Even Better Than Fiction: Interview with Tyler Hayes, Author of Imaginary Corpse!

Hayes’ debut Imaginary Corpse, which was only published last week, absolutely blew me away when I got the chance to read it, and I’ve barely shut up about it since. Angry Robot, who published it, caught wind of my flailing and asked if I might like to do an interview with Mr Hayes?

Actual video footage of my reaction to being offered an interview.

OF COURSE I DID, I told them. YES VERY MUCH PLEASE!

Now, a secret: I was super nervous. My blog is a baby blog! I’d never done an interview before that wasn’t for a school project! And this was the dude who wrote a diverse hopepunk murder mystery set in the human imagination and narrated by a yellow triceratops plushie – aka, the best thing!!! What would it be like actually talking to someone that awesome???

Well, spoiler alert: it was epic. Tyler Hayes is just as cool as his book. Don’t believe me? Then read on for the interview, conducted by email across many, many timezones!

Content warnings for discussion of privilege, mental health issues incl PTSD and trauma, and mentions of the 2016 USA elections/the General State of the World.

The Interview

Me: So, Mr Hayes… What should I call you, and what are your pronouns? I’m Sia, agender but she/her, and I have never done an author interview before!

Tyler: Thank you for asking! I’m a cis man, he/him.

I am so excited, your review seriously made me vibrate with joy. I am so glad this connected for you!

Me: I am ridiculously happy that you liked the review – as is obvious, I freaking adored your book, so I’m glad I could, I don’t know, reflect some of that joy back to you. A tiny bit! I honestly haven’t been so excited about a book for a long time – my husband sends his gratitude, by the way, since he immensely enjoyed watching me flail around with delight as I read it!

Something super simple to start with: did you ever have an imaginary friend, or know someone who did/does?

Tyler: Oh gosh, thank you so very much for your kind words! This book was a labor of love and hearing that love, as you say, reflected onto others means the world to me.

Definitely!
Mine was named Jokey, and I could not tell you what he looked like now but
apparently he loved hanging upside down from trees. When I tried to draw him I
wound up drawing Orbitty from the Jetsons, more or less, but I am pretty sure
that isn’t what Jokey looked like.

I have many friends who had imaginary friends! I don’t want to speak out of turn and reveal names, but I had some folks ask me to personalize their copies of The Imaginary Corpse, which I thought was really fitting.

Me: What made you want to write about imaginary friends? Was there ever a real-life Tippy?

Tyler: The Imaginary Corpse has its roots in a game of Let’s Pretend my dad and I played as kids, called Stuffed Animal Detective Agency, where we took all my stuffed animals and we made funny voices for them and had them solve crimes…by which I really mean I made my dad make funny voices and tell bad jokes at my behest. But many years later, I started noodling on the idea of turning the Stuffed Animal Detectives into a novel, but I wanted to write for adults, so I needed something else to play with there…jumping to The Velveteen Rabbit felt natural, the idea of stuffed animals loved so much they become real beings, and so I thought of the idea of an imaginary friend being loved Real, and it was all kinda downhill from there.

And that dovetails with my next answer: Yes, there was, and is, a real-life Tippy the stuffed triceratops. I have him sitting on my nightstand right now. He’s not in a detective outfit, but he is yellow!

Me: I’m not going to lie, those were absolutely the answers I was hoping for, because that’s just ridiculously delightful! And I love the thought of you personalising copies for people’s Friends – that really does seem very appropriate, somehow.

I must tell you that learning that the Stuffed Animal Detective Agency is/was in fact a real thing is just the best. I’m probably going to be grinning like a twit all day, knowing that. Even moreso knowing there’s a real Tippy!

Tougher/deeper question now: I’m agender, so the first time Tippy asks someone’s pronouns in the book was a big deal to me – even moreso when it became obvious that that question is a standard part of Stillreal etiquette. But it was actually the very first page that told me Imaginary Corpse was going to be something really special, beyond the awesome premise. You had Tippy say ‘No is fine. No is always fine here.’ Which is – an incredibly powerful statement, and one I think a lot of us, unfortunately, didn’t and don’t hear often enough. It set the tone for the whole book, that what I’ll call Millennial values, for lack of a better term, were going to be intrinsic – things like ‘no is fine’, and consent, and personal space, and gender being a spectrum not a binary, etc. I am so glad that you did, obviously, but I have to ask; what made you decide to go that route? Because of course, you didn’t have to.

…Said absolutely no one on this blog.

Tyler: This
is a long answer, so I’ll summarize first: Because I refuse to give into the
defaults, everyone who isn’t cruel deserves to feel seen, and I have privilege
enough to weather the storm of judgment for doing it.

Digging
deeper: It kind of started with the scene where Spindleman is introduced, and
it kind of started with…let’s be vague and avoid trauma triggers and say
“recent political developments in major developed nations.” When I
was writing the scene with Spindleman, I realized that there was absolutely no
reason for an amorphous drill-monster to adhere to the artificial gender
binary, and also no reason for Tippy to know what gender it is at the outset.
Combine that with me having a lot of trans, nonbinary, agender, and
gender-non-conforming friends, and I said, “No, this is where I take a
stand. In the Stillreal we ask for pronouns.” And once I did that, I
thought, why not go all the way?

So
every character I wrote, I asked myself, do they need to be white? Do they need
to be cis? Do they need to be male? Do they need to be straight? And of course,
the answer was pretty much always No. (There are two exceptions where I said
“Yes, they do,” but they are spoilers to discuss. You likely know who
I mean though.