Richard Godwin's Blog, page 25

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Michael D. Brown

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You may know Michael Brown from 6S where he consistently writes great shorts.

You may know him for his blog Mudjob.

If you do you'll know his respect for a variety of literary forms which he understands deeply.

If you don't then check him out.

He is a talented writer who writes with a rare degree of economy.

He also knows a lot about literature and all its genres.

He met me at the Slaughterhouse where we talked about the Nouveau roman and Jean Genet.

Do you feel feel that American foreign policy has made your job teaching English in Mexico harder or easier?  

I came down to Mexico in 2001 for a seminar and to look into the possibilities for teaching English because I was at a bad point in my life at the time. I had lost someone dear to me to heart failure and I was bored with my job, and I guess going through a mid-life crisis; although, I probably wouldn't have called it that at the time, but I was in my mid-forties, and yeah, that's what it was.

I met some people with whom I became friendly at the seminar, and they suggested there were loads of opportunity for teaching in southern Mexico, and I took up the suggestion. I figured then that I'd give it a shot and see how it worked out for six months or a year, and maybe go back to New York refreshed and ready to return to the type of work I was doing for a living. I'd always been employed in some way in office work: payables, receivables, assistant to the assistant in insurance, publishing, cargo transport, and other areas; making enough to take a couple of vacations each year, and writing on the side. I had never had anything published at that point, and I had this dream that as a teacher I'd have these long summers off and be able to finish a novel.

Well, the teaching idea worked out well enough. I obtained a better job at a good school shortly after moving to Chiapas. Better than the one I had lined up, but I had the agenda all wrong. I work all year with just a couple of weeks off in the summer and in December, and the salary is terrible by U.S. standards. I make enough to get by here, but at what might be considered the poverty level back there. It's the work though that keeps me here.

I have been lucky enough to bring writing and reading into what I do in a more satisfying way than at any other job I've held, and now, combined with my online activities, and my association with many wonderful writers and creative students, I feel I am once again in a growing and learning process.

I don't pay too much attention to foreign policy problems. I know there are a lot of political changes in the U.S. and I have been keeping one eye on the current administration although I had no interest at all in the previous one, but teaching is a noble and well-appreciated social activity throughout the world. Teaching a language and grammar, I don't think the foreign policy of another country, even one so close up north does much to expedite or hinder that process, as it might if I were covering the intricacies of say, Foreign Relations or History.

I love using words to tell stories, and promoting other people who do so. Sometimes politics comes into play, but for me that's only as a backdrop to an interesting fiction.

I will say though that it is only recently the immigration process has been streamlined to the point where I only need several hours off from work and about four visits to the office, whereas renewing my status used to seem like an endless activity every January. Bureaucracy exists everywhere.

How did the idea of Mudjob come to you?

MuDJoB comes in various flavors. There's MuDJoB at blogspot, and wordpress, and ning, and tumblr, and there may be a few others still out there. When I started thinking of it as a brand name, I signed up for many free blogs and hosting sites, but the four I mentioned are those I regularly maintain. The way it started was as a social network for my students' writing on ning when it was free, and I was thinking of Rob McEvily's Six Sentences, where I'm still active, as a model. The name comes from my intitials with a couple of schwas in there to hold them together.

Then, after I applied the name to a blog at blogspot, and liked what my friend CJT was doing with Guest Writes on her wordvamp blog, I invited others to submit pieces initially for my students to have quality reading all gathered in one place instead of sending them all over the Internet. That's still the idea although I have been sent some racier stuff to post, but I like to think that everything that has been posted is high quality and worthy of them reading to see how it's done.

I appreciate all the good work that has come my way, and how the various writers involved have elevated the status of the site.

There is also a blog now at wordpress where journal entries posted by students on the social network have been polished a little (not too much) and gathered together and for which up to this point they are the basic audience.

Lately, I've been posting blurbs and announcements on tumblr on my own and others' work.

I love the creativity shown by the young people who post, sometimes as specific assignments, on the social network, but I guess I'm most thrilled by the stories and observations posted at blogspot. I never thought so many terrific, talented writers would willingly contribute such good work. I truly thought they were going to submit their cast-offs because I can only offer exposure without financial remuneration, but the site is coming up on its first anniversary with Guest Writes and I can honestly say there is not a second-rate piece in the bunch.

By the way, since the name is getting known, I've recently been inundated by poetry submissions, and I'm having a hard time choosing among them. I think I'll do a daily thing starting on 1 February leading up to Valentine's Day, but I'd sure like to see some of the darker, noirish stories coming my way because when I try my hand at writing poetry I produce doggerel at best and am hardly qualified to critique others on it. Besides, stories of intrigue, action, adventure, and romance are what the students appear to enjoy most, and they have turned a number of them into little plays as projects, which I'm hoping they will take to the next step for our annual fall video competition. We've already seen enough television commercial parodies.

So in answer to the question, MuDJoB started as a resource for my ESL students, but it has grown beyond that.

Who are your literary influences?

I like to delve into the psychology behind why people tear at their relationships or mess up when trying to repair them, so for that part of what I write I'd probably have to say I've been inspired by Henry James with a lot less analysis of the situations, and Raymond Carver, with a bit more. I've been attracted to minimalism since it became a thing, and love Carver's work, but I think sometimes he supplies barely enough for you to draw conclusions. Although I tried and succeeded at NaNoWriMo this year, I've never had a great hankering to write a big novel myself, but I do draw inspiration from novelists as well as story and flash writers.

Let me give a list of some of the works, parts or all of which keep coming back to me when I write my own stuff and we can assume those writers have influenced me.

The Double, All the Names, and A Year in the Death of Ricardo Reis by José Saramago

Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet, just about the most inward-looking novel I've come across outside of Thomas Bernhard's work Zazie dans le metro by Raymond Queneau–high-minded and lowdown funny at the same time Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner, a quiet beauty of a novel.

Any of the titles by Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor (not the actress), David Lodge, or Roberto Bolaño. I'm trying to get through El tercer reich in Spanish at the moment.

Night and the City by Gerald Kersh, one of the best nourish fictions around.

Replay by Ken Grimwood, and a host of other sci-fi and speculative fiction writers. I'll read almost anything having to do with time travel.

Electricity, a story by Bob Thurber, and Before the Gravity Stopped by Jason Young–two flash gems among myriad fine examples of the form.

Ay, there are so many, but those come immediately to mind. And I can't deny that I have been influenced by many of the terrific writers I've come into contact with at Six Sentences and Thinking Ten. I never knew I could work so well to prompts or perform in such a confined space.

Why do you think people tear at their relationships or mess up when trying to repair them, is it due to some inbuilt sabotage mechanism that is connected to trauma?

In real life I think most sane people try to be as happy as they can in and out of relationships, overlooking the fact that if we were happy one hundred percent of the time, life would become pretty boring. Still, pain and heartache hurt, and we would rather read about them happening to other people. Fiction is a vicarious experience. Well-done fiction in its vividness and verisimilitude helps us accommodate the little bumps and jams that occur in our lives before they become major upsets, and I think many people need to see the thorns in the rosebush, but from a safe distance.

Everyone likes a little drama, though, and so we emulate our favorite tragic figures, our celebrities, and iconoclasts. Sometimes we get to feeling a little bigger than ourselves, and so we do and say things either by accident or design, and the tearing and messing up follow.

Would humankind have such a long history of warring and sparring and grabbing for more if it weren't in our nature? Even when we tell stories of the first humans we put that attitude on them, as if it couldn't possibly have developed on its own later in our history. So if it wasn't inbuilt to begin with we have built it in to stay.

Relationship spats are just little wars between people who believe they understand each other.

When we read case studies or go through analysis we would like to think once the tears start flowing all the mental torment will cease. As if it were that simple. We put hurt on other people, including those close to us by way of avoiding it falling on ourselves.

As a writer, I'd much rather concoct a tale in which someone can see something of him or herself, and say, "Jeezus, that's happened to me," and identify with what I'm trying to say, although in looking over my work I find I do rather tell more than I show in order to produce that epiphany, which is one of the reasons I enjoy working in short forms, where explosive moments can be described and experienced succinctly. I don't think I could sustain relationship tearing for a novel's length, and I wouldn't want to foist that discomfort on a reader.

The bottom line in writing or reading break-up stories is being able to realize pain can happen to other people and we can watch it, and maybe learn something, from the safety of an observer's seat. And whether or not we came from the factory that way, I can't say, but it's how we live now. Maybe it's entropy at work.

Raymond Queneau's 'Exercises in Style' is a collection of 99 retellings of the same story, each in a different style and is representative of the Nouveau roman in which writers tried to use a different style with each novel. Do you think the Nouveau roman holds any value and is Alain Robbe-Grillet readable or merely a historical footnote?

Going back to my comparison of Henry James and Raymond Carver, who by the way, was quoted somewhere as saying although he made himself familiar with the metafictionists who immediately preceded his time of writing, the nouveau roman crowd, found metafiction somewhat boring as it seemed to be all construct lacking in flesh and blood, I think both displayed aspects of metafiction in their writing. For they, like all authors, wrote for an audience, and once you do that, you have created an "intradiegetic narratee," that is, the reader becomes a character in your tale.

First person narration points this out most clearly, as the "I" in the story is speaking to someone, and that someone is "you," whether an ostensibly named fictional character within the construct or you, the reader. In that way, we have to grant that all fiction is meta to a degree.

Those French writers in the 1950s just made the drawing in of outside sources all very apparent. They put a name to the thing or at least made it a thing and claimed creation of something new that had always been there.

Are Joyce's Ulysses, or Sterne's Tristram Shandy, or for that matter, Cervante's Don Quixote, any less wacky and uninvolving for having come too early to be included in the nouveau roman genre? I don't think so. They've all been around for ages, and though they come into and fall out of favor from time to time, they each have their proponents, and I think always will.

