Claude Lalumière and David Nickle Interview(ed)

Much like our recent interview with Nir Yaniv and Lavie Tidhar, BSC presents another dual-interview, as talent interviews talent and vice versa. This time it’s Claude Lalumière and David Nickle talking about each of their own latest projects, Objects of Worship and Monstrous Affections respectively.

    
David: Where do you get your ideas?

Claude: Watch it with the stupid questions, Nickle — or you’ll get a kick in the unmentionables. And, given how tall you are, they’re an easy target. I think you should talk about why the title of your collection keeps changing and why neither you nor your book seem to be able to keep pants on.

David: Ah, so it’s to be this sort of interview, is it? When I ask you a question like “Did you authorize the waterboarding?” — or “Where do you get your ideas?” — you turn it around with some throwback question about why I can’t keep pants on. Okay, Lalumière — that one first: they chafe.

The title — that is a more interesting question. The title has flopped all over the bottom of the boat before we managed to club it into submission. As you well know, my friend and sometime editor. A number of years ago, I had put together a collection very similar to this one for a publisher in San Francisco. That one would have been Night of the Tar Baby and Other Stories. But, for various reasons, it fell through, so I began to think of Night of the Tar Baby as cursed. For many years, I could think of no other title but Nice Stories for Kids, written in severed arms arranged in a bloody, sans-serif font. But that would have led to trouble with both public libraries and border guards.

When Brett and Sandra at ChiZine got into the picture, I realized I had to think fast. So I started to think about the theme of the collection — which had some new stories in the mix at that point. And there was a lot of inappropriate smooching and unpleasant urges and thoroughly un-huggable monsters… so I came up with Monstrous Affections.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Sandra hated the title. As we brainstormed over the tops of an ever-increasing number of pint glasses, I dimly recall saying, “I know — let’s call it Pants Are for Company!” Sandra thought that was wonderful. And I started to realize just what I’d gotten myself into. So I sort of fumbled around and said, “Fine, but only if I can write a story called “Pants Are for Company” and call the book Pants Are for Company and Other Stories, because really the title makes no sense otherwise.

So I wrote the story. And I was pretty happy with the story I wrote. And it shows up in the table of contents in the pre-order. But I was filled with a sneaking suspicion (fueled by you, as I recall) that Pants Are for Company is in fact a really dumb title for a collection of stories about monstrous affections, and Monstrous Affections is a really good one. So we changed the title. Which is a good thing; because as we are in the final stages of editing the collection, we’ve figured out that “Pants Are for Company” the story was in fact the weakest link in the collection, and another story, “The Webley,” would be a better fit. So if we’d stuck with Pants Are for Company, it would have been called Pants Are for Company and Other Stories Not Called Pants Are for Company. Dodged a bullet on that one.

So now that we’ve gotten that out of the way: Where do you get your ideas? And following from that (and given your proclivity for stories about gods and superheroes) a thought experiment: Yahweh and Hochelaga meet for a smack-down in the desert. Who prevails?

Claude: It’s true I was pretty insistent that you should go back to your original title. In other words, if it weren’t for me, your book would be stuck with a sucky title, and the title story wouldn’t fit the theme of the book? Do remember to send me 25% of all advance monies, future royalties, and any ancillary earnings like film rights and so on. Also, that was a really long answer. Your stories are pretty long, too. You do like to go on, don’t you? Is that because you’re, like, ridiculously tall, or is there some other, darker, perhaps even humiliating, reason for that?

To answer your question, Hochelaga would totally kick Yahweh’s sorry nonexistent ass. Yahweh is such a total loser. Whines all the time about how everybody should love him, fear him, worship him, blah, blah, blah. I mean, if he’s as omnipotent as he claims, why should he care? Then he gets his followers to do all his dirty work, like collecting the foreskins of neighbouring tribes who were just minding their own business, having perfectly pleasant sex with their unmutilated genitals. I mean, what a perv — collecting foreskins. You gotta wonder about a guy like that. So, yeah, my superhero Hochelaga would righteously annihilate Yahweh.

    
David: Okay, you got me. I do write stories on the long side. But that’s because… among the tribe of slouching, screech-swilling yeti that raised me after the mishap with the zeppelin, I am actually considered rather short. In fact, you might call me a midget. Over and over again, as did the bull-yeti as he divided up the day’s haul of berries, mountain goats and sherpas among the tribe, apportioning according to height. So if I tell stories on the long side, it’s only to dry the tears of my inner hobbit.

Shall we take a moment to sing the praises of our cover artist, Erik Mohr? The only thing that could have improved the pink-cheeked horror on my cover was a tarantula on its groin and a snake around its beer gut, I thought. Seriously though — more Mohr, I say.

Thoughts?

(And you still haven’t told me where your ideas come from.)

Claude: Erik Mohr does indeed rock all kinds of awesome. In a perfect world, he would henceforth design all of my book covers. Erik’s website is http://www.erikmohr.com/ — and there’s evidence aplenty of his awesomeness to be found there. I disagree that anything — including the wonderfully creepy snake and spider from the cover to my book — could improve the cover Erik did for you. That’s one of the most arresting covers ever. Erik gets better with every new book.

