Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology (38 page)
Read Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology Online
Authors: ed. Pela Via
Craig Wallwork
: The darker side to life tends to bleed out of The Velvet. Stephen Graham Jones, Craig Clevenger and Will Christopher Baer never compromise, nor are their novels similar in style, yet the flesh of their prose is diseased with the same fallacy of hope and moral resurrection that consumes my own work. So, when deciding to submit a story for the collection, my initial concern was not if I had a story to submit, but which one. Pela gave me more time than an editor would on a project of this scale. She indulged my egotistical rants and reined me in, and of the two stories I sent her, one she enjoyed and the other she threw to the curb. Had it been anyone else at the helm, I probably would have caved at the sheer weight of authors included. But like a gypsy snake charmer she enchanted me into believing I was good enough to stand shoulder to shoulder with these giants. I danced for her, and the result is finally in print.
Paul Tremblay
: Only that the readers and writers who make up the Velvet are truly passionate about dark literature. It’s why I wanted to submit. That, and to possibly get to be in an antho with Craig Clevenger, Stephen Graham Jones, and all the other talented folks associated with the book. I must say it was an absolute pleasure working Pela Via on the edits. I’m very much looking forward to reading the anthology she worked hard to put together.
Vincent Carrella
: I wanted to give The Velvet something biblically epic but on a micro scale. I thought that the story of a man at the end of his rope, having hit rock bottom and with no other option but to swallow his pride might resonate with this crowd.
Pela Via
: The Velvet’s three pillar authors, Baer, Clevenger and Jones, set an incredibly high bar for prose with their work. It’s almost inhuman, what they’re capable of with words. I simply needed a story that didn’t read like fourth-grade level writing. That’s difficult, following guys like that.
Brandon Tietz
: When you think of The Velvet, you think noir or transgressive, or just dark fiction in general. I have a tendency to satire things, though, and that’s not really The Velvet’s style. So where I’d normally try to slide in some humor, this piece works the heart authority a little bit more.
Bradley Sands
: I just submitted it because I read it during The Velvet’s reading at AWP last year and it really seemed to resonate with a lot of people. Same thing for some people who weren’t there because it was recorded and used for one of The Velvet’s podcasts.
Craig Clevenger
: I didn’t have any preconceptions. I just knew that the Velvet has taken on a life of its own, independent of me, Stephen or Chris, and I felt an obligation to support their efforts.
3.) What would you say in a single sentence to convince an unknown reader to buy Warmed And Bound?
Caleb J Ross
: Steve Erickson said it perfectly already: “The writers of The Velvet are contemporary fiction’s most effective and least self-conscious aesthetic guerrillas.” Hell, Erickson could have said “The writers of The Velvet warrant contempt and evacuation of bowels like a pathetic guerrilla” and I would still pick up the book.
Sean Ferguson
: I’ve already read about 80% of this book, and it is easily the best thing I’ve read all year.
Anthony David Jacques
: This collection contains work not only from established authors whose work will surely require a trip to Borders or a couple clicks on Amazon, but also debuts some talented up and comers whose future work just might warrant a trip to IKEA for the new bookshelf you’re going to need.
Gordon Highland
: In a pinch, the book may also be used as a weapon, a mirror, or even an alibi, but not a contraceptive.
DeLeon DeMicoli
: The “Warmed and Bound” anthology comes out during a time when most literary blogs discuss the demise of the book and rarely discuss the great literature coming out of small presses and self-publishing…Fuck the politics, ya’ll, “Warmed and Bound” is about good writing and great storytelling.
Stephen Graham Jones
: It’ll stop a small-caliber bullet from a distance greater than twenty yards.
Tim Beverstock
: These stories will bleed well crafted fiction into your psyche.
Bob Pastorella
: Warmed And Bound: Thirty Eight Authors, thirty eight stories in one collection, destined to be The Anthology of The Year
Richard Thomas
: The Velvet warms and binds.
Edward J Rathke
: Steve Erickson believes in it enough to lend us his words.
Nik Korpon
: These stories will change your understanding of fiction.
Amanda Gowin
: This book attacks with murmurs and teeth.
Nic Young
: These authors will hurt you, and you’ll like them for it.
Chris Deal
: The talent contained in this anthology, the pure dedication to literature, transcends any boring descriptor like “genre”; no, this is a collection that gets to the very heart of what it takes to be alive in this day and age.
