out when it comes to art. I’m curious about your sense of “outsider”  writing and art, your thoughts on these kinds of questions. I’m curious about your own path, how you came to OWC, and now that you are with us- your experience. I wonder how you identify yourself, and if you use terms, what terms do you connect to and identify with?

WBM: There are barriers everywhere! When I was playing music, I’d meet people who seemed to have something cool & different – they were outsiders at first glance. Then, when I was on the cusp of being welcomed into the fold, I found there were rules to abide by, sometimes more strict than anything in ‘accepted society.’ I’d do some research in an attempt to understand the clique, to see if I really wanted to be associated & labeled; I would usually end up amused in
the most bitter of ways when I’d learn that whomever I’d envied didn’t adhere to the philosophy they claimed to embrace, whether naive or hypocritical.
Now I see it everywhere – you aren’t punk enough, you aren’t gay enough, you aren’t feminist enough. I’m not anything enough except contradictory; I can get along with nearly anyone until the big questions get asked. I dislike barriers & labels, & have great affinity for the grey areas in between the tribes, their customs & belief systems.
I suppose what I’m getting at is I don’t see myself as an Outsider artist, I’m an Outsider person. Insiders (if I can use that term for Jane & John Average) love self-defining terms to rally around, to reinforce their comfortable facades so they can pretend to be normal in nice big normal groups. No one’s normal, really – there’s just a whole lot of people trying to be normal, a good number of the overly vain making great efforts to be anti-normal, & *ahem* us wise few trying to tear off the masks we donned in our youth so we can learn who we really are. Without my mask, I think I have something I can teach the world. ‘Reality’ looks a certain way to me & I’m keenly aware that my world is vastly different from my next door neighbour’s world, my co-worker’s, my local grocer’s, my Mom’s, my Member of Parliament’s. As a result, my comics are Outsider, & there’s absolutely no effort on my part to make them that.

As for my own self-definition during my development, any time I found I could label myself, I’d see if I could break it down. Guitarist became musician who happened to play guitar, became artist who created with music. I’m not so headstrong about art anymore; I’m perfectly at ease as a comics creator, rather than a writer/illustrator or the
blanket term ‘artist,’ although they all apply. My vanity wants to rebel against the more fundamental identifiers like gender & orientation, the things that aren’t so much about what I do but who I am.

LA: The following is something you wrote a few months ago, about the
drive to create:

“I believe I’ve just acknowledged what drives me to create. It’s a
sense of incompleteness, perhaps in me personally, perhaps in my
immediate surroundings or even the greater world.”

You went on to say that there are differences in the immediacy of art, drawing versus writing, and the sense of needing to capture a particular moment. Can you explain the sense of “need”  when it comes to your creative work? Why you need to create, why do you continue?

A: Physically, I’m a homebody, but I don’t languish anywhere philosophically. I constantly reevaluate why I do what I do. I remember making that statement, but there’s this distance between the me when that statement was 100% true & the me right now. I’m not so sure there’s any incompleteness. Today’s terminology includes the words ignorant, self-deceptive, misguided. Not that I think I was necessarily mistaken, but I’m recognizing, to a certain level of
satisfaction, that ‘incompleteness’ was like a placeholder for something I hadn’t yet identified. Incompleteness knows it’s missing something, but not what that something is.

The need to create, though, is a mystery. This very moment, I’m creating text to relate my ideas. I break that down into the desire to be understood, choosing words & crafting phrases that have a flow to them so they’re easy to read & they transfer ideas without unnecessary mental effort for the reader, which culminates in an effort to gain respect. But there’s a job at hand – the questions have been asked & need answering, so this isn’t the same as making art.

I went through an interesting transition a few years ago with psychiatric medication. Before meds, ‘now’ was all that mattered. With a lover, when we fought, then we may as well have been breaking up, because that’s how painful it felt. Happiness now was happiness always; unhappiness now was unhappiness always. When it came to writing words, all I was capable of conceptualizing was song lyrics or blog posts. With the turn of a page came a blank slate; the page
before may as well have never existed.

With meds, my entire conception of reality has ‘opened up.’ I can write a 100-page script & have a concept in my mind of the themes, the progressions between scenes & how they go together to make the whole.When I fight with my partner, I have a sense of preservation of the relationship over the long term. I can tell this is a bump & I shouldn’t push too hard, because I don’t want to give her a reason to never return.

As I analyze the difference between pre-meds & now, it makes perfect sense to me that music was my artform. With music, ‘now’ is all that matters; listening, performing or creating, music is always in the moment. With meds, I’m post-music. I have a broader sense of reality, so music doesn’t satisfy me anymore. But I still have the need to make
something from nothing, which is where storytelling comes in. If all I had in the world was mashed potatoes, that would be my medium.

LA: Comics. Art and Commerce. What are you willing to say on these?

WBM: I don’t know if I have a right to comment. I’ve come to realize most comics creators are like musicians – they started in their teens or earlier, were driven to the medium & it’s all they do. I grew up reading comics, but I dropped them for music. I’m a 40-year-old who has only been making comics for about 5 years, so I’m a latecomer.

At around 37, the meds caused music to lose its appeal & most of my creative history went with it. At that point, I kicked myself for sticking to my creative vision instead of writing pop music & going for the money. With comics, I’m driven to tell certain stories, the marketplace be damned. I do have stories written about mythology & superheroes, fantastical tales that could be commercially viable, but I believe I have a purpose & am compelled to stick to it. I’ll never learn.

It’s a good thing I don’t measure success in dollars.

LA: When you think about artists that you admire, comic artists or otherwise, who stands out?
What are some of the common attributes, what are some of the traits that seem common between the artists whose work you find yourself drawn to?

WBM: There are too many artists I admire for various reasons to try to list them all. Honesty, vision & eccentricity tend to speak to me.
With three sentences during a 20min critique a few years ago, indie comics creator Chester Brown completely changed the way I write. The raw honesty in his autobiographical work is the biggest influence in my autobio writing.
I’m completely enamoured with the complexity of Alan Moore’s plotting & his full-bodied approach to character sexuality.
John Romita Jr’s artwork is the perfect example of comics illustration that walks the line between realistic anatomical rendering & caricature. I’m tempted to use the term ‘cartoony’ to evoke the less-realistic rendering of ‘cute’ & ‘funnybook’ comics, which is what I mean by caricature, but the word ‘cartoon’ doesn’t mean what we think it means.

Musicians like Bjork, Prince & Frank Zappa cut a swath of originality through popular music that is nothing short of breathtaking. With words, Kim Gordon, Clive Barker, Kevin Smith & Charlie Kaufman are able to get at the essence of humanity in their own unique ways.

LA: What are your plans, looking ahead?

WBM: Every day I take a breath is a good day to be alive. I mean that. If someone took my pencils away there’d be no reason to live, because life for its own sake is completely pointless. I mean that, too.

LA: How can we find out more about you and your work, websites, etc.

WBM: My ‘tactile’ comics are available through http://roostertree.com/ In the works is the 2nd issue of Lynchpin, a Kindle release of issue #1 & a current affairs-inspired webcomic series. E-comics & a gallery of my cartoon portrait work are in development for http://wbmaclean.com/ I’m ‘RoosterTree’ on both Twitter & WordPress, & ‘William Brian
MacLean’ on The Sphere & Outsider Writers. I try to attend the monthly Toronto Comic Jam at Cameron House as
often as possible.
Rooster Tree
roostertree.com – comics self-publishing
WB Maclean
wbmaclean.com – artwork site

Michael Solender is known to everyone who visits A Twist Of Noir, where you can find many fine examples of his chiselled dark stories.  If you don’t know what I mean check out ‘Seventy-two Hours Or Less’.

