Today it is my distinct pleasure to bring
you this recent interview I did with the talented author, Brian Evenson. I
recently read his early collection Fugue
State and thought it a fantastic book. Here’s my review, which doesn’t
really do it justice – I encourage you to read this and any of Brian’s other
superb books (click on the book cover images below to be taken direct to the Amazon book page):
If you haven't already, please take a moment to subscribe to this website (here is the link: free instant book download for all new subscribers) so that you can catch all the latest news and interviews. Next interviewee is with Mort Castle, in case you've been living under a rock, he is a brilliant author and a massive figure in the Horror world. Until next time - stay tuned, thanks for reading and please share this post with your pals.
“Brian Evenson's Fugue State is a very surrealistic, slip-stream kind of collection
soaked with dark themes and nightmarish allegories that make the reader think!
A bit of a rarity these days. I especially liked the way the stories encouraged
a second reading. Stand-outs for me were 'In the Greenhouse', 'Life Without
Father', 'Fugue State' and 'The Adjudicator.' Will definitely be reading more
from this fine author.”
Without further ado, here is my interview with
Brian.
BRIAN EVENSON is the author of a dozen
books of fiction, most recently the story collection A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press, 2016) and the novella The Warren (Tor.com, 2016). His
collection Windeye (Coffee House
Press 2012) and novel Immobility (Tor
2012) were both finalists for a Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Last Days won the American Library
Association's award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press, 2006) was a finalist for an
Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. Other books include The Wavering Knife (which won the
IHG Award for best story collection), Dark
Property, and Altmann's
Tongue. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an
NEA fellowship. His work has been translated into French, Greek, Italian,
Spanish, Japanese and Slovenian. He lives and works in California, and teaches
at CalArts.
Q: You have recently been in Transylvania
teaching at the Horror Writer’s Workshop, did you get an opportunity to explore
the countryside and were you inspired by your experience?
A: We did. The Horror Writer’s Workshop was held just
outside of the town that houses Bran Castle, the basis for Dracula’s castle in
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, so I spent
some time there, also explored some of the nearby towns and medieval villages
and fortresses, places like Sighisoara and Brasov, took my son to a decaying
Communist playground complete with scary cartoon figures, passed through a
gypsy village in which on a Sunday morning everyone was carrying a broom, spent
time in the forest, etc. It’s an amazing
place, and it reminded me a lot of what parts of Europe used to be like 30 or
35 years ago, back when I visited as a kid.
I do think I got a lot out of it and that it’ll figure in my writing in
various ways.
Q: What of your childhood experiences
determined your future works of fiction in thematic terms? I.e. How/what
aspects of your childhood influenced your love of genre, reading and,
ultimately, writing?
A: My parents were both big readers, and I
think that rubbed off on me. They read a
lot of mysteries in particular, but literature as well, and some science
fiction (Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, C. S. Lewis). I think that, the pleasure they seemed to get
out of fiction, was more important to me as a developing reader than anything
else.
When
I was young, I read mostly genre, most SF (Wolfe, Moorcock, McCaffery, etc.) but
when I was in my mid-teens my father introduced me to Kafka and my mother
introduced me to Poe. That ended up
opening a whole new world to me, made me realize that literature was maybe
something different than what I’d been led to believe it was, that it didn’t
have to be boring and could be very odd.
For a long time after that, a decade or more, but then I suddenly
started finding it again and began remembering what I liked about it. And I also realized at that time that a lot
of what I was trying to do with my own writing was to figure out a way to
combine literature and genre.
Q: Many of your stories invoke a sense of
unease and disquiet in terms of both the effect of characterization and imagery,
is this a stylistic device that you employ to psychologically and imaginatively
impact upon the reader, or do you think that it is more of an organic signatory
aspect of your work?