Doc O’Donnell
: Welcome to Velvet Noir: it warms and binds.
Craig Wallwork
: Reading this anthology is like tying one end of a piece of string around a rotting tooth, and the other around a doorknob; you await an end with mouth agape, and when it comes a small part of you is wrenched away, forever leaving your smile a little less pretty.
Paul Tremblay
: Buy this book or I’ll stab you in the kneecap while making fun of the kindle you loaded with books you’ll never actually read.
Vincent Carrella
: If you don’t buy this book I *will* shoot this dog.
Pela Via
: I genuinely believe there’s nothing else like it.
Brandon Tietz
: Just buy it or I’ll cut you.
Bradley Sands
: I haven’t read it yet so I dunno but Steve Erickson wrote the intro so that’s cool since he’s one of my favorite authors even though he didn’t mention my story (it was probably too zany for him) but there are a ton of authors in the book so you will probably get a lot of bang for your buck, plus there are a few contributors whose stuff I’m really into: Blake Butler, Brian Evenson, Cameron Pierce, Stephen Graham Jones, Jeremy Robert “Crunkcore Will Never Die” Johnson.
Craig Clevenger
: I can only steal from Steve Erickson’s introduction, to answer this question: “The writers of the Velvet are contemporary fiction’s most effec- tive and least self-conscious aesthetic guerrillas and obliterators of ‘literature,’ vaporizing arbi- trary distinctions intended to tame a spirit that needs neither distinctions nor quotation marks.”
The Warmed and Bound Sessions
With Hosts Robb Olson and Livius Nedin
Booked Podcast interviewed a staggering seventeen Warmed and Bound contributors. The conversations were released as individual episodes, as part of the unique series
The Warmed and Bound Sessions
, July 18 to August 3, 2011.
Brian Evenson
:
Booked
(
transcript
)
Stephen Graham Jones
:
Booked
(
transcript
)
Craig Clevenger
:
Booked
(
transcript
)
Warmed and Bound Wrap-up Episode Featuring Mlaz Corbier
(External links can also be found at
BookedPodcast.com
/WB
)
Interview Transcript:
Hosts
Robb Olson
and
Livius Nedin
Transcript of a live interview produced 8/03/2011 by
Booked Podcast
Audio available at
bookedpodcast.com
ROBB: Craig, thanks a lot for coming on. We’re really glad we could have you.
CRAIG CLEVENGER: Thank you, gentlemen, for having me.
LIVIUS: Craig, we’ve interviewed 16 authors for
Warmed and Bound
so far, and we’ve gotten each one of their perspectives on The Velvet, how they got there, why they stuck around. Can you tell us a little bit about the genesis of The Velvet, what the inspiration for it was, and how it came to be focused on you, and Baer, and Jones?
CRAIG: Okay, I’ll see if I can make this a quick answer. Chris Baer had just had his first two novels reprinted by MacAdam/Cage, and the
Handbook
had been out for some time, and he and I were both getting our websites up. I had a little starter Blogger site a while back and Chris didn’t have anything, as you might gather, he’s not a super-big internet guy. So, we knew that having a forum for the readers to discuss was important. We took a lot of cues from The Cult, obviously. It just didn’t make any sense for the two of us to have separate discussion forums, given that we had the same publisher and so much overlap in our readership, so we joined them. How Chris lassoed Stephen in, I don’t know. It really started out as a way of having one message board for the two or three of us, rather than dividing our audience up into three different boards and diffusing the readership that way. So that’s how it started, and has since become self-aware and ambulatory and has moved on without us, apparently.
ROBB: We’ve heard that there’s kind of an interesting origin for your story that’s in
Warmed and Bound
called “Act of Contrition.” Is that something you can share with us?
