by ed. Pela Via
STEPHEN: I had to trade in my iPhone because I couldn't get reception in my house with AT&T. Now I have a Droid, it's a fun thing, but I miss my iPhone.
ROBB: You mentioned gadgets before. When I was doing a little research before we did this, I think I saw somewhere that you're into gadgets. What kind of gadgets are you looking for or that are coming out? What do you geeked out the most on?
STEPHEN: I like the look of the Sony S2 tablet. I've never been big on Sony; I know they do quality stuff. The Sony stuff never plays well with my Macs. I like the way the S2 looks. It's a tablet that folds in the middle like a little DS or something. That would be so handy to have something like a clam shell I could stick in my pocket like an eye glass case and then fold it up on the bus and go to town. I love that. I like that split screen idea. I would like to play with it anyways. I don't have a tablet right now. I think it's because I got my nose in my phone all the time anyway, I'm like what am I going to do with a bigger phone? It takes up all my time. I'm still jealous of those people with iPads or different tablets. They cock it open wherever they are and they got that little Bluetooth keyboard. Man they're cooking. I'm thinking they're doing work and I'm just sitting here listening to songs.
ROBB: You mentioned in an email to us that you're teaching a class that has to do with zombies. That sounds exciting. We've talked to a lot of people about zombies.
STEPHEN: Yes, it's zombie renaissance. It’s an online course for continuing ed. at CU Boulder. They invited me to teach it and I jumped on it. Because the wonderful thing about an online course is you can give your students six times too much to read, and they have to read it. In a chalk and seats classroom, you have to police yourself a little bit, but online you can go crazy. And I got so many cool zombie stories. I have the class split into 5 units, protozombie, then we go pre, Haitian, Romero, rage and post, maybe it's 6 units. We go all the way back to Tibet, those freaky zombies, we go through the hopping zombies of china, and through the dark ages, come up and try to read Poe, follow The House of Usher such that it's a zombie story. The Monkey's Paw of WW Jacobs, which I think is a zombie story. Then we look onto all the enthusiast stuff happening with people importing these stories up out of Haiti in the early 20th century, for a terrified or guilty America who was scared of an underclass rising against them. Then you have Lovecraft, 1922, he gives us these zombies, they're hungry, they'll rip you limb from limb, they walk around in hordes, he was the first dude to say hoard in association with zombies, anyway, I found some cool old stories. I found this one story; it cost $142 for me to take a picture of it at some Australian library. It's an old old zombie story that's so good. And then we jump to Romero, you know how he gave us flesh eating and infectiousness and the all important head shot.
We stay with Romero for awhile and have fun with him. We get to Return of the Living Dead, and I love Return of the Living Dead, that's probably one of my favorite zombie movies. Although Max Brooks says it killed the zombie story, which it did, but then Boyle brought it back in ‘02 with 28 Days Later and Resident Evil was the same year. The next year was The Zombie Survival Guide, which is actually a defense manual for Romero zombies, but we were already in the Rage Era. Then World War Z and now here we are with Rammbock. We got these rage zombies developing in really interesting ways. In that class, that’s what we're trying to figure out in class right now. Why this zombie craze right now and where is it going? Those are the two main questions.
LIVIUS: Wow, that's all I can say about the brief history of zombies we just heard. Of all the zombie types, whose camp are you in?
STEPHEN: I prefer the rage zombies. I think they make for more exciting stories because any plans the characters make are always frustrated by these zombies that are so fast. The trick with a rage zombie is, like our trick, as humans, we grew up as persistent hunters, we could run an antelope down until it died, then we'd stab a spear through its side and have us some food. Our lungs and our long legs and our intelligence are the three things that separate us from animals, but now you have these rage zombies, they don't need to breathe, or maybe they breathe, but their hunger out balances their need to stop running because they're hurting themselves, so the rage zombie is never going to stop chasing you. And for that reason they're terrifying. Although on an individual level, I'd hate to encounter a rage zombie, but on a global level, I think the Romero zombie is more effective because I think Romero zombies infect the population better. Because they're so slow, they get one bite out of you, then you run away to the safe place and you infect everybody else. Whereas a rage zombie, they bite onto you, they're chewing for awhile and they got you. Haitian zombies, No one is scared of Haitian zombies. They developed because of a cultural fear of enslavement, you know, what's worse than being enslaved your life, well, being enslaved during death too. In America, we're not scared of that, we're scared of marketing campaigns turning us into mindless consumers.
