Laird Barron

Hi Laird! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. The elephant in the room is all your nominations. In your opinion, how has your writing evolved over the years, especially when it comes to horror?

Hi, Charles. Can’t say whether I’ve evolved, but I hope I’ve learned a few things along the way. I worked different notes in Occultation; where The Imago Sequence dealt with horror through a hyper- masculine, noir lens, the new collection features, on the whole, a broader spectrum of protagonists, most of them quite ordinary. The focus is much more on relationships than gunfights. People dealing with each other, the wilderness, the inner dark. More focus on atmospherics, more attention to the ghostly and the weird. The third collection, The Beautiful Thing that Awaits Us All, is a fusion of the first two in many ways. I worked in cosmic horror tales alongside the occult and one pure ghost story.  Hope to see it out in a year or so.

A lot of your stories tend to be quite lengthy. Where are you more comfortable, the short story or novelette format? What are the pros and cons of each?

I prefer the novelette and novella forms; anything between twelve to twenty-five thousand words. The majority of my recent work is somewhere in that range, although I occasionally write a short story as well. I enjoy longer forms because there’s room to develop secondary characters and plots, more space for the darkness to expand, more layers of the onion to peel. I guess I’ve bought into that theory the core of art creation is akin to archaeology—you don’t write a story, you unearth it. My tendency is to keep boring in, to keep mining for the next black artifact my subconscious has convinced me lies in wait.

How did Night Shade Books end up publishing your second (as well as first) short story collection

The first collection came about after I spoke with Kelly Link at Readercon and she suggested I contact Jason and Jeremy at Night Shade. Turned out that Kelly and Nick Mamatas had championed my stories in Fantasy & Science Fiction and SciFiction to NS among others–this proved to be a huge boost for me. So, I dropped NS a line and Jason Williams took the collection a few weeks later. I ended up with a beautiful book, too. The guys made a nice offer for another collection and a novel. Occultation is equally gorgeous. Next, The Croning novel, which has been running behind due to unrelated life complications on my end.

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Jeff VanderMeer

Hi Jeff! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. Aside from your short story “The Third Bear”, you also have an essay of the same name. How did the concept of The Third Bear originally develop and how did you finally settle on the title?

I was asked to write about fairy tales from a male perspective for a book of essays put together by Kate Bernheimer called Brothers & Beasts. I’d already been building up a kind of mythology around a man transformed into a bear for a story called The Situation and for the essay I more or less deconstructed and then reconstructed the whole idea of “three bears” around very different precepts than the actual folktale. In doing so, as sometimes happen, bits of story and plot got mixed in with the essay, and at some later point I found I had to write the short story too. My idea about a “third bear” is that this bear was outside of the confines of stylized folktales, and more like the literal versions of the originals. That the third bear was a kind of senselessness—beyond comprehension, as are some acts and situations in our world. And that as a result, sometimes folktales were inadequate for dealing with reality, because reality is messy—it doesn’t have discrete beginnings, middles, and ends, and stories that try to say reality has order to it are telling a lie.

What was your criteria in selecting the stories for your collection? How about the sequence of the stories?

I wanted to focus on stories that expressed a search for the inexplicable, the strange, the unknowable. For something beyond ourselves. In terms of the sequence, I wanted to start with the heart of the matter, “The Third Bear,” and then pull back from that horror into more subtle explorations, letting each story resonate in the heart of the next as much as possible, before opening up again at the end into the ultimate search for the unknowable in the last story.

What were the challenges in writing “The Quickening,” which is original to the book?

Knowing that a rabbit eating rabbit stew was the second key image in the story, after the first one, and to know when to create a sense of the luminous and when to create a more down-to-earth mood. But perhaps most essential was not being too nice. I kept recoiling from the central act that takes place in the story, toward the end, and then eventually realizing it was inevitable and to not go in that direction was a lie. And also that easy explanations for the rabbit would also be a lie, and that my decision in that regard would leave some readers expecting a certain set of tropes puzzled. But that’s okay—a puzzled reader is better than a bored reader.

