Booklife

Marly Youmans is the author of Val/Orson (novella) and the forthcoming The Throne of Psyche (poems) and Glimmerglass (novel), among other books.  A poet, fiction writer, and mother of three teenagers, she lives on Main Street in a historic village in a house filled with noise and constant commotion.

Below, Youmans answers the following questions about the relationship between music and her writing life.

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In what ways do you or have you used music to enhance your writing and creativity?   And/or what has music — listening to it, seeing it live, playing it, writing it, whichever — taught you about writing fiction?
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Marly Youmans: Surely music and all the sounds of nature inform our childhoods and give us an extraordinary freedom that we can barely understand—give us strange longings that point the way toward the sources and joy of art.  A small child dancing with abandon to Swan Lake, twirling with arms flung outward, is a child awakening.  In this way, I was shaped by music as by many another element of the world.

I can’t say, however, that I have “used music to enhance . . . writing and creativity.”  For me, that seems to diminish the luster of each activity.  Sure, I have been swept away by music and have written poems or passages of stories that sprang from that sense of being pushed into another and an unfamiliar place.  But such responses happened as a simple, natural response to one of the marvelous parts of the world:  in this case, music.

Every way of writing is different, and I don’t suppose one way is better than another since it’s not the process but the end result that can be judged.  I happen to have a fairly deep level of concentration in which everything other than the story or poem seems to move to a distant room.  Any woman with children will recognize that such a trait is valuable to a writer who is also a mother.  So I tend not to be fully aware of the noises around me, whether they are children’s shouts or music or traffic. All I have left is mother-radar:  awareness of certain kinds of sounds and silences that feel dangerous or ominous.

But my children are nearly grown and seldom need such radar any longer.  Because I have three children of various ages—the youngest having just become a teen— there’s always a lot of music in the house.  My younger son plays the drums, and my daughter plays piano and organ. If she’s at the piano downstairs, she might be playing Mozart or Erik Satie or Greta Salpeter’s “Lighthouse.”  All three are likely to have music streaming out a door, so I might be overhearing Patrick Wolf or Owen Pallett or Fleet Foxes or Andrew Bird or The Last Shadow Puppets Show or whatever singing wolf, bird, or fox is the interest of the hour.

Occasionally what the three choose to hear or play seeps into fiction. Last fall I wrote a children’s novel, a three-part adventure in which the young hero was a drummer.  He tended to drum on his enemies when they needed it.

Having performers in the house is always enlivening.  Since one of the great goals of art is to make creations that seem to have a living force of their own and do not die in time, it is good to have live music pulsing through one’s rooms. But I would say that what music and all the non-verbal arts have to “[teach] about writing fiction” is simply experience that, at its best, shows the way to the fount of things where the stories start.

Jeremy L. C. Jones

When I was in the fourth or fifth grade, I pitched a fit over my Halloween costume.  I wanted to be a hobo* and there was something about the way the overalls fit that just wasn’t right.**  I don’t remember the exact problem, but I do remember totally melting down—tears, screaming and yelling, finger pointing, the whole bit.

My mother came up with a last minute solution.

“It’s perfect!” she said.  “Just perfect.”

She dressed me up as a girl.

Mom had given birth to two sons, but she always wanted a daughter.  She used to tell me often enough how she’d “carried me like a girl” when she was pregnant.  My name would’ve been Meredith.

Minutes before we headed off to school, Mom put me in a slate blue suede skirt, a puffy white blouse, and heels.  I’ve blocked out the color of the heels. All I know is they were high and they clunked loudly everywhere I walked.  There was a faux pearl necklace, and my long blonde hair was pulled up in pigtails.

School was a nightmare.  Lots of jeering and teasing in home room, and it only got worse when we marched through all the classrooms in the costume parade.

I figured maybe I’d get to take my costume off at lunch time, but, no, we had to keep them on until after the assembly during which they’d announce the winners of the all-school costume contest.

Groan.

In retrospect, I can see it coming, but back then it caught me as a total surprise.  Up I went onto the stage.  In front of the whole school.  Even the high-schoolers were there.

In my mind’s eye, I can watch myself from the audience: chubby, shy, well dressed, and kind of cute.  At the time I was totally and utterly traumatized.  The word terror comes to mind.

This all happened at the tail-end of the 70s and it took until the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981 before I ever felt comfortable wearing clothes – any clothes, boys’ or girls’ – again.  From then on, it was khaki pants, plain button down shirts, and brown leather shoes.  Simple, rugged, manly clothes.

Still haunted by my first and only intentional experience wearing women’s clothing***, I was both delighted and a little startled to meet fiction writer Danny Pelletier who once…  well, I’ll let him tell you about that below.

Pelletier attended the Goddard College MFA program and he now teaches at Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Pear Noir!, Quarterly West, Monkeybicycle, and Night Train.

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Danny Pelletier

One of my earliest memories is begging my sister to dress me up like a girl. I’ve always had a fascination with the female mind and body, something I eventually confused with sexual desire, since I spent my years in college desperately trying to get any warm body under my covers. But by my senior year, with Mrs. Dalloway sitting dog-eared on my bookshelf, I realized I was more interested in what it means and how it feels to be female.

I’d been writing female characters, and been thoroughly ego-stroked about how well I did so, as early as junior high. Classmates attributed this to my complete disregard for sports, my love of poetry, and my desperate need to succeed academically. But these are all stereotypes.

I spent two years at Goddard trying to put my fascination to good use. About my thesis, my advisor wrote, “That a male has written so thoughtfully and accurately about female experience and the female body is nothing short of amazing.” My second reader wrote that it was “an intense exploration of what it is to be female, nuanced and balanced and astonishing from a young male writer.”

Out of idle curiosity, I once pasted a few excerpts into an online gadget that claimed it could identify a writer’s sex by using some sort of algorithm. Two out of three times I was female. The catch? The two “female” excerpts had male narrators. And the “male” excerpt was a story with a female narrator that I labored over for years.

So my two years in grad school were both my best and worst experience writing the Other. Though I enjoyed my experience at Goddard, immersing myself in the female psyche, I can’t help but wonder if I really explored what it means to be female. My main character, Margaux, had a complete disregard for sports, loved poetry, and had a desperate need to succeed academically. Sound familiar?

Both of the excerpts the online program listed as female were stories about men coming to terms with female sexuality. And though I’ve been praised for writing women so well, I’ve yet to publish any story about what it means to be female. My only honest explorations have been male characters with the same desire as me to blur the gender lines. No, I don’t mean begging, like my four-year-old self, to be decked out in a dress and high heels, but to look beyond clothes and body and skin. Maybe the real question I should ask myself and my characters is what it means to be human.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones

My experience being dressed up like a girl and winning the Halloween costume contest doesn’t have a whole lot to do with writing.  Or it didn’t really at the time.  Back then, I was deeply engaged in writing a series of space stories about flying fruit and ray guns.  My astral lemons and oranges were all male.

Over the years, though, I have struggled with writing female characters.

I grew up in a mostly male house, lived on a mostly male street, played male sports and games, and had very few female friends until later in life.

Yet, today, I live in a house with two women, my wife and daughter.  One of the greatest joys of my life is being there as my daughter grows up.  It’s like getting to re-live a childhood, this time seeing the world through the eyes of a girl.

When we’d found out my wife was pregnant, I just knew our child was a girl.  Just knew it.  I was beside myself with joy.  I so wanted a daughter, and we were going to have one.  Perfect!

But I was a little nervous, too.

“I don’t know how to raise a girl,” I said to my wife.

“Don’t raise a girl,” she said.  “Raise a person.”

Something clicked–as a writer, as a father, as a person.

No longer would I try to write female characters.  I would write people.

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Danny Pelletier

Post-Goddard, my writing has evolved from exploring gender to exploring gender roles. One of my characters, a tomboy who loves basketball, gets pregnant and must confront female gender roles head-on. In the first draft of my thesis, her abortion leaves her ruined. I even publicly read a god-awful story I’d penned about her angrily trying to come to terms with her decision.