When people speak of television screenplays, they sometimes mention the dropping of the fourth wall, but hasn't it always been invisible anyway by virtue of us viewers being able to observe the characters going about their drama or comedy, and usually feeling drawn to do so by virtue of our association with what they do?

So, if we look at the nouveau roman as a trend rather than something wholly new and unique, Robbe-Grillet might be thought of as merely a historical footnote, but he did have style and he did produce work during a period I for one am drawn to again and again—that post-war world that led up to the Age of Aquarius, that cold war period that is lovingly recalled as an age of innocence, or an attempt to recapture the pre-war innocence, that was for many writers working today their childhood.

For some reason, when I noted his name in your question I immediately recalled a time when I was about twelve or thirteen and watching Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player on television. There was a scene in the film when someone, maybe it was Charles Aznavour's character, says something like, "If I'm lying, may my poor mother be struck dead," and for a brief moment the scene switches to an old woman suffering a heart attack, and then returns to the action at hand. I remember that moment so vividly, the scene in the film, and my watching of it, and think perhaps it was the first time I became aware that not all the fiction exists within the story on the screen or page. I think I may have read At Swim-Two-Birds shortly after that, or maybe it was Robert Sheckley's Mind Swap. I was a great reader of science fiction when I was a teenager, but soon went on a campaign to read the Great Books before going to college. Among the Classics and the speculative fiction on my to-be-read list there were quite a few titles that are today considered prime examples of metafiction.

'Tristram Shandy' is arguably the first great experimental novel and contains three dimensional characterisation, whereas a novel like 'La Jalousie' by Alain Robbe-Grillet lacks that through its use of detail to explore a man's jealousy as he spies on his wife through the Venetian-blind like slats of the jalousie windows of their home. Raymond Roussel, an obsessive millionaire who never wore a suit more than once, details objects in his novels often without characterisation. When fiction crosses over into that kind of self-consciousness has it lost its ability to tell a story?

Robbe-Grillet said in an article regarding Michel Foucault's study of Roussel's work:

… this chain of extraordinary, complex, ingenious and far-fetched elucidations seems so ludicrous and so disappointing that it is as if the mystery were still intact. But from now on it is a cleansed, eviscerated mystery that has become unnameable. The opacity no longer hides anything. It's like finding a locked drawer, and then a key, and the key opens the drawer impeccably…and the drawer is empty.

And Foucault himself said of Roussel.

I would remain very cautious about Rousel's historical place. His was an extremely interesting experiment; it wasn't only a linguistic experiment, but an experiment with the nature of language, and it's more than the experimentation of someone obsessed. He truly created or, in any case, broke through, embodied and created a form of beauty, a lovely curiosity, which is in fact a literary work. But I wouldn't say that Roussel is comparable to Proust.

Kenneth Koch of the New York School, under the influence of Roussel, and experimenting with a form of Roussel's "process" wrote:

Sweet are the uses of adversity / Became Sweetheart cabooses of diversity / And Sweet art cow papooses at the university / And Sea bar Calpurnia flower havens' re-noosed knees

What to make of that? Is it supposed to signify anything beyond the thought that some words sound mellifluous together?

Art, Robbe-Grillet reminds us, is not just a way of presenting a message: it is the message. Like the world at large, a novel is self-sufficient and "expresses nothing but itself." Its "necessity" has nothing to do with its "utility." Whenever an author envisages a future book, "it is always a way of writing which first of all occupies his mind," which leads Robbe-Grillet to state that "the genuine writer has nothing to say. He has only a way of speaking."

The word novel means new, so it must be an evolving thing. It doesn't really have an obligation to tell a story. Since fiction is so all encompassing in its application to theater, cinema, music, and the document, it, too, may be said not to be under any constraints to tell a story.

All that being said, if an author is looking for an audience, s/he must provide work that pleases an audience, and most people simply want to be entertained by story. I don't think profound self-consciousness of a production necessarily precludes the telling of a captivating story, but, yes, sometimes the work is story-less. Still, an audience exists which is enraptured by mere wordplay, and that is good news for visionaries and experimenters alike.

Michel Foucault said in 'Language, Counter-Memory, Practice' 'sexuality is a fissure - not one which surrounds us as the basis of our isolation or individuality, but one which marks the limit within us and designates us as a limit.' Jean Genet dramatised this in his fictions, do you think Foucault as a post-structuralist was expressing anything more than a working prostitute knows from her or his experience of physical need?

I'm not so sure the prostitute would want to sit down and analyze what s/he has come to know through experience thereby extracting the frisson out of the situation, but I believe in the back of their minds, those not addled by drugs, they know what they're about.

Foucault used a lot of big words to talk about transgression, when he could have said, "In a godless world, all we have left is to see transgression where 'polite' society has propagated it exists, sidle up to it, and put a toe over the line, being careful not to erase it, and enjoy the shock on other faces." Not to erase it, of course, because if we completely shatter taboos, we'll have nothing left to think of as sacred, and I think we still feel the desire in a secular world to value something in that way. What's the point of droning through life from beginning to end without the thought of something, anything, bigger than us? That wouldn't be a life at all.

Genet understood the value of maintaining a belief in something. In his prison cell, he had a lot of time to think, and rethink his position as a sentient being without recourse to a god on high, and he knew his transgressions had placed him in that situation. Still, he got off on it, I believe, to a degree and he was never one to advocate erasure of the boundary lines. Otherwise, he wouldn't have kept placing himself at the mercy of the authorities. He wanted to fart in the face of polite society and be punished for it.

I will never forget one scene in Our Lady of the Flowers, where for lack of human contact, he and another prisoner in isolation blow cigarette smoke through a straw inserted in a chink in the wall between them, and from this he derives some sort of sexual satisfaction with which he makes do. Nor another where he cups his own farts to his nose to be reminded of what it means to be alive. Small potatoes to those of us who read him in our "freedom" to move around. He wasn't whining, however, just describing his adaptations and the need to feel.

He dreamed vividly and "lived" in those dreams, and even in them he transgressed.

Foucault was stating something many of us in the modern world are indeed aware of, yet few have his vocabulary to declare it so eloquently, and now that God has been driven from our house, some would like him to come home, and a goodly number believe he never went too far away, perhaps just to the outhouse to take a dump and contemplate where we made him go wrong.

In 'Miracle Of The Rose' Jean Genet asserts his freedom through the use of fantasy, chains become garlands of flowers, a condemned prisoner is discovered to have in his heart a red rose of monstrous size and beauty. Do you think that fantasy is a force of subversion and at what point do you think it tips over from art into mental illness?

Well, since the time that Sartre declared Genet a saint, modern scholars have discovered more about his so-called "abused childhood," which didn't happen in quite the way Sartre put forth. There is little doubt now that Genet did indeed suffer from mental illness, and did so from an early age. Still, when you're of a certain age, or in that frame of mind, his work makes interesting reading. I never wanted to emulate him. I always detected the sickness behind his overblown images. It was the small private moments that drew me to his work and kept me lingering for a little while.

Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth is filled with fantastical images which serve to subvert, but I haven't read anywhere about him suffering from mental illness. I love that film, and the images are just as stark and vivid as Genet's, but of course put forward to a different end.

The problem with Genet was he was all gay, all the time, and an unscrupulous character, and that's wearing on an observer. It's hard to say if the monstrous red rose came out of mental illness or he truly meant those images to say something. Certainly, after he somewhat cleaned up his act, he spoke out, along with those esteemed writers who idolized him (a mutual admiration society?) against tyranny and abuse, but that was after years of glorifying pain and degradation. There's a dichotomy there, don't you think? Don't get me wrong, as a writer he had his moments where he transcended, some of which I cannot forget, but I don't think I have ever considered him a saint.

For similar reasons I've trolled through the work of William Burroughs, but unfortunately cut up rarely provides images that linger, in my head at least. And how many people do you know who have completely and enjoyably read Finnegans Wake? All artists have their method, and sometimes they or their admirers claim they were out to change the world in some way. The more clearly you can reason your way through their fantastical prose or tortured canvasses, the more you pick up on what they had to say. Sometimes a rose is a rose is merely a rose.

Jacques Derrida in 'Writing And Difference' writes 'To be affected is to be finite: to write could still be to deceive finitude, and to reach Being – a kind of Being which could neither be, nor affect me by itself – from without existence. To write would be to attempt to forget difference: to forget writing in the presence of so-called living and pure speech'. What do you think of his observation?

Derrida worked at deconstructing what others observed before him, and I haven't got the head for all those isms. I'm not exactly clear on why he took on such a job. If you google him, you find sites that report that specifying his "method" is difficult as he approached every piece of work from a different angle, appropriate to the work at hand. Sounds kind of nebulous to me. Maybe he had fun doing it, and there is an appreciative audience willing to follow his breadcrumbs and see where it leads them, but then what is his true legacy, a string of dilapidated gingerbread houses? I think Merleau-Ponty put it more succinctly when he said, "My own words take me by surprise and teach me what I think."

Do you think that the inherent snobbery of many critics is justified given the great writing that is coming out of genre fiction?

Snobbery is never justified, and if it comes with a bad attitude, it's unbearable. While it's true there is a lot of great writing coming out of genre fiction, what have critics got to be snobbish about? If someone reviews and builds a reputation towards a goal of being able to sit on a throne and acting as an arbiter of taste, that sounds like perversion to me. We all read good things and want to tell our friends about them and get them to read so we can discuss, but those who make a practice of finding fault and then attempt to get others to avoid material have a problem, and should best be avoided themselves. I learned this first hand a while back when I picked at a terrific writer on one of the sites I frequent because I thought that person was writing too much of the same type of material and it bugged me. How twisted is that? What the hell was I thinking? I issued an apology, stepped back and reread some of that writer's stuff. My way of thinking was wrong, and my speaking out in that tone was wrong. My m.o. now when commenting is if I love it, I compliment, and if it doesn't appeal to me, I say nothing. The unfortunate thing is being so busy, I miss a lot of stuff, and writers who know me may think I'm not responding because it means I didn't like their latest piece, when the truth is I probably haven't had a chance to read it. As to critics who get paid to review and are almost always negative and dole out their compliments as if they were gold, they're an entertainment in themselves. As with Addison DeWitt in All About Eve, it's fun to watch someone being bitchy. If you're writing to keep bread on the table, well you have to know you may someday run up against someone with attitude, and take it on the chin. Arguing back and forth is unproductive at best and can damage a writer's reputation before it does anything to the critic's.