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Stephen Graham Jones

Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. How did The Ones That Got Away end up being published by Prime Books and how did you decide on which stories got included in the collection?

How Ones ended up with Prime is that “Raphael” was supposed to be in Prime’s Horror, the Best of the Year 2007, which I think somehow died. But I guess that got my work on Sean Wallace’s desk. And then — I think this is beforeOnes, anyway — I also placed “Captain’s Lament” with Clarkesworld, which got me in his office again. Oh, wait. Right around then, Paul Tremblay and Sean were editing Phantom, and I was lucky enough to sneak my story “The Ones Who Got Away” in there. So, I mean, Sean probably thought I was waging some campaign or something. Which of course I was, and always am. On January 12th, 2008, then, he finally succumbed to all my mental telegraphy and emailed, asked if had considered getting my horror stories together into a collection? I think I got the email in a hotel in Boulder. I was up here scoping for a place to live, or picking up a bad-idea truck. And I said yes and please and thank you, of course, and then at some point Sean said let’s call it The Ones That Almost Got Away. I think up until then I’d been leaning toward The Meat Tree, maybe. Though I had a lot of titles cooking. Anyway, yeah, that rocked, and, the more I thought about it, the more it rocked. So then we were both kind of surprised when the cover came back The Ones That Got Away. It was kind of halfway between the title story and our intentions, but the words were all locked together so cool, and the cover was so pretty, and Sean said we could call a re-do, of course, but I was already saying please and thank you and yes again. Now I can’t imagine it being called anything else.

As for what stories, that was not an easy task. First I just piled all my horror stories into one file, then I started sneaking in dark stuff, then kind of science-fiction themed stuff, then just bloody and violent and disturbing stuff, and that was ridiculous. Way too much for one collection, and no kind of theme or anything running through it at all. And collections need . . . not so much continuity, but a feeling that they’re all kind of orbiting the same person, anyway. The same small set of ideas. So I gave myself that filter, only let myself choose stories that were in the same neighborhood as each other but weren’t quite cousins, if that makes any sense. I didn’t want any repeats, I mean.

This meant cutting a cool zombie story and some other stuff, and it meant rehabbing “The Meat Tree,” which turned out to just require prose-level fixes, as the story was there. However, selecting these, trying to make them into a real collection instead of some kind of unearned ‘greatest hits’-trick, what I finally had to go with were ones that scared me. I figured I’d have to let that be the center. There were a lot of others that I was jealous of — I can’t write X way anymore, don’t know how I ever dreamed that premise up, on and on — and a lot that I thought exhibited what I consider my meager strengths on the page. But that’s not what a collection’s about. So I just finally went with the ones I didn’t like to read too late at night. And, until Laird Barron’s so-cool, completely surprising introduction came back, I honestly didn’t know that there were so many kid pieces in there. I mean, ‘kid stories,’ I guess. There’s pieces all over the collection, of kids, adults, dogs. Well, no — when trying to sequence these stories, I did realize I couldn’t let the kid-voices merge, just because I didn’t want any character continuity suggested from this story to the next. But I never saw it in the real way Laird did. Not until he did, anyway.

What’s the appeal of the short story format for you and what are the challenges in writing for such a medium?

What I so dig about the short story is that you’re in and out in an afternoon. Just Sunday (it’s Tuesday now), I’d been up half the night with this terrible nightmare. Which is nothing unusual. But I had to be out the door at six or so, for my son’s swim meet. On the way, though, I bought this little dollar notebook, because I could feel my hand getting all twitchy, wanting to write. And I did. Got about three-thousand words down by nine, longhand (laptops and pools don’t mix), then read and watched the events, then got home about three in the afternoon and, by, I don’t know, six, I think, I’d transcribed and finished the story. Seven-thousand words and change. And it terrified me. And, in writing it, I realized it was all stemming from this lamp my wife had bought at a garage sale the day before, which I kept seeing in the rearview of the car that day. Anyway, I’m in the middle of a deadline novel, so didn’t need to be jacking with unsolicited stories, but the story didn’t care, was messing with me. Monday morning, I added two thousand more words, then another thousand after lunch. It’s sitting at ten thousand now, and’s the scariest thing I’ve done, I think, and, what? I invested ten hours or so? It’s so completely worth it. I mean, even if it somehow doesn’t sell, still, I’m so proud of it, feel like I cheated, getting it written.