ROBB: I have something, I risk outing myself as a far huger geek than I ever have admitted, at least not on an audio podcast that other people will listen to. I have a pretty okay knowledge of how role playing games like D&D work. Now traditionally, let's say in D&D, zombies add a seriously different element, like they can be defeated by religious people. The holy aspect of it, not something you see in traditional zombie movies. Does that ever come up in your class? Do you address that at all?
STEPHEN: You know it doesn't come up. We talk a little about the priest in night of the living dead, but we didn't talk about it very much. But yeah, the clerics in D&D they always have powers over the undead. I think must be kind of like the port cross from the vampire. I think that was a sloppy move on D&D's part, or whoever created the world at the time. I completely understand those 18 sided dice. I nearly failed out of college playing D&D. I weaned myself off of D&D with Magic, which was pretty addictive too, then I weaned myself off Magic with Settlers, then I don't have anybody to play Settlers with anymore, so I just write fiction.
LIVIUS: Probably the more profitable venture of the two. One more follow up on zombies, only because we had to quiz a couple other authors on this. Assuming Romero type needing brain death zombies, if you were in the zombie apocalypse, and your choice was sword or sledgehammer, which would you go with?
STEPHEN: I think I would go for sword. Not because it's more effective, because I would feel cooler. I think the zombie apocalypse plague, it’s not about surviving, and it’s about having the best death. I think I would have a much better death with a sword. It would look a lot more dramatic if Frank Frezetta were to draw it or something than if I had sledgehammer. I'd go for the sword. Especially like a katana, not a long sword, I wouldn't know how to swing a long sword. I wouldn't be much use with a rapier or a cutlass or any of that. I've seen enough martial arts movies that I think I could pretend in my head I knew how to use a katana.
LIVIUS: That's where we all learned our katana abilities, Kung Fu Sunday.
ROBB: For the record, Livius has chosen "sword" in a previous episode and I had chosen sledgehammer. Back to teaching a little bit. I'm assuming the zombie class isn't the only thing you teach. Are there any other authors that you think are important to teach in your classes that you want to mention?
STEPHEN: You know, I don't. In the other classes that I teach, I've taught Slasher, I've taught Haunted House. I guess, in Haunted House King was kind of important and Shirley Jackson was pretty important, but in Fiction Workshop, which is really what I teach the most, that's what they hired me here for, I don't know if there is any author, I have two or three, maybe ten or twelve clutch stories that I try to walk people through just so they can understand a story works, somewhat, so they can see that I don't understand how a story works, either way. The way I keep those fiction workshops interesting to me, usually, is I don't have a textbook.
The first day of class, the assignment I give is everyone goes out to the library, go out into the world, go out to the magazine rack and find, you have to read at least ten stories, ideally
fifteen, you have to prove to me that you read them you have to give me a annotated bibliography, and you have to bring the best of those stories to us, eighteen or twenty copies, so we can all read it and that's our textbook for the year, those eighteen or twenty stories they bring. So, I get to read a lot of stories that I would not have otherwise found, and it's all new, and I think that the things that I might to say about these stories are probably, or hopefully rings a little more true because they aren't canned, I haven't said this to fifteen other classes, you know. No, I don't think I have any writers I say you have to read ever, I just have ideas about story that I try to pass on.
ROBB: That's really, really cool and unique, I like that.
LIVIUS: That being said, since you're not recommending students read some writers, who were your influences?