I keep thinking about the title of your book. Monstrous Affections is such an apt description of your fiction in general. Take, for example, the story of yours I’m most intimately familiar with, “Wylde’s Kingdom,” which I rewrote from scratch … huh, I mean, “edited” for inclusion in my anthology Tesseracts Twelve. It’s not in Monstrous Affections, but it could well have been. There are monsters, both literally and figuratively, and whenever any of the characters care for each other the emotions are always monstrously distorted both by their own fuckedupness and by circumstance.

Which story in the book do you feel best captures the essence of the title and the essence of your work in general? In other words, is there a signature story in the book, one for which you have especially monstrous affection?

David: Erik’s literally terrifying cover is an embodiment of nightmare — spiders and snakes would just make it comforting, which isn’t what we want. It made me scream when the sketch first showed up in my inbox. I screamed in terror, but also in delight, because — to twist around to your final question — it refers to “The Sloan Men,” which is the oldest story in the collection and for which my affection is truly monstrous. It was an observational piece I wrote in my 20s that was seeded by my mystification at pretty girls who picked inappropriate men (i.e., not me). What could they be thinking? Why would they do this to themselves? Must be pheromones, I figured. But that couldn’t be it. The story lays out the monstrous truth.

I can’t throw that question back at you entirely, because the story that best embodies Objects of Worship is your opening story, called “The Object of Worship.” But when you get theo-satirist James Morrow to introduce your collection, call it Objects of Worship, and then open it with a dark tale of small, hamster-like vengeful gods demanding peanut butter and other tribute from their retail slave worshipers, it’s safe to say a theme is emerging.

And I would put to you that it’s not so much a mistrust of God, as it is a skepticism toward worship in general — whether of household gods or domesticated superheroes, or pretty girls on trains in Italy. But I can stand to be corrected, given that I’m still a few stories from the end of Objects of Worship.

Thoughts?

Claude: Yes, a theme emerges. Objects of Worship isn’t simply a collection of all my stories to date. As a reader, I like thematic collections. I really enjoyed, for example, Paul Di Filippo’s first ten or so collections, all of which took stories from all over his writing career but organized them thematically. I thought that made the collections really feel like full-fledged books, and not just potpourris. So I’m endeavouring to continue in that tradition. When I’m old and decrepit but famous and venerated, that’ll be the time to collect all the stories in chronological order.

You noticed my mistrust of worship, did you? True, I am a die-hard atheist. As for pretty Italian girls, I’m all for worshiping them. Preferably naked in a hot tub, with lots of them and one of me.

Given that I’m an atheist with a collection of stories that all deal with gods or religion in some way, James Morrow, a fellow atheist well known for writing fiction about the tension between the scientific and religious worldviews, was a natural choice to introduce my book. Your book is introduced by gentleman extraordinaire Michael Rowe. Aside from the fact that he’s damn smart and charming, what made him the right choice to present your work to an unsuspecting readership?

Oh … and you forgot to ask me where I get my ideas from.

David: I held it back this time so as to ambush you later in the interview. Did you want to tell me where you get your ideas from? You seem quite anxious.

But before we get to that — Michael Rowe. He is indeed a gentleman and very extraordinaire about it, and also a dear friend, and a fearless and fantastic journalist and author — and that’s one big reason that I asked him to introduce my book. In addition, he was (and hopefully will be again) one of the most challenging and encouraging editors that I’ve worked with for my short fiction. Earlier in the decade (and late in the last one) Michael was in the business of inventing the genre of queer horror. He started out easy, editing a couple of anthologies of queer vampire stories (this not being a particular stretch for the delicate sensibilities of the horror-fiction-reading public) and invited me to write a story for one of those, Sons of Darkness. Then he went on to edit two volumes of the Queer Fear series for Arsenal Pulp Press. I wrote stories for both of those volumes, at Michael’s request and with his encouragement, and the story from Queer Fear 2 is “Polyphemus’ Cave,” which closes off the collection and is another favourite, clear-cut monstrous affection of mine. Now straight writers have written gay characters for as long as gay writers have written straight ones. But I found that, when I was writing the Queer Fear stories, specifically aimed at a GLBT readership, I became more acutely aware of the need to be honest and true to the inner lives of my characters — that I was writing for people whose experience I hadn’t shared, and that meant engaging empathy in more than the cursory way we sometimes do for the characters in our stories. Of course, this is how we should approach all our stories and characters. And hammering that point home in the Queer Fear work I did with Michael has made me appreciate that, and, I hope, do better work.

Also, he let me go on for as long as I wanted. Which to an emotionally-stunted, yeti-raised Ontario boy, counts for a lot.