I like to follow a critic unknown to me for a little bit, and see how many things, movies, books, I've read and liked and how often I agree with what they say. If they denigrate more than a few pieces of the stuff I loved, I stop following. I do believe, now however, that snobbery is not justified no matter how much learning went into building it.

Thank you Michael for giving an insightful and eclectic interview.

 

 

Another MuDjoB link:

Caitlin and Mathias, a little book CJT (Nicole Hirschi) and Michael D Brown put together.

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Patti Abbott

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Patti Abbott writes top crime fiction. If you don't know that go and read 'Portraits Of Detroit' by her at A Twist Of Noir.

She is the author of more than 75 stories in literary and crime fiction print and online journals and anthologies.

She is the co-editor (with Steve Weddle) of DISCOUNT NOIR. She won a Derringer for her story, MY HERO, in 2008. She blogs daily at PATTINASE. She's been running a series on forgotten books for almost three years.

She met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about the legal system and psychology.

How much of your material do you get from Detroit?

Increasingly over time, more of my stories have become set in Detroit. (My childhood was spent in Philadelphia so some of my material also comes from there).

In a recent attempt to turn a story "Raising the Dead" into a novel, I researched ten crimes involving young black men that took place in or around Detroit. Those ten stories have figured into a lot of my recent flash fiction. More and more, Detroit has become a major player in what I write because it is hard to think of a darker place to dwell.

I live six blocks from Detroit, work there, and go into Detroit for cultural and sporting events so it has a major impact on my world view. Also my son is a prosecutor nearby and his tales sometimes morph into my tales. I can't imagine anyone who writes not finding Detroit frightening, exciting, and apocalyptic. Every institution from the city government to the schools to the neighborhoods are plagued by poverty, unemployment, crime, corruption and incompetence. Less than half the people in Detroit have driver's licenses. Only a quarter of them read at an adult level. They cannot perform eighth grade math.

Pretty fertile ground for writing stories. But also ultimately depressing as hell.

Do you think the legal system needs to be changed in order to cope with crimes, or do you think there is a better way of dealing with the problem?

The legal system in Michigan has coped with crime by incarcerating more than 50,000 citizens as of 2007. The number is dropping now–but mainly from the state's need to save money. One of the most prevalent reasons for incarceration is drug- related crime.

I think drugs like marijuana should be legalized for persons over 21 and regulated for purity. We spend 40 million dollars prosecuting drug offenses. Drug trafficking produces much of the violence in cities like Detroit and fills the jail cells.

I think the best way to deal with crime is to improve the education system and improve life in the inner city. When people have no legitimate way to earn a decent living, they turn to the drug business or to the drugs. If you are addicted to a drug that is expensive on the black market, you turn to crime to procure it.

I am very far from being an expert in any of these things, but I live in a city where drugs is the number-one business for the uneducated population.. An amazing percentage of black men in Detroit spend time in jail and I see few attempts at rehabilitation.

I think you could now be paid to take a house in Detroit. Any taxes the city could derive from the gift would improve their position.

Who are your literary influences and why?

I write short fiction and my favorite writers in that form would include Andre Dubus, Alice Munro, Antonya Nelson, Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Mary Lavin, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Jean Thompson, William Trevor, John Cheever, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempl, John Updike and the incomparable Lorrie Moore. I like the precise, succinct and elegant prose of all of the above. Now it the realm of crime fiction, great short story writers are more rare. The traditional "mystery" does not lend itself as well to a short form because solving a puzzle requires more pages. But as we've come away from that narrow definition of crime fiction, there are more and better short story writers. Kyle Minor's collection IN A DEVIL'S TERRITORY, Paul Tremblay's IN THE MEANTTIME and Bonnie Jo Campbell's AMERICAN SALVAGE are three recent stellar collections.

My favorite crime fiction novelist is Margaret Millar. She looks at crime from a psychological viewpoint, which I admire greatly. I am also a fan of Charles Willeford (his Hoke Mosley series is one of my favorites), Sjowal and Wahloo, Simenon, Nicholas Freeling and all the usual suspects.

How do you think the psychology of a serial killer differs from that of other criminals?

I have never written a story about a serial killer nor researched the topic but I imagine the crime is less profit motivated than other crimes. Less against a specific person and more against society at large. More about perceived injustices, perceived ill-treatment, a desire for fame, a wish to prove himself smarter than other, especially the police. I have never found serial killers all that interesting because they seem interchangeable in most cases. Hard childhood, psychosis develops, they act on it. My preference is for stories about the victims of crime or a person who gets backed into a corner and kills once. After Hannibal Lector, there is little to say for me.

Do you think humour is a form of social commentary and which comedians do you like and why?

I think a good comedian can have more impact that a good columnist or essayist because it goes down easier. Of course, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are both brilliant and I can't believe they turn that stuff out four nights a week. I also like Lewis Black, Chris Rock and Wanda Sykes. Fran Leibowitz' recent HBO special PUBLIC SPEAKING was witty and reminded me of how much I enjoyed her books SOCIAL STUDIES and METROPOLITAN LIFE. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Monty Python, David Sedaris, George Carlin, Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce all made an impact. I adored Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby in their day. Right now, Ray Romano has turned out to have more to say about the angst of the middle age man than I would have ever expected (Men of a Certain Age). It isn't as funny as his standup routines, but it sure is great writing.

Do you think that crime is related to economic deprivation and to what extent do you think crime authors reflect this?

Economic deprivation is an important element in crime. I think the best crime writers always reflect the political and economic situation to some degree. Pelecanos has been taking on race relations and poverty in D.C. for many years. Mosley does this too. Stieg Larsson looked at right wing politics and crimes against women in his trilogy. Stuart Neville looks at the repercussions of the troubles between Ireland and England. Woodrell sheds light on the consequences of poverty in Missouri–where an entire society has been turned into one giant meth lab.

Lehane and Connelly have important messages in all of their books. Gillian Flynn looks at dysfunctional families. Megan Abbott and Laura Lippman, among others, are concerned with the treatment of women across the decades of the 20th century. I could go on forever. But the best crime fiction functions in the same way the best so-called literary fiction does by shining a light on what makes us act in the ways we do. And it is often related to poverty. Other than psychosis, poverty must be the biggest factor in the commission of crimes.

Any book that has no larger goal than entertainment, in any genre, is only a fast beach read to me. I feel the same way about movies. I am almost never there solely to be entertained.

Elias Canetti commented that 'Paranoia is an illness of power'. When you think of rulers and the exploitation of power how true do you think his observation is and in what ways does it expose the legitimisation of crime by those in authority?

I think the seeds for paranoia would have to be already in place for this to occur. If we look at the American presidents as an example, Richard Nixon comes immediately to mind. He exhibited paranoid tendencies from his earliest years in politics. It reached a crescendo during Watergate when he felt entitled to do whatever was necessary to hold onto power. LBJ acted similarly, testing people's loyalty constantly, even in his years as leader of the Senate. Nearly all dictators seem to exhibit such tendencies: Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, Castro, Saddam, Kim Jong -il. Democratic elections help but do not solve this problem.

Plato said in Book 9 of THE REPUBLIC that tyrants have no control over their emotions so they project their bad impulses onto others and then punish them for it. English kings such as Richard 3 and Elizabeth 1 saw plots all around them. The more isolated political leaders allow themselves to become, the more likely such latent, perhaps, tendencies are to arise.

I think people in power begin to believe that only they understand the circumstances and only they can lead the country effectively so they do what they feel they need to to maintain power. Recently, I think Vice President Cheney was perhaps more paranoid after 9-11 than President Bush and as the stronger personality set the country on a course he believed was necessary.

On a lesser stage, you see such behavior in the workplace and in the home as well. A paranoid supervisor can wreak havoc on a workplace and a parent on a home.

Tell us about your novels.

I have two unpublished novels. The first one was based on a short story called Raising the Dead. It is the story of a photographer who hasn't achieved the success she'd hope for and how she goes about achieving that elusive goal. It takes place in Detroit and deals with the current situation here–the poverty, the animosity between black and white, the failure of a once-great city. The second novel is about a Philadelphia woman who steals, grifts, hoards, and eventually kills, and the effect of her behavior on her family over many years.Neither novel falls solidly into crime fiction or solidly into literary fiction. I have not put the effort I need to into finding an agent and I am not sure why. I think I am past the point where such an endeavor seems worth it to me. I'd rather put my time into writing short stories where I know I have a better chance at success. I enjoyed writing the novels and do not regard it as a waste of time, but I won't do a third. I continue to tinker with them between stories. I think thirty years ago, I would have been able to find a publisher. But with the current situation, no one would know how to pitch them. And I can't seem to write a book that lands squarely in the proper place to attract interest.

Do you think that Charles Manson is guilty of incitement to murder or is there something else going on with the killings he was convicted for?

I think he must have had some potent gift for mesmerizing people to persuade seemingly normal woman to engage in such activity. Of course, you cannot overlook the times, when it was very easy to be swayed by a sense that if you did this or that, you could change society. Cults and radical groups abounded. And the war put us on the path to examining every social construct. If you read the memoirs of some of these sixties radicals, many of them red-diaper babies, you can see the angst it all produced. But in the end, I think Manson, was a megalomaniac and guilty of incitement to murder among other crimes. None of his followers would have come up with such a dire and directed action on their own. They may have bombed banks, draft headquarters or post offices but not tortured people in suburban houses. For a good look at this phenomenon, read Philip Roth's AMERICAN PASTORAL or Carol Shields' UNLESS. It was not so hard to persuade vulnerable children to engage in destructive acts.