I knew this was the wrong reaction when I read Lauren B.’s essay “Roe vs. Wade vs. My Boyfriend”, in which she writes about her abortion being “no big deal”.

“My abortion had basically been the uterine equivalent of minor knee surgery,” she writes, “annoying and a bit painful, but not soul-destroying or existentially angsty.”

I felt as if I were reading the words of my character, as if she had taken life outside of me—as all good characters eventually do. And I knew I’d been cheating myself, writing toward some clichéd idea of female hysteria.

The last lines of the god-awful story are, “We killed our baby.” But my character, I knew, was adamantly pro-choice. I’d seen a video online once of a punk-fab looking girl confronting a pro-life protester, explaining that he didn’t know what it was like to have to make that kind of decision. She was visibly upset about his protesting and perhaps regretful about her decision, but she was confident about having made the right choice.

Again, I felt as if I were watching my character speak for herself.

Although the god-awful story remained in my second draft, I’d done some damage control elsewhere, making her a more confident, self-assured character in the story I eventually published in Quarterly West and in a revised first chapter, in which both she and Margaux became more fully developed characters.

But all this is necessary. Writing badly is an important part of the process. We must first misjudge ourselves and our characters before we can truly know one another as people. Your characters will misread you and you’ll miswrite them, just as two people who have known one another for a long time squabble over petty misunderstandings.

In other words, the arguments make the marriage work.

By revising “What I Should Have Done” for publication, I learned a lot about keeping part of my characters in shadow. You can’t let all of your characters wear their emotions on their sleeves. I think now of my characters as a crescent moon—reflecting certain societal expectations, like gender roles, and keeping most of themselves hidden. When writing badly, we tend to focus on the crescent, since that is the brightest part, but the shadow is what’s important.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones

When my mother was a little girl, she stuffed half a dozen kittens into a cigar box.  By opening and depressing the lid, rhythmically, she made a sort of squeeze box.  When I first heard about her making music with a box full of kittens, I thought it all sounded like something a boy would do – not a girl.

Around the same time, my aunt carried a mushroom-shaped bullet around in a sock.  It was the slug from a stray rifle shot that almost killed my grandfather.  Carrying that thing around seemed like something I would do.

I combined these two oddities in a short story and I learned that girls aren’t just girls, they’re people, too.

My six-year-old daughter, Molly, has a stuffed animal named Bug Eyed Monkey with a Shirt On.  He has big eyes and wears a leopard print shirt with a pink collar.  He also wears an expression that suggests he just did his monkey business on the carpet.

A while back, I called Bug Eye a girl.  It was a simple slip, an inadvertent use of the feminine pronoun.  Maybe it had something to do with the leopard print and pink collar.

“Daddy,” Molly said, with equal emphasis on each syllable.  “Bug Eye is a boy monkey.  He just likes girl things.”

Molly takes make believe very seriously.  She immerses herself into scenarios of her own creation with astounding intensity.  She will sing, dance, and narrate as she goes.  I call it Extreme Pretend and I admire the heck out of it.  I hope she never forgets how to access her imagination so fully.

Since Molly was born, I have learned a lot of very important lessons about writing, but none of them teaches me as much as Molly’s ability to dive headfirst into her imaginings—to all-but-become someone other than herself, to stretch the boundaries of possibility well beyond their limits.

Writing has to be more than merely dressing up like a girl or acting like a fictional character.  The writer must believe in characters as individuals.

Writing can put us in our mother’s heels or our sister’s dress, can bring an inanimate monkey to life, but it must also must make us all feel that the person in that dress is real.

We can never completely know each other.  There is a limit.  If we could know what it was to be another person, know what another really felt and thought – if we could actually see through the eyes of another, we wouldn’t need art so desperately.

Art thins the veil between us.  It cannot remove the barrier between us fully, but it is the closest we can get.  We will always need each other, you and I, to satisfy our desire for connection through conversation, love, and art.

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*I was and still am a big Woody Guthrie fan.  And I still like hobos.  However, my daughter tells me that my wife likes hobos better than I do, because she bought a hobo a hamburger once.

**The problem, according to my mom, was that I wanted to wear my t-shirt over the bib of the overalls.  Stretched tight by the pillow I was wearing to form a hobo belly, the buttons on the overalls made “nipples” on my chest and under the shirt and I thought it made me look too much “like a girl.”  Maybe this is what gave mom the idea?

***I have nothing against cross-dressing.  It’s just not my style.  Not that I really have a style.

The morning heat was thick enough to clog a drinking straw.  The sun had just risen and already was lifting steam from the grass beyond the porch screen.  Our Brazilian parrot whistled and trilled a stream of Portuguese profanity in his cage.  I’d awoken early after staying up most of the night reading in order to sit on the screened-in porch with my father.

Beside me, dad folded the newspaper into fourths.  He’d been up for hours.  I’d heard him stirring as I was drifting off “last night”.  He had already made coffee, fed and walked the greyhounds, showered, dressed.  He smelled of lemon aftershave and soap, chicory and cigarettes.  His clothes were neat and tidy, a blend of prep school teacher and boot camp graduate.  I planned to read myself back to sleep after he left for his first period class.

Neither of us was doing much talking on this porch in south Florida on a late fall morning.  We’re never all that chatty together, either of us.

My eyes burned from lack of sleep and too much reading the night before.  It must’ve been before my 26th year, because I hadn’t quit smoking yet and I hadn’t started teaching English at a prep school in Kentucky.  That made it 1995 or earlier.

Soon, my job would evolve into his job; my course reading lists would look more and more like his, more and more like the courses he taught me at home and in school when I was his student in English classes.

My memory might be mixing things up, might be blending all this together, but even on that morning I felt a deep sense of comfort and familiarity. This had happened before, would happen again, and was who we were as father and son.

I wasn’t fully awake yet.

He clicked his four-colored ballpoint pen and slid it back into his shirt pocket.

“Here,” dad said, handing me the newspaper.  He had circled a paragraph in red ink.  I read the paragraph with a strange little thrill in my gut, looking for the misprint, the error, the inadvertent innuendo.

This was how I learned grammar.  Sure, I was taught the rules in a classroom or across the kitchen table, but I really learned grammar on these mornings when dad marked a passage and said, “Notice anything funny about that?”

Notice anything?

Funny.

The newsprint.  The paper.  The red ink.  The way the words moved and slid around the page under the pressure of possibility and my gaze and dad’s authority and soon of my authority and his gaze.

No one taught me more about writing than my father.  Long before I was dad’s student in the 11th and 12th grades, dad taught me the mechanics of writing.

“There’s a rabbit and there’s a hole,” he said, by way of explaining prepositions.  “The rabbit can go in the hole, down the hole, up the hole…”

No one enjoyed grammar as much as dad.  Grammar made him giggle.  Turned him on.

Dad also taught me about style.  “Maybe using a comma as a conjunction so often is a little confusing for the reader,” he would say.  “I get what you’re trying to do, just be careful and be clear.”

Be careful.

Be clear.

Great advice at any level.

Every morning for two years and the summer in between I had my dad for class first thing in the morning.  Expository Writing, American Lit, American Studies …  I came away from them all with a head full of Sandburg and Steinbeck and the sound of my father’s voice and a burgeoning sense of my own.

At a time when school was a growing aggravation between awkward dates and increasingly frequent drinking binges, I used to sit front and center in dad’s classes.  I heard — really heard — every word he said.  Looking back on a time filled with anxiety and drunkenness, the mornings in dad’s class are illuminated in a soft light.

Dad had his share of quirks in class.  He tended toward oddball metaphors about “the bird of paradise” and “the glass bicycle with the jelly seat.” He demonstrated flicking cigarettes like Walter Mitty by using his thumb, forefinger, and a piece of chalk.  Most of all, he relished reading out loud the descriptions of women from the books he’d assigned us.

