Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology (37 page)

Craig Wallwork
: Bruised Flesh is about Jonah, a young man recounting his childhood at the hands of an abusive father. My intention was not to make this mis-lit. I didn’t want Jonah’s story to be Pelzerised or anything, but more a story about a son and father getting to know each other. In the opening paragraph we see Jonah recounting a moment from his childhood when his father purposely injuries him. We don’t why this is until we realise the father has been given a chance to make a lot of money overseas by selling real estate to the elderly. All the father needs is capital to invest. To raise the cash he stages incidents using his son, films them on a video camcorder, and sells them to one of those popular comedy television shows like America’s Funniest Home Video. The father’s motivation behind all this it to provide for his son’s future by making lots of money from the real estate scam, but as the story progresses, the far reaching complications force the two apart. What interested me is the pursuit men undertake to better understand their fathers. My father never abused me, nor did he intentionally injure me for personal gain. For that reason, I am not Jonah. My father was, to the best of his abilities, a decent man. The problem was he was forced into fatherhood. He was not prepared, but battled on, doing the best he could. He was young too, and as such was still living his life while I was crawling through mine with dirty diapers and a snotty nose. When I was old enough to know better,a distance grew between us, awkwardness at times, and the bridge that finally united the gap was the local public house and the rivers of alcohol that ran beneath. He assumed the role of “involved” father more when he had a skin-full, much the same way I found courage when drunk, or love when on ecstasy. Alcohol brought us closer, but as a child, alcohol pulled us apart. The way Jonah finds solace and guidance when his father is muted by a coma, I found the same in mine, save it was not in a hushed hospital room but a polarised world of loud voices, dense cigarette smoke and hops and barely. Bruised Flesh was me committing to paper a story that I had carried for many years. It is a story of longing, of a universal forsaken love that heals but is always bruised by history.

Paul Tremblay
: My story “Chance the Dick” is me riffing on the scene that turned out to be the opening chapter to my novel The Little Sleep: A stereotypically beautiful woman walks into a stereotypically dark office of a big city private dick. The fingers on one of her hands were stolen and replaced with someone else’s fingers. In my novel, that scene is a part of a dream/hallucination of a narcoleptic detective. In this story, I play it straight, sort of. Her fingers really are gone. And it goes in kind of wacky places from there. With the story, I was neck deep in my first novel, and I took a little step sideways and was trying to work out some thoughts/questions about noir and the classic PI story, what relevance it has today. That, I wanted to get my weird on with the story too.

Vincent Carrella
: The Redemption of Garvey Flint was my first attempt to write a story set within the world of Serpent Box, my debut novel. I had planned on writing a collection of stories that would all connect in some way to the book, but that effort fizzled. Garvey is the black sheep of the Flint family , he’s sort of a prodigal son and the antithesis of his brother Charles, who is a Pentecostal preacher. I was hoping to convey that very powerful connection between brothers and the unconditional nature of brotherly love. As a brother myself I’ve wanted to explore the bond between brothers – one good, one bad , and that heart-aching shame and disappointment that often results from poor decisions.

Pela Via
: “Touch” is about intimacy which maybe, in a way, means it’s about sex relative to the belief in God. The story’s relevance to me—I’ve been married forever. 13 years, at age 31. Sex changes its meaning in that much time; people around us get married, get divorced, die, some quick and some slow. “Touch” is a sad story. I’m lucky for the parts that are fictional, for every day I can touch my husband. Lucky, not blessed.

Brandon Tietz
: My grandmother on my father’s side had dementia for the last few years before she died.  I think a lot of that stuck with me, even though her and I rarely saw each other.  Just hearing about it through family members made enough of an impact.  So there’s the whole issue of trying to connect with someone who doesn’t know you anymore, and in this character’s particular case, clinging on to things that you’re about to lose.  “Fading Glory” addresses those particular struggles.

Bradley Sands
: It’s the opening chapter of TV Snorted My Brain, a novel that LegumeMan Books will be publishing next year. It’s about a teenage wannabe anarchist who doesn’t know very much about it. He likes peewee soccer games because he believes them to be perfect examples of total anarchy considering how the players’ parents behave. But his dad died during a riot that happened at a pee wee soccer game. I think I originally wrote it as the scene where that happens. But I changed it for some reason. Probably to have a greater emotional impact. Another riot starts, just like the one that the protagonist’s father was killed during. And he gets really excited because it’s pure anarchy or whatever. But at the end, he experiences a major emotional shift because he goes from having a great time watching the riot to remembering his father and how he died.