He worked for years in Corporate America as a Human Resources professional and is now giving worthy attention to his creative output that ranges from noir to music reviews. He is a consummate professional in his approach to writing and manages to achieve an edginess in his prose that is built on a carefully refined technique.

Michael met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about theatre and insects.

Your stories often contain detailed descriptions of physical processes and use the alien menace of insects to achieve their effect. Why do these two themes preoccupy you?

Process fascinates me. I like understanding how things work and how they are put together. When writing I like to create strong visuals. Sequence of actions and activities are important to me in developing scene and character. What I don’t do is describe motivation or purpose behind these actions or the why behind the process. I leave this for the reader to assign.

Early on as I started to get feedback on my pieces people shared with me all sorts of wild and way out theories behind what they thought was going on in my characters’ heads. Outlandish notions of why people did things, what they were thinking and what must be driving them. Stuff so out there that I could never have possibly imagined it.

I quickly came to realize the power that lies in what the reader brings to one’s work and how, if provided a template that was detailed enough, the reader would project all sorts of their own motivations, thoughts and emotions upon the framework that I laid out. That is what makes a story so satisfying for people, they bring their own sensibilities and experience to everything they read. People don’t want things so detailed that they can’t fill in some blanks on their own.

The same is said for insects or alien menace. These are blank canvases for people to project their own fears and insecurities upon. I try to be descriptive in terms of shape and form but don’t want to suggest what they mean to my characters or the readers. That is up for them to conjure up. The fear and horror of the individual reader will be far greater than anything I can assign. Why not let them do the hard part of frightening themselves?
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In Franz Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ travelling salesman Gregor Samsa wakes to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect and the story has been interpreted as a dramatisation of alienation. Imagine you are one of the readers you mention, what outlandish things do you see in insect tales and what do you find frightening?

I interpret Kafka’s Samsa as embodying more than alienation with the external world. Anyone who finds himself a monstrous vermin has in effect met the enemy and the enemy is he.

Who amongst us does not find the prospect of unlocking our core hidden self, our most base desires, peccadilloes and peculiarities as perhaps the most frightening and disgusting discoveries we can make? Exploring and enjoying behaviors and beliefs that conventional society finds abhorrent does not make for a well socialized citizen. Most of us can keep these in check.

I worked for many years with a behavioral psychologist who was a well researched expert in the field of psychological assessment. Large firms retained him to evaluate executive candidates for selection and promotion. He also did a fair amount of public sector work and evaluated law enforcement candidates.

He often spoke of the incredibly fine distinction between the psychological profiles of successful law enforcement personnel and sociopaths – the difference he said was very slight between people who thought about and were fascinated with non-normative desires and those who acted upon them.

My own fears are probably run of the mill and pedestrian. Wild animals, large or small frighten me upon initial discovery, especially if I don’t expect to see them.

I wrote a Halloween story a while back called Orange Dot. It was about a suburban couple who liked to take their morning walks through the neighborhood quite early before they day got going. This couple, like my wife and I, walked their neighborhood in the dark and were confronted by all sorts of things that bump in the night. Fear doesn’t appeal to the rational brain; it is only the irrational part of me that fears something will jump out of the woods to harm me.

The greatest fear I have is of drowning and the ocean. I used to be a very strong swimmer but have become a bit soft in my advancing years and a few years back my wife and I had a scare in Mexico after she got caught in the rip current. One moment she was right next to me and the next she was fifty yards away and trying to swim directly in, the worst thing you can do as it tires you out and pulls you under.

I ran along the shore line to the point where she was and swam out to get her, when I reached her she was exhausted, throwing up and almost drowning. I had her swim parallel to the shore, where I could keep her afloat, holding her hair tightly and swimming with her until we made it back in. It was the most afraid I have ever been, I really thought we were both goners.
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Do you think that large corporations eliminate identity in their workers?

Work and self actualization are not mutually exclusive. A small number of individuals can find that their work is satisfying, innervating and perhaps even noble. I envy them. Most people I know work to live and definitely do not live to work.

I am afraid in my experience the overwhelming majority of people are trapped into careers and jobs that not only create an environment that stifles individual creativity and individual voice but goes further than identity elimination and can drain one’s very soul.

Large organizations are the worst because the infrastructures that are created become so cumbersome and institutionalized that it becomes almost impossible for those in power to recognize their inefficiencies and often, contrarian outcomes to stated corporate goals.

For almost thirty years I was an “organization development professional” much of the time for Fortune 500 corporations. I was often called upon by senior management to help shake things up, change the status quo and work with organization leaders in aligning their goals with those of the corporation.

It became a lesson in futility for me. I had the opportunity to interface with those on the frontline, who were rightfully distrustful of management and rarely asked for their input even though they interfaced directly with the customer. I also dealt with top executives who often didn’t trust the workers to think for themselves and prescribed everything down to the minutest actions.

Functional groups often had competing, not complimentary goals and reward systems. All this leads to work-arounds and self preservation, people end up abdicating their thought process and quit voicing their opinions. To protect what little sanity they have left, they take lane of least resistance and end up becoming a mindless droid, it is so much easier to do this than continually piss up a rope.

For me I could find pockets of change and success, though in the end the system is simply too powerful to be changed from the bottom up, even top down efforts only succeed less than twenty-five percent of the time. The average tenure of a Fortune 500 CEO is less than five years, what does that say??
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It indicates you are inside a power structure. To what extent do you think the basic tenets of power and rule advocated by Machiavelli in ‘The Prince’ apply today in the politics of big businesses and the way they are structured?

Machiavelli gets perhaps an undeserved bad rap as people are quick to forget, or don’t recognize that the time and place in which he lived was quite tumultuous and did not lend itself to democratic principles.

Don’t get me wrong, he’s not a guy I’d like to have over for dinner nor do I subscribe to the cruelties he advocated in the name of protecting the state, I just think we need to keep in mind that Florence at that period in history was quite chaotic and he was advocating tactics that could bring some sense of order to the chaos – not dissimilar to martial law or what we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Business is NOT a democracy and I never have advocated equal “voting rights” amongst workers and management. The Machiavellian “my way or the highway” management style is dead. The contemporary business leader understands conceptually that participatory management will lead to results more aligned with management outcomes than the stick.

The real problem, in my mind is not between management and the worker, it is between management and itself. Today’s organizations set up inherent competition between Marketing, Operations, Info Systems, and Finance etc. The mini-Machiavellis come in the shape of department heads who won’t play nice with their peers and/or act in the best interest of their functional groups even when that is at odds with the overall business goals. Ie: “I’m not going to give up headcount, even though I don’t need them and the dollars could be better used elsewhere. If I lose these headcount, I lose power…”
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Which writers do you admire and why?

I’m drawn quite often to traditionalists and playwrights.

Theodore Dreiser is a classic American author who wrote my all time favorite book, An American Tragedy. The story is that of an ambitious young man who comes from very little means and a poor background, gets introduced to power, wealth and society and is ultimately ruined by betraying the values he was brought up with. It builds like a rambling freight train and leaves such a rich and lush trail of pain and devastation. Dreiser is a master at tapping into readers psyche and exposing rawness that we all can summon given the right framework. I reread this book every year and never tire of it.

