Other Aliens

by Bradford Morrow

  HAND: I didn’t see Alien when it first came out, I was so nervous about watching that scene. Waiting didn’t make it any easier when I did see it. You channel the perils and sheer weirdness of childhood and adolescence better than just about any writer working today, some of which make Alien seem tame in comparison.

  LINK: I don’t think that can be true. I don’t even know if that’s what I’m aiming for. I think that I’m trying to get something true enough, accurate enough, that I can get away with the kind of invention or entertainment that I want to tackle. The emotional stuff has to echo with the reader, or blindside the reader in the right way for the uncanniness to have verisimilitude. Everything is in service of the uncanny or to allow an easier approach to a certain kind of structural difficulty. I’m not entirely sure what the uncanny is in the service of: representing life as it seems to me, I suppose. So we’ve come full circle.

  HAND: What was your own early life like? Were you interested in writing then, or did that come much later?

  LINK: I was interested, when I was a teenager, in writing but only in the most dreamy kind of way. It seemed like it would be neat. It seemed as if there wasn’t anything else that would be more interesting. But it also seemed like a lot of work, so I put off doing it for as long as possible. I’m still very good at putting it off. As for what kind of person I was, I was a mostly happy child who didn’t fit in. I was interested in the same kinds of things that I am interested in now: books, music, horror movies, pattern making and pattern recognition, people who make and do things that are surprising. The difference between child me and adult me is that I have to organize my own life now, that I have lived in the same place now for fifteen years, and that I have many friends whose preoccupations are congruent with, or at least neighborly to, my interests. I spend less time catching snakes. More time designing book covers.

  HAND: Was there ever a book or story you were afraid to read at night?

  LINK: No and also yes. I read H. P. Lovecraft and M. R. James and Stephen King at night in bed when I was ten or eleven, and then I would go tell my mother I was too afraid to go to sleep. But I kept on reading them anyway because it was pleasurable to lie in bed and be so terrified by a story that I couldn’t go to sleep.

  HAND: So you were both terrified and there was an element of pleasure involved too? How do you think that fear can generate the frisson of pleasure we get from reading the best kind of eerie story? And did that girlhood reading help inspire you to become the kind of writer you are today, scaring other girls as they read late at night?

  LINK: The idea that I might cause anyone at all to lie in bed at night feeling uneasy about things that don’t exist is almost overwhelmingly gratifying. I suppose it’s an addictive thrill, the feeling of all of the senses prepared to detect strangeness in the absence of tangible stimulus that would justify the effort. The satisfaction of an eerie story is that it gives a shape and a narrative arc (even if it isn’t one which completes/resolves) to something that we have a capacity for—or even a longing to experience.

  HAND: Shirley Jackson is another great American writer who decamped to northern New England. Her relationship to the small town where she lived was somewhat complicated, as evinced by stories like “The Lottery” and “The Summer People.” What if any impact has that part of the world had on your own work? It certainly attracts a lot of artists.

  LINK: It’s had tremendous impact on my working life in that I regularly meet up to work with the writers Holly Black and Cassandra Clare in this area. Jedediah Berry and Susan Stinson and John Crowley are also more or less local. In terms of what I write about, I think that I’ve now lived in one place (Western Mass) for so long that I can now comfortably write about the other places that I’ve lived: Florida, North Carolina, and Boston.

  HAND: Is there anything in particular about New England that resonates with you?

  LINK: In my day-to-day life, I find it easier to live here. I wasn’t great at being southern, in the social sense. Here we live in a place with terrific music too: the Winterpills and the Fawns are local bands and I often listen to their songs while I’m working. There are a lot of bookstores in barns and old mill buildings. Pretty idyllic.

  HAND: You admire Shirley Jackson’s work: what story or novel of hers would you give to a first-time reader?

  LINK: The Haunting of Hill House. I can’t imagine anyone reading the first paragraph, and then the first page, and not wanting to know more. As much as I love Jackson’s stories, there’s something luxurious about getting to inhabit her imagination, be under the influence of her sentences for a whole novel.