Forgotten Books has been a feature on your blog for almost three years now. Do you think it has served much of a purpose in drawing attention to older books?

I am not sure. What is has done, at the very least, is draw a group of people together in talking about these books. Books that often have languished on dusty used bookstore or flea market shelves for years. And it has also introduced some new writers to the readers of the blog. Stuart Neville did a book review just as his first book was debuting here. I am not saying it sold any books for him, but it told a few people that he had a book coming out.

It has introduced me to the many people who I've gone to for reviews. Hundreds of them, in fact, and very few have refused to do a review. In the beginning I was shocked at how few people turned me down. Laura Lippman, Ken Bruen and Sandra Scoppettone did reviews in the first few weeks. I think all of us have a book we want people to know about. A book we believe is unjustly forgotten or was neglected on publication. I am appreciative of the support of the people who do this every week. Bill Crider has not missed a single week and several others are right behind. And I am also appreciative of Jeff Pierce on THE RAP SHEET who has done this project along with me until recently.

In many ways, we have access to these books more now than ever through online resources, but in other ways, all but a few of us ignore them.

Thank you Patti for giving a revealing and insightful interview.

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Doc Noir

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Anthony Neil Smith otherwise known as Doc Noir is one hell of a writer, who is also the Director of Creative Writing Associate Professor at Southwest Minnesota State University.

He writes fast paced crime fiction that leaves his rivals in the shade.

You may know him as the editor of Plots With Guns.

His novels have put Minnesota on the map with Noir.

His latest novel 'Hogdoggin' is out.

He met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about real crime and gun culture.

Do you think that Minnesota lends itself to a particular style of crime writing?

To be fair, I haven't really read a lot of Minnesota crime fiction, and the one or two books I have read don't really have much local flavor.  I've only been in Minnesota for six years, so I'm really more familiar with the Southern fiction of my home state, Mississippi.

However, I guess I was first exposed to the idea of Minnesota crime fiction through the movie FARGO.  And the tone of that seems to still fit, I think, especially if you're looking at that world as an outsider like Steve Buscemi's character was.  A bit of the absurd mixed with a dark underbelly.  Yeah.  But the Minnesotans don't much like to talk about the underbelly, thank you.

"Minnesota Nice" was a concept I'd been warned about–surface politeness that repressed what people really thought.  But right away, here in the Southwest part of the state anyway, I was greeted a general sort of unfriendliness.  That sucks in a neighbor or plumber, yeah, but as possible characters for noir?  Gold mine.

Also, my slice of Minnesota is in farm country.  Very rural.  And one thing I've seen from Mississippi to Minnesota is that rural is rural.  A lot of the same attitudes.  Accents might change, weather might be worlds apart, but still more similarities than differences.

You see a lot of attention given to Scandinavian crime fiction right now, and I really do love the atmosphere from writers like Jo Nesbo and Henning Mankell–showing us harsh people, withdrawn.  You'd think that would translate easily to Minnesota which is full of

Scandinavians and cold weather.  But for some reason it doesn't quite make it.

Henning Mankell is known for his political views, being a strong opponent of the Vietnam war, South African apartheid and Portugal's colonial war in Mozambique. To what extent do you think these views are reflected in the stark and brilliant figure of Wallander?

I don't know much about Mankell.  I've just read a few Wallader books and liked them okay.  But I guess thinking of the books in a political way didn't occur to me.  Could be that's a blind spot for me.  I like to read novels where it's harder to tell where the author comes down on the political spectrum.  Even better if over several books he or she is a bit of a wild card.  I hear Ellroy call himself a conservative and do a double-take.  Really, you can be a conservative and say that?  Act like that?  Same with Ted Nugent, Andrew Sullivan, Stephen Hunter, for example.  I like the politicians who surprise me, make me think.  And, you know, being opposed to bad stuff, that's great and all, but…hey, I don't like war either.  But I won't oppose them all on principle.  Lots of gray areas.

When you read about real crime do you find it more shocking than the events in crime fiction and do you think crime fiction can be too realistic?

I've never read crime fiction that feels as real as real life crime, no.  And I don't think we should ever stop striving for that realistic feel in crime movies or novels, but we should also remember that a lot of real life crime lacks the sort of drama that fiction delivers.  A lot of crimes in real life are, well, usually inexplicable moments where people who know each other do terrible things out of a strong emotional jolt.  The majority, I'd say.  And yet whenever I hear of real life crime stories, they get me in the gut.

For example, this case in Massachusetts of the home invasion, where the two assholes tortured the family, demanded the mother drive them to the bank to withdraw money, then raped and murdered the mother and daughters while the dad, tied up in the basement, escaped just as the assholes set the house on fire.  That really gets to you.  Shit.  But as a work of crime fiction?  The closest thing I can think of to this is FUNNY GAMES, which has a lot of craft to it (I'm not saying it's a good movie.  Not that keen on it).  There's story.  There's drama in that we see the movement of the story from more than just the outside.  There's even a sick dark humor and metafictional element to it all. We experience it differently than we experience stories of real crime.  Maybe that's what crime fiction's real power is–showing us crime from the inside-out.  But it will always feel like art compared to true crime or news reports.  That's because the artists, even when trying to show shocking crime and violence, are still crafting art, right?  Can reality be art? Maybe accidentally.

Crime fiction needs to reach for the realism, sure, but I don't think it can ever feel the same as how we experience real crime stories when they're told to us.  And they don't need to.  Crime fiction needs to serve a different purpose.

Tell us about your latest novel.

HOGDOGGIN' was the most recent, from the Summer of 09.  It was a sequel, kind of, to YELLOW MEDICINE, which took my characters Billy Lafitte and Special Agent Rome to their psychological extremes (and in Billy's case, physical).  Bad cop Billy somehow got away from Pale Falls and ended up as enforcer for a small motorcycle gang led by a guy named Steel God.  Rome used Lafitte's family as bait to draw him out into the open.  And then shit got wild.

I have finished two more since then, which I think will go out to publishers under pen names due to my crappy sales record under my own.  The first, I can't tell you about because we're keeping the pseudonym secret.  But the other I can tell you is a thriller concerning the disappearence of young Somali men from the Twin Cities.  About twenty of them vanished, only to end up back in Somalia fighting for the Muslim extremists over there.  Something about that really got to me, and since our small rural town west of the Cities has a pretty decent-sized population of Somalis, I imagined what would happen if one of these small town guys became one of those converts, and what the local cop assigned to the case would do about it.  The action shifts back and forth from the search for answers in Minnesota, and the action on the ground in Somalia.

After that, I've got another idea I'm exploring right now, and since I've got a one-semester sabbatical this winter, I'm looking forward to jumping back into the pool.  I like it when I'm working on a novel.  It seems I only ever take a month or two off from writing one.  This time, I'm thinking a few weeks.

There is a definite distinction between various types of crimes, for example between robbery and serial killing. What psychological extremes do you think drive men down criminal paths that many people find impossible to comprehend?

You know, I think a lot of it goes back to a sense of entitlement.  Part of a larger, narcissistic personality disorder, maybe.  Take selfishness to the extreme.  We see plenty of sociopaths around, but they're not all killers. Many are just manipulators, able to get what they want through emotional blackmail, emotional play-acting, passive-aggressive suggestion (I'm not an expert, though.  I'm just pulling this out of my ass as I see it). Never taking responsibility, always ready to pace the blame elsewhere.  So the next step, taking it into the criminal world, is to see others' lives and property as belonging to them to do as they please.

Even the most heated decisions to kill or maim or steal, we see, always come back to the perpetrator not taking responsibility.  It was a temporary fugue state, or insanity, or he or she wasn't thinking straight because, after all, it was the cheating spouse/partner's fault, or or or…you know.  I think of those kids (allegedly) who broke into celebrities' homes, stole their stuff, paraded it online, and then got a fucking TV show out of the deal.

Charles Baxter talks about something similar in Burning Down the House, about "Dysfunctional Narratives", starting with Nixon's Watergate denials/justifications/blame game, that ended up defining how we communicate in contemporary American culture.  No one taking responsibility.  I'm paraphrasing here, but Baxter says something along the lines of us losing the story of ourselves.  Losing our way.  And in todays criminals, you see this writ large.

Do you think that crime writing overlaps with horror?

It should, I think.  In the best instances, especially with the "suspense" category, which Hitchcock learned to do very well by the time he got to PSYCHO.  Yeah, crime, which is the thing that scares us all more than zombies, should be horrifying.

So that's why Agatha Christie is so hard to read.  No horror.  Too much tea.

I'm not so sure I like the overlapping of supernatural horror with crime fiction, though.  In those cases it's a bit hard to believe.  I can take a psychological fake out, but not an actual supernatural connection.  But then again, I'm sure there are some books out there that would prove me very wrong.

I like zombies as much as the next weirdo, and I enjoyed Anne Rice's rock star Lestat novel, and I like some of Lansdale's horror stuff, and some King, and so on.  And the feel of those books can be a lot like crime fiction.  So my objection is more along the lines of having a series detective keep stumbling over the supernatural every time out.  Hell, I tried to do that when I was eleven years old–my "cajun detective" named Mason Jane was always finding out it was a ghost or some shit.  Of course, those were handwritten, never published.  I could've cashed in!

Horror and crime should go hand in hand, and I'm glad to see it does in the hands of Sean Doolittle, John Rector, Stephen Graham Jones, Scott Phillips, Vicki Hendricks, Lansdale, Allan Guthrie, Ray Banks, Tara French, Sara Gran, wow, that's a lot of fucking names right there.

What do you think's wrong with the publishing industry today?

Not much.

I mean, yes, you've got bean counters who won't publish mid-list stuff, thus making the expectations for everything they do publish unrealistic.  But small or indie presses could take up the slack.  Except that it's hard to make money publishing…even if you were to do it like the indie record labels, it's a different product…

You know, I guess that's all way above my head.  I'm not a businessman.  I want to write stories, get paid for them, and have the company who paid for the stories to do its damnedest to get them into the hands of the right readers.  I don't really care what format that is, either.  Although I do think paperbacks are better technology than a Kindle, and that hardbacks are way way way overpriced and not a good determination of an author's selling ability until he or she becomes pretty well known.