And that’s how all the stories are for me. I never mess with one for longer than a few days. If it’s broken, throw it away, I say. That’s what I like so much about them. I mean, with a novel, if it’s broken, you nearly always feel this guilty push to rehab it, right? At least I do. I’ve fallen in love with the characters, this made-up place is so real, all that. With stories, I fall in love as well, but it’s a different kind of love. Not a one-night-stand kind of thing, but . . . I say it’s the slight investment that draws me, but it could also be the shape. The end comes so fast after the beginning, and you have to use so much economy, have to find all these elegant little workarounds. They’re fun, I guess. The problems built into the form of short stories — maybe ‘mode’ is the good word? — they’re problems I get a rush out of playing with. And every once in a while one turns out all right.

What was the genesis of “Crawlspace,” the story original to this collection?

Just the usual: my life. When my son was young, still in the crib, I found that if I read horror too late at night, he’d always need us to come get him. And, I say ‘us,’ but if I was reading horror, I’d usually find some way to accidentally wake my wife up, so she could walk down that dark hallway. I’d go with her, of course, to show I wasn’t being lazy, but I’d be watching behind us, too. One of my uncles used to always tell me I had a leaky brain. Maybe he was right, I don’t know. Or maybe I’m just making stuff up, seeing connections where there’s just coincidence. But isn’t that how fiction gets made? Paranoid people and dreamers already have the toolkit for writing. Anyway: horror movies? My son would sleep right through me watching them. And through me writing horror as well. I wrote all of Demon Theory with him sleeping on my chest. But reading horror, that’s always completely different for me. I get scared when I write, sure — okay: terrified, shaking, can’t get out of my chair but can’t stay here either — but reading the scary stuff, that’s keying a different part of my brain up, I think. The part that leaks.

Anyway, so I wrote “Crawlspace,” which at the time was called “Gabriel,” I think, and was a novella, a sister piece to “Raphael,” and I wanted to use a lot of other angel-names too, do a whole collection like that, but I don’t know any more angel names, and if I had to look them up I’d feel like I was cheating. It was pushing twenty-thousand words, I think. And it had this cool interdimensional portal way down in the grime of this apartment complex’s derelict swimming pool, and some way-cool stuff going on with somebody crawling on roofs. But it was too unfocused, was kind of just me, stacking up some jump-scares, trying to foist it off as a story. So, for Ones, after Sean said let’s do it, I found that “Gabriel” really and truly scared me, in spite of the fact that I could see the cracks in it. And, I say I don’t stick with a story for that long, but cutting it down to size — and it’s still long-ish — that might have taken two weeks, even. And I kept giving up, deciding it was unrecoverable, that it was broken at the conception level. But then I’d be walking down our hall at night and the story would be real for me all over, and I’d be running to my bedroom, diving for the covers again. So I finally just wrote it down like it felt, I guess. I haven’t reread it since then, either. It still scares me, is too real.

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Karen Joy Fowler

Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. What is it about the Booth family that interests you as “Booth’s Ghost” isn’t your first (and hopefully not the last) short story you’ve written about them? 

Actually, Mary Doria Russell is encouraging me to write a novel about the Booths and I am seriously considering it.  I’ve been accused of being fascinated with John Wilkes, but I deny this.  My last story was about the conspirators and particularly Mary Surratt’s innocent daughter.  My current fascination is Edwin Booth and his sister Asia.  The destruction of their lives through the acts of their younger brother is such a Shakespearian story, human-sized but also immense, epic, and the fact that half the players in it are Shakespearian actors is irresistible.  And I’ve always been interested in the people on the edges of the great events.  I like the stories about the stories.  