He’d read a description of Hester Prynne on the pillory or Rose of Sharon saving a starving man, and every guy in the room would be blushing and clearing his throat.   He turned me and a lot of others on to reading and writing.  Though he assigned mostly books written by men, he loved strong, beautiful women characters.  (Later he’d introduce me to a strong, beautiful character, my future wife.  It was the one and only time he intervened in my dating life.  The man has good taste.)

When I received an invitation to drop out of college and work on a newspaper in an Alaskan fishing village, dad said, “Sounds like something Mark Twain would do.”

He quoted Emerson like other parents quoted the Bible or their parents.  Quoted Emerson, explained Emerson, lived Emerson.

Thanks to dad, Natty Bumppo ran beside me in the woods long before I’d read any of Cooper’s novels.

Mostly, though, dad taught me that writing is fun and important.  That reading and writing are a way of life.  That words change lives.  He taught me that narrative has the power to guide and to heal.

In 2001, while training for an AIDS benefit bicycle ride across Montana, my dad was struck by a van.  The driver was stoned and drunk.  Vomit covered his feet and the floor of his vehicle.  Dad was up before dawn, riding and riding and riding.  One of the accident investigators suggested that the driver had seen all the lights and reflectors on dad’s rig and was drawn toward them, across three lanes.

The doctors weren’t sure if dad would come out of the coma.  They weren’t sure if he’d ever breathe on his own.  They weren’t sure if he’d remember his family.  They weren’t sure of a lot of things.  One doctor compared dad’s brain to a desktop computer.  “If you drop a PC from a second story window,” the doctor said, “you can’t put it back together again.”

Dad put it back together again by telling stories, long, rambling, delicious stories.  As soon as he got that breathing tube out of his throat, he started telling stories.  They didn’t make much sense at first, and many seemed to be more about fear and anxiety than any narrative, but pretty soon he started getting the hang of it again — started being clear and careful with his words.

The more dad talked, the more he remembered.  The more he remembered, the more he talked.  In those early months after his accident, I’d stay up all night with a novel on my lap and a hand on his arm, watching him, listening, making sure he hadn’t pulled out the tubes or stopped breathing or fallen out of bed.  When he wasn’t sleeping, he’d sip thickened water through a straw and talk and I’d listen.  If I noticed anything funny, I’d point it out and we’d both laugh.  Every once and a while I’d give him a nudge or a bump with a piece of information, a reminder, a correction, a little verbal red ink to keep the stories flowing.

Less than 12 hours after dad’s accident, I had been sitting in small, private waiting room reserved for the families of people in the trauma unit.

“We got very lucky today,” someone said.

I just stared in disbelief, simmering.

“He could’ve died,” I said.

“But he didn’t.”

We did get lucky.  We were blessed.  Are lucky.  Are blessed.  Dad pulled through, battered but not broken.  He’s still with us nine years later.

“There’s a rabbit and there’s a hole,” I imagine him saying every day.  “The rabbit can go in the hole, down the hole, up the hole…”

Or the rabbit can do something wholly unexpected with the hole or to the hole.

It was Father’s Day recently, and like many sons and daughters I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad.  He’s neither perfect nor horribly flawed.  He’s simultaneously my hero, my friend, and a guy I don’t see nearly often enough.  I have regrets and I am sure he has some regrets, but everyone does.  He’s one heck of a teacher and a man.  He’s survived a stroke, heart attack, brain damage, and the loss of his ability to do the thing he loves, classroom teaching, and through all that he’s lived by stories and taught by stories and loved by stories.  And this one’s his.

In Growing up Dead: the Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead, Peter Conners tells the story of coming of age in the suburbs in the 1980s and discovering the music of the Grateful Dead.  Starting in high school, Conners followed the Dead, learned to dance without inhibition, and discovered the joys of living a creative life through making music and writing.  Those first Dead shows started a lifelong romance that has permeated every aspect of Conners’ life.

I love Growing up Dead.  Not just because Conners and I are the same age (we were born within two weeks of each other), and not because we went to some of the same Dead shows (most notably Silver Stadium June 30, 1988 which gets a chapter in the book).  I love Growing up Dead because it is beautifully written — Conners has a poet’s grace, a seeker’s heart, and a musician’s ear. 

Maybe, too, I’ve been carrying this book around with me so much lately because Conners answers the question a lot of Deadheads, myself included, have struggled to answer over the years – why the Grateful Dead?

As a writer, Conners moves around a lot, from project to project, genre to genre.  He is the author of Whiskey and Winter (poetry) and Emily Ate the Wind (novella).  His next book, White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg, is due out from City Lights in November 2010. He’s got a collection of poems, The Crows Were Laughing in Their Trees, on the way from White Pine Press in spring 2011.  There are rumors that he has two music-based novels hiding in his desk drawer.

“I hit fewer dead ends [these days] because I’ve tried just so many different approaches and found out what works best for me,” said Conners. “That doesn’t mean I don’t try new things, but it does mean that I can sniff out the fruitless ideas faster and move on to more fruited plains.

“Writing keeps me from looking at the world the same way every day.  I see things through the filter of my writing and as long as I’m working on different projects, I’m seeing the world in different ways. It’s a great way to get high and stay that way without being arrested.”

Below, Conners and I talk about creativity, dancing, and riding the bus.

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How’d you come to write Growing up Dead?  What sparked it off after all these years?

Peter Conners:  I’ve been writing and publishing poetry and fiction since I was about 20, but other than book reviews and the occasional essay, I hadn’t tried nonfiction. So, in some ways, it was just time to try that genre and see how it worked, how it felt, etc. It also seemed like the right time to capture my touring years. Many of the experiences I wrote about in Growing up Dead are from the 1980s and, frankly, my memory isn’t getting any better. I’m also still in touch with a bunch of people from those days and, like memory, people don’t last forever. So I was artistically in the right place and also chronologically in the right place to write Growing up Dead.  Then I just had to do it.

You write poetry, fiction, non-fiction.  What is it about the memoir form that appealed to you?  That suits this material – the story of your days on tour – more so than, say, fiction or poetry?

Peter Conners:  I’ve touched on the Dead scene in some of my fiction, but nothing as in-depth as Growing up Dead. I certainly could’ve tried fictionalizing the story and it may have made certain things easier (i.e. “I didn’t really do all those illegal things… it was purely fiction!”). It was important to me to really own this story though. To tell it as I remembered it and as my friends and I lived it. The experiences I wrote about were so powerful for me, so formative, that fictionalizing it would’ve felt a bit like copping out… or selling the story short. If I was going to do it, I was determined to do it as true as possible. Ironically, for the screenplay of Growing up Dead, just the opposite was true. The best way to tell the story was to turn it into fiction.  

Surely, it was a challenge to bridge the gap between worlds, between the world of Deadheads and the uninitiated.  How’d you keep the book from being inaccessible or too cryptic for the non-Head?

Peter Conners:  A lot of the book relates to the general experiences of growing up in the suburbs in the 1980s. That might sound limiting, until you think about how many people in this country had that experience. Once you isolate those factors (teenager, suburbs, 1980’s) you can approach the material from a sociological standpoint – what was the culture, the clothing, the traditions, the underpinning of the relationships, and, of course, the music? In that way, the book can strive to illuminate a unique social experience with the potential to be just as fascinating as the study of a remote village, or an Amazonian tribe, or Paris in the 1920s. If an author finds his/her subject matter truly relevant and fascinating, then he/she will communicate that. As unhip as it may be, I grew up in the suburbs in the 1980s. That was my life. No apologies, no regrets. So for people who aren’t into the Dead, the book offers insights into a more familiar time and place – and those insights can, in turn, be a doorway into understanding what attracted many suburban kids to the Dead scene. 