But if someone offered me a juicy hardcover deal, I'd take it.  So no matter what I think is wrong with the industry, I'm pretty sure I'd fuck it if it was putting out.

What is the most disturbing thing you have ever experienced?

I was on a panel once called "Guys with Guns" or something like that, and we were talking about noir fiction when a woman on the front row, a British writer of mysteries (not my favorites, I'll tell you that), asked, "Have any of you ever been on the wrong end of a gun?"  And of course, no one on the panel had, so she held her nose high and said, "Well, I have, down in the blah blah jungle at the hands of the blah blahs…" Of course, trying to upstage us, make us feel as if we really didn't know what we were talking about.

But fuck that.  No, I've never been on the wrong end of a gun.  But I've been afraid for my life.  I've lost people in my life, I've had some bad bad luck, even though I was raised upper middle class and didn't get into a lot of trouble.  But yeah, I've experienced some disturbing shit, but I don't want to talk about it.  I just…don't think it does any good.

Do you think it's possible to write a made for film novel and if so how does it differ to other novels?

It would be short.

The best TV shows, like THE SHIELD, for instance, feel like a good novel.  But a two hour movie?  Feels like a short story, at least to me.  Very different experiences.

To write one for film, you have to be as objective as possible, not a lot of character thoughts or description.  It just has to move.  And it has to have style.

Personally, I'd love to see more adaptations made into completely new stories, like THE HUNTER becoming POINT BLANK, or the way the Coen Brothers made MILLERS CROSSING almost like a Hammett novel, or how Tarantino's PULP FICTION was the best adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel ever, even without it being Based on an Elmore Leonard novel (and JACKIE BROWN was not that good of one, I'll say).

TV is where you can make novel-like stories shine.

Do you think gun culture still informs the American psyche and if so how do you think it links into men's perceptions of themselves?

Yes, yes I think it does.  I think it links into men's perceptions by having us buy into the fact that we're the masters of our own fate.  A big individualist streak.  We protect our households and our families, not the government.  The government's in a building across town.  That won't do.

So, really, it's life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness all balled into a 15-shot clip.  Is a lot of it pure psychological delusion?  Probably.  But a gun can end a life, save a life, all at the same time.  It makes a man feel safe first, powerful second.

Especially out here in the big, wide, empty Midwest.  Guns are like muscle cars.  Awesome machines in the right hands, deadly if you fuck around with them.  Cool.

Thank you Neil for giving a revealing and engaging interview.

 

Doc Noir's office hours are posted here.

And get your copy of one of Doc Noir's new novels, 'Choke On Your Lies,' on Kindle at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk, or on NOOKbook at Barnes & Noble.

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Lynn Alexander

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Lynn Alexander created Full Of Crow and stormed the internet with her vision and artistic insight.

She is a great writer and a great editor.

Her unflagging efforts have supported many online writers and built a mini-Empire.

She is a highly energised force on the net who knows her literature and art.

She is also a great poet.

Lynn met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about Royalty and what inspires her.

If you had to pretend you were a Royalist in order to survive how would you need to distort your character to carry it off?

What an odd question. I would probably go into a paranoid panic, hiding my Sex Pistols and Morrissey. In this hypothetical, am I adapting to an installed monarchy, or am I fighting for one? I assume that if they have the power to kill me for dissent that it is in place and I am trying to appear loyal, maybe so I can get cake. Maybe I would sell "I Heart The Queen" t-shirts at flea markets, get a new tattoo.

One of the reasons we beat Brit ass way back was because we here in America have a thing with Kings-although we are certainly used to the senseless squandering of the public purse. We want to at least pretend that we have a participatory democracy and we want to pretend that we are engaged in the process. If I had to pretend I was a Royalist to survive, it would indeed be difficult because I am about as far away from being desirous of a monarchal-fascist system as you can get because in general any model where people are controlled by an entitled power elite seems a step in the wrong direction.

I suppose there is a difference between acceptance, something we all do quite readily, and actively campaigning for it or participating in it. If I had to be convincing, like to secure confidence, I would most definitely start my ruse with the purchase of a fashionable hat.

You're given an unlimited sum of money to buy an obscenely fashionable hat and indulge a secret vice, what is the vice and what do you do if the proviso is you have to shock everyone you know and how do you do it?

First, the obscenely fashionable hat would be made from the exhumed body hairs of Jim Morrison. A few would be shocked by that.

But that isn't enough and I want to use the unlimited money for something cool… So let me set up what happens after I get said hat:

We organize the biggest gathering ever, taking care of the logistics- think "Burning Man" or Woodstock, only in the forest. "Building Woman" maybe, where people construct giant vaginas from branches and re-enact their births and honor the earth mother. Whatever. Everyone is naked, natural, no money or clothing or ipods or cell phones. People come as they are for as long as they want. We take care of basic needs, but we explain that their laws and obligations do not apply in this temporary Utopia. We tell them that we don't take their visa cards or want to hear about Facebook. If they don't like dinner, they can grab some vegetables and go squat in a corner and make something else. People gotta be chill.

In the center, we erect a circular wall that is wide enough to walk along, perpetually, around. It is too high for anyone on the ground to see who is up there. A helicopter brings ten individuals who are dropped off without having their identities revealed to the crowd. I know who they are. Soon, they know who they are. Some are puzzled, some are happy. One begs to leave.

We spend time together, but every few hours we walk around the circle ledge and listen to what is going on outside. We heckle and holler poetry and stuff. Then I kick one out.

Their identity is known when they emerge, but they have done nothing to be ashamed of. The others can attest to that.

The one who remains is the one who wanted most to leave, and I present the choice to stay or go. The person stays, and now everyone wants to know what is going on in there.

The shocking part is the speculation. Are we doing drugs, drinking, hallucinating, having sex, what is going on? Why the party, why the wall? People imagine things that are crazier than what I can devise, the crowd environment fuels rumors. We have odd things delivered. They know I am wearing a hat made from man hair. An earnest hipster from San Francisco wants to make a documentary but he doesn't have his flip camera and he's naked. I give cryptic answers that he has to remember and they become distorted when he repeats them. Like that game- "Telephone".

The myth becomes more interesting than the truth, which is that mostly we are inside playing scrabble and drinking tea.

I never tell anyone who this person is, in two days I get the helicopter to carry them away, and we continue the party until everyone has enough and misses their clothing and ipods and cell phones and houses. Eventually, only a handful of people are left and they are invited to live in the fortress, which we keep. They become my friends, tribe, family, the Cult of The Twig Vagina Festival. We are described in Wikepedia. Some of the content gets disputed.

Do you think that inasmuch as it is arguable that fucking is done naked so is killing?

No. Clothing is inconvenient. In the one case, it is inconvenient to have it on. In the other, it would be inconvenient to stop and take it off.

Fucking is a means to a connected humanity, killing is the product of it breaking down. To me, killing should be the result of being faced by specific circumstances, such as being unable to defend one's own life without resorting to lethal means. I don't buy the argument that humans are meant to kill for territory or resources or even necessarily for food- although that is another question.

Just as clothing renders us less animal, being naked brings us closer to nature, so killing and clothing seem more consistent.

The tarantula is a conditional pacifist. They seem to have resolved this issue to their satisfaction.

Fucking is nature's consolation prize for having to walk around with the spectre of mortality. We use it to perpetuate ourselves, to feel infinite, to distract us, the temporary antidote to the death chant. It is worthy of our nudity.

If you argue that capitalism has destroyed the social fabric with competition, do you think that real anarchy as exemplified by Kropotkin and based on co-operation is a valid social model or is it no longer workable?

I would love to get into anarchism and Kropotkin with you but find it hard at this point in my mental evolution to be succinct, as you'll see.

When I talk about anarchism, I generally focus on the relationship between authority and PERSONAL autonomy, even beyond social liberalism, with the elective use of empowered systems in place to intervene in specific ways, namely on matters of human rights or where it is practically warranted by scope.

The latter is often the basis for the justification of authority, things like disaster relief and national security, these are often areas of contention as we can agree quite readily on many of the personal freedom matters. When it comes to the justification of the state because of scope or complexity, it becomes harder to apply extreme philosophies. Some anarchists do not necessarily view their beliefs in terms of absolutes- but rather see power on a continuum where authority is challenged, metered by default, and in need of defense as necessary when rights of groups are competing.

For example- your right to rape might necessarily be curtailed by an authority because I have the right to be protected from rape. The "state" has a specific role that we can defend when pushed. That is different than saying "let's not have any laws and burn shit!". Anarchism suffers from some bad p.r. as she is often championed by people who care more about their t-shirt slogans. Do we really want absolute chaos? My fear is that children would suffer the most in such a scenario. And I don't think that chaos is what we mean, but rather a different relationship with power and control.

I don't argue that capitalist competition has destroyed the social fabric, as I don't see us as "destroyed", I'm not quite to that level of cynicism yet. I don't know that competition is necessarily the key issue, nor do I think it can be practically eradicated in favor of a cooperative or communal model. In many models that aimed to try, we saw a shift to corruption where the common people were the losers and a new elite took the place of the old. Recall how the descamisado became serf, liberators became monarchs.

What often emerges is an oppressive hold on individuals, replete with exploitation, in the name of "state" that makes it hard to reconcile anarchism with communism. I find it interesting when people try and would love to hear more vigorous debate on this.

A simple way to explain the problem is by example: you can't force me to grow apples in the name of social cooperation without having a pretty strong boot on my neck. And if I spend the day picking apples while your brother and friends who do you favors stand around, eventually I will lose my motivation and will not see you as my ally but as my enemy. Is that about competition, or the way power corrupts? So the power itself is the issue, and we give up far too much.