  HAND: You’ve taught creative writing at places like the Clarion [Science Fiction and Fantasy] Writers’ Workshop. Are there any habits of student writers that you like to unteach?

  LINK: I don’t know that there’s anything that I think of as unteaching. I usually start by asking a workshop what books/work they respond to as writers and what they respond to as readers. I used to frame that second question as “guilty pleasures,” by which I meant the kinds of things that they wouldn’t feel represented their best writerly impulses, but which they were drawn to anyway. I taught at Clarion again this summer, and I came away thinking about patterns of storytelling. It’s useful to consider the kinds of patterns that you find interesting which are generic/often replicated. You should use those. But you should also think about the kinds of narrative/structural/technical problems that you haven’t seen solved. Many writers will do interesting and compelling work with generic patterns. But the problems that, as a writer, you are interested in solving—and their solutions—are more likely to be particular to you. Conversely, the things that you object to most strenuously are also tender places and you should consider those as well and why you have an emotional reaction to them. There can be a kind of recognition of self in the things (techniques, modes, ambitions) that we most loathe.

  HAND: Pop culture ripples through many of your stories, sometimes like a secret tributary. Were you and are you a comic-book fan? If so, who’s your favorite character?

  LINK: Referencing pop culture is a way of rendering landscape. Right?

  HAND: “Rendering landscape” through pop culture is such an intriguing notion—how does that work? By giving readers a hook into your own imaginary landscape?

  LINK: The kind of spaces and communities that people inhabit now aren’t solely defined by a particular physical place or landscape. And even physical landscape (if, like me, you’ve moved around a fair amount) is defined, in memory, by the person you were when you lived in that place; by the things that you read, that you discovered, that you loved, that you later abandoned. In a piece of fiction, particularly a short story, every detail tells you something about the characters and their community. How they define themselves, how they want other people to see them, what they love and are ashamed of loving, what is vital to them. I spent not quite a decade as the member of a very active youth group in a Presbyterian Church in Miami, watching movies about the Rapture, listening to Amy Grant, playing Capture the Flag, and making out with other people on church buses. I went to malls every weekend and spent my allowance at Spencer’s Gifts, B. Dalton, and a novelty candle shop. All of that, I think, is as much the landscape of Florida to me as the Everglades and Coral Gables and catching snakes and iguanas.

  The first comic to get me into a bookstore, literally, was the cover of an issue of Dave Sim’s Cerebus. Or, more accurately, Gerhard’s background on the cover of an issue of Cerebus. But I don’t know that I have a favorite character. I love Hellboy and the manga Twin Spica. Scott Pilgrim, The Land of Nod, Emily Carroll’s Through the Woods. I loved Bill Sienkiewicz’s art. I loved Lynda Barry’s Ernie Pook’s Comeek. I love Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim’s Dungeon, Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics, Kevin Huizenga’s Glenn Ganges. That last one is probably closest to my life.

  HAND: I adore Lynda Barry. She got me through a brain-numbing job in the 1980s. What really grabs you about the folks you ment
ion—their artwork? Narratives? And what did that Gerhard background depict?

  LINK: I think I have that envy, particular to writers, of artists who work in mediums that are more immediately accessible/economical. Musicians, artists, screenwriters. My daughter draws a lot of comics at the moment. There isn’t much text, but you can tell, in a flash, what the rats are feeling. Fear, sadness, exhilaration, rage. The text is almost extraneous. I love black-and-white comics, maybe because even with that limitation, so much life, so much narrative and emotional information is available. Cerebus was about a warrior aardvark who becomes a kind of pope. A ridiculous premise, but Gerhard’s backgrounds were somber and luminous. The contrast between the aardvark and the kind of art nouveau backdrop behind him was intriguing.