David Mamet is a genius. No one writes better dialogue. Many have seen his plays, films and now television. I suggest they read the plays, Oleanna and Glengarry Glen Ross. Brilliant pitch, tone and fire. He is a masterful craftsman and uses talk overs, interruption and emotion better than anyone I know of.

Garrison Keillor is a native Minnesotan and someone I grew up reading and listening to on the radio. I have many times been to see The Prairie Home Companion in St. Paul. The man knows satire and is a fine, modern day Mark Twain. He is biting with his wit and spot on in his critiques. He is a frequent book reviewer for the New York Times and provides wonderful insight.

Jim Thompson is a classic noir writer and was one of the best pulp fiction writers going. Nothing More Than Murder is my favorite Thompson tome though he has tons of great work available including $.99 Kindle downloads of short stories. His earlier work is darker and draws heavily on his own alcoholic troubles.

I bought a Kindle for my wife but have commandeered it and am just starting to dedicate more time to novels as I have gotten away from reading as much as I would like, I need to make time and will, especially for the classics.
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David Mamet’s dialogue is effective because it has complete authenticity within highly dramatised situations. Do you think his play ‘Oleanna’, which dramatises the power struggle between a male professor and his female student within a patriarchal power structure, works because of or in spite of this?

This is precisely the reason it is so effective. The male dominated power structure, particularly in the academic setting where this play takes place is firmly entrenched and the reader/audience brings with them an implicit understanding of the “rules of the game.”

That a younger and supposedly naïve student can completely turn this paradigm over upon its heels and use sexuality as a power device not only in the subtle context of a one on one relationship but in the larger societal context of abuse of power and authority makes the climax of this work so very powerful.

Athol Fugard is another playwright who is extremely effective in using this technique. Bar none the most incredible stage experience I ever was part of was witnessing Master Harold and The Boys, a story of power, subservience, race and societal convention. Like Mamet, Fugard is skilled at dialogue and can almost lull his readers into complacency with seemingly banal discourse then out of nowhere BAM, he socks you in the gut.

I was witness to one of those once in a lifetime theatrical events that had Mathew Broderick and James Earl Jones on stage in of all places the venerable Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Fugard is a contemporary Becket, his work stands alone and should be both read and experienced.
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Samuel Beckett used a very different dramatic technique with dialogue that is stripped back and heavy use of symbolism. How do you think the effect of his writing differs from a playwright like Mamet?

This is spot on. What you are speaking of is the difference, the literary difference, between implicit and explicit.

Beckett, while not at all being coy, was metaphoric, obtuse and symbolic in much of what he wrote. Scholars to this day debate the meaning behind his classic Godot and he was famous for letting people interpret it however they chose.

Mamet is beyond direct – his dialogue is abrupt, clipped and completely in your face. There is no debate in what comes out of his characters mouths. The mystery comes in the next response or the reaction and series of reactions between antagonist and protagonist. Mamet employs an ingenious device in which he flips roles between strong and weak, antagonist and protagonist, male and female, seemingly at will. It is not random but very deliberate. Suspending a sense of control is required for engaging in Mamet’s work because it is precisely when you think you understand, you don’t.

With Beckett, you never understand, until you think you do and then you’re not sure.

They are both master head-fuckers.
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The English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham, who inspired utilitarianism, designed a prison building called the Panopticon, which allowed an observer to observe all prisoners without them knowing they were being watched, as if they were under the scrutiny of an omniscience. Do you see any correlation between this and big business management, and if so could these power structures be the cause of much pathology in the work place?

Look, I’m not out to paint all business with a broad big-bother brushstroke, but people are naive to think that actions they take in their lives are anonymous and outside the purview of their employers.

The Wall Street Journal reported that over 70% of employers use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to background check candidates for employment. Most all large and even many small companies utilize screening software for email. People are naïve to think that personal data they maintain on work computers is safe from their employers view or is even in fact their data.

It’s too simplistic to reduce the Us vs. Them equation down to the little guy and the big-bad employer. The research and my own personal experience in the area of employee dissatisfaction shows the overwhelming majority of employees think of their boss as “management” – invariably workplace violence is between coworkers, colleagues and/or subordinates and bosses. It is not as random as one might believe.

There are contracts, implied and explicit we enter into when we work for an organization. The first and the most very basic is that individual freedoms are subordinated to the organization. People know this and for the most part are OK with it, they get compensation for this in exchange for their consent and labor they provide. Where employers start getting into trouble is in not recognizing where they have abusive management, believe me the signs are there whether in excessive turnover, employee complaints or a host of other signs that many employers choose to ignore. That’s when people start taking matters into their own hands and break the social contracts – usually with unproductive outcomes.
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Thoreau felt strongly enough about slavery to go to prison, when he refused to pay tax because the revenues contributed to the support of slavery. In his work ‘Civil Disobedience’ he argues that people should not permit governments to overrule their consciences and he encourages people not to become acquiescent and enable governments to make them the agents of injustice, do you think he was right?

Morally he was right unquestionably. As a matter of practicality however, behaving outside of the laws of sovereignty where one is domiciled is problematic at best. I agree with his stand and advocacy for people to rise up not only against injustice but in all matters of government actions that don’t further the social agenda of the people.

When individual citizens decide that certain laws are unjust or taxes shouldn’t be paid or they should have three wives it gets very messy. This is called anarchy. The arguments Thoreau made at the time regarding morality and conscious are the same ones being made today by anti-abortionists.  You see where I’m headed, I’m sure.

It is not simply a question of right and wrong it is by what standard, whose morals and ethics and how much room for compromise exists. This entire business about Quran burning is an example of those self righteous individuals who believe in their heart of hearts they are right. This does not make it so.  Given the everyday divisiveness that exists in our society (re: Democrats and Republicans) it is no wonder that where religion, values and beliefs are involved, the  “my-way-or-the-highway” school of thought seems to trump reason, logic and tolerance every time.

Gandhi had it right, you must change the system from within, demonstrate your civil disobedience in a nonviolent way, absorb the consequences of your actions and soldier on.
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Do you think Cole Porter was a poet?

Porter was one of the very few Tin Pan Alley composers that was also a lyricist. He was most definitely a poet, a student of verse, meter and of course rhyme.

I’d sacrifice anything come what might / For the sake of havin’ you near / In spite of a warnin’ voice that comes in the night / And repeats, repeats in my ear: / Don’t you know, little fool, you never can win? / Use your mentality, wake up to reality. / But each time that I do just the thought of you / Makes me stop before I begin / ‘Cause I’ve got you under my skin.

One of my all time favorite stanzas. Absolutely LOVE the highlighted lyric.

When my wife and I honeymooned in New York City in 1992, we went to the Carlyle and saw Bobby Short. His entire repertoire was Cole Porter. He has long since passed but it was one of our all time favorite evenings.

I’m a sucker for romance.

For a sample of just a few of the many rewarding Michael Solender links, try these:

Michael’s blog ‘Not From Here Are You?’, affectionately known as ‘The NOT’, is here.

In addition to ‘Seventy-two Hours Or Less’ on ATON, here are some other good examples of Michael’s work: ‘Pewter Badge’ at Yellow Mama and ‘Bug Lady Audio’ at Cast Macabre.  His essay ‘Unaffiliated’ will be published at blairpub.com in early October.

Michael’s an editor for these two Full Of Crow publications  On The Wing and MiCrow.

And he’s staffer and contributor at Charlotte Viewpoint and a columnist at Charlotte Observer.

1. Can you talk a little bit about some of your favorite creative projects? Looking back, what stands out as a novel or screenplay or other work that really puts forth your objectives as a writer, or typifies your style, what says “Matthew C. Funk”?