Craig Clevenger
: “Act of Contrition” was a personal exercise in writing outside my own comfort zone. I wanted to write a story I wouldn’t share with anyone else. As it happened, when they asked me for a story, it was all I had ready to go. So, I made a leap of faith and sent it to the editors.

2.) What preconceptions or themes did you have when deciding to submit your story to The Velvet?

Caleb J Ross
: I’ve known a lot of the people associated with The Velvet for a long time. Many of them I’ve worked with and many I’ve had beers with. I had no preconceptions and no thematic direction aside from the type of material I’ve come to know and expect from The Velvet. And I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I don’t know that it would have been possible to write something specifically for Warned & Bound. As corny as it sounds, I think the possibility of Warmed & Bound has existed inside these collected authors for a long time.

Sean Ferguson
: The story starts with a guy dying on live television.  Its violent, its gruesome and public.  There’s an intimacy to it too, standing there completely alone with the whole world watching.  He’s isolated as the rest of the studio is in hiding from his attacker.  The story just seemed right, with these underlying feelings, and the issues that the story covers.  

Anthony David Jacques
: I honestly didn’t know what to expect. I knew it would be a lively project sure to attract some great talent, but I was still relatively new to the group. Perusing the final list of authors, I’m not only blown away by the number of authors I respect and admire who submitted work and (obviously) made the cut, I’m humbled to be counted among them.

Gordon Highland
Most of my work to date has been very character-focused, and knowing that it might share space with some well-respected authors, even if only my peers from the Velvet community, I wanted to ratchet things up a notch. To go darker, with more action, more disturbing imagery, but also with a certain moral core. So I dialed back my trademark oh-so-clever wordplay and went for a visceral response. It wasn’t until I’d already submitted the story that I recognized its literal “warmed” and “bound” aspects. I swear. The original plan was to attempt a southern gothic tale, but then I remembered I live in effing suburbia and barely know a whippoorwill from a weeping willow.

DeLeon DeMicoli
: There weren’t any. Pela reached out and asked if I was working on anything that could be submitted for the anthology. I just finished “Blood Atonement” so I consider it dumb luck that the story matched the anthology’s theme.

Stephen Graham Jones
: If I only I ever had preconceptions. I mean, outside the range of ‘this is probably going to win the nobel prize.’ But I’ve gotten kind of calloused to that particular mispreconception. As for themes, though, man. I’ve never thought in terms of themes, not when teaching– my students have all been trained that way, but I’m completely lost in theme-land — and especially never in writing. I mean, you’ve got the story, it’s happening right there under your pen, under your fingertips. Just be honest to it, follow it where it goes, don’t let go until you have to, and then let go all the way. It’s the only thing I know.

Tim Beverstock
: I didn’t have any preconceptions about the anthology, I was just happy to be asked to submit something. The main reason I chose this story was it was also the only thing I had laying about that felt right and also something that I could easily edit in the timeframe. I’m a notoriously slow editor (though am getting better with practice!).

Bob Pastorella
: The writers at The Velvet lean towards dark fiction, Velvet Noir if one could label it.  It’s not about a private detective getting caught up with a blackmail scheme with his client’s wife. Velvet Noir is the point where morality meets mortality, that no matter how we try to live, our own motivations twist the choices we’ve made, often with disastrous and deadly results. “Practice” certainly fit the bill.

Richard Thomas
: Twisted love stories is about all I had in mind. So you start with conventions, and then, twist them: pleasure bumping up against pain, laughter masking the body wracking sobs of grief, love where there shouldn’t be love, where it isn’t deserved, or welcome. Beyond that all I knew was that I wanted to be true to the neo-noir voice that I’ve been developing over the last couple of years. After that, I left it up to Pela, and took her advice. Well, most of the advice, anyway.