Being “on the bus” grew out of the days of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters.  In “That’s It for the Other One,” Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann, and Bob Weir write, “The bus came by and I got on/ that’s when it all began.”  What does it mean for you – as a writer, a father, a husband, a man, a human being – to be “on the bus”?

Peter Conners:  It’s an inextricable part of who I am. I’ve been on the bus for 20 years now and I’ve got a pretty good window seat. I’m on the bus as a Deadhead and I’m also on the bus as a writer and artist – and that combination keeps me grounded and also reaching for constant growth (as Bob Dylan says, “ He not busy being born is busy dying.”) To me, being on the bus is about movement and not settling for a mundane point of view. It’s a state of mind and I wouldn’t want to live any other way. 

How much of the prankster do you reveal in your writing?

Peter Conners:  All of my previous answers are lies.

Growing up Dead alternates between first person past tense and second person present tense, from “I was” to “you are.”  What prompted you to make this decision?  What were the limitations?  What did it allow you to do? 

Peter Conners:  The second person allowed me to do a few different things. First of all, it kept the structure of the book from getting too staid. It’s one thing to sit around telling “war stories” with your buddies, but on paper, that gets old pretty fast. You want to tell a good story in an interesting, fresh way. So the second person point of view helped me structure the book in way that kept the reader engaged, not lulled. Along those same lines, there’s an immediacy to the second person – it’s not “me” telling you about my experiences all the time. It’s “you” – the reader – getting put into the middle of the scene. I found that certain experiences – for example drug-infused ones that cause the mind to race and search for traction – can be better communicated by foisting that confusion upon the reader rather than telling them about your befuddlement. The second person also allowed me to bring more of my lyrical, poetic bent to the writing of the book. I’ve spent a lot time writing, reading, editing, and studying prose poetry and that’s a tough habit to break. So the second person allowed me to take off onto poetic flights without abandoning the heart of the story.  

You describe the freedom of dancing at Dead shows, the safety, the using of your hands to direct balls of light and energy… What did dancing at a Dead show teach you about writing?

Peter Conners:  Fluidity, experimentation, freedom, not worrying so much about what other people think, creating beauty even in ugly places (next to garbage cans in a coliseum hallway), valuing individual expression – my own and other people’s – and seeing what stifling that expression can do to people, how to find joy, the importance of release, the value of repetition (you become a better dancer by dancing… and so too with writing), and the importance of being simultaneously present and completely gone when creating.

Some of the most compelling sounds at a Dead show come when the band doesn’t stop between songs, during the fade into…  the gloriously improvisational exploration of possibility between recognizable songs.  Is there an equivalent in writing for you?

Peter Conners:  There is, but – for me anyway – those parts get edited out before the final piece of writing is published. Jack Kerouac is the best example of a writer who communicated at his best when leaving those parts in. I learned a lot and found a lot of joy by swimming through his “tuning” sections. But other writers have tried the same only to come off indulgent and tedious. For my own work, I’d say those sections can warm me up as I find the true subject, the true pulse, of a piece of writing. But then I’ll go through and trim them out before the work is published, so the reader can get right to the jams. 

At any point during the writing of the book or after its publication, did you worry about your kids reading this stuff?

Peter Conners:  Oh sure. All the time. I still do. But, you know, Daddy’s a writer, he’s an artist, and that means he’s walking a different path than some of the other Daddies. Eventually, we’ll have to have more in-depth talks about what that all means. But one good thing about coming clean like I did in Growing up Dead is that my ability to bullshit them just got slashed. And I choose to see that as a good thing. That said, my kids are eight, six, and three. Talk to me when they’re teenagers and I may be whistling a different dirge.

You mentioned that you’ve adapted Growing up Dead for the screen.  Was this your first go at a screenplay?  How’d the material adapt to the new form?

Peter Conners:  Yes, this was my first screenplay. It was a real challenge and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Just like with trying nonfiction for the first time – I was eager to tackle a new way of writing, and this offered that opportunity. Growing up Dead didn’t convert easily to screenplay because there isn’t a strong, distinct narrative arc to the book. So I had to pull out some key characters (Harry and Peter) and focus on a succinct period in time (their senior year of high school leading up to 1988 spring tour). The film will bring out those sociological aspects of 1980s suburban culture I talked about in the book while shaping a story that rings true, even though it’s 90% fictionalized. The screenplay is very much “based on the book” or “inspired by the book” as opposed to a pure adaptation. But the main thing is that – within this particular art form, the film form – the piece works. I think that it does. Now I stand back a little bit and learn about the collaborative nature of filmmaking. I’m working with some really sharp and passionate people who are as dedicated to bringing Growing up Dead to film as I am. It’s gonna be a good ride. 

What are you working on these days?

Peter Conners:  I’ve been swinging back and forth between working on the Growing Up Dead screenplay and finishing up my next nonfiction book which has been heavily research based. The book is called White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg and it will be published by City Lights in November 2010. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ll just paste in City Lights’ description of the book below. I’ve also recently finished my next poetry collection, The Crows Were Laughing in their Trees, which will be published by White Pine Press in spring 2011. As usual, I’m juggling projects and enjoying how they careen off of each other and what that does to my brain, my perspective, my life. That’s my window seat on the bus.

Here’s how City Lights describes my new book, White Hand Society:

In 1960 Timothy Leary was not yet famous — or infamous — and Allen Ginsberg was both. Leary, eager to expand his experiments at the Harvard Psilocybin Project to include accomplished artists and writers, knew that Ginsberg held the key to bohemia’s elite. Ginsberg, fresh from his first experience with hallucinogenic mushrooms in Mexico, was eager to promote the spiritual possibilities of psychedelic use. Thus, “America’s most conspicuous beatnik” was recruited as Ambassador of Psilocybin under the auspices of an Ivy League professor, and together they launched the psychedelic revolution and turned on the hippie generation.

White Hand Society weaves a fascinating and entertaining tale of the life, times and friendship of these two larger-than-life figures and the incredible impact their relationship had on America. Peter Conners has gathered hundreds of pages of letters, documents, studies, FBI files, and other primary resources that shed new light on their relationship, and a veritable who’s who of artists and cultural figures appear along the way, including Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Thelonious Monk, Willem de Kooning, and Barney Rosset. The story of the “psychedelic partnership” of two of the most famous, charismatic and controversial members of America’s counterculture brings together a multitude of major figures from politics, the arts, and the intersection of intellectual life and outlaw culture in a way that sheds new light on the dawn of the 1960s.

Lastly, what’s some of the best writing advice you’ve received over the years and how did you use it?

Peter Conners:  It’s sort of bleak, but my favorite college professor told me not to be a writer. He told me I was too smart for it and it was road of misery. I used the advice by ignoring it but never forgetting it. It has evolved to this little gem: If you don’t need to write, don’t do it. It’s sort of a mini-MFA course in 9 words. Young writers will either heed it or they won’t. It doesn’t much matter. If you don’t need to write, then don’t. But if you do, then do. And good luck to you.

On the day after Shared Worlds, I will be teaching a class on music and writing at the Writing in Place Conference in Spartanburg, SC.  The topic is so huge that I had no idea where to begin in narrowing it down. 

Music plays almost constantly in my life—while I am writing, driving, reading, you name it.  I take music like medicine.  Classical sharpens my thinking.  Jazz clarifies.  The Grateful Dead opens the flow.  Bob Dylan awakens mischief.  While I prefer long, exploratory instrumentals from guitarists like Jerry Garcia and Carlos Santana, the lyrics of Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark open the parts of me that have to stay closed in order to prevent spontaneous weeping at inappropriate times.

While I do not play an instrument – I’ve tried just about everything at one time or another, it seems – I do like to improvise nonsense songs as I go through the day.  If I try to write those songs down, they skitter away and hide from my pen.

At times, I wonder about the complex relationship between my love of music and my inability to make real music.