How did you decide that “Booth’s Ghost” would make its debut in What I Didn’t See and Other Stories?

Small Beer wanted at least one unpublished story in the collection and Booth’s Ghost happened to be the one I was writing at that time.  I’d been thinking about this story for quite awhile — years in fact — so when I was finally ready to write it, I was able to go quicker than my usual pace.   I was particularly pleased to find that it had a happy ending.  I don’t manage those often.

What I Didn’t See and Other Stories is a tight and strong short story collection. Who decided what stories went into the book and how did Small Beer Press end up publishing the book?

Thank you!  Kelly Link and Gavin Grant and I had been talking about a possible Small Beer collection for a couple of years.  I wanted a good collection and I don’t think I’m able to see which are my best stories and which not so much.  I like them all the same, which means some days I like them and some days I don’t.   So I asked Kelly and Gavin to make those decisions.  They made suggestions and I agreed.  So easy!  A perfect working relationship.

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Lily Hoang

Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. How did you decide to narrate “The Foxes” the way you did, with all the layers and juxtaposition utilized in the piece?

When Nick Mamatas, one of the co-editors of Haunted Legends, first approached me about the anthology, I didn’t have any place-centred ghost stories at my disposal, so I asked my parents about ghost stories they remembered from their childhoods. They couldn’t think of any. My mother went so far as to buy me a boot-legged dvd of Vietnamese ghost stories, but it turned out to be a collection of cheesy b-movies. Then, my father remembered the story about the foxes. He told me the tale. Then, my mother told me a completely different version of the tale. They both circled around the same characters, but the narratives were almost antithetical. This is one of the greatest pleasures in oral narratives: their evolution and movement. The narrative form of “The Foxes” is intended to mirror the way oral narratives are passed down and around. Each time the story is told, something is changed, made more gruesome, made more fantastic. But at the same time, the way both of my parents told the story, there was a politic to it, maybe a subconscious feminism and anti-colonialism. My retelling of their story magnified these political tendencies, while playing with metafictional and form.

What’s the appeal of the short story format for you and what were the challenges in writing your story?

I very rarely write short stories. I prefer novels. Novels are messy and there’s room in them. Short stories are clean and precise. I tend to think in the longer form. I generally write short stories when an editor solicits something. (The exception is that I wrote a collection of short stories a couple years ago. I asked roughly 25 writers for stories they had started but couldn’t or wouldn’t finish. More information about that collection can be found here: http://jadedibisproductions.com/UNFINISHED.html.) But when I wrote “The Foxes,” I hadn’t written a short story for a couple years, maybe. I had a hard time making my ideas fit. The narrative seemed too grand. After trying to approach the story a few times, I found that juxtaposing disparate threads of the narrative allowed the story I wanted to tell to emerge, on its own.

Could you share with us how family has impacted your writing, and how it influenced your stories?

My parents and family were a very large component to my first two books, which have fair amount of autobiography in them. Other than that, I am always trying to make my parents proud. The fact that I’m a writer – no matter how many books I publish or accolades I receive – is a failure to them. I was supposed to be a doctor. I continue to write stories and books in order to make up for the deficit in their lives because I’m not a doctor. My family also instilled in me a very strong work ethic. I have an actual addiction to being productive. I guess there are worse addictions to have.

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Joey Comeau

Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. What was the inspiration for One Bloody Thing After Another?

Horror movies. I watch a lot of horror movies. I love them. I love that they can be funny and strange as often as tense or scary. And I *really* love when they slip into unexpected sadness. I wanted to write a horror book that touched on all those feelings. An optimistic horror book.

What were the challenges in writing a story that includes a lot of elements and different genres? What made you decide to combine them all into one book?

I don’t really think of different genres as different kinds of writing. It seems fine to have a book where different kinds of things happen. I wanted to write a monster book where the monsters had real people who cared about them. Also, I wanted to write a book about an old man and his stupid dog, and their love for each other. And I wanted to write a book about a headless ghost! I wanted to write about all these ideas, the way I always have a million ideas, but these ones sort of clung together in my head, because they all were about the terrible things people will do to protect someone they love.