Edward J Rathke
: I’m familiar with most people at the Velvet, through their writing or through conversation, so that’s hard to sum up, really. I’ve been there for about three years, which, again, so much longer than I thought. Seems like just the other week when I was getting my wisdom teeth out and accidentally signing up. But, yeah, I didn’t think much about it. I just wanted to be proud of what I sent, mostly, so I sent an unpublished story that I still believed in, and just let it go. Of course, back then we hardly realised what we were getting ourselves into, never expecting Steve Erickson or Blake Butler or Brian Evenson to be in the same book. But, yeah, terrible at answering questions here. I think the Velvet has become, for some, synonymous with dark fiction, which I think is inaccurate, or it is, at least, to me. I think we write from and for the same reasons so many others do. To make sense of the world, to understand what love is, how we feel about it, to process a chaotic existence and find the threads that hold it together, no matter how surreal or unreal they must be.

Nik Korpon
: The only thing going through my head was ‘There will be a metric shit-ton of amazing writers: Do not let your story suck.’

Amanda Gowin
: No preconceptions. No themes. This story was important to me, so I gave them the best that I had, without thought to a particular mold. I think that’s one of the things that’s so special about this book – the writers gave their best as opposed to giving what they thought might ‘fit.’ And it has become an amazing collection.

Nic Young
: The Velvet is directly responsible for me writing at all. I respect the people there more than I can express in this short answer, so my only preconception was that the anthology would be amazing. I wanted to be a part of it, so I tried a couple of stories, but none of them worked. I had written the first draft of My German Daughter back in November, but I wasn’t going to submit it for fear of it seeing light. It fit the ‘scary love story’ aspect of the theme though, and as the deadline approached I became more afraid of missing the opportunity than of letting the story out into the world, so I sent it in.

Chris Deal
: None, sorry.

Doc O’Donnell
: Well, there’s a Baer quote–and I can’t, for the life of me, remember where it’s from–that I keep coming back to when I think, not only about his work, and the type of stories I like to read but, when I think about my own writing and the things I want to write about, the things I want to share, the things I think are important. He’s talking about his work and what he thinks he writes and says it’s basically “scary love stories”. So, when I think of Velvet Noir and the type of things I want to write about, to explore, to pick at until I bleed, I think of scary love stories: Sucking on your lover’s bottom lip while you’re digging a blade into their guts, either metaphorically or literally; I think about vulnerability and manipulation and the fine lines between lust and love and love and obsession; I think about hurting the ones you love, when all you’re trying to do is love them the right way; I think about moral ambiguity, blurring the distinction between what’s right and wrong; I think about every day guys and girls, stumbling, tripping, falling, through this dirty world we’ve found ourselves in; I think about the lingering sense of hopelessness, of doom, that surrounds the lives of these people–of us–and I want to inject hope in their veins, but, ultimately, that hope is crushed when we take that long drive back to reality. So, all that in mind, I thought “If You Love Me” was a perfect fit for Warmed and Bound–I mean, even the title Warmed and Bound has these connotations of scary love stories attached to it, right? “Warmth” is loving and tender yet “Bound” adds this nasty kind of S&M feel to it, for me, at least. It’s a great phrase in that sense, really. And, on top of that, I just knew this was something that I wanted to be a part of, something I’d be honoured to be a part of. That was before there were stories from Craig and Stephen. So, suffice to say, my mind is well and truly blown, like a shotgun to the back of the head. I can’t even begin to express how proud I am to have my name among two of the three Velvet authors. It’s something I couldn’t have dreamed of accomplishing this early in my career. And then there’s the surprise Erickson Foreword–just when I thought this fever dream couldn’t get any stranger. He had some nice things to say about my story, too, which, you know, still doesn’t feel real. I’m sure I’ll check my emails in a few months, looking for that note, and it’ll be gone–never existed. If that wasn’t enough, my story sits alongside some of my best friends and favourite new voices: Nik Korpon, Richard Thomas, Caleb J. Ross, Chris Deal, Bob Pastorella, Craig Wallwork, Eddy J. Rathke, Axel Taiari, Amanada Gowin, Gordon Highland, Gayle Towell, Sean Ferguson, Anthony Jacques. I mean, this line-up is bullshit good. All edited, meticulously, by Pela Via. We’re all in debted to her for nursing our stories, for fighting with us on them, for seeing the dark glow that they’re capable of with the right kind of polish–The Pela Polish. Now that’s my kind of polish.