The blurb for the Writing in Place Conference class reads as follows:

In what ways can music enhance your writing and creativity?  What can music — listening to it, seeing it live, playing it, writing it, etc. — teach you about writing?  Focusing on a variety of musical genres and drawing on commentary from a wide-range of writers, you will explore the many ways to intertwine your two loves: music and writing. 

Ambitious, no?  In a desperate attempt to get a handle on the topic, I’ve been asking other writers about their relationship with music. 

Here’s what Steven K. Brust, Thomas Cobb, Peter Conners, Stephen Leigh, and Sheri Reynolds have to say on the subject.

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Steven K. Brust is the author of 19 novels, including the Dragaeron series.  In Brokedown Palace, Brust blends lyrics of Grateful Dead songs with Hungarian folklore.  Brust is also a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter.

Thomas Cobb is the author of Acts of Contrition, Crazy Heart, and Shavetail.  Donald Barthelme called Crazy Heart “a bitter, witty psychological profile of genius that is also a wonderful celebration of country music.”   Before his success as a fiction writer, Cobb was a music journalist.

Peter Conners is the author of Of Whiskey and Winter (poetry),  Emily Ate the Wind (novella), and  Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead (memoir), as well as the forthcoming  White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg.  Conners is a Deadhead and a musician.

Stephen Leigh writes under his own name, Matthew Farrell and S. L. Farrell.  As S. L. Farrell he wrote the Cloudmages trilogy and the the Nessantico Cycle, which continues with the recent A Magic a Dawn.  Leigh is a professor, martial artist, and musician.

Sheri Reynolds is the author of Bitterroot Landing, The Rapture of Canaan, A Gracious Plenty, and The Firefly Cloak. She is also a playwright, professor, and a musician.

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In what ways do you or have you used music to enhance your writing and creativity?
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Steven K. Brust:  This question is tough, because the answers are either too prosaic to be interesting or too esoteric to be useful.  For example, I type a lot, and play guitar, and drum.  Three things that can lead to carpal tunnel, but because I switch off, among them so far I’ve avoided it.  I suppose I have used music and musicians in my stories, but that’s because music is like food:  a part of life that matters to almost everyone to one degree or another, and can be used to provide insight into character.  

I know many people listen to music when they write; I do not.  I cannot.  If there is music on, it demands attention.  Voices I can filter out, music I want to listen to.

Stephen Leigh:  I’m always listening to music when I’m writing unless I’m in a public space with my laptop and without headphones. Otherwise, iTunes is always on, usually set to random play. Sometimes, for specific scenes, I’ll put on a particular tune or genre of music. For instance, while writing the Cloudmages series (which was Celtic fantasy), I was playing a lot of traditional Irish music. For the Nessantico Cycle, I would occasionally play medieval/renaissance music to put me in the right mood. Otherwise, I just let iTunes surprise me. I have very eclectic tastes in music. My library has some 14,000 pieces in it, and comprises everything from classical to jazz to rock to indie to world to folk to country to the various hard-to-classify pieces.

Thomas Cobb:  I used to listen to music while I wrote.  I don’t anymore.  I don’t know why.  It wasn’t a conscious decision as I remember.  It’s important to me.  There is always some sort of soundtrack running through my head, no matter what I’m doing.  How that influences me, I’m not sure.  I suspect it has something to do with the rhythm and cadences of what I do. 

Sheri Reynolds:  Music is usually a break for me from writing. Whenever I get stuck, I crank up the music and sing while I clean the kitchen or cook. Sometimes when I’m struggling with my writing, I’ll make myself work for an hour with the promise that afterwards, I can play my guitar until my fingers get tired. I often move between my laptop and my guitar during the work day.

Peter Conners:  Well, I’m always listening to music and a lot of the time it’s the Grateful Dead. When I’m writing, I listen to things that either won’t distract my mind or contribute to the spirit of my work. For example, during my last writing session on White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg, I listened to Blind Faith. That worked both ways because I didn’t have to focus too hard on it, and it was also very 60s sounding. The Dead are perfect to me because they’re like breathing. I can pick whatever era fits my mood and just let it roll. And then when I’m done, I can crank it up and enjoy it on an entirely different level.
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And/or what has music — listening to it, seeing it live, playing it, writing it, whichever — taught you about writing fiction?
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Peter Conners:  Fluidity, experimentation, freedom, not worrying so much about what other people think, finding beauty even in ugly places (next to garbage cans in a coliseum hallway), valuing individual expression – my own and other people’s – and seeing what stifling that expression can do to people, how to find joy, the importance of release, the value of repetition (you become a better dancer by dancing… and so too with writing), and the importance of being simultaneously present and completely gone when creating.

Sheri Reynolds:  One important lesson I’ve learned from music is to pay attention to what’s happening in the background. Naturally my ear first hears the melody, the lyrics. Then I begin to notice all the nuances, the off-beats, the different instruments and how they play with and against one another. As a writer, I want a similar complexity and richness in my work. A first draft is rarely more than the melody.

Thomas Cobb:  Writing about music, which I did in the 70′s and 80′s, taught me how to write.  Music and writing are very different forms of art and don’t, I think, go naturally together.  When you write about music, you learn to write around it more than directly at it.  That was an important lesson.  It pertains to a lot of things in writing.

Steven K. Brust:  I don’t know what music has taught me about creativity in general, or writing in particular.  Something, probably, but I can’t say what.  The other way around is easier to describe: because I’ve had a certain amount of success at writing, it made me cocky enough to think I could learn to be a passable musician.  More specifically, when I was teaching myself to write songs, my knowledge of and interest in the processes of writing led to take a very methodical approach: I’m going to write a song that focuses on characterization revealed by a few significant details; now I’m going to write a song that tells the story in the negative space; now I’m going to write a song that explores a single character in some depth, and so on.

But I suppose it’s cheating to talk about songwriting–because the basis of songwriting is still the sentence, and that’s the basis of fiction too.  I’m flailing around here because the question fascinates me, but I have no insight into it.   Certainly the moments of inspiration in music and those in writing involve the same euphoria, but so do a million other things for other people.  That leads me to consider the similarities between music and writing, but that goes nowhere, because the similarities are so vague and general as to have essentially no content.  The difference between music and writing is much easier to express: when I’m writing, I never use drugs.

Stephen Leigh:  Playing music has taught me more than listening. From being a gigging musician, I learned that no matter how you’re actually feeling, you still have to give it your all when you step on the stage. It’s the same with writing: you can’t wait to feel inspired, and you can’t wait until you’re in the perfect mood to write: you have to sit down at the computer every day and you have to write, no matter what how you’re feeling otherwise.

Likewise, I’ve learned that the more you practice, the better you get. You don’t get better by thinking about playing, you become a better musician by actually playing music. You don’t become a better writer by thinking about writing; you become a better writer by actually writing.

And finally, you can’t ever be satisfied with where you are. It’s always possible for you to learn some new technique, some new way of approaching your instrument, if you’re open to that. I play bass most often, and I’m still learning the various techniques. I’ve also started playing guitar again in a duo setting, and I’m both re-learning stuff I’ve forgotten on that instrument and at the same time learning techniques that I never knew in the first place. Writing should be the same way: there are always new places to explore, new techniques to try, new ways to approach voice and structure — and I try to do that as well with each new work.

“Werewolves,” says Ekaterina Sedia in the introduction to Running with the Pack, “are not the expression of our own wildness, but the longing to be like those who hunt us, the desire to become the predator.”

Running with the Pack offers a variety of takes on the werewolf story.  Some agree with Sedia’s assertion above and others go more for the “beast within us” angle.  The table of contents features writers like Jeffrey Ford, C.E. Murphy, Laura Anne Gilman, Mike Resnick, N. K. Jemisin, and many more.  Below, I asked six of the contributors to Running with the Pack about the appeal of werewolves to them as readers and as writers.  The result is a round-table discussion of much more than just fangs, fur, and blood. 