A: Matthew C. Funk tells the monster’s story. The writing that inspires me most is the writing that takes the reader to a dark place and shows its reflection is not all too different from their own. I have written about Germans and Russians in World War II, slave-peddling pirates during the fall of Republican Rome and outlaws in modern New Orleans slumland, but all of these projects have the same aim: I want to illustrate how the other side thinks and feels, and for those thoughts and feelings to have an effect.

What kind of effect I aim for differs, but I want all aspects of the writing to drive it. Pacing, structure and word choice all have to fit together into a complete and potent message. I’ve come to regard writing as a process close to sorcery. Just like any magical ritual, the components have to be pure, the rhythm needs to be precise and there has to be a “song” to it.

I wrote a historical fiction manuscript, Reaver, which was about the doom of the ancient Greek hero figure during the ascent of the “civilized” state. My message was that before vast civilizations took hold, humanity’s mythic heroes were, by modern perspective, self-centered psychopaths who thrived in a moral system that valued destruction almost as much as creation. My writing was modern and pulpy, in the style of Robert Howard—Conan’s author—because I wanted to convey rich detail and a gruesome, epic feeling to the reading. It was also unapologetic and intimate, to give the reader an unfiltered perspective on the minds that inhabited this time of transforming collective consciousness. Reaver, the title character, is like Hercules or Jason would have really been, psychologically, so that the reader could see the inner workings of a mind that could act in the atrocious way Greek heroes acted. I wanted it to be disturbing and accurate and, in the style of epics, rather long—a complete mythic style like Joseph Campbell would have nodded in approval to.

My next manuscript, AVA, was very different. It’s a horror novel about a schizophrenic serial killer in pre-Katrina New Orleans, Ava, who believes she kills to save the world. Like Reaver, it is very psychologically intimate—even more so in that it’s first-person. But since Ava’s mind is distinctly different, the writing is different. The novel is casually poetic, given that Ava sees the world in a “synaesthetic” way—the sensations blend with one another and she makes hallucinatory associations with what she experiences. The structure is brief, direct and full of mnemonic repetition, like schizophrenics use to maintain their slipping grasp on reality. AVA is intended to lock you in her mind, the core of its horror being how alien and yet how familiar her thoughts are.

In both instances, I’m trying to relate a provocative psychology in an intimate way. The means vary. Given that both works were so unusual and ambitious, I’ve tried my hand at more easily edible prose lately. It’s difficult to find a market for the bizarre that’s as widespread as I would want. I figured I would carve my reputation with crime fiction since it’s more accessible. My writing usually aims to get the pulse pounding—it’s succinct, savage and disturbing.  I still try to convey the complete experience of a depraved mind. I just try to do so through stories people will want to read, so that eventually, I can get them to read the even more difficult stories.

I want to make people think. I want to make them feel—feel afraid, feel hopeful, feel desire. And ultimately, I want to link those feelings with a character that they would never have expected to identify with—one who lives in a very dark place, but who treasures the light of life just as they do.

2. In an interview with Richard Godwin (Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse) you said some things that really stuck with me, on a number of points- and not all of them related to writing.

First, in reference to Chomsky, you stated that citizens often turn a rather blind eye to the atrocities of their own nation, compared to the “enemy”. To me, it often resembles the mother’s inability to find fault with her own child, it is a dynamic I think we can implicate in complicity- although not the whole explanation. Now Amy Goodman once said that if we really saw the pictures, the truth, the real horror- that war would be eradicated. Think so? Is it ignorance, denial, the inability to mix fault with loyalty?

Is there an element of ignorance, that if we only knew what was done in our names we would rise up and rally…or, is it the opposite? That we are not ignorant of killing, but desensitized? Do either come close to explaining the apathy, the tolerance, the acceptance of citizens to avoidable bloodshed?

A:

It comes down to ignorance. Desensitization is just ignorance defending itself.

We are desensitized, but only because we have had this very real, intense, personal human agony cast in abstract. It’s insulated as entertainment or laminated in patriotic purpose. Yes, finding fault in what our nation does is a hurdle of loyalty for many to overcome. But even citizens who frown on the abuses of the prison system or foreign policy aren’t, many times, compelled to act. I believe the missing link between discomfort and action is a lack of personal interest—of intimate experience.

This isn’t to say that everybody who has first-hand experience of a broken judicial system or the horrors war inflicts will have the same opinion. But so often, the political decisions we make are from the remove of ignorance. We don’t consider the actual effect—the cost—of our political action. Some that support Goodman and Chomsky’s point about how, when human lives are abstracted and reduced to just “the enemy,” it is easier to accept their suffering. But some of it is a broader lack of understanding.

Best to use an example: Afghanistan. Afghanistan is an extremely poor country that had always been a site of tribal strife and famously failed nation building. Intervention there is historically costly, sometimes disastrous. But because these complexities are reduced to a simple formula of “us or them,” the decisions made by the body politic are facile. The argument is transformed from whether we can achieve our goals and what they would take, into “How can we not defeat this adversary?” And as I noted in the interview at Chin Wag you cite, the world is filled with adversaries by that standard. Only by understanding the actual cost would people give pause.

The problem that the U.S. public keeps running into is that it signs on for the “us or them,” but then has to deal with the complexities. That’s why we keep intervening in such disastrous and disappointing ways—in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and even in bush wars by proxy like Nicaragua. We get involved but then don’t want to pay the check.

It’s easier to put the emotional gratification on credit and pass the buck on. That’s where the apathy comes from. People want their sense of security and justice to be like their pizza and their DVDs—just a mouse-click away. They don’t want to have to check their bank balance first and they sure as Hell don’t want to worry about long-term interest. Neither side of the spectrum is immune to this—plenty of leftists championed intervening in Afghanistan given the atrocities committed against women. The only hope to overcome apathy and indifference is for people to place as much care in intervening in a life as they would if the life was their own.

We need to not only see the suffering. We need to internalize it.

3. What are your thoughts as far as art, whether literary or other, and a role in swaying people in either direction?

A:

The only thing that would change our attitude would be to feel the consequences of our actions ahead of time. That is nearly impossible. In the heat of the moment, with the media drumming up the tension of an impending conflict and politicians having to act like Pro-Wrestling bad asses to grab a hold of the nation’s fear, people tend to forget the ultimate cost.  Military families often don’t, but they’ve already signed on for sacrifice. It’s up to the civilian population to apply the brakes, and that’s very difficult to do when arguments against intervention are boiled down to “us or them.” Decision is distilled to emotion.

This is one of the things I want to achieve with my writing: I want to put a face on “them”; I want to knit the reader’s nerves with the adversary’s. If it happens enough, it may change feeling—and since feeling is where most political action comes from, that’s the only hope we have. But when the government begins the drumbeat for war or for defeating “evil” criminals, it’s nearly impossible to stop. The U.S.A. has never turned away from intervention once it got its blood up. It has done nothing to seriously reform its twisted justice system and economic privation.

Poor minorities remain “them.” The shape-shifting enemy in the War on Terror remains “them.” And until that ignorance is shed, and we see “them” as human beings whose lives we’re trying to control, we’re never going to get an actual grasp on how to achieve our aims. We’ll be firing blind and having to deal with the mess.

4. I want to ask about a quote, by you, again from Godwin’s interview:

“…what mesmerized me – was how banal evil was in these grand tragedies.  Monstrosity was less a matter of the cryptic dementia of solitary psychopaths or nefarious plotters as it was born of laziness, pettiness and pedestrian fears.”