CRAIG: Yeah, it was inevitable that this was going to come up. [laughs] I wrote four, maybe five travel diaries while I was down in Bolivia. The very last one I wrote before I came home, I just sort of came to this realization, part of what I think, I was struggling with this third novel. I’m always very nervous when someone close to me reads my work. I’m pretty boring, actually. I watch movies, I sit around, read and write, and I’ll take the occasional walk. People that read my work think I’m some kind of outlaw, and nothing could be further from the truth. What’s really disconcerting is when, say, I’m dating someone and she says, “My dad’s going to read your book.” Few things put the fear of God into me like that. So, I kind of thought that was the strength of the work. This third novel I’ve been working on, I was too comfortable sharing things. And I’m proud of what I’ve done; I think I’m a much better writer than I was with my first book, but I think I was getting comfortable. I wanted to write something that would make me uncomfortable. I wanted to see where my own threshold was, because I don’t think anything good comes from the comfort zone. So, it was a very late-night writing binge in Bolivia. I had a wad of coca leaves in my mouth the size of a softball, and started writing until I made myself nervous. That pretty much veered into Nabokov territory. So when The Velvet asked me for something, it was all I had, and I knew that to not contribute to this anthology would have been just a grievous insult. So I mailed that one to Logan and Pela, and just prayed that neither one of them reported me to someone.
LIVIUS: Can you tell us just a little about the story itself?
CRAIG: There’s not a really deep story arc. It’s fairly static, the narrative. But the narrator is a very, very religious person, to the point of beyond being sexually repressed; he just cannot handle his own sexuality at all. So, Nabokov territory maybe was a bit of an exaggeration. It’s not that he’s a pederast; he doesn’t know what he is. So, even though he commits no crime in the story—spoiler alert—he’s always on the verge of doing
something
, but even he doesn’t know what that is. I can be more vague if you’d like.
ROBB: That’s good. It’s tough with a short story to just talk a little bit about it. Actually, in reading Steve Erickson’s forward to the anthology, I really like that he said your narrator utters the anthology’s most dangerous sentence: “I’ve been good my whole life.” And the more I read that foreword—a couple times recently—and the more I thought about it, the more I was like, “Yeah, he’s really right about that!” That’s kind of a cool little insight he had.
CRAIG: That had me dancing on air. Steve Erickson is a writer I’ve, to say the very least, looked up to for pretty much all my adult life after college. I have books of his he signed to me 20-plus years ago. You want a list of things I’d take from a burning building, I’ve got signed
Rubicon Beach, Days Between Stations, Tours of the Black Clock
, all when they came out. I had
Tours
before it came out. Yeah, I used to go stalk him. So, that’s a real honor to have that come from him. I consider him the invisible giant. I think he’s honestly the greatest living American writer that we have, and he’s got the least amount of recognition. I was dancing on air. Still am, actually, after that intro.
LIVIUS: Over these past interviews, we’ve had occasion to talk to several authors who participated in some of the numerous writing intensives that you’ve taught. And they’ve, across the board, kind of credited you with helping them hone their craft. What do you personally get out of teaching other, younger, aspiring authors, or up-and-coming authors, a little more about the writing craft?
CRAIG: What I get out of it is a fire under my ass. As you may have gathered, I’m not the most prolific writer. It’s kind of daunting following Stephen Graham Jones, who probably just finished a novel as we started talking. It always amazes me how ferociously every one of my students just dives headlong into the work and the assignments. Every one of them is more prolific than I am; I can say that with fair confidence. So for me to put an assignment out or a lecture or whatnot, and have people attack it so fiercely and so quickly, really lights a fire under me. Not that it’s led to more productivity, but the fire is there, trust me.
ROBB: Talking a little bit about your writing, I’ve read
The Contortionist’s Handbook
and
Dermaphoria
several times, and one of the things that I picked up on, and I’m sure you’ve gotten this question before, there seems that there may be a cameo appearance of John Vincent in
Dermaphoria
. Is that true or not, or is that something that you leave up to the imagination of the reader?
CRAIG: I’d like to say that I can neither confirm nor deny, just to be funny. I have a strange relationship with the
Handbook
, but regardless of how I feel about it, it’s why the three of us are talking. It’s kind of my nod, but the more I read of certain writers, I like this idea of sort of an enclosed universe where—Chris Baer does this a lot in his short fiction—the idea of having the book co-exist in this authorial universe. So having John Vincent pop up is a fun way to weave those things together. And his appearance in
Dermaphoria
is appropriate. And he will likewise have one in this third book I’m working on. It opens up with my main character going through a name change, and that’s pretty much the extent of that, and he briefly mentions a redheaded man he meets near the courthouse. If you know the
Handbook
, you know that’s John Vincent.
ROBB: Regardless of how the author feels about it, I think it’s a nice treat for a dedicated fan who’s read multiple things that someone’s written to have that familiarity and stuff like that. So I always get geeked-out on those types of little minor appearances and stuff like that.