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Marie Brennan is the author of the Onyx Court series, including the forthcoming A Star Shall Fall.  Her contribution to Running with the Pack is “Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics as Employed Against Lycanthropes”.

Jesse Bullington is the author of The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart and the forthcoming The Enterpise of Death.  His contribution to Running with the Pack is “Blamed For Trying To Live”.

Karen Everson is a freelance writer working on a novel, Crown of Shadows, among many other projects.  Her contribution to Running with the Pack is “Deadfall”.

Geoffrey H. Goodwin stories have appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Rabid Transit.   He writes regularly for Bookslut, Weird Tales, and Tor.com.  and non-fiction.  His contribution to Running with the Pack is “Are You a Vampire or A Goblin?”

Molly Tanzer is an assistant editor at Fantasy Magazine, as well as a freelance writer.  Her contribution to Running with the Pack is “In Sheep’s Clothing”.

Carrie Vaughn is the author of the Kitty Norville novels and the forthcoming Voices of Dragons.  Her contribution to Running with the Pack is “Wild Ride”.

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What is the appeal of werewolves to you as a reader? As a writer?   What do werewolves allow you to do in fiction? And what unique spin do you put on the werewolf in your story in Running with the Pack?

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Molly Tanzer:  Though it’s simplistic, as a reader, I enjoy it when just about any monster shows up in a book or a story because I love monsters. I get excited about werewolves, specifically, because they tend to signify a number of things: the transformation of one thing into another, the beast within, clannishness and/or loneliness, and, I feel obliged to say, loss of innocence/discovering one’s sexuality (but I might be feeling that because I just last night re-watched The Company of Wolves).

Geoffrey H. Goodwin:  Werewolves are monsters that haven’t been defanged yet.  ”Are You a Vampire or A Goblin?” is my first werewolf story but I doubt it will be my last.

Vampires used to be frightening because it was a sales pitch that you had to be buried in consecrated ground and all the rest or else you would rise from your grave and eat your relatives. That was scary and not one bit sparkly: convert or eat grandma. I loved Buffy as much as anyone, but I like my vampires and werewolves with their fangs bared.

Werewolves are interesting because there’s less preconceived cultural baggage. I wanted to explore an origin myth and avoid packs or silver bullets. Lycanthropy dates back to Ovid, but my generation had Teen Wolf and An American Werewolf in London. Both played for laughs, but the latter mattered to me and the former offended my sensibilities. I don’t look at a hungry wolf and want to date it. I look at a hungry wolf and I want to run as fast as I can, even if Duran Duran plays in my head while I flee.

Karen Everson:  What is it like to own the night?  How does the world change when perceived through different senses, when, instead of our human visual orientation, the mind seeks its first clues from scent or sound?  What is it like to read the textures of the earth against your flesh?  And how would our purely human senses change, once that other world had been opened to our minds?  Modern humans live at a remove from the natural world.  What if, by a twist of magic, we were turned, a-tuned, to more primal selves?  Would we find those changes savage and bestial, or liberating and somehow innocent?

Of all the non-primates, wolves are closest to our shadow selves.  The ancient Lapps saw them as another tribe, humankind’s rivals in the eyes of the gods and nature.  Wolves use many of the same food sources as humans.  They live in family groups, exhibit a fidelity in their pair-bonds that humans might envy.  They care carefully for their young, they play, they hunt co-operatively.  Closer study, such as I made for a yet-unpublished werewolf novel, implies very strongly that they have a complex language of sounds, facial expressions, and body language.  Though their societies have firm patterns, the personalities of individual pack members can change those patterns, and those personalities, in and of themselves, can vary from the nurturing care-giver to the truly vicious.  Wolves show behavior that, displayed in humans, would be called loyalty, love, and even grief.  But unlike humans, they have no distance from the more savage realities of their lives.  They hunt.  They kill.  That they take only what they need to live does not diminish the merciless persistence of the hunt, their deadly swiftness, nor the hard truths of tearing teeth and blood-stained ground.

Our shadow selves, indeed. 

Jesse Bullington:   I’ve always been a sucker for werewolves, both as a reader and a writer. The concept allows us to preserve the childhood fear of the wolf long after we’ve realized the mundane animal poses no threat to us, and expand upon it as we see fit. Do we represent the werewolf with the same compassion and understanding that we now view the endangered wolf with, or do we channel that primal terror of teeth and claws and fur into a monster worthy of the name? I’m fond of both approaches, personally.

Molly Tanzer:   Monsters are fun to write about because they can occupy space in stories in exciting ways, often very differently than human (well, with werewolves, fully human) characters. They are intrinsically flexible and thus they can be used to talk about social issues, or yield an awesome visual image, or just provide a chance to write a character with a consciousness alien to the author’s. I guess that’s why I’ve never minded “new” takes on classic monsters–I like to see people get creative. While old-school tropes can be rad when used well, I’ve found that they can (sometimes, not always) become crutches for lazy world-building. I think it’s fun to see writers (and I try, as a writer) to strike a nice balance between hearkening to the past and exploring what one’s own mind might create if, for example, one had just come up with the idea of “what if this person could transform into a wolf! What then?”

Marie Brennan:  I’d never written about werewolves before this story.  The inspiration came about from an article on Patricia Briggs’ website, written by her husband Michael, on the topic of silver bullets.  It turns out they’re surprisingly hard to make; no melting grandma’s cross over the campfire.  When I read that article, the idea really stuck in my mind: taking this bit of folklore and approaching it scientifically, to see what really works.  I think werewolves especially lend themselves to that approach, more than some of the other things you see in urban fantasy.  (I spend most of my time writing about faeries.)

Carrie Vaughn:  I have to confess that the number one reason I started writing about werewolves is that they’re not vampires.  I had a story I wanted to tell in a supernatural setting, and I realized I didn’t have anything new or interesting to say about vampires.  Werewolves, on the other hand, had been sadly neglected, stuck in bloody retellings of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for the last hundred years.  Struggling against the beast within, unleash destruction, die horribly, yadda yadda.  What happens if you get werewolves past that story?  If you have werewolf main characters and assume that they’ve learned to live with it, that they’re not a slave to the beast within and destined to die a horrible death?  What you get is a character living on the border between civilization and the wild, between human and animal.  This can be a powerful way of looking at the world.  And to me it’s a far more interesting metaphor than simply battling the beast within.

Karen Everson:  There are wolves of some variety in every environment.  Forest, tundra, jungle, mountain, even desert, the wolf has found some adaptation.  No wonder the werewolf is ubiquitous, and that there are so many myths concerning how they may come to be.  They are the servants of ancient gods and goddesses.  They are born, or made by a curse that may be singular or carried in a bite.  They are the other-selves of warriors, shamans, wizards, witches fair or foul.  They are the children of elder gods who shift at will, or humans twisted into monsters at the call of the moon.  How do such dual selves co-exist?  And if, in a world of magic, all of these variants exist, how would they interact if they met?

What could be richer ground?

Geoffrey H. Goodwin:  Werewolves have mileage right now because the rules are murkier. The predatory incarnation will come back for vamps, for sure—but it’s going to take a lot to get the blood flowing again. We like to be reminded that people can be monsters, but we also need to remember that monsters aren’t always people.

Jesse Bullington:   As a kid I was positively obsessed with werewolves, particularly becoming one, and for “Blamed For Trying To Live” I revisited that childhood desire, with the twist being on the former word instead of the latter in the description “urban werewolves”–in marketing “urban” is often synonymous with “African-American,” or worse, “ghetto,” and so I set my piece in a rough neighborhood in the city where I grew up, with a protagonist a bit different from the stereotypical “urban” character.

Molly Tanzer:  If I had to pick what I love most about my story in Running with the Pack, I’d be torn between the setting and the way my character becomes a werewolf (if indeed that’s what she is). I imagined my character’s town as being Gold Hill or Ward, one of those little mountain towns close but not too close to Boulder, and writing something set in that sort of environment was new for me. I’d just moved to/fallen in love with Boulder when I wrote “In Sheep’s Clothing” and so I wanted to write about where I lived, and what weirdness might ensue if something catastrophic happened here, given the location and the general mentality of the folks found within The Republic of Boulder and its outlying satellite colonies.