For some reason this got me thinking about the surprisingly “normal” details in many of the biographies of history’s “monsters”. I have a few questions in this direction, linking history with writing, the point about Lovecraft and the known vs. unknown enemy.

Do we need the “villain” to look or act different from us? What about this tendency to mythologize historical figures, those considered good or evil, this tendency to glorify and embellish their stories?  Do we have an appetite for the Hollywood version of a monster?

A:

Appetites change with the era, and mythologies change with them. What doesn’t change is that the public craves its scapegoats. It wants a figure to blame, burn and exile.

But they want a public execution in high parade style. They don’t want Sean Penn’s Dead Man Walking. They don’t want the monster to have once been a baby, or to still be that tender human being inside.

So the villain is abstracted. What that means, is to take a fully fleshed person or a complicated idea and to stick it in a framework like an abstract shape: It makes it less tangible and less complete. It lets us feel it as less real.

That’s the Hollywood villain—or the death row inmate, the restless enemy abroad, the convict. It’s what the public wants because it’s what the public can invest their own fears and darkness in. It makes it simpler to slaughter such a creature. It focuses on the sin, not the sinner.

Not all villains need be like this. The appetite for the grotesque varies with the era because the public’s sense of security varies. The less secure the public feels, the more monstrous their villains. The more secure the public, the more complex and “real” the villain can become. That’s why the 30s, 50s-60s, 80s and 00s are epochs of grand guignol—famous eras of swaggering action stars and larger-than-life monsters.

But just like almost every artist has to admit, the message that reaches the masses has to in some way hit the common denominator. Even in a time of sophisticated story, mainstream media continues to sop to the simplistic story if it wants a big hit. And that’s because conflict is necessary for story, horror necessary to drive conflict, and horror has to be abstracted to be universally edible.

The other part of why history’s “monsters” are embellished is because sensationalism sells. The “Helter Skelter” or “Rise And Fall of the Third Reich” approach to history—where the historian lards on scoops of sleazy facts about their monster, from drug addiction to underage sex—is because when it comes to dirt, the public’s in for a pound if it’s in for a penny. The more extravagant, the more the masses love it. It gives them more to feel superior to, more sins to slay.

It all comes down to that Biblical scapegoat—a beast ceremonially presented, invested with the public’s sins and slaughtered. It doesn’t give us the fact of justice. Far from it. But the act gives us a feeling of justice. Feeling is what’s craved, not fact.

Do you think this tendency carries over into a tendency to embellish characters, to exaggerate their backgrounds in novels? I mean, some of the scariest people to me weren’t the ones with eccentricities, but the ones who blended, the “murderer next door” types. Consider the mother who microwaves her infant, or the killer who entertains children as a clown by day… consider hidden illness, secret depravity…

“Monsters” are about fears we understand, maybe?

A:

Monsters are the fears we can defeat.

We can’t fully understand our fears. We certainly can’t conquer them. Fear is a constant and it is a complex creature. As soon as we’ve demolished it in one form, it springs up in another.

Not monsters. Monsters are abstractions—they’re not real fears, but the “masks” or the icons we create to contain our fears. And just like the icons ritually destroyed in pagan ceremonies that mark the change of the season, we tell stories of how monsters can be bested.

In some of those stories, the monsters live on. The notion that the menace isn’t quite destroyed just sweetens the thrill. But the important part of the story is that something conquers the monster. Jason Vorhees of Friday the 13^th may always rise from the grave and Apophis the Egyptian God may eat the sun every night, but the moral of the myth is that they will always be defeated.

You’re right when you say the scariest monsters are the ones who seem like everyone else. And I believe that the worst real monsters are the ones who never seem different. Politicians have inflicted inestimably more pain than serial killers. But even though the real human cost is worse, they don’t act depraved. They hardly pay it much mind, and that casualness to cruelty is contagious—epidemic in the public.

The reason why it can stay casual is because most people don’t want their fears to be that real. Whether it’s prison conditions or poverty or PTSD from combat, most people push those fears away before they can touch too deeply. More people read True Crime than watch documentaries on the agonies their political decisions cause, but not as many people as read Horror novels.

And when it comes to Horror, the most popular are the monster stories: The Stephen King and Sookie Stackhouse of Tru Blood fame.  It’s important to keep this in mind when writing a horror story. If you write a horror story, it’s difficult to win over the audience from the monster’s perspective. Most readers want a sympathetic protagonist. And, as opposed to a Thriller story, monster stories require an antagonist that is larger-than-life and stalking the protagonist. If you start getting deep into the monster’s head—truly deep enough to reflect the humanity of the reader—you’re entering disquieting territory. Plenty of writers do it, but they’re not as widely read as those that don’t.

Do you think it preys on that sense of being able to decipher good and evil with our filters, the sense that we can somehow keep ourselves protected when such monsters rarely appear so in front of us? Do we want predictable fear, monsters we understand, or can explain?

A:

The monster that blends is the monster we want protection from.

The less protection that a Horror story allows us, the less it’ll appeal to the public. There are exceptions. Good writing can lure a reader into a healthy sense of security, then repeatedly rip it away. I attempt that very thing on a regular basis. But you are exactly right in that most people want monsters they can identify. Whether on the news or in a paperback, we generally feel most comfortable being able to stick an obvious target on our monsters.

The exceptions depend on exceptional people. Not most, but many readers feel more secure in reading about the monsters that grin and blend and pay their taxes. There is a market for the kind of smart, sophisticated story that seats you soundly in the monster’s forebrain and rivets you there for every vicious deed. This audience is generally the kind of person whose sense of security comes from skepticism.

This breed of audience finds the unpredictable more predictable than the plain and ordinary. For whatever reason—usually a childhood populated by masks, false flags and other forms of lies with the seams showing—that audience has been forced to accept life in its chaos and complexity. They crave the bizarre and deceitful because they’ve come to know that’s how the world works. They feel safe being told this is an unsafe world, usually because the trust they put in safety was betrayed.

I am that kind of reader. I like to read gray stories, dismal stories, sophisticated stories. I don’t want my heroes to survive. I don’t want my victims to die gloriously. I want the fear to go on and on, flashing its myriad shades, because that’s what I see when I look at the world around.

It’s just my own pallet of predictability—predicting the unpredictable. And reading, like any consumption, comes down to appetite.

5.  Speaking of fear and the senses, and your experience with the psychology of warfare, I wonder about your take on terror and heuristics, or terror and statistical likelihood as skewed by the media or repeated imagery. For example, a Friedman article once made mention of the way image repetition skews the mind’s sense of threat. You might be much more likely to die from the flu, but news clips of the Twin Towers have you more afraid of an event that is really quite rare. Terrorism, as a cause of death compared to other things, is pretty rare. And yet we devote quite a lot of resources and it keeps us awake at night in a way that food bacteria or black ice can’t seem to match.

What can you say about perceived threat, and horror? Perceived threat, and advantage? What about character, the monster again, how important then is image in that fear equation?

A:

Monsters are bought and sold every day—from book shelves to board rooms to cable TV—for the same reason: Profit.

Perceived threat is a tool used to make money. That’s venal and boring and true. There is a much greater likelihood that a person will die of the consequences of poverty here at home than of a terrorist attack. Criminal acts from desperation, disease from inadequate health care, plain old starvation—these kill more people than extremist bombs. But the cost of tackling these problems here at home is toxic to the corporate bottom line.