Beyond the corruption, the problem with a detached state is that it cannot help but control from afar and with broad strokes, mixing good intentions with social controls that have no merit, a model of authority with control being exerted from the top down, something that might appease the hippie side of my nature because it has the power to redistribute resources to solve problems like poverty but sets off the tyranny alarms. This is the crazy-making area for many of us, myself included.

Do you think that esotericism allows women more scope for liberty?

Not necessarily, because the ultimate goal of liberty is to render itself an unnecessary pursuit. Liberty will just be, without a fight, a state of freedom that transcends that constant challenge. As a woman I also understand that this won't happen, because the ability to sit back and consider it a battle won is a privileged perspective that we don't experience.

"Scope", though, is achieved through maximum universality, something that seems at odds with esotericism, despite the draw of comfort, insulation. We need some security in our nurturing of self, but when you say "more scope for liberty" I think that is achieved through engagement across the broadest of levels, looking outward, not inward, being open and thereby exposing ourselves on a bigger scale. Scope is achieved through boldness, forcing others to reckon and acknowledge, and I think esotericism can involve barriers, or require deciphering that makes dialogue less accessible. You might have freedom in your bedroom or another safe place, but you are hiding, and liberty requires us to confront both the power and shame that makes hiding seem so compulsory.

What are your darkest thoughts?

My darkest thoughts. I'll pass on a dramatic answer to this because they are quite cliche'. I don't suffer with much originality.

 I think many of us think about death, but are relieved to have moved beyond the obsessive regard we once gave the subject. I had to learn that thoughts are just thoughts, our fantasies and desires don't make us terrible people, our impulses can be controlled, we learn when we get older to exert more control. Sometimes we even have to laugh about it.

When my mother was dying, she made a joke about ordering a pizza and not being dead before it arrived. Sure, that's sick, but that was how I was brought up. That is how we cope with "dark thoughts".

Part of how we process is to learn to live with them, give them a chair at the table. There are aspects that we often come to deny for all kinds of reasons- dignity, shame, guilt. I deny my share. This year, I have had a few things pop up again, like trauma flare-ups. And it sucked.

We all have experiences that stay with us and in aggregate form that layer, that deeply painful place. My way has been to tread with detachment and safety through art, through fiction, and when possible to diffuse pain by laughing about it.

Who has had the deepest influence on your life and why?

The person who has had the most influence on me was my mother, because I wanted to see myself through her eyes, her expectations, her standards- and not my own. That wasn't her fault, it was just the way that I responded. My father's love was unconditional and available, he believed that it should be that way. But my mother was a person who always had people desirous of her attention and time, she was brilliant and beautiful and people wanted to be close to her, but it was something that had to be earned.

To this day, I feel insecure in many of my relationships, some going back decades, like my worth is subject to constant evaluation, renewable terms. This explains why I work very hard, people always ask when I sleep. I am not driven to be better because it makes me happy, I am driven to things because I don't ever feel like I am ok as I am. It's a rather pathetic mindset. You don't rest, you give, trying to earn your keep with people because you enjoy having them around and want them to feel the same way.

Do you think that since modern women have rebelled against the patriarchal influence exerted on them they are trying to free themselves from the ways their mothers sold them out?

I think there is tension between what many call the different waves of feminism, but it is important to remember context. In many ways our mothers paved the way and we should remember that, although I believe that critical reflection is important. We have to appreciate what was accomplished but we also have to evolve, and we do this by criticism. We discuss the differences a lot in our circles, and I think some key areas that have emerged in modern feminism include more understanding of diversity among women, privilege, and changes in the way we view the response to patriarchy. I rarely use the word patriarchy, because I want to focus on power dynamics as human experiences, and move away from competing "teams", which is not to say that these are not very real struggles that need to be defined.

Do we feel sold out, and are we responding? Well, it depends on how you look at it. One problem when we look at oppression is the tendency to either adopt the mindset of the oppressor resulting in internalized self loathing, and lateral oppression where we begin to lash out against our own. I am hopeful that we are dealing with that more now, or at least taking a close look at this dynamic and how it plays out. We can see how it played out for our mothers.

Another problem is the quite invalidating tendency to approach equality with emulation. I am equal to a man, and to show this I will adopt stereotypical masculine behaviors and rally against what is viewed as overtly female? What's that about, really? I don't have penis envy, I want pay equity. I don't give a shit about wearing your suits.

We should make decisions based on need, desire, choice- not because we feel that equality is achieved by either copying "typical male traits" or worse- by hating them. We can acknowledge privilege, sure, but we shouldn't seek to become oppressors as a response to victimization, that is not empowerment, that is a cycle we need to avoid. If I wear something sexy because I want to, you should not assume that it is to please you. Many women however feel that we are not capable of choosing "sexy" for ourselves, and I believe that we are. I also don't want to feel pressured to be something I am not to meet expectations and I hate when I see us doing that. This is about self determination though, not about the length of a skirt and I think that we forget that as we latch onto symbols that make it easier to lash out at each other.

That is why I often talk about "covalidity", that we need to move away from defined gender expectations and also avoid the thought trap that we are "supposed to" eradicate lipstick and burn our bras. I am all about eradicating "should thinking".

That is part of asserting ourselves, taking that ownership of our lives and our own rules. There shouldn't be "bad feminists", and to impose rigidity is to really carry the torch for misogyny, instead of men telling you what to do you now have other women telling you what is right or wrong for you- and that doesn't work for me. That is very "first wave".

In my "mother's feminism" the lateral oppression-women against women- often played out in a distrust of other women and the assumption that any woman wearing lipstick MUST be doing it to please men, the result of conditioning, and the way to rebel was to cast it aside. If you recall, many feminists spoke out against books, films, calling for censorship of ideas because of how women were portrayed in the arts. Censorship is dangerous ground. Talk about how women are portrayed, sure, but don't get into silencing others.

When you ask if our mothers sold us out, this is what comes to mind, the way many feminist "leaders" not only sold out women as mindless idiots to be protected from books, told what to do, but also the new "rules" about how we should behave that created dilemmas. i.e. If I decide to stay home with my children, I am "oppressed" as opposed to an empowered woman making an intelligent decision about parenting, perhaps in partnership with other caregivers.

Ideally, we learn to act from self determination, mindful of the "male gaze" but with the autonomy to define our own sense of beauty, vocation, parenting roles, etc. Ideally, we can protect ourselves from exploitation but have the autonomy to make decisions about our bodies. Ideally, we can trust one another to be experts of our home and professional lives, and move away from making conclusions about the motives of other women. Live and let live.

Do you think education hides scars or exposes them?

I think most of the time, earnest education that is sought rather than received exposes them.  Exposure makes us more mindful, more empathetic. Exposure shines that necessary light, brings us closer to deciphering things, the more access to information- the better we usually are.

In some cases, education is the mask of propaganda and distortion, and so access is key to transparency.

How has Ted Hughes influenced you and Full Of Crow?

Full Of Crow and Ted Hughes. Well, Ted Hughes once said "a crow would become symbolic in any author's hands."

The Crow of Hughes is mythic of course, a reflection of many themes from religion to natural survivalism. Crow is ego, even as he is a "black little nothing". Crow is an embodiment of something uniquely stubborn, strong and yet- wretched.

As many in small press know, I started Full Of Crow with Aleathia Drehmer, who edited the first few poetry issues. Aleathia and I had some discussions not only about poetry but crows- not only the Crow of Hughes, but crows as beautiful special birds: intelligent, misunderstood animals. It was a discussion about the mythic crow, defiant against the sun, rendered black- "Full Of Crow" that became the title of this new project. That was almost two years ago, and a lot has changed since then. I think the symbolism of the crow is important and enduring, and fascinating.

I have crows on my arm, in ink, in different stages: solitude, reflection, flight, vanishing… these are very much phases of the poet's work…"full of crow" constitutes a sentiment regarding the need to be bold and strong even when it seems foolish.  We poets are all flying against the sun, we do so because we must.

Thank you Lynn for giving a brilliant and honest interview.

Lynn links:

My web link is http://www.lynn-alexander.com and the online Full of Crow is http://www.fullofcrow.com.  The "dot org" is http://www.fullofcrowpress.org.

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Jodi MacArthur

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If you like horror fiction you'll like Jodi MacArthur. She writes dark layered narratives that draw the reader in with an efficacy and assuredness that is the sign of someone in control of their genre.

She uses mythology and a clever psychological subtext to evoke her readers' fears.

She does it all with a deft touch and skill and she keeps doing it.

She has written two novels, 'Xscents' and 'Devil's Eye'.

If my opinion counts for anything she will be a household name.

She met me at The Slaughterhouse where we nailed a beating heart to the inside of a box and played pool with some eyeballs.

Then we talked about insects and fiction.

Do you think crime and horror fiction are more closely related than people realise?

Both crime and horror appeal to the dark side of humanity. It's important to recognize the realities of our personal demons. And both of these do the job safely within the confines of a book. Horror is an emotion. Crime is an action. I think each are very defined, but are often blended.

With crime fiction we get to go over the edge and do whatever it takes to get what we want. We get that mad adrenalin rush when the jewel thief overcomes obstacles and the law to get that jewel. But in the end, he always loses, when we make ourselves more important than anything or anyone else, what we are stalking will stalk and consume us. It never ever ends well.  With crime there is a building up (how a thief steals a jewel and gets away with it) or a descent (the law catching the jewel thief). A jewel heist is exciting, but you won't experience the emotion of horror when the alarm bell goes off.

Its not horror until it's personal. We'd call horror a person chained to the wall in a doorless room being devoured limb from limb by a beast with sharp curved teeth, unless you are Roman in the first or second century. You'd call that an entertaining sports event. However, if a owl hooted three times in the dead of night a Roman might take it as a curse of the gods and pass out from fright, while we'd roll over in our beds and snore. So horror really in truly is taking societal and personal fears and turning it on its head.

So how do we mend the two together to get a good crime (a law that has been broken)/horror (the psychology or motivation behind the crime) story? True life bites harder than fiction. Let me tell you a personal story.