Then there’s the actual transformation, caused (maybe? I think) by the wolf-fur belt my character dons. Despite what your average furry might think, there’s little more horrifying than an animal getting up on its hind legs and coming for you. Also, if you’ve ever been up in the Rockies or the Flatirons when it’s snowing, the whole world goes grey. If you hike or drive up to some of the higher elevations, you can’t see beyond the prominence you’re standing on. If you know, for example, you should be seeing the entire Boulder valley as you stand atop a rock, but what you do see is just blank endless grey, it’s unnerving and terrible and beautiful (Kant’s theory of the sublime comes to mind at those times, as well as “man it’s cold up here”).

The idea of one’s neighbor becoming something neither human nor wolf and emerging out of the snow to come and eat you. . . well.  That’s, as they say, no good at all.

Carrie Vaughn:  “Wild Ride” is the backstory of one of the characters from my first werewolf novel, Kitty and The Midnight Hour.  One of the things I’m trying to do with the Kitty series is show that there are lots of ways that characters come to be werewolves, and lots of reactions to the situation afterward.  T.J. is a character who chose to become a werewolf, and this story explains why, and what happens after.

Geoffrey H. Goodwin:  To me, the most fertile ground with werewolves is in looking back. I put the Malleus Malificarum into “Are You a Vampire or A Goblin?” because I was sorting through the precedents. Up against Frankenstein or Dracula, werewolves need those elements to bring their myths forward. The legends are out there but they’re less monomythed. I’d even go so far as to say that goblins have more rules in myth, more requirements built up over the long haul. But that’s the magic in werewolves, they’re still unsettling.

Karen Everson:  Olwen Ap Howell, the main character of “Deadfall” in Running with the Pack, is a recurring character in my work.  (Another Olwen story, “Support Your Local Werewolf,” appears in Esther Friesner’s Strip Mauled anthology.)  Her family traces their lineage to characters in early Welsh mythology.  She Changes at will, and retains essential elements of her human consciousness in her wolf shape.  “Deadfall” is my exploration of a question that, to me, is one of the most fascinating posed by werewolf myth.  It is the wolf, the “Beast,” we are used to seeing presented as the savage, the killer.  It is, perhaps, our own acknowledgement of the monsters that lurk in our own psyches, the “Id,” the “lizard brain” that whispers our most selfish desires, our most savage wills.   But is it the wolf that is dangerous?  The needs and wants of the wolf are fairly simple, after all.  Or is the true danger of the werewolf that it is the perfect weapon — unknown, untraceable, even unbelievable — by which very human murder can be accomplished?   Most people, somewhere in the course of their lives, have had some event or person that would tempt them toward the perfect, undetectable, murder.  If werewolves, like wolves and people, live primarily in family groups, how do they govern such deadly possibilities?  How do they live and love and joy in what they are, and still stay hidden and unknown?

What happens if they get tired of hiding? 

There are interesting answers in Running with the Pack.

Geoffrey H. Goodwin:  Mad scientists, corrupt priests and vampires, the more Gothic tropes, all have their place. Ghosts have been taken in almost every direction and they beg for reinvention every time they rattle their chains…but werewolves remain harder to tame than those others. The precedent is more entrenched in film than literature, unlike the rest. The actual accounts are far less codified or consistent. Fewer unbreakable rules are floating in the collective unconscious. In looking at the other stories in Running with the Pack, I was impressed by both the range and the writing. I think putting dangerous vampires and sparkly vampires in the same anthology would disappoint most everyone…with werewolves, we got away with fewer restrictions and more maulings.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magazine.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. 

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Editor’s Note:  I was about to turn 11 years old in the summer of 1981 when American Werewolf in London came out.  And it scared the crap out of me, especially the transformation scenes and the fang shots.   Though I lived in an area of the world where alligators regularly ate our cats and water moccasins bit our dogs, American Werewolf re-populated the shadows of my psyche with fangs, fur and blood, with werewolves.

American Werewolf left me so unreasonably freaked out that I totally missed the humor while skewered to the seat in the theater.  And I can find humor anywhere.  Usually, at least.

For this reason, I avoided werewolf stories until I discovered last year that both James Lowder (Curse of the Full Moon) and Ekaterina Sedia (Running with the Pack) were editing werewolf anthologies.  Jim Lowder has edited some of my favorite anthologies, including The Best of All Flesh, Worlds of Their Own, and Astounding Hero Tales, and Kathy Sedia…  well, if Kathy Sedia digs werewolf stories enough to do an anthology, then I just had to see what they’re all about.

–JLCJ

I first met Pete Turchi across the ping-pong table in the mountains of North Carolina while I was attending the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.  Later, I got to know Turchi through his novel, The Girls Next Door, and his story collection, Magician. 

Turchi’s teaching and his non-fiction has had a powerful impact on me as a student of the craft, as a writer, and as a teacher.  Turchi co-edited two remarkable collections: The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work with Andrea Barrett and Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life with Charles Baxter.  Together these two books pull together the best of a writing program—the fiction, the shop talk, the look behind the magician’s curtain.

But it was Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer that so overtly changed the way I see the craft of writing and the way I teach it.

Turchi attended the MFA program at the University of Arizona. In various capacities, he has taught at Northwestern University, Appalachian State University, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the University of Houston. He directed the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College for fifteen years.  Currently, Turchi is the director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University.

Turchi has taught in traditional MFA programs and a low-residency MFA program, as well as in a variety of conferences and workshops across the country.  Below, Turchi and I talk about the importance of integrity, rigor, and generosity in the study of writing.

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All in all, what was the impact of attending an MFA program on your writing?
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Peter Turchi:   Attending an MFA Program tested my commitment to writing in a variety of ways. I had wanted to write fiction at least as early as second grade; and while I pursued other interests both in and out of school, I read and wrote fiction of some sort through junior high, high school, and college. I got praise and encouragement along the way, and I won a sizeable prize for “promise in the field of literary endeavor” when I graduated from Washington College, in Maryland, so I believed I was doing all right. But I was rejected by a number of the MFA programs I applied to, and far from the most talented student writer in the MFA Program I attended, at the University of Arizona. I found myself torn in a variety of ways, lost and lonely. Thousands of miles from the only places I had lived, a long and expensive plane flight from my girlfriend (now my wife), I had to confront the fact that there were a great many people my age trying to do what I wanted to do who were already much better at it.

Over time—and I see this only now, many years later—I developed a variety of coping strategies. I made friends with some of the best writers in the program; I experimented with other genres (I wrote movie reviews and long feature stories for the Tucson Weekly, notes for the international film series, a couple of full-length screenplays, an essay or two, and some curious, gimmicky short stories); and, through it all, I wrote and re-wrote and re-wrote the novel I had drafted as a junior in college, and which I published not too long after getting the MFA. Doing all of that other writing was good for my fiction directly, in that I had to create and revise drafts quickly and focus on clear and effective prose, and indirectly, because it gave me psychic hiding places. Even though some of that other writing was read by thousands of other people (once, sitting in a movie theater, I listened to someone in the row behind me read aloud and respond to one of my reviews), that writing wasn’t “workshopped,” and it was published.
Twenty-five years later, some of my best writer-friends are people I went to school with. They continue to influence me.
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What exactly is a low-residency MFA program anyway? What are the benefits? The drawbacks? Who should apply?
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Peter Turchi:  Low-residency programs can take many different forms, but the one I know best, at Warren Wilson (which I taught in and directed for 15 years, and still teach in now, when I can), along with many that have adapted its basic structure, brings students and faculty together for ten days or so every semester for classes, lectures, workshops, conferences, etc. The rest of the time everyone is at home, working. In the old days students sent faculty their work by mail; now it’s by email.