It may seem cynical to cram the Twin Towers tragedy and the resulting War on Terror into so mercenary an outlook. I believe it holds up. The political gain of regime change in Afghanistan and, later, Iraq, was seen as immense by the war planners. That’s not without merit. The concept was actually a lot more “noble” than just Big Oil. The central Neo-Conservative idea began as a Liberal idea: That by putting American troops and American cash in these centrally located nations, you could introduce prosperity, democracy and liberties in an entire region. That is still being put to the test and I believe its success relies more on the nations we intervened in than in our investment. And as for the profit to the media, war sells. Whether the media is pro-war or anti-war, people tune in. And for them, it all comes down to keeping us from changing the channel.

So, those complex, domestic monsters only get trotted out on a slow news day. Any solutions to defeat them are kept dull and confused. Meanwhile, when a foreign policy of intervention will turn a buck, the media and politicians fire us up into a fury.

Senses fire that fury. The more we see something offensive, the more it has power to offend us. The media’s message shapes the mainstream fury. And the simpler the fury, the better the media likes it.

Fury sells and so does the simple notion that a few divisions and a couple thousand smart bombs will solve a situation. It plays better than the health care crisis or judicial reform. It’s more difficult to argue against. That’s why, in terms of heuristics, it’s easier to peddle a war than it is a repeal of insane drug laws—even though, in terms of our American values of liberty and self-determination, it is logically opposite.

With a war, you can simply say, “Look at all the evil They are doing. We must smite Them.” And from then on, the argument is defined as “Anti-Evil vs. Pro-Evil.” That’s a tough argument to win. But the heuristics of domestic evil are more complex. You can’t break it down to “us and them” as easily. It is especially difficult considering the “Them” are the people who have the money to broadcast the message. They don’t want to broadcast grounds for their own dismissal or execution. The result is an argument so complicated that when it grinds to a stalemate, nobody’s surprised.

The fear equation works best when there’s a monster—a “Them” to defeat. When “Them” is “us,” the fear equation equals frustration.

6. Do you think that the sense play a role in fear, that the visual image holds more sway in the minds of the scared?

A:

Senses are the core components of fear. If you want fear to flower in the mind, you have to seed the senses. It is a chief reason I am smitten with studying the aesthetics of horror.

Visual image is not the most powerful, though. Look at modern horror movies as a case study. Paranormal Activity typifies this best, as it relies on loud, instant sounds to shake up the audience. Spooky, brooding noises and eerie soundtracks are also potent instruments of horror. Watching a horror movie without the sound diminishes the effect considerably. From what I’ve seen, sound tends to be used to amp up the foreboding or ferocity, while images supply the substance of the shock. In writing, these tools are present, as are others:

Suddenness. That is a particularly powerful sensory device when it comes to inflicting horror: Composing something in the space of a heartbeat. Subtle flaws are also sublime when it comes to cultivating terror. Some of my favorites are skewed, scratched or repetitive recordings. Perverse or broken innocence is another tool—consider how creepy dolls, carnivals and children in general are when used in horror.

But all manner of sensory disquiet is used in horror. I love writing the horror of smells especially. There are some truly vile smells, and our experience of them is confined to the imagination. When I want an element of horror to linger and taint the imagination, I give it a smell.

7. What is next for you? Do you have anything in the works? Is there a dream project in the back of your mind?

A:

Next is getting published in as wide a market as possible.

I always want to tell the monster’s story. That hasn’t changed. What has changed—evolved—is my awareness of what it takes to get that story out to the broadest audience.

In the last couple years, I’ve been studying Web marketing and literary marketing. It’s led me to a few conclusions about reaching the reading audience.

First and foremost has to be that you need to know your readership’s tastes. This isn’t as cynical as it may sound. On the contrary, I think that there’s a market for just about any kind of well-written material. The Internet is a huge facilitator of this. But any writer looking to reach a market—large or small, mainstream or fringe—needs to recognize the demands of that market.

It is easier to sell non-fiction than fiction to a broad audience. That’s a basic numbers game: More non-fiction books are sold every year than fiction.

It is also easier to sell “genre” fiction than “literary” fiction. The reasons for this are two-fold. First, a publisher or producer wants to be able to sum up a story’s selling points readily, and a genre is a neat package for them. This isn’t to say that a genre piece can’t be complex—more that it needs to be able to sum up its selling points, and a label like a particular genre helps with that. And secondly, “literary” fiction is actually its own genre, just as restrictive as any label. The academic critical community that run lit mags and supply book reviews have very prejudiced ideas as to what a Literary Fiction novel needs to be. Anything that smacks of another genre need not apply.

The result is that a lot of good stories are in commercial limbo because they’re difficult to sum up in marketing terms. So, I decided to gear my fiction towards the “genre.”

Once an author is published in this environment, their story’s success depends on the quality of the writing and the “platform” of the author. The latter is increasingly important considering how promotional budgets are slashed. Just like how some stories languish, unpublished, because they fail to fit in a neat commercial model, some authors languish, unheralded, because they don’t make for great TV.

An author needs to market themselves. Social media helps with this, but in many ways, it’s just raised the bar. They need to be able to tap into the appetites of the market they want. Whether we’re talking about Stephenie Meyer or Jonathan Saffron-Foer, the author has to have a timely story and to seem like an interesting property for the media to point the cameras at.

This is all a long way of saying that after writing two intense and bizarre manuscripts, I have resolved to tell a story that both I and the mainstream would want. It’s a novel set in post-Katrina New Orleans and, yes, the protagonist is a kind of monster. But she’s a sympathetic monster—driven by trauma to seek redemption in an ecology of damnation. I’m telling her story so that I can earn the trust of the market. Once they trust me to tell a good story, I’ll tell the ones I wouldn’t have got them to listen to otherwise.

One way or another, I’ll be putting them in touch with some real monsters.

We thank Matthew Funk for taking the time to answer these questions, and for indulging a little bit of departure. You can find out more about his work by visiting his website, here.

We also have some new sections: Crow Audio and a blog. The Audio section lists our internet radio shows and upcoming guests and audio interviews. The blog is a place for updates, events, readings, and more from the editors of Full Of Crow- which also includes Blink|Ink, ARTERIALIZE, Fashion For Collapse, Comix For Collapse, The Sphere, and more. Crow is a growing family, whose nefarious tendrils extend into unexpected territories. Follow the madness on facebook and twitter. Contact Lynn Alexander for more information: lynnalexander@fullofcrow.com.

JM Reinbold: Hi, Sherry! Please tell us a bit about yourself.

Sherry Thompson: I’m in my sixties, retired, and fairly unconventional. Storytelling is my second career but my first love.

I’m servant to two cats. Khiva, the seal-point Siamese was considered unadoptable by her breeder–terrified of all humans–but we’re good buddies now. Vartha is a black foundling with some Maine Coon mixed in. She’s no longer a kitten but she still acts like one. She’s goofy over cardboard boxes. Khiva comes and tells me when Vartha is misbehaving.

I have a variety of hobbies, though it’s hard to make time for them with writing. Amongst these are jewelry-making (making beads, beading, wire jewelry) and interesting stones which sometimes end up in the jewelry.

I love filk, world, and folk music. Filk music is the folk music of the SF and Fantasy community. I am not knowledgeable about world music, but I like Putumayo recordings especially music of the Caribbean, Africa, and crossovers between them—CDs like “Music from the Coffee Lands”, “… Chocolate Lands”, “Wine”, “Tea”, etc. My fascination with traditional folk music is very old, stretching back to singers like Jean Ritchie, and moving forward through Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Stan Rogers, Gordon Bok, and Robin & Linda Williams. I also like virtually all forms of guitar music, Celtic music, and most forms of Christian music. Actually, it’s hard to name a type of music I dislike–Maybe bluegrass vocals and really angry raps.