How has your experience writing for comics influenced/impacted the way you write fiction?

It has definitely made me more comfortable with brevity. Why say something in 1000 words when you can say it in 200? Why not just say a thing? I like plain language and simplicity. Clarity! When you only have 20 words or so to express an idea in a comic, you get more practice with brevity and clarity, for sure. And I think it’s improved my fiction writing.

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Scott Edelman

Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. What’s the appeal of zombies–and horror–to you?

I love horror for the same reasons I love science fiction and fantasy — because it allows me to break free of writing only of the things that are and escape into the world of things that could only exist in dream. It also gives me access to metaphors that non-fantastic literature cannot, and allows me to explore the human condition in ways unavailable in mimetic fiction. And also — it’s fun!

But as for the special appeal of zombies — because the zombie is a blank slate, there is no metaphor the zombie cannot inhabit. It’s a universal conceit. And the zombie also happens to be the most frightening of the monsters, because that mindlessness, that lack of self, is an aspect we all fear. If we live long enough, we will all become somewhat zombielike, our personhood gone. So zombies are chilling to me in a way vampires could never be.

Did your previous experience working in comics have any impact in the way you write short fiction? What are your influences for your zombie stories?

I wrote many short comic book scripts for such titles as House of Mystery, House of Secrets, Secrets of Haunted House, and other DC horror titles, trying my best to channel the great stories written by my betters in the EC comics of the ’50s. And one thing they taught me was an economy of plotting. There’s no room for fat in 5- and 6-page stories. And while they were helpful in the beginning of my short story career, it was something I needed to break away from as I matured, because art shouldn’t necessarily move in a direct line from A to B to C.

How did PS Publishing end up publishing your collection? How did you decide on the order of the stories in the book?

When I realized that I’d achieved critical mass in my zombie fiction — that is, I’d written so many stories of the undead that I had enough for a collection — I went looking for a home for such a project. And the wonderful Pete Crowther, who has been so good to me over the years — between magazines and anthologies, he’s bought more of my stories than any other editor — said he’d publish my collection as long as I wrote a new story to entice potential purchasers who might have already read all the other stories. That story, “What Will Come After,” which became the title story of the collection, will be reprinted in Steve Jones’ Best New Horror later this year.

I’m extremely grateful that Pete suggested a new story, because “What Will Come After” turned out to be one of my most powerful pieces.  What I didn’t realize when writing it — though I should have — was that it will become more and more difficult for me to read as time goes on. I wrote it when both of my parents and my mother-in-law were alive, though in the context of the story, they’re all dead.

When I first read it aloud at Readercon, all three were still alive, yet I had trouble not losing it at the ending. The next time I read it, at World Horror in Burbank, my father had passed, and my voice cracked and I had trouble keeping it together during the section that mentioned his death. Now my mother-in-law is also gone.  I can only imagine what it will be like to read it next. And then there’s my mother, still alive, but she, too, will go someday …

So I’ve set myself up for quite a few emotional experiences in the future. I don’t know whether I’ll be up to them.

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Lou Anders and Jonathan Strahan

Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. What’s the appeal of sword and sorcery for you and what made you decide to edit an anthology devoted to such a sub-genre?

Lou Anders: I grew up on sword & sorcery and was a much more avid reader of S&S than of epic fantasy. I started with the sword and planet of Edgar Rice Burroughs and quickly worked my way into Michael Moorcock, Robert E. Howard, and Fritz Leiber. I’ve largely ignored the big epic fantasies as a reader and have always gravitated more to the grittier, more personal, character-driven tales of S&S. In the last few years, it seemed like not only was there a resurgence of S&S, but also a melding of S&S sensibilities with epic fantasy scale narratives, that if we were both going to do it, we shouldn’t do it separately but should combine our forces.