There are many benefits to the low-residency model. Writing, as we all know, is solitary work. Residential programs put people in classes week after week, so that the focus can seem to be those classes, and what happens in them and in workshop discussions. But of course that’s just a small fraction of what students should be attending to. Students should be focused primarily on their writing, and on all the reading related to it. A low residency program offers the benefits of a community of writers—you get to hear everyone, students and faculty, talking about the aspects of their work that fascinate them—as well as the necessary isolation. If the faculty is good, the experience is like a dream: every few weeks the student sends a more accomplished writer, one who is thoughtful and sympathetic, work in progress and a discussion of related concerns and ideas, and the faculty member responds by engaging in that discussion and offering suggestions.

All of that said, there’s nothing magical about the format: anything can be done poorly or well. If there’s an inherent drawback to low-residency programs, it may be that they require more independence and discipline on the part of the student. (Some people worry that the physical distance comes at the expense of a sense of community, but that is far from the case at Warren Wilson.)
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You’ve taught in both low-residency and traditional programs. What, beyond the residency requirements, are some of the major differences? If you had it to do all over again, which would you choose, low-residency or traditional residency? Does a young writer need an MFA to be successful?
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Peter Turchi:  If I had it all to do over again, I would start eating better and exercising much earlier. As far as my education as a writer is concerned, I think I would still opt for a residential program if I were to enter an MFA program immediately after earning the BA, which is what I did. If I were to wait a few years, I believe I’d opt for a low-residency program. But here’s the truth: I think any writer should go to the best program that will accept him or her, regardless of format or geographical location. The quality of the education trumps everything else. The great challenge, of course, is to recognize what makes a good MFA program, or a great one. The various rankings are not particularly helpful, and things like the celebrity of the faculty and student funding are irrelevant (to the quality of the instruction). Visiting programs is ideal, if that’s possible; second best is to ask students (and faculty) what they find most valuable about the program they’re part of, what reservations they have. And of course the best program for one person may not be the best for another.

This sounds terribly old-fashioned, but things to look for include integrity and rigor. Many students are, initially, inclined to avoid rigorous programs; but students thrive in programs that both challenge them to do more, at a higher level, than they think they can, and reward that effort. We’re living in a sad time when colleges and universities talk about students as customers, a kind of thinking that encourages teachers to make students “satisfied” by giving them good grades, and not to risk making them “unsatisfied” by asking them to do something difficult, and invoking consequences if they don’t. But a deeper satisfaction comes from doing something new and challenging. There’s an exhilaration that comes from exceeding what we believe to be our capabilities.
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Both low-residency and traditional programs include a workshop experience. What are the benefits and drawbacks of the workshop? When does it go well? When does it fail? What is this strange beast called an “MFA Short Story” I hear people grumbling about?
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Peter Turchi:  Writing workshops can be useful, but they can also be destructive, tedious, or both. The format—a group of people sit and discuss one person’s work in progress—tempts many people to offer pronouncements and opinions, and while that can be entertaining and, depending on the pronouncer, informative, before long that sort of workshop is too excruciating to bear. I’ve spent a good bit of time articulating my thoughts about workshops and how they can be most useful to everyone involved. The current version is here.
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You’ve attended and taught at a lot of conferences. What is their main value, who should attend, and are there any you recommend over others?
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Peter Turchi:  For writers serious about developing their work, conferences and workshops are something like MFA programs—opportunities to engage with writers at an equal or higher level, people who are serious about writing and invested in discussing it with others. Writers—like other artists, and maybe people in every profession—don’t have much to say about what they do to people who don’t engage with it or think about it in the same way. The challenge is to avoid dullards and people whose primary motives have little to do with any serious investment in learning. Instead, seek out good and generous people who will engage in conversation or correspondence about writing in ways that are stimulating, provocative, and useful.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magazine.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.

Here’s the tenth and final interview on collaboration.  This series celebrates collaborative creativity in honor of the Shared Worlds summer camp, which challenges teenagers to build and share imaginary worlds.

Marcia Muller‘s first novel, Edwin of the Iron Shoes, introduced the world to the private detective Sharon Cone.  Muller has written more than 35 novels and seven short story collections.  Her most recent novels, Burn Out and Locked In, both feature McCone – a female private investigator who cleared trail for the likes of Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone and Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski.  Muller received the honor of Grand Master from the Mystery Writers of America (MWA) in 2005.

Also a MWA Grand Master, Bill Pronzini is best known for detective fiction, though he writes mysteries and westerns as well.  He has edited or co-edited more than 100 anthologies.  Pronzini’s Nameless detective series began with The Snatch in 1971 and continued last year with Schemers.  The 35th novel in the series, Betrayers, is due out in July 2010. 

Over the years, Pronzini has collaborated with John Lutz, Collin Wilcox, and Marcia Muller, among others.  Together, Pronzini and Muller have co-written Beyond the Grave, The Lighthouse, and Double.  Below they talk about collaboration and that unique third voice that is neither his nor hers.

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What are the benefits of collaborating on fiction writing?  How do you do it?  When does it work?  How does it positively affect the final product?

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Bill Pronzini:  I’ve collaborated with a number of different writers over the years, including my wife, Marcia Muller, and have generally found the experiences to be highly rewarding.  For one thing, collaboration eases the loneliness of the long-distance writer.  For another, it’s easier for two heads to work out a fictional plot progression than it is for one.  And for a third, it allows two individuals to create a ”third voice” when blending of the styles and visions of each.  No collaborative novel or short story in which I’ve been involved reads the same as it would have if I’d written it solo, or if my partner had written it solo.  In some cases, when the collaboration has worked at its best, the third voice is superior to both mine and my partner’s.

As to the mechanics of collaboration, it all depends on the individuals involved.  Some prefer a single method; I’ve done the deed in just about every way imaginable, depending on who I was working with and on what type of project.  Alternate pages, chapters, and sections.   Alternate drafts of an entire manuscript.  Series fiction in which my partner and I established a storyline and then each wrote the sections dealing with our individual characters.  In most cases, whether writing series or non-series fiction, the plot has to be worked out ahead of time; but on a few occasions, as literary exercises, friends and I have written short stories without anything other than the simplest of situations in mind:  one member of the team writing a single page and leaving the other to carry on, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, on the next page.   But I wouldn’t recommend this method; while it has led to a few published stories, it has also led to some unsalable time-wasters.

Marcia Muller:  I have had only one collaborator–my husband, Bill Pronzini.  However, our three collaborative novels and numerous short stories encompass the full range of the types of collaboration.  Double is an example of alternating chapters using established series characters, in this case Bill’s “Nameless” detective and my Sharon McCone.  Beyond the Grave also uses series characters (John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter), but in alternating sections.  In The Lighthouse, we utilize a third-person voice which is neither his nor mine.  The latter was particularly challenging because we were traveling into previously uncharted territory.  The stories are a mixture of all three approaches.

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Can you share some advice (and maybe some words of caution) for fiction writers setting out to collaborate?

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Marcia Muller:  Collaborating is a real pleasure for us:  it stimulates ideas, makes the writing easier (but not easy, never easy), makes working time less lonely.  Trust is a necessity, as is compromise.  We gladly cede control over a project to whomever wishes to hold the reins.  Advice for would-be collaborators:  make sure you have resolved the above issues before you begin, and be willing to resolve differences again and again.

Bill Pronzini: Two pieces of advice for potential collaborators:  First, trust is a must.  If you don’t have complete trust in your partner’s skills, instincts, vision, etc., chances are there’ll be conflicts that will hamper and affect the quality of the work.  And second, a corollary to the trust issue:  Before beginning a joint project, make sure you and your partner are willing to compromise on any differences of opinion that might crop up, and then decide on which of you will have the final say once the work is completed or nearing completion and stick to that decision.  No collaboration can be successful when both partners end up fighting over control of the finished product.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magazine.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.