I love birds and animals, especially the furred ones and as long as they have no more than four legs. I love trees and plants, though I know next to nothing about them. I can stand and stare up the trunk of a tree for a half hour in complete fascination, unless someone interrupts me. This last interest is echoed by my enjoyment but lack of knowledge about modern sculpture.

Back in the late 80′s or early 90′s, I was introduced to my first labyrinth. (A labyrinth is not a maze–it has one path and is used for meditation, prayer, relaxing or centering.) Even though that first labyrinth was just traced on newsprint, I became enamored of them. I even slipped hints about labyrinths into “Seabird” and a partially-completed manuscript titled “Marooned”.

Foods, television programs and films? Yes. Love them all. Okay, seriously, I love ethnic food of virtually every description. Unlike Cara in “Seabird” I love sushi.

In TV shows and film, I prefer mysteries, suspense, and psychological thrillers, plus the better SF and Fantasy films. I’m particularly fond of The Princess Bride, Alien and Aliens (film #2), Raiders of the Lost Ark, Groundhog Day, LotR (#1), Grand Canyon, Memento, Charade (orig), The Haunting of Hill House (orig), Blade Runner, Brazil, The Lion in Winter, The Shawshank Redemption, The Others, Galaxy Quest, Krull and Max Dugan Returns.

I watch CSI, CSI:Miami, Bones, and I am still decompressing from the end of Lost.

JMR: How did you get started in writing?

ST: When I was in late elementary school, I would tell myself stories after I went to bed. I never wrote any of these down, except for the first two or three pages of a time travel story in which the heroine (me) worked for the U.S. government as a secret agent. I was sent back to various time periods to fill in the details missing in historical records or to check out the truth behind legends. Generally, I got into terrible trouble and rather handsome young men would rescue me. Then I would rescue them. And like that.

JMR: What is your writing process? How do you work as a writer?

ST: I come up with the essential premise of a story—the skeleton of a plot. In the case of the Narentan books, I choose an Alphesaic weapon, and decide what kind of crisis or situation would be solved by that weapon. I may work briefly on setting as well.

Then, I put all of this aside, and begin to think about my characters—all of my characters, good, bad, undecided, human and animal. I spend a lot of time with my characters in thought, jotting down “discoveries” about their personalities and appearance. For example, during this getting-to-know-you phase, one character “told me” he was a poet. I told him he would have to be a bad poet, since that’s not my forte.

Do you think I’m nuts yet? Let’s try this. Back when I was writing Seabird I created a character meant to be cannon fodder so that his or her death would have devastating effects on another character. That was set for a while—until a different supporting character told me that he/she was the one who needed to die. They were right, too. I made the change in my notes. When I got to the scene, I cried so hard I could hardly write it.

JMR: Your book, Earthbow, has been getting some excellent reviews. What is your book about?

ST: Well, half of Earthbow has been getting great reviews, because half of it is out. Gryphonwood Press decided that Earthbow was too long to be published in one volume. Consequently, the book was semi-literally cut exactly in two, and the first half was published in late March. This half is titled “Earthbow Volume 1”. I am currently making final revisions to Earthbow Volume 2, which should be published some time this summer.
But that doesn’t answer your original question. What is “Earthbow” about?

Earthbow tells the story of the 2nd Narentan Tumult, just as Seabird related the story of the 1st Narentan Tumult. Tumults are cataclysmic periods of plotting, murder and battle during which parts of Narenta are threatened by various forces of evil. Frequently, these include sorcerers, and the 2nd Tumult is no exception. Madness, the blind striving for power, the possible destruction of whole ecosystems are also involved.

Because the Earthbow story is so complex, parts of the tale are experienced by certain characters while other parts are experienced by others. Consequently, Earthbow has an ensemble cast and several plot threads. It all comes together near the end of Earthbow Volume 2. Well, that’s the general idea. Maybe the whole planet will implode when the Death Star reaches it. Just kidding.

JMR: Can you tell us a little about the history of Earthbow and your experience writing this particular book?

ST: The first draft of Earthbow was written during a very dark time in my life. My beloved grandmother had just died. Added to that, I was determined to make sure Earthbow got off to a lively start, so I brought in a young fighter as a supporting character. When I began writing Coris’ first scene, I learned all sorts of things about him. Gulping, I had to rework my plot. I wrote for quite a while, and decided that the story was too dark. Enter Khiva the Stoah, meant to be comic relief. Khiva tried at times to make away with the whole story. So did Cenoc, Harone, Coris, etc. I had to keep reminding myself that Earth hadn’t sent Xander to help Narenta for nothing.

Massive rewrites later—with gigantic chunks of story being jettisoned and parts switching position, the story begins with the Outworlder Xander, then Coris comes in and the next thing you know, there’s Cenoc. Thus were my three original plot threads created. Slightly different character mixing-and-matching takes place in the second volume.

JMR: Earthbow is high fantasy, is that right? Could you describe what high fantasy is for readers who may not know?

ST: Backtracking to my first book, Seabird is high fantasy because it is set in a fictional location. In the case of Seabird, this other world of Narenta may or may not be part of our universe. Occasionally Earth inhabitants or people from other worlds are brought to Narenta—otherwise Earth would know nothing about it. Seabird is also “epic” in that a major part of the plot involves two or more forces struggling against each other.

Earthbow certainly fits these definitions – up to a point. That particular point is when the sorcerer, Mexat, and a young fighter named Coris strolled into my group of characters. Coris took a nearly instant dislike to Cenoc and Beroc, while they didn’t much like him either. In the meantime, Harone (an initiate enchanter) caught on to Mexat’s machinations and knew he had to be stopped. Voila: Sword and Sorcery

So just to confuse things, I look at it like this: the world of Narenta is definitely an epic high fantasy setting. However, the plot of Earthbow has strong characteristics of Sword and Sorcery, in which individual battles between wizards and/or fighters take place.

JMR: What drew you, as a writer, to fantasy as a genre?

ST: Wow! I think I was born this way. Okay, when I first started inventing stories, I was very into horses, and cowboy shows were the most popular genre on TV. Except weekends, when Ramar of the Jungle, Buck Rogers & Flash Gordon serials were rerun. I also loved fairy tales. Add my early interest in time travel to the ancient and medieval past. Mix it up all together in some proportions or the other, and out comes a fantasy author. Do it the “wrong” way, and you get space opera writers. (I’m saying this just to rile up my friends over at the Lost Genre Guild.)

JMR: Earthbow and its predecessor Seabird are also categorized as Christian fantasy. Can you tell us a little about Christian fantasy and how it differs from other categories of fantasy? What similarities might readers find in Christian fantasy and other types of fantasy?

ST: Speaking of the Lost Genre Guild, we’ve debated this one a few dozen times. You see, the LGG is made up of Christians who write speculative fiction, i.e. fantasy, SF or horror. Very little of our writing overlaps anyone else’s in any significant way. Except the base assumption of Christian principles. In most other respects, our work fits comfortably next to any fantasy, SF or horror you might find in any brick-and-mortar store. Actually, where LGG books are less likely to be found is in family Christian bookstores. We are, as a whole, too edgy.

JMR: What inspired you to write Earthbow?