  HAND: Many of your stories—“The Specialist’s Hat” or “Lull,” to name just two—are profoundly unsettling but also kind of funny. Do you think about balancing humor with terror when you’re writing something? Or do you just decide you want to really creep out the reader?

  LINK: Humor and horror are both approaches that dislocate or disarrange. They jar. The person experiencing them is necessarily surrendering control over their response. They’re pleasurable, or can be, for the person having the experience, and as a writer, if you discover that you can produce that effect, it’s addictive. I was the kid who liked to jump out of the closet to scare people. I still like slapstick.

  HAND: I can definitely see that slapstick, “Boo!” element in some of your stories, also that sense of dislocation. “Lull” is a perfect example, I think. And “Stone Animals” remains one of the most disturbing stories I’ve read in the last twenty years. Do you know how you produced the effects in that story? Is it more of an organic process, or do you have a particular technique or techniques that you deliberately make use of?

  LINK: “Stone Animals” took over a year to figure out, by which I mean revising over and over again. The last couple of pages I wrote in the space of a couple of days, and I don’t think I had to rework them quite as much. But the premise of the story seemed so comical to me (it started with the ending) that I spent a great deal of time reworking for pacing and description, in order to provide weight. Eventually I began to move in and out of tenses as a way of increasing discomfort. And because the premise was comical, I had to think about comedy differently. Goofiness is more my natural mode, but anything that I might be tempted to handle in the manner of a soufflé in other stories is, in “Stone Animals,” more somewhere between dour humor and inexorable nightmare logic.

  HAND: How do you feel when you finish writing a story?

  LINK: Relieved! Slightly euphoric. The desire to jump into a pool and go sit at the bottom. (I grew up in Florida, we had a swimming pool. I miss having a swimming pool.)

  HAND: Let’s say our planet has somehow miraculously survived the current electoral cycle and made contact with an alien race. You’re one of the six people chosen to first meet them. You also get to choose the five other people who will accompany you: who would you bring? (In addition to making ET contact, we’ve also developed a time machine, so you can choose anyone from anywhere anytime on earth.)

  LINK: I’m sure that this is a terrible list, but Tove Jansson, Grace Paley, Queen Elizabeth I, Michelle Obama, and my mother, because she can talk to anyone.

  HAND: So why these particular women? And why no men?

  LINK: If I had listed all men and no women, would you ask why no women? General preference, I suppose. Five is a small list. I could come up with probably another fifty lists of five people who could go meet aliens. I’d love to hear Ted Chiang’s list.

  HAND: You also get to be the Decider on the aliens’ first contact with world literature. What five books would you give the aliens?

  LINK: Oh, boy. Don’t ask me to justify my choices, but I guess I’d go with Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book, Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren, Frank Stanford’s What About This, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, and Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey. Or maybe there should be a graphic novel in there. Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics? Garfield? I don’t know.

  HAND: Some of your tales read like brilliant variations on a campfire story or slumber-party story. There’s always a kid who everyone wants to tell the scary story. Was that you? Or were you just listening very closely to that kid?

  LINK: I wasn’t that kid, but I am that kid now. Although I’m also just as thrilled now to be the one listening.

  HAND: Do you listen to audiobooks? I always find the experiences of reading and listening to a story to be very different. Do you?

  LINK: I’m terrible at listening to audiobooks. The only one I can remember enjoying was the audiobook of James B. Stewart’s true-crime book, Blind Eye, because it was so harrowing. I don’t typically enjoy listening to recordings of books, perhaps because I read so much faster from the page. Having said that, I really love “Selected Shorts,” especially if I don’t know the story. And I love listening to writers read their own work.

  HAND: This is a golden age for literature of the fantastic. Who are the emerging writers you’re most excited about reading?