STEPHEN: Stephen King is probably my big influence. Joe Lansdale is a huge influence, just because when you ask Joe Lansdale what genre does he write, he'll say the Joe Lansdale and I think, "Wow, I'd love to have the Stephen Jones genre," or really the Stephen Graham Jones genre, I guess. Yeah, I'm so jealous that they can do that. Gerald Vizenor, an American Indian writer, an Anishinaabe guy, he is one of my heroes, he's just really talented and real intelligent. I like Sherman Alexie's stuff a lot. Phillip K. Dick is my idol, Vonnegut is what I would aspire too if I could even begin to aspire but I'll be able to write like Vonnegut. Nabokov, I respect Nabokov so much. He had such an intellect, it just blows me away. At the same time, C.J. Box, he's a detective writer, a mystery writer, I guess, and he's able to put stuff on the page in a way in which I cannot put the book down and I so wish I had that talent, you know. Every time I write, I'm trying to write like C.J. Box, I think.
One writer that people don't read anymore, very much, is Charles McCarry, he had a series of spy novels, the Paul Christopher novels, I don't know, six or seven of them, and that guy, he was like Stanislaw Lem kind of smart but he had Dan Brown sense of story, and he was the complete package. I say nobody reads him anymore, they were probably reading him like crazy back when he was publishing back in the 70s and 80s, back when I was reading only horror, I wasn't reading anything but horror, or Conan, so I missed out on his stuff when it was happening but I'm glad I found it afterwards. Also, can I mention also Louise Erdrich, she's been a huge influence on me, especially Love Medicine, but the way she was able to dilate Love Medicine in that whole series of books, which I don't even know how high it's got now, but Love Medicine to me is one of those truly magical books we've got, and I hold every one of the endings for my novels up against that, to see is it even in the arena of getting close to that, you know.
LIVIUS: You mentioned Joe Lansdale. Lansdale does really have his own way.
STEPHEN: He really does, man, and he has like a laughter in his stories, that he's not afraid to pull to that rug out from under you, either, to make you split your head open on the floor, he's really kind of magic. He's got a lot of confidence; too, I think that helps tremendously.
ROBB: Going back to the beginning of the world, how did you get started in writing?
STEPHEN: I guess I figured out I could write in maybe the fourth grade. I read Where the Red Fern Grows, it took me four checkout periods because I was not at all a quick reader, and I kept having to go back to figure out what was going on and everything. At the end of it, and I'm sure you have read it, at the end there's an axe head stuck in a tree and there's a rusted lantern hanging from it, and that's like the closing image, and I hope I'm not spoiling it for everybody. There's also a werewolf, I’ll add that, so people should be expecting stuff. I remember when I was in fourth grade, I thought, I could do that. I could stick an axe head in a tree and hang a lantern on it; I had a sense that I knew how to do that. And then, all through my various stupid stuff I did for the next ten or fifteen years, I always knew that I could write, that I probably would write, but I never planned on it, I never planned on going to college, I just was going lease a tractor and get a trailer and be a custom farmer and that was my big dream.
I did some writing in high school, I didn't go to much high school, but the writing I did was these long, long notes, apologies notes, I would write to girls and leave under their windshield wipers I could so I could get back into the fun. I think that's the purest form of writing, because if it's not compelling and it's not rhetorically powerful, then you're out in cold, man, then you don't know what you're doing. Then I went to school, I was a philosophy major. The only reason I went to college was I wanted to take this girl, I wanted to go out with her but she was untouchable, but then I found out she needed a ride to the SATs and I thought this was my chance because I had a truck. So, I called her up, I said, "Let's go take them SATs together." And she said, "Sure." And so I took the SATs not paying attention but apparently I did pretty good on then and my mom, behind my back, submitted them to schools so I ended up going to school for my first year as an Archeology major because I wanted to be Indiana Jones, but that fell through pretty quickly, then I became a philosophy major which I loved, but then I was in World Lit, a second semester Freshman, I guess, and I was nineteen years old. In a big old lecture hall, a big class, and I forget what book we were talking about, but the police came in and got me out and I thought, "Here we go again", because I was always having various law troubles. They pulled me out and where they delivered me was the hospital. It was stupidly surprising.