ST: I was inspired to write Earthbow at the same time I was inspired to write Seabird. I had finished reading Tolkien’s LotR & the Hobbit and C.S. Lewis’ Narnia and Space Trilogy. I was just starting on the other Inkling, Charles Williams, with his seven urban fantasy novels and his Arthurian poetry. But I was running out of fantasy to read. (That was a long, long time ago.) Since I was in danger of running out of fantasy, I wrote some. For myself at first, just as I used to tell myself stories. I very specifically began with an audience of one in view, then allowed as to how other people like I was might like the stories too.

JMR: Can you tell us any interesting or unusual “facts” about Earthbow?

ST: Let’s see. Coris started off to get some tension into the early scenes. Khiva, as I think I mentioned, came in as comic relief, and will now definitely be in the sequel to Earthbow. I had decided on an Earthbow as the weapon for the second tumult just as the Sword of Living Water was involved in the first Tumult. (One ancient “element” per Tumult). In both Seabird and Earthbow, I had no idea what the weapon would do when I started writing.

JMR: To a greater or lesser degree all authors write from personal experience. What part do your own personal life experiences play in Earthbow?

ST: Probably the chief one is my close observation and love of animals, particularly cats. (This does not make Khiva “actually a cat”!)

I’ve known people with thought processes rather like Cenoc’s. Not a particularly nice personal experience.

JMR: What other authors or books have significantly influenced your writing?

ST: George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams. Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series. Madeleine l’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time series. Barbara Hambly’s excellent and out of print fantasy series, Lewis Carroll, Poul Anderson…

JMR: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had related to the writing of Earthbow?

ST: Finding what certainly looked like one of my Narentan plants in a private garden. I went back and checked, and sure enough.

JMR: Earthbow is the second in your Narentan Tumults series. What next? What do readers have to look forward to from you in the future?

ST: The next thing is getting Earthbow, Volume 2 out, so that readers can read the whole book straight through, as originally intended.

Logically, I should continue with the story of the 3rd Narentan Tumult. The title for that one is variously, The Gryphon and the Basilisk, The Behemoth, or The Book That Intends to Eat Delaware. It’s over two-thirds done and, oh yes, large.

Alternatively, I would like to work on Marooned, which incidentally is four-fifths done but runs only a quarter of The Behemoth’s total word count. So, now you’re probably thinking that Marooned is about the 4th Narentan Tumult. Not so much. Marooned is set roughly between the 1st & 2nd Tumults, and it follows the adventures of a minor character from Seabird.

JMR: What kinds of books other than fantasy do you enjoy reading?

ST: Mysteries. I like a number of both old and new mystery authors: Ellery Queen; Agatha Christie, Tony Hillerman, Barbara Hambly and Elizabeth Peters.

JMR: What has been your experience of the publishing world and what advice would you give writers, especially new writers seeking publication?

ST: If I may put the cart before the horse, which is the way most new authors think; do not expect publication. You had better be writing because you love to write and can’t envision ever stopping, since you may be the only person who ever reads your work outside of your family.

My second piece of advice is the well-worn BIC: Butt in Chair. My third suggestion is find yourself some willing beta readers who are NOT friends or family. While you’re at it, find yourself a writer support group. Or maybe a mental health support group. We’re all a little crazy to keep doing this with little promise of any monetary reward or acclaim. Taking classes can accomplish several of these suggestions simultaneously, at least if you have a good fiction-writing professor.

JMR: What writers organizations do you belong to and how have they helped you on your path to publication and in general as an author?

ST: Critters is an online group for speculative fiction authors, designed to facilitate the exchange of critiques. It is run by Andrew Burt of SFWA (Science Fictin Writers Association) and is probably one of the oldest such groups on the web.

OWW (Online Writing Workshop) is a group similar to Critters, originally sponsored by Del Rey.

WRWG is the Written Remains Writers Guild. I’ve been a member since 2003. Originally serving as a local critique group, it has expanded its function in recent years with emphasis on serving the needs of professional Delaware authors and their associates. Please check out our website for more information!

BU is short for Broad Universe, an online and in-person group designed for the needs of female professional speculative fiction writers. BU sponsors rapid fire readings by its members at conferences nationwide, creates and maintains catalogues of members’ work and has a lively mailing list, amongst other functions

LGG is short for the Lost Genre Guild. Members are Christians who are actively writing speculative fiction of all kinds, or who have an interest in promoting this type of fiction. Increasingly our membership has welcomed publishers, editors and reviewers.

Path2Perf is a newly created subset of the Lost Genre Guild, and serves a function similar to Critters and OWW (See above.)

Coinherence is a mailing list for people interested in the Inkling, Charles Williams. It isn’t specifically for authors, though many members do write. Most of the membership are involved in the scholarship or study of the Inklings, with particular emphasis on Charless. Williams.

“How have they helped you on your path to publication and in general as an author?”

In ways too numerous to recall or mention. I’ll go with camaraderie, encouragement and the exchange of expertise in writing and in related fields like publication and research.

JMR: Is there anything you’d particularly like to say to your readers, those who are familiar with your work and those new to world of Narenta?

ST: Buy copies of my books. Give them away for birthdays, Christmas, anniversaries, graduations, Arbor Day, or whatever you’ve got.

Seriously, if you have read Seabird, I would love feedback. The same is true for Earthbow, Volume 1. Negative, positive, in the middle. Writers type alone but that doesn’t mean we like to live in isolation. We really want to know what people think—even about that picky little bit of dialogue on page 392.

JMR: Do you have a website? Do you blog, Twitter, or post on Facebook? Where can you be found on-line?

ST: You can find me on-line at these locations:

Sherry Thompson’s Official Website
Sherry Thompson on Facebook
Sherry Thompson’s Blog on Live Journal
Sherry Thomspons at Redroom

JMR: Thank you, Sherry!

Interview by JM Reinbold

Read an excerpt at Written Remains

Read About the art and symbolism on the “Earthbow” Covers

LA: How long have you been writing, and when do you recall first thinking of yourself as a writer?

IH: Been a songwriter for thirty years and a novelist for about ten. Both flex the same muscle.

LA: Some writers describe a sense of having a “novel in them” or a “novel to get out”. Did you feel that you had a story you had to tell? Did you have a sense of nagging, did it prompt you to sit down and get started?

IH: Cliché as it may sound, I am but a prism to the tale, and probably to my past. They come together. I enjoy the alternate universe and miss it when it’s gone.

LA: “The Gravedigger” is your debut novel, but you have done other work including short stories. Have you tried writing novels before this point? The challenge seems enormous, the commitment overwhelming…What was it like, trying to devote the time and energy to “The Gravedigger”?

IH: Novels are fun but need their time. I’ve written ten so feel comfortable with the process. Best to do is to trust the story, and not get upset if it chooses to leave for a while. The story always seems to come back, like a reluctant voyeur, wanting to know how it ends.

LA: Was it difficult to develop characters from other time periods, how did you decide about details and background?

IH: Characters present themselves before I can make them up. I tweak them but don’t sit to ‘outline’ them. I then research the details needed to include their environment.

LA:Is it difficult to write about subjects that seem close to the heart- love, loss, grief, spirituality?

IH: Not more difficult then writing a comedy sketch, possibly easier. Larry David is probably one of the best story tellers of all time.

LA: What’s next for Ilan Herman?

IH: Become a world renown novelist whose tales inspire the masses and rise to the movie screens (preferably I-Max 3D) and make tons of  money. I swear do donate 90%  to charity.

www.ilan-herman.com- Stories

www.emily-music.com-  Music