In my early twenties, I managed a low income housing complex. Right before I started, a woman had stabbed her husband in the stomach with a butcher knife. She was taken to the crazy house. The husband, after a week or two in the hospital, moved in with some friends. And their children, both under the age of five, went to Child Protective Services. We can look at that and say, huh, weird. A crime was committed, but you can't call that horror.

Nobody paid the rent. Neither party was reachable. I started the eviction process. Weeks later. The day before the officer brought the eviction warrant, the husband showed up with a bunch of guys and a big van. They removed several items from the duplex. I talked with the husband about the eviction. He was well dressed, well spoken, and charming as ever. He told me he had no money to pay the rent, and that he didn't care about anything inside. He said to trash it and gave me the address, where I could contact him. (Which I knew was a fake address, but what can you do?

The next day, what I saw when we entered the apartment and began to dig around was just surreal. It was unspeakable. The children's bedrooms had locks. Urine and faeces were in the corners, smeared on the walls. Cardboard sat in the windows. A few toys and mattresses lied on the floor.

The master bedroom was covered in wall to wall pornography: magazines, photos, movies. Inches of it. (Later we rented a giant dumpster and actually shovelled it out the window.) The bathroom was littered with used condoms and sex toys. The smell? Indescribable.

This is bad, right? A person doesn't have to be a detective to put two and two together. The children had been starved and abused. How? Every which way those kind of perverts do it (I spoke with social services later on).

So let's come back to the original crime. Wifey stabs Mr. Prince Pervert Pedophile Charming in the gut with a butcher knife.

Why was she with him? Why did she stay? And what motivated her to try to kill the SOB? A normal person would think:

A: She was a victim from the start. A kind of person a man like that picks out. He beats her into submission, emotionally, physically, mentally. Fear, self pity keep her there. She turns a blind eye to the abuse her children suffer. Finally, the time bombed ticked and she stabbed him.

B: She was in on it, a fellow perpetrator. Women and men are equally cold hearted and/or narcissistic. How many cases have you heard of kidnap, rape, and murder with a woman/man team? One of my sisters was almost abducted by a man/woman team. I saw it with my own eyes. It happens. In that case, perhaps this woman had been planning on gutting him for months? Perhaps they argued? Perhaps there was a jealousy factor?

But really, who knows right?

The downstairs was trashed and nasty in general. I was pretty shaken. But nothing prepared me for the coat closet.

When we opened the door. It was dark and empty. The pull light didn't work. The door locked from the INSIDE. We saw something on the walls. Got a flashlight. Scribbled in red crayon over and over everywhere on the walls were words. A simple sentence. This simple sentence has haunted me ever since.

"Amy is broken on the inside".

Amy was the name of the woman who had stabbed her husband in the gut with a butcher knife.

Bam. There. Ladies and Gentleman of the jury, we have horror.

She was crazy. Psychotic. Multiple personality? Or (more politely and politically correct) Dissociative Identity Disorder? Schizophrenic? Who knows. Given a cool hearted, charming man like her husband and a psycho like her, most likely they worked as a team. The horror those little children went through is just unimaginable.

So is crime and horror the same? No. But do they go together? If you want to be scared shitless- hell, yes.

What are your views on President Obama and the last decades of American politics?

Are we still talking about crime and horror? If so, perhaps we should move to the moon where I shall reign as goddess. If that isn't an option, then my personal views are these: Government was created to protect the people, not to control the people – to protect people from harm, abuse, fraud etc, not to protect people from themselves.  I believe in individual responsibility. I believe in giving to others out of kindness and generosity, not by force from the authorities. I believe the human spirit in order to flourish needs liberation and the freedom to make decisions and suffer consequences. If you don't wear a seat belt, you can accept the risk that in an accident you might fly out the windshield and be decapitated. Should it be a law to wear a seat belt? If we are at the point of making stupidity laws for stupid people, the battle was lost long ago. We need the freedom to be stupid, as well as the freedom to be intelligent.

President Obama? No fucking comment.

What fascinates you about insects and are you going to be writing about them?

Their long spindly legs, the light hum of a wing, pinchers, polkadots, teeny tiny eyeballs… what is there not to be fascinated with? I have many memories with bugs, or critters in general. My earliest memory was at my grandmother's. I had awakened at dawn due to nightmares. I wandered out of my room, sat down at the kitchen table and laid my cheek on its cool surface. I felt a tickle on my leg. I remember scratching it, then feeling more tickles over my thighs, ankles, stomach… I drew back from the table and to my horror found myself covered in hundreds! (dozens) of baby spiders. The egg sack had just hatched. I remember trying to scream, and not being able to breathe. When I finally did let out that yowl everyone in the house thought surely someone had murdered JoJo in the kitchen.

Ants. Ants fascinate me. And I'm not the first. There are references back in some of the earliest writings, fables, the bible, the Koran. Through the centuries their colonies/societies have intrigued mankind. Of course, one of the ways they communicate is through pheromones or scents they leave. This summer I researched the human sense of scent, and was fascinated to find that we ourselves emit different pheromones that people react to emotionally and physically as much as they would with body language or vocal communications. And yes, this includes sexual attraction. We talk about visual physical attraction but it seems we can be just as sexually attracted to someone based on his or her pheromones (or animal attraction). It was their scent you most likely noticed first. If you believe in love at first sight, then I'd suggest love at first scent (and guys I'm not talking about farts, so please don't go fart at your potential romantic interests or your significant other for that matter). To get your man in the mood, a woman might light a pumpkin scented candle (essential oils) or dab on lavender. Do both at the same time for extra fun. For women, surprisingly, the smell of cucumbers and good & plenty candies create the strongest arousal. Licorice does it also for both guys and girls. Anti arousals: cherries, men colognes, and charcoal barbecued meat.

ANYWAYS, after a discussion with Jason Michel earlier in the year, I got to thinking about cautionary tales (fables and fairytales), where they come from, how they are formed. How people, religion, societies take a story and twist it from the author's original intention, and re-spin it based on their own spiritual/political beliefs. People will do amazingly heroic or horrific acts for what they believe in. I wrote an article on it for a zine that had asked for some nonfic work. It was rejected because of form & style. Blah. Blah.  They wanted formula. Which I suck at.

An idea occurred while writing the paper to write my own fable about ants, then create a society which valued the story (which occurs in the village of Secretos, fictionally located in the northern mountains of Peru). Throw in some power hungry mongrels, coca fields (which I did extensive research on as well– cool plant!) thug wars, underground tunnels and factories, chained men running on hamster wheels, lust in a bottle (human pheromones mixed with botanical essential oils), warrior women in leather, a pied piper in a cat suit, a feverish priest declaring the fable a prophecy, and you've got yourself a real weird story that made itself into a novel over the last couple months.

So yeah, I wrote about ants.

Do you think people only wake from a dream when it becomes a nightmare?

I had a dream once that I was at my aunt's. We were sitting at her kitchen table talking about her cats and kids. She asked me about my writing, and she said she'd do whatever I needed to help me with my dream. We had steamy cups of coffee and muffins. I remember telling her, "Sandie, I had the most awful dream that you'd died and I hadn't found out for months later."

She took a sip of her coffee and said. "Oh Jo, I am dead. I've been dead for awhile."

I remember being shaken and I started looking around her home, and real life began to dawn on me. "You can't be dead, we are sitting here talking."

"This is a dream sweetheart." She grabbed my hand. "But don't worry, I'm here for you every step of the way."

I remember feeling the tug of reality, of waking up. I burst into tears and said, "I don't want to go back. I want to stay with you."

"You have too much to do, Jo. Go back. We'll catch up later." Last I remember she was giving me a huge hug and told me never to forget.

I woke up in a pile of tears and my own messy life. My aunt has been gone for a couple years now. I'd given anything to go back to the simplicity of her home and warm laughter. SO, sometimes the horror is waking from a good dream to the nightmare that is your own life.

But let's get to the heart of what you are asking. I think when we are set on a way of thinking, a life path, a belief, a religion it takes something juristic to change it, and yes, often a nightmare of sorts. You can be bouncing on your way through life, you make money, you got religion, you have wonderful relatives, the perfect spouse and your children are on the swim and dance team. Perfect. And then, one day, your child comes to you and says Grandpa has been touching him in certain places.

Thwap! (as an old Batman comic bubble might say)

What do you do? Something has been going on under the radar you hadn't seen. You have two choices: ignore it, tell your child you are sure it's nothing (so many people sacrifice their children for the sake of keeping their world the same) or follow the breadcrumbs to find more horror than you ever saw on tv or read in Stephen King book.

Problem is. There's been signs all along, for some reason (and who am I to judge?) you CHOSE not to see it. So when the shit hits the fan, it's decision time. Are you going to wake up and deal with it or are you going to fall back asleep into your perfect world? Herein, the horror lies.

Fiction is a safe place to expose and explore nightmares. To follow the paths of others who wake up, and watch what they do. Horror is so metaphorical and mimics true life. I choose to write nightmares because it also helps me deal with my own personal demons. Nothing brings me more joy than scaring the hell out of readers and making them smile at the same time. Sort of an oxymoron, but life is an oxymoron dammit!

The extremities of human psychopathology, be they war crimes or the nauseating acts of child molesters are caught deep in the throat of our collective consciousness. You say rightly that people wake up to such horrors after crafting a good life that is partly image and the revelations and ramifications that these revelations bring are too real for humanity and inhabit no fictional world. TS Eliot said 'humankind cannot bear very much reality.' Many people who have found that monster in their cellar acknowledge a lurking doubt, some body of observation where they suspended and pushed away a sense that something was wrong, why do you think people push their unconscious knowledge of these crimes away?

Oh geez. We all have our reasons don't we? Acknowledging 'these crimes' requires us to CHANGE our perception of a person, situation or a relationship. I think one of the hardest things for we as humankind to accept is change. Nothing stays as it is, even the planet doesn't hold still. It revolves, it goes through cycles, and so do we.