  LINK: I’ll mention two writers whose work I love, whom I’ve also been lucky enough to get to publish, Alice Sola Kim and Sofia Samatar. Carmen Maria Machado! I loved two recent debut novels. One, The Loney, by Andrew Michael Hurley, which is a very old-fashioned Satanists (or the equivalent)-in-an-isolated-English-countryside setting, is just out. The other is Rawblood by Catriona Ward, a really gorgeous Gothic novel that skips around in time. I think you’d really like that one too. And here are two more writers whose first books I loved, Ben Rice (Pobby and Dingan) and Jen Banbury (Like a Hole in the Head), and ever since I’ve been waiting to read something else they’ve written.

  HAND: Two last questions about your writing process. Do you work from an outline, or do you work in a more instinctive, organic fashion?

  LINK: I don’t have any sort of formal outline, but I tend to have a particular kind of structure in my head, and I usually have a firm idea of the ending that I’m working toward. The first three to ten pages is usually the trickiest part, and the piece that I spend the most time revising before I get anywhere else. The middle I figure out as I revise the first bits.

  HAND: So why are those first pages the trickiest part? It’s funny, that’s the one part I find much easier than writing the ending. Can you give us an example from your recent collection of one story that was especially difficult (or easy) to write?

  LINK: I have about seven significantly different versions of the first six pages or so of “I Can See Right through You.” That is, I saved seven separate, distinct versions. There were probably another two dozen slight variations. Each start felt as if it would work to build on, and yet I couldn’t build on it past a certain point. So I revisited it off and on for about a year, until I had versions of the two main characters that were dimensional enough to me, a kind of tonal quality that felt sustainable, and movement between time periods that suggested as much as I wanted to suggest about the entanglement between the personal relationship and the supernatural element. On the other hand, I wrote most of “The Lesson” in about a week, assembling it out of components that I’d had in my head for many years.

  HAND: Do you create a playlist for whatever you’re working on, or do you prefer silence?

  LINK: Oh, a very long playlist that I add or subtract things to as I start new stories. Currently it’s lots of the Kills, TV on the Radio, Winterpills, Prince, the New Pornographers, Lady Lamb, Wolf Alice, Santigold, Jenny Lewis, and Lucius.

  HAND: Are these old favorites, or do you add new music and musicians all the time? What is it about the artists you mention here that helps you write? (I’m trying to do a kind of musical forensics and see if I can guess what story might come out of this song mix.)

  LINK: I used to switch between playlists once I moved from one story to the next, so that I could imagine that I was resetting a kind of aural prompt. But at the moment, I’ve moved on to
writing a novel, and so I’ve kept most of the last three playlists and just added on a bunch of old/new material. A kind of security blanket!

  HAND: One last question: You and your husband, Gavin Grant, run Small Beer Press—what’s it like to wear two hats, writer and editor/publisher? (Maybe that’s three hats?)

  LINK: It used to seem to me that I would be miserable if the only work that I had was writing. My year used to break down into teaching/writing/editing and Small Beer, and I liked being able to move from job to job to job. Teaching/workshop is the most purely pleasurable/gratifying. What’s better than being useful? With Small Beer, I get the fun work: editing and cover design. Gavin does all the heavy lifting. I hope that being a writer makes me a better editor and teacher. Now if I only had a bookshop as well, I’d be set.

  Fallout

  Madeline Bourque Kearin

  It has been twenty years since the last bomb dropped and his skin still prickles in the open air. From far away he looks like an impressionist rendering of a man, drips and dabs of pink and brown and beige molded into humanoid form. Close up, the illusion breaks, and in its place, the skin asserts its rugged intricacies: the taut geography of cells that have lost their substance, dissolving the boundaries between fingers, between features, between his face and neck. His body is anarchy, anthropomorphized. Yet his two brown eyes, round and glossy, are preserved perfectly, fixed like wet marbles in tight rings of scar tissue, and somehow their presence calls the rest of the face to order. He is proud of his eyes, and of his half head of hair, which grew back brown and lustrous after it fell out. He has every one of his fingers and seven of his fingernails. He wears his grandfather’s clothes, flannel shirts and moleskin pants and cabled sweaters that nearly fit him, and his mother’s wedding ring on a chain around his neck.