Now it occurs to me that all this gushing about Michael Rowe the Best Editor in the New World might have hurt your feelings. Because certainly in our work together on “Wylde’s Kingdom” for Tesseracts, you emerged as an encouraging and often extremely challenging editor who let me go on for as long as I wanted. You’re probably the most prolific editor of short-fiction anthologies in Canada right now. How does your life as an editor of other people’s fiction inform your own writing?

    
Claude: Don’t worry about my feelings, slave-boy; I understand the dynamics of such deeply imprinted primary master/slave relationships such as what you share with your master Michael Rowe.

Am I the most prolific anthologist in Canada? It doesn’t feel that way to me, but you may be right (as it stands, since 2002, I’ve edited eight of the things). It’s so damn hard to get new projects off the ground. Publishers are very wary of anthologies. I love anthologies, both as a reader and a creator. I’ve always loved to read anthologies. I’m always surprised that they’re not more popular. They’re so much fun to read. If I could I would edit two or three new anthologies every year. I even love going through the slush pile. I love that rush of discovering the work of a new writer. But, as you say, I’m a “challenging” editor (that’s a very diplomatic way of putting it). I gnaw at the stories I select until nothing about them nags at me anymore. I hope as hard on myself, as a writer, as I am on the writers I work with.

I like that you brought up empathy in your last answer. I think of writing as “a leap of empathy.” I hate it when writers only write transparent doppelgangers of themselves as protagonists. For me, the artistic impulse is to try to view the world from perspectives other than my own; the more alien from my personal experience, the better. Otherwise, it’s just masturbation. And, really, that stuff should stay private.

If editing informs my writing at all, it’s only in that it keeps me thinking about the craft of writing fiction, and that’s one good way of keeping my mind in creative dreamtime — what is for me a very fragile state of mind. I’m not one of those writers who can just sit down anytime and crank out a first draft on demand. I don’t have stories eagerly waiting to pour out of me. As I said, editing fiction is one trigger that can help me enter creative dreamtime; there are other triggers: sketching, listening to music, sex, aimless walks, large bodies of water, traveling to new places…

When I write a new story, I’m grasping for something I don’t fully understand. I usually start with a voice, and then I bring several ideas into play that seem unconnected on the surface, but I can feel that there are resonant connections to be made. My subconscious works on dealing with those connections narratively, and, when all the ingredients are done fermenting, I sit down and extract that first draft. First drafts are really hard on me. They often leave me physically and psychically depleted. Although writing the final scene is often a near-orgasmic high that restores me. Once I have that first draft done, then comes the easy part: editing. I can delete, add, and/or transform scenes, characters, themes, and/or subplots with total abandon. It’s extracting the raw material from my subconscious that’s a challenge. But once I have a full draft, it’s playtime.

When it comes to the craft of writing, I get the feeling you’re more the storyteller type, as opposed to my more artsy-fartsy process.

David: I guess that’s true — I am a big fan of traditional short-story structure (that being a protagonist with a problem who through escalating attempts either solves or fails to solve that problem), although I don’t think our methods are all that different; I have very broad definitions of “protagonist,” “problem,” and success and failure. And ultimately, a story’s an exploration; I don’t write it because I know the resolution for the characters; I don’t come at it with my theme fully developed, just with a vague issue in mind. The story’s done when I think I, and the character, have drawn some meaning from it.

Oh, and thank you for telling me where you got your ideas. It sounds sticky.

So with that out of the way: on to our final question: if you only had $100 US plus appropriate taxes and had to buy two collectors-editions from ChiZine this year, which ones would you pick?

Claude: Actually, I told you how I get ideas, not where I get my ideas. But that’s a subtle distinction. So gloat if you want to, you tricky bastard.

You’re right, it’s time to wrap this up. Your final question’s a no-brainer: Claude Lalumière’s Objects of Worship and David Nickle’s Monstrous Affections. But only for Erik Mohr’s gorgeous covers. Certainly not because of those two bozos, Lalumière and Nickle.

    
Both Monstrous Affections and Objects of Worship are now available for pre-order and are published by Chizine Publications.

    
About Monstrous Affections:

A young bride and her future mother-in-law risk everything to escape it. A repentant father summons help from a pot of tar to ensure it. A starving woman learns from howling winds and a whispering host, just how fulfilling it can finally be.

Can it be love?

Bram Stoker Award-winning author David Nickle takes multiple stabs at the question in his first collection of short fiction, Monstrous Affections. Three stories are published here for the first time. Others have appeared in places like Cemetery Dance, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Queer Fear 2, and the Northern Frights series.

Monstrous Affections also features an introduction by award-winning editor, author and journalist Michael Rowe.

    
About Objects of Worship:

OBJECTS OF WORSHIP, the debut collection by Claude Lalumière—twelve strange, eerie, sensual stories of monstrous gods, disturbing faiths, and urgent desires by a bold new voice in weird fiction. Interior illustrations by Rupert Bottenberg (Claude’s Lost Myths collaborator). Introduction by World Fantasy Award-winning author James Morrow.

    
Please note that BSC is currently hosting a contest for a copy of Objects of Worship.

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