Turns out, one of my uncles had been burned over like 90 percent of his body was third degree burns. He was expected to live. There was the best burn unit in our part of the country, our part of the state anyways, was in the town I was in, Lubbock, Texas, and I was the only relative that he had for hundreds of miles around, I guess, and somehow they knew that, I don't know how they knew that. So anyway, they ditch me in the waiting room, and all I had was my spiral and my pen from World Lit, and I was there for three days waiting for him to live or die. I just started doodling around in my notebook and what I started to write down was this other family's story that was there. There was this dad, he was a big old dude, you know, and wasn't seven feet but six and a half feet, I guess. This was right after Halloween and he had been taking his son out trick and treating and he was changing a tire out in the country, he had a flat, and this drunk dude came down the road, weaving, slapped him and drug him for a long ways and then spit him out in a ditch and kept driving, and so this guy was in ICU now, and he kept waking up and fighting and pulling his cords and pushing people away and just trying to live. He ended up dying, but even though he died I was already writing his story down so it was like he didn't die for me. I kept writing and writing and ended up submitting this story to the English class I was in because I hadn't written whatever I was supposed to write, so I asked the teacher, who was writing to get me into witchcraft, too, which was kind of neat, I asked her if I could turn in a story instead.
She said, "Sure", and she liked it, and she submitted it for something and it won some award and I got pulled into creative writing, then my last semester of school there, my councilor, my advisor, he told me if I took one more English class I could have my Creative Writing degree so I did that. Then I put out two applications for graduate school. One was to Philosophy school, and one was to Creative Writing, and Creative Writing got back first, so I went there. Then I burned through my PH.D in two years and went to work at Sears because I never wanted to be a professor, but sure enough I hurt myself pretty good at Sears, and soon as I could stand again I looked for a desk job and found a desk job at a university library, then a job opened up in the English department for a Creative Writing teacher and I applied and got it and, there I am.
ROBB: That's got to be the best origin story that I've heard in a while.
LIVIUS: You were recently nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for The One's that Got Away, alongside Stephen King, who you mentioned as a writing influence. How was that, for you, to compete with one of your influences?
STEPHEN: That was great. I competed with him before for a Shirle
y Jackson Award, we both got trounced, I guess. But this time, of course, he rightfully won, Laird Barron also won, because I know Laird got more votes than I did, 'cause he's a better writer, you know. But you know, King’s Full Dark, No Stars, it's a solid collection. When he puts out a collection, everyone notices, as they should, I think, but it was definitely an honor just to have my name up on that list of finalists with him and the other guys was swell.
ROBB: Totally changing directions, again, I'm sure you've taught your share of aspiring or new authors, but if you could just give them one really quick life lesson that they can learn when they're beginning out, is there anything that you would say?
STEPHEN: Yeah, actually, Mark Vanderpool at The Cult just hit me up for this exact same advice, "What suggestion would I give to a starting out writer?" I think that suggestion, or that advice would be that you're not as smart as you think you are. Yeah, you've read a lot of books, you've seen a lot of movies, you've got a lot of stuff in your head, you can do amazing things with sentences, but when you try to put your brain on the page, the story becomes you telling people, "Look how smart I am. Look how good I can do sentences. Look how much I know." And that's not the story we want to read. We want to read the story where it's your heart on the page, where you're just thinly veiling that time that you had to go shoot your pet rabbit, but you're dressing it up different, you're trying to disguise yourself. I think those are the stories that we want to read, we don't want to see you being smart and clever, and I say this as someone who used to think he was smart and clever, you know. Now, I know I'm just clueless but pretty lucky sometimes.