A:
I see it as organic, as something that I
admire about the fiction I read that I liked the most and that became
part of
my literary DNA. I like work that makes
me uneasy as a reader, that throws me off balance, and I think from the
beginning of starting to write I was trying to understand how those
stories worked
and how to do it myself. But I also see
it as operating more instinctively than being something I set out to do
with a
specific set of tools and, honestly, my stories that work the best
manage to
accomplish the unsettlement in a way that I can’t quite replicate or
can’t
quite understand why it does work. I
love those moments in my fiction: the
moments that really work but that I can’t explain to myself. At this
point, it’s organic: I don’t think about it any more. I only have
to think about it when I want a part of a story to not move in that
direction...
Q: Your work seems slippery in terms of
genre definition, what genre/s do you most feel at home with (writing) and do
you have trouble placing your work in your intended market/s?
A: Initially, back in the 90s, I did have
some trouble—people had a hard time deciding what to do with me. When I was first publishing, one of the first
reviews my first book got at a large newspaper suggested that I was talented
and I’d be worth reading once I got over the dark stuff and started writing
“normal” stories. But as time has gone on most have decided they’re okay with
me being a little slippery, and that the darkness in my work is crucial and
non-gratuitous. That’s partly because
they’ve gotten used to me and partly because I think the nature of the relation
of genre and literature has shifted over time:
what editors and reviewers used to think of as a Trump-style gigantic wall
most now see as something that can be easily and productively crossed.
Q: What is it that you are trying to
communicate to your readers? I.e. When someone finishes one of your stories
what do you want them to come away with from the experience?
A: I don’t
want to communicate information at all.
I do want readers to go
through an experience with my stories, to have an intensive experience. I want my fiction to be something that sticks
with readers, that they continue to think about after they’ve finished the story. I want them to feel slightly changed by it.
Q: In a recent interview with BookForum
(Jan, 2016) you mentioned that you “go for intense ambiguity, where you just
don’t know what the stable ground is.” In the context of your stories that this
is applicable to, why is it that you deliberately write this way and what do
you hope to achieve by using this type of literary device?
A: I think so much of fiction that is
written takes most things for granted.
But I think so much of our experience of the actual world (or at least
so much of my experience of the actual world) involves misperceiving and
misinterpreting things, muddling forward by getting things mostly right. For me, being put in a position where you
remember that, where what you think you know becomes a little less insistent, a
little more tentative, opens you to a different experience of reality, one that
is much more interesting.
An
ex-girlfriend of mine used to get very frustrated with me because her
perception of color was slightly different from mine. She used to see things as grey that I saw as
green, or maybe the reverse—I’ve been out of that relationship long enough that
I’ve mostly blocked it out. She would
show me pieces of clothing in varying shades of grey or green and then tell me
I was wrong about what color they were.
But, honestly, whatever I said, I was still going to see the color that
I saw. We could agree on liking a shirt
but not on what color it was. So, either
you have to insist on your color being the “right” color (as my ex-girlfriend
did) or you have to be willing to realize that there’s no right answer to
perception, that perception is different from person to person, but that
experience of misperceiving or having your perception challenged is a very
common one, one that swirls underneath the surface of seemingly solid
things—and that what’s actually there, might be even different still from what
either of us perceives.
Q: As an academic how do you distance
yourself from writing academically (in the style of) when it comes to writing fiction?
A: I think it’s fairly natural to shift
from one to the other, in the same way that you might talk differently to a
minister than you would to your friend in a death metal band. It’s enough of a different speech genre that
it doesn’t tend to get mixed up. Having
said that, I do have some stories that play with the language of academia, like
“The Wavering Knife.” There are writers
who can mimic that voice for fictional purposes and use it to excellent effect. John Langan, for instance, is exceptionally
good at it, as is Thomas Ligotti. When
you do it, it makes for a different sort of reading experience than you usually
get from either academic writing or fiction—the tension between the two modes
ends up doing something productive.
Q: Your work has previously been compared
to the likes of Poe and Kafka, do you see yourself as following in the
trajectory of gothic fiction and, if so, do you have any allegiances to a
particular strand of the gothic genre, or are your thematic and stylistic
concerns influenced by other literary traditions?