I heard once that the people who survived the concentration camps were not the extreme pessimists, nor the super duper happy positive thinking people, it was the people who accepted the reality of the horror of their situation but did the best with what they had. That doesn't mean they lost hope or did not make plans for the future, but it does show willingness on their part to accept change/reality.

Psychology, my dear Watson, is afoot:

Remember the story awhile back, about the family that owned an apartment complex in Austria? A family of two parents and four children. The father began molesting one of his daughters at the age of eleven, when she was eighteen he lured her into the complex's cellar. After raping and drugging her, he handcuffed and chained her in a dark room. He gave his wife (the mother) a running away letter "written" by the missing daughter. And his wife accepted it.

He kept his daughter there for twenty-four years, raping her on a consist basis. She birthed him seven children. Six lived. He burned the infant that had died (from neglect) in a kitchen oven. Some of the children he brought upstairs to his wife and said they had been dropped off on the doorstep by the missing daughter. The other children stayed with their mother in the cellar and had never seen the light of day.

Now you tell me, did the mother or siblings of this kidnapped girl ever wonder why daddy was bringing extra food to the cellar? Why he visited there so often? Did anyone ask why he was building and digging underground? Did NOBODY hear a sound, a scream, something? 

You can't go 24 years without nobody knowing nothing. Someone knew, but chose to ignore, because acknowledging the horror, the truth of the situation, was too much of this TS Elliot quote to bear.

So. Humanity not only suffers at the hands of such sickos as this man, but just as much from people refusing to acknowledge such sickos exist. Why? Because it will change our perception of how we want things to be or stay. Again, truth bites harder than fiction.

How much truth do you think it is possible to put into fiction and how do you adapt truth as a writer?

I'd like to quote King for your question. He says, "Fiction is the truth inside the lie." So let's think about that. Fiction is like one giant metaphor for the truth. So there has to be truth in the metaphor because the metaphor is the truth. If we want to empower our reader's imagination and take them on a journey, especially a dark journey, they will need to trust. And the way to build trust is to tell the truth. The way to tell the truth is to take a piece of life, say, a beautiful butterfly fluttering around enjoying its freedom, and stick it into the middle of a sticky spider web. We will all watch fascinated while the spider crawls out of hiding, climbs across its silk. The butterfly fights and struggles for its life. Will it get away or will the spider eat it? Depends on how strong the web is or how strong the butterfly's wings are. Who wins? Who is good or evil? Depends on the slant. Depends on the characters. The jury (reader) ultimately decides this, as they should, because we as storytellers give freely and the reader takes away what he or she wants.

We do know, all of us together as one KNOW, one way or another the spider or the butterfly is going to get what it wants.  This is the truth. What happens next and how? That is where we as storytellers can weave our own fictional webs. It is where we seduce our reader's minds. And once we seduce, once they know we are telling the truth, they can trust us to take them through the house of horrors…. And that is when the magic happens. Ha ha, and what is magic? Masqueraded truth used in a way to entertain, delight, and dare I say, frighten. In times past and even now, those who can perform magic are regarded as powerful, and sometimes I think artists think of themselves this way. But, I believe, storytelling isn't about power, it is about humility. Without the audience or the reader, there is no magic. We as storytellers cannot physically grab a person and force them into our world. We seduce, we tell them the truth so they will trust, and only then will our worlds and imaginations collide. The reader can take and leave what he chooses. Free will. Even when it comes to fiction. It's all about truth and trust. Just amazing. This is only one of the reasons why I am so enchanted and in love with this form of art.

Tell us about the significance of the number 13 in your life.

Well, for starters, it is the font number when I copy and paste your interview questions into my Word doc. It is also the size of my clown shoes. It is one inch more than a foot. I won a jar of jellybeans with the number 13 in first grade. It is the number of colonies that came together to sign the Declaration of Independence (which is quite lucky if you ask me).

The only thing that scares me about 13 or Friday the 13th is the western collective conscience believing bad things will happen on that day.  A group of people putting out negative vibes as one great force of emotional power scares me way more than a simple number ever will.  

Triskaidekaphobia (the fear of 13) can be traced back to Norse mythology. Odin throws a dinner party for 11 of his closest friends. Loki, mischievous as always, decides to crash the party making the number in attendance 13. However, in this story Loki's mischief turns malicious when he orchestrates the murder of Odin's beloved son Balder (the god of truth and light). The death of Balder was the real turning point in Norse mythology leading to Ragnarok.

Why do you think mythology is so important in the history of human civilisation?

We all have questions don't we? Why? Where? How? When? Who? Every culture and society try to answer these questions with their own mythologies, legends, stories, fables etc..Again, they are a metaphor for truth or vice versa. Often times these tales become religion. And the religion sets the standards and morals of the society.

If I had four people hold you down on an altar and I used an obsidian knife to rip open your chest and tear out your beating heart, then later dismember your body and eat it: America would call that murder and cannibalism. I would get the electric chair or your tax dollars would go to keeping me well fed, educated, medically cared for and physically protected within prison walls for life. The Aztecs would call it sacrifice and for this great deed the world would keep spinning, and I would have pleased the sun as well as the rain god. Our people would be rewarded with rain for the crops, as well as personal blessings from eating the sacrificed body.

So it is different for every society and culture. The stories that have stuck around for hundreds or thousands of years have stayed because either there is a morsel of truth to them, or because of their truly entertaining/shocking nature. I think they are fascinating and there is something to learn from it all.

Mario Praz wrote the seminal study of Romantic Literature 'The Romantic Agony', exploring the links between it and early Gothic literature, which morphed into horror fiction. He explored decadence and morbidity as lying at the roots of the genre as well as graveyard fiction. To what extent do you think morbid eroticism and as Mario Praz saw it, the ghost of  the Marquis de Sade hangs over the modern tradition of horror?

I can't agree with Mario Praz that decadence and morbidity lies at the root of horror. I'm not indulging in base desires because I have some kind of unnatural obsession with body parts and places I can stick them. To be honest, I think Praz is rather arrogant to make these assumptions.

As a horror writer, I am seeking the truths of the human condition. And the truth, what lies at the root of horror, is what has scared humanity since the beginning of time: Death.

We are afraid of pain. We are afraid of change. We are afraid of the Grim Reaper with his scythe and skeleton smile. We are afraid of what happens after death. Is there a god or devils or demons or angels or boogey men in the closets. Or is there nothing? Do we simply disappear and get sucked into some black void? We simply never really existed. Perhaps we are just scribbled words of something far bigger and greater than we are; a rough draft crumpled and tossed away.

We were afraid of this before Marquis de Sade entered the scene, and will be as long as humanity exists.

I do not have a MFA or PHD. I have not studied intensely on these subjects. I am not a philosopher or a theologian. I just want to tell a damn good story. To do this, I tap into the vein of humanity and draw out what I find. I write what I know, what I've experienced, and what I've imagined.

I wish I had some grander answer for you, but that's about it.

You frequently refer to The Sea Of Imagination. Most recently it has come up in your pirate series. What is it and what are you talking about when you refer to it?

I believe everything that has been or will be exists in some kind of gigantic collective consciousness: an unseen world of possibilities and impossibilities. Every single one of us has access to it. You do not need to be Beethoven, Poe, Da Vinci or Britney Spears to drop a line and go fishing.. You can be some half assed crazy trailer trash white girl from nowhere and everywhere. A composer once said that he doesn't create his music, he simply remembers a song he had never heard before, as if it had always existed and he is simply recalling it. That is how it feels when I write my stories.

I have a little wooden boat that I've patched together from my own life's tool shed.  I have a fishing rod with a string and nightcrawler dangling from a hook. When I cast it into the sea, I honestly have no idea what I'll catch. And when something latches and starts tugging there is always this "Oh SHIT!" moment. It could be a 30 ft hammerhead. How will that fit into my little boat? It could be a tiny minnow, boring and insignificant, but thriving just the same. It could be a Bowie knife snagged out of the hands from a huge WWF wrestler and you better believe he's coming up after it. Or perhaps there is a shrewd woman who creates sex in a bottle and rules the world through lust addiction. Or perhaps there is a Captain Rueben Viper searching for the Cave of Ali Baba to win the heart of what he thought was his true love until the mysterious frogslinging Amazon goddess steals more than just his treasure map. Or perhaps a man whose soul was stolen by demons and his salvation is held in the hands of a little girl who possesses only shards of sanity- a gift of dried violet petals from her father…

In the Sea of Imagination anything and everything can happen. There are no limitations. There are no giant eyes in the skies watching our every move and ticking off points on the nice or naughty list. It is free for all and all for free with two stipulations. One: Like the wind, you must believe in it, although you cannot see it with your physical eye. Two: If you have the balls to bait a hook and throw it in, you must be brave enough to deal with what you've caught. There is no excuse for cowardice. Catch and release is for sissies. And the world has enough of those.

On the sea of imagination, there are great islands brought up from volcanoes of great minds. Their names are Defoe, Poe, Dickens, King, O' Brien, L'engle, Koontz, Keats, Benson, Stroker, Shelly, Palahniuk, Lewis, Harper, Golding, Dickenson, Suess, Steinbeck, Marie De France, Grimm, Wilde, Ash, Salvatore, on and on…

Their characters play out lives on these islands and I am delighted to be able to anchor my boat off shore and watch these brilliant catches. And what an amazing thought to think my characters create their own volcanoes and islands for others to enjoy.

Thank you Jodi for giving an outstanding and thoughtful interview.

Thank you so much for the Chinwag and showcasing at the Slaughterhouse, Richard. It's been a mind-bending and absolute delight engaging with your keen and perceptive mind.

J links:

Pillow Talk, Spindled Souls, Weeping Stones (scroll down), Rabid, WILDCARD, Painted Black (scroll to last story), and there be me beloved thievin' piratical series, The Wicked Woman's Booty. For the daring and not easily offended you can explore my random rants about life and writing here.