Jonathan Strahan: I think the appeal of swords and sorcery is that it’s one of the purest forms of adventure fiction we have left. It focusses on characters in perilous circumstances taking direct, physical action to remedy problems that are often and dark and mysterious.  What’s not to love?

The reason I was looking to edit a swords and sorcery anthology was that I could see that there seemed to be something new, or at least energetic, happening in fantasy. Stories were appearing that were either true swords and sorcery (in the pages of Black Gate for example) or that strongly featured elements of swords and sorcery (books like Steven Erikson’s Malazan Empire novels, Joe Abercrombie’s work, and so on). I thought it would be fun to edit a book that would explore what was happening.

What did you end up co-editing the book together? What was the collaboration process like?

LA: I wanted to explore this aforementioned resurgence of swords & sorcery and its blending with the epic. It turned out that Jonathan was observing much the same thing as I was. I don’t remember who approached who first, but it was at the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs (J, correct me if I’m wrong), and we realized that rather than publish competing anthologies, we should combine our forces and do a book together.

JS: Lou tells the story well: we’d come to the same conclusions independently, and in a bar at a convention somewhere (I think we discussed it in Saratoga Springs, but perhaps really progressed it in Calgary) we mentioned our plans to one another. I remember thinking I really didn’t want to compete with a book from Lou, whose work I admire greatly, so I suggested we team up. Lou was amenable, and things went incredibly smoothly. We sketched out the proposal, sold the book, and then worked hand-in-hand with Diana Gill to bring it to fruition.

In your opinion, has sword and sorcery been evolving and adapting for today’s readers?

LA: I think that sword and sorcery has evolved in several key ways. First, it has evolved in line with the field itself, which is to say, rich complex character-oriented stories are the order of the day, and S&S has grown along with the rest of the field. This has produced novels like Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora and James Enge’s The Wolf Age, which are rich, dense narratives that could each contain in their pages multiple numbers of the shorter novels that comprised S&S in its heyday. Secondly, the definition of what constitutes S&S has grown and evolved. There are those who would like to limit the genre to imitations of Robert E. Howard, but I feel strongly that to do so would be to declare S&S dead and its modern practitioners merely purveyors of pastiche. So in growing beyond the constraints of naked barbarians plundering strange temples, you get broader works like Glen Cooke’s Black Company series, with its grunts eye view of soldiers in the service of a (dark?) lord, or Saladin Ahmed’s tales of Doctor Adoulla Makhslood, a “ghul hunter” in an Islamic-inspired secondary world whose personal piety might see him disqualified as “true S&S” by those who feel that greedy self-interest is a prerequisite of a sword and sorcery protagonist. Finally, you get the “post George R R Martin” epic fantasy narratives, which take epic fantasy’s larger-scope focus on kingdoms in conflict and apply a “sword and sorcery sensibility” to its morally gray cast. While these narratives aren’t technically S&S, they couldn’t exist without the thesis-synthesis of epic and S&S and are therefore the children of S&S if not S&S themselves. And finally, and perhaps most controversially, I”m not sure if the profusion of urban fantasy today, with its narratives of young, bare-bellied and  tattooed woman fighting demons and vampires and ghosts (often with swords!)  doesn’t owe just a tiny bit to C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry. Even if it doesn’t, the recent trend in urban fantasy to move its tropes to historical settings may see a new type of S&S evolve, though whether its readers or S&S’s core readership will recognize it as such remains to be seen.

JS: I think it has evolved and adapted. There have been keepers of the flame like Black Gate who have ensured that quality swords and sorcery existed in the world, but writers like Scott Lynch, Joe Abercrombie, and even George Martin have broadened its palette, bringing in richer, more complex characters; more nuanced politics and so on. It’s moved into the real world.  It still has a long way to go, but it is happening, and I like to think the Swords and Dark Magic has played a part in it.

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Al Sarrantonio

Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. You’ve edited several anthologies across various genres. What was your impetus for creating a “not-tied-to-one-genre” anthology?