CRAIG: I’m a sucker for all that stuff: any sort of, we call them Easter eggs, now. When I was growing up they were sort of a Cracker Jack prize. When you found some sort of hidden code or cipher or symbol buried somewhere that really didn’t affect the story, it didn’t change the meaning of anything, it just added a layer of discovery that just made it more engaging. So, I try to do more and more of that as I move on.
ROBB: I think that mystery has a lot to do with it. Having just enough of that subtle hint that it might be this person is, for me, even just kind of tastier in a way.
CRAIG: And you sort of have to be in the know to pick up on that clue. And again, it adds to a feeling of discovery when it’s something that you found on your own and you’re privy to.
LIVIUS: In keeping with
The Contortionist’s Handbook
and
Dermaphoria
, both of the rights to the movies have been purchased. Do you have any thoughts on that? Do you have any news?
CRAIG: Both of them have been recently re-optioned. Both companies have been buying more time. Beyond that, I go back and forth as far as what I think is going to happen. Part of me, I know there’s nothing I can do, it’s completely out of my hands, I should take the money and take care of business, and focus on what I’m writing and look forward. And there are parts of me that sometimes, it’s like I’m just looking at the Hollywood meat thresher coming right at me, you know? Grain thresher. Whatever cuts up meat or grain, it’s coming at me or my work, and I get really frustrated, and I’ll have the occasional rant or tantrum, and then I’ll get back to my zen mentality of just letting it pass and focusing on the work. So as not to dance around the subject, people keep hammering me about Channing Tatum. And I’ll be really honest, I have no problem with Channing Tatum at all. I don’t know him enough to have an opinion about him. All I do know is that historically that we have plenty of actors that have overcome the low expectations set by their bone structure, shall we say, who have gone on to become taken very seriously. Is that grammatically correct? “Gone on to become taken very seriously?” [laughs] Anyway, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp come to mind. Angelina Jolie. Whatever you may think of them off-screen, the fact is, they hold their own on camera. So, my hunch is that Channing Tatum is getting to do the kind of stuff that his agent and manager all but forbade him to do early in his career, until he was proven bankable. So, I’m not worried about him. I have misgivings about the script and the studio asked my opinion. I gave them my opinion. I have yet to ever hear from them again, as I pretty much expected. So, my fingers are crossed.
LIVIUS: As geeked as I get when I hear a favorite book is going to made into a movie, there’s always that kind of inevitable, you know, you feel it’s going to be a letdown because so many movies don’t hold up. I’m just glad when authors get paid a little extra something for it getting turned into a movie. That’s really where my thankfulness for that comes in.
CRAIG: Yeah, I tend to agree with you on that. I’m waiting for that payday.
ROBB: In
Dermaphoria
and
Contortionist’s Handbook
, your characters give some very, very convincing details about their professions: a chemist in
Dermaphoria
and the document forger thing in
Contortionist’s Handbook
. What’s your process for doing research? It seems like you have some really, really well-detailed stuff. So, do you think it’s really important for a story, that kind of deep research?
CRAIG: I think so. It depends on what you’re doing. If you’re writing a story that involves details about something you’re not familiar with, if your main character is a private detective and a plumber, you should probably do some homework on both and not make it up as you go. To that end, I did pretty much the same amount for both of those first two novels. I included less of it in
Dermaphoria
than I did in the
Handbook
. Two reasons. One, I just, I really want to lean more on storytelling than factoids and trivia to engage a reader. Secondly, the
Handbook
, the voice of the
Handbook
, necessitated more research being in the story. John Vincent being sort of an OCD cokehead, he’s going to tell you everything he does. If you’ve ever met someone like this, and I’ve met a few . . . like, the greatest car-detailer I’ve ever known, was this kind of meticulous, just, almost psychotic in his attention to detail. Unfortunately he would also
tell you
everything he did to trick your car out, you had to listen to him. And John Vincent was one of these guys with the lack of social skills that just sort of wants to hook the reader and explain everything that he did. So, part of it was necessitated by John Vincent’s narrative voice. So I did a lot of research for both, and I think it’s important to do research if you’re going to be out of your depth. At the same time, most of what I did in the
Handbook
, at least half of the facts that he throws out there, I made up. But I made them up after doing a lot of research and really understanding the discipline very, very well.