A: I do see myself as tied to the gothic,
and early on thought of myself as being part of a kind of New Gothic
school—there was an issue of Conjunctions
magazine called “The New Gothic” that made me think there might be a place for
me in the literary world after all. I
tend to read pretty widely and eccentrically, and I think that a lot of
different strands end up coming together in my stories, so probably the
experience of reading them differs depending on what traditions you’re most
steeped in. So, for instance, in a story
like “The Second Boy” I’m playing with campfire stories and ghost stories,
sometimes particular ghost stories, and stories about doubles, sometimes
particular double stories, but also carrying on a conversation with Isak
Dinesen and Roberto Bolaño. And since
what I allude to in Bolaño is actually a conversation he’s having with another
writer there’s a further level of complication if you know Bolaño and his
influences well. And if you know the
Dinesen story I’m dealing with, you’ll see how I’m turning it against
itself. You don’t have to know any of
that to enjoy the story, but what you do know and sense and feel will inflect
your experience significantly.
Q: Whatever genre banner your stories fall
under there seems to be a prevailing preoccupation with interior psychological
landscapes and the relationship between perceived realities and ‘other’ possible
states of existence. Does this concern stem from a personal sort of existential
questioning and/or is it more of a literary technique that you employ to add to
the depth of the story?
A: It stems very directly from concerns of
my own. That questioning of reality is
tied to my own fears and doubts and suspicions, and I think that’s what makes
it work in the stories: if it’s
unsettling for readers it’s at least in part because it’s unsettling for me.
Q: When you write a story, what is your
process? For example, do you outline or jump right in? How many edits do you
usually make when writing short fiction and do you use a similar process when
writing longer works?
A: I’ve done different things depending on
the story and on where I’ve been in my career. I used to jump in and just write
the story straight through, but as soon as I began writing stories that were
longer than a thousand words or so that became difficult. I almost never outline a story, but I do jot
notes as I go, and if I stop for an hour or for the night I often will write a
few lines about where I intend to go. If
I’m working on a longer work, I do sometimes outline, but the outline can
change quite a bit by the end. With
novels I’ve done both, but find it much more productive to outline—it allows me
to write much quicker and keeps me from wasting a lot of time in dead ends.
In
terms of edits, I tend to try in my first draft to establish a structure, but
then will edit a piece anywhere from 3-4 times to a dozen times after
that. Usually the structure stays
relatively the same, but parts will shrink or expand and individual wording
really gets honed and perfected in the later drafts in particular.
Q: When you write a story from a particular
philosophical slant do you try to align it with universal human principles (common
to the majority of your readers) in order to solicit a certain type of response?
I.e. Do you measure your own intent with an understanding of your reader/s and
how they might perceive your work?
A: I do think about the reader and how they
might perceive the work, but I write in a way that has enough openness in it
that I think different people can have slightly different experiences with my
work. I like that about it. But I do
hope that the majority of people have the kind of experience that makes them
continue to think about the story after they put the book down.
Q: Finally, thank you for agreeing to be
interviewed. Are you working on any new projects that you can share details of?
A: You’re welcome. I have a new novella, The Warren, coming out in a few weeks. Other than that, I’ve been working on stories
and am on the way to a new collection (probably still a year away at least from
having something finished). I also have
some ideas for a novel, and am just getting going with that.
Please make sure you check out Brian’s website
and Amazon author page (links below) for more information about his available titles.
Brian Evenson's Website: http://www.brianevenson.com\
Amazon Author Page: http://tinyurl.com/BrianEvensonAmazon
If you haven't already, please take a moment to subscribe to this website (here is the link: free instant book download for all new subscribers) so that you can catch all the latest news and interviews. Next interviewee is with Mort Castle, in case you've been living under a rock, he is a brilliant author and a massive figure in the Horror world. Until next time - stay tuned, thanks for reading and please share this post with your pals.