That’s an easy one.  After deliberately doing three genre-specific anthologies in a row — 999 (horror), REDSHIFT (sf) and FLIGHTS (fantasy) the only thing left was to jump into a rainbow anthology.  When Neil Gaiman and I decided to edit STORIES, it was with the specific idea that the stories would come first, the genres second.

How did you end up co-editing the anthology with Neil Gaiman? What was the collaboration process like?

Co-editing is easy.  One of us finds a story, passes it by the other editor, and the thumbs up or down ensues.   It’s no different than if there’s a single editor.  Actually, it can be more fun, because one of us can stumble on something the other one never would.  Neil found Kat Howard, whose first published story was in STORIES, and in a million years I wouldn’t have found her wonderful piece.

What’s the appeal of the short story format for you? What are its advantages, whether it’s writing one or crafting an anthology like Stories?

The death knell for the short story has been tolling for almost a hundred years.  The form ain’t going away, and for a simple reason: it’s a fantastic way to tell a story in a one-sitting way.  What reader can resist a well-told tale, no matter what the length?  And now that e-readers are upon us, I think the form has been given another shot in the arm.  As for writing them, I’ve always thought of it like catching lightning in a bottle.  I love the constriction of the form, the dilution of energy to a point — every word counts.  It’s extended poetry without meter.  I love that!

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Kate Bernheimer

Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. What’s the appeal of fairy tales for you?

Fairy tales are possibility spaces; they create new openings, fresh ways of considering the world.  Fairy tales cross false boundaries of genre and time and belong to no one. They practice free love, lending themselves to all sorts of readers and writers.To me, they’re sublime.

What was your criteria in selecting the stories and contributors for your My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales?

My editor at Penguin, John Siciliano, was amazing to work with because he pretty much gave me free reign—of course we talked a lot about what we wanted the book to feel like but then he sent me free in the fairy-tale woods (or to the wolves!).  The criteria were many—often they felt, at midnight, like a crazy puzzle I had to and never could solve. I wanted the collection to convince the National Book Foundation to remove their stated exclusion, in the National Book Award rules, of fairy-tale retellings.  I wanted the stories—the bulk of them written upon invitation by me—to break the stereotypes about fairy tales as princess-gets-married stories and turn new readers on to its great incredibly adaptive techniques. I wanted to satisfy those readers who already knew and loved fairy tales well.  I wanted to make a humpty dumpty of a book that would seem at once thrilling and incomplete. I wanted stories that created momentum for fairy tales—one of the criteria was that the book feel like a beginning. I wanted very much that there would be something for everyone in the collection. Most of all I needed to try to include work that would inspire readers to read more fairy tales however I could. We need more people to read the old versions and cut the clichés. The book quickly grew to 600+ manuscript pages, and I just had to stop; I get letters nearly each day from authors hoping to be in the next collection I do. This means they’re reading fairy tales—so I think that my criteria were met.

You have a vast repertoire, whether it’s writing fiction in various mediums and nonfiction. What’s the appeal of editing an anthology for you and what kind of satisfaction does it stimulate in you?

I just deleted most of an answer in progress by accident, but the remains sort of makes a nice answer: “Ogres and bliss.”  All of the work that I do comes through the lens of a practicing fairy-tale author—whether it’s writing a trilogy of novels for grown ups, a children’s book, the text for a comic, an essay, or an introduction to an art book or one of my own edited books.  The medium, that is, is constant: the medium is fairy tales. Editing an anthology—which means soliciting new work from all sorts of strangers—is a beast, but a beast that I love and the work of it is an essential part of the fairy-tale tradition.  Ogres and bliss. I get  to read all these new fairy-tale works and talk to writers about fairy tales and read and research the old fairy tales and then all of this absolutely terrifies and enchants me when I turn to my own writing.  I find nothing more satisfying or surprising than the fact that I get to communicate with the medium of fairy tales as my mode of employment. It’s like a gigantic séance each day with different guests at the table.  It’s like living in the unfinished Shirley Jackson novel Come Along with Me.

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