CT: What made you decide to include those cryptic marginalia, or music suggestions under each story/poem? (And wouldn’t it be cool if one day each magazine came packaged with a soundtrack?)

MK: For the latest issue, I created an iTunes playlist (http://www.sensesfive.com/2009/05/30/sybils-garage-no-6-playlist/), which is about 95% accurate to what appears in the magazine. I know iTunes isn’t available or convenient for parts of the world, but it’s a start.

For the musical suggestions, it’s simply because I love music. Music has always been very inspirational for me, and I thought it would be a fun way to see what others were listening to and inspired by. Kind of like peeking into someone’s record collection. Crap, I just dated myself. I should say “mp3 collection.”

For the marginalia, I’m not sure I can answer that simply. I think part of the reason I pepper it throughout the pages has to do with my obsession with detail, a desire to fill in every nook and cranny. I also think it has to do with the joy I’ve felt in finding similar cryptic messages or imagery in song lyrics, album art, comics, books, films, and other media. And then, as I dig in further, discovering what they mean. I’m purposely trying to invoke that in Sybil’s, that unexpected frisson when you suddenly discover three quarters of the way through the magazine that there’s a story written in the margins, for example. It’s no secret that my favorite film is Blade Runner, and I’ve always admired Ridley Scott’s obsessive attention to detail, the intense layering of objects, so I guess in a way I’m emulating that too.

But yeah, a Sybil’s Garage soundtrack would be brilliant. I’m actually working on something related to that, interestingly enough.

You can read the full interview here.

by Devin Poore
to the sound of Bob Mould, Life and Times…

This interview appears in Sybil’s Garage No. 6.

Sybil’s Garage No. 6
“Sybil’s Garage is one of the best run and downright prettiest of the small press magazines…” - Escape Pod, Stephen Eley, Editor
	$7.95	More info »

Interview by Devin Poore
to the sound of “Haitian Fight Song” by Charles Mingus…

As published in Sybil’s Garage No. 5

Lauren is a survivor of the film industry, a former Sybil’s Garage editor and contributor, and a member of the Altered Fluid writing group. Her short fiction has appeared in Sybil’s Garage, Interzone and Salon.com. She has recently completed her first novel, Cycler, which will be published by Random House in the fall of 2008. She is currently working on the sequel, Cycler-2, and the screenplay for Cycler.

My “significant other,” choreographer Kristen Mangione, and I had dinner with Lauren and her husband, photographer Andrew Woffinden, and discussed… well, everything. It was a table full of artists, after all. Afterwards Lauren and I collaborated to boil-down the writer-related topics, which I’ve compiled here. —Devin Poore

You fared fairly well with your short stories, though, selling a couple of them to large markets like Salon.com and Interzone. In the end do you believe that helped with getting your novel picked up and securing an agent?

I think my small successes in short fiction were useful in attracting editors to my novels. One editor, in particular, approached me after my story, “The Perfect Man” appeared in Salon. But not a single one of those editors ever acted. By that, I mean they neither rejected nor made an offer. In fact, they don’t even return my emails. So, in sum, I’d have to say that writing short fiction had absolutely no impact on selling my novel. To be honest, I became quite disenchanted with the novel submission process until I met my current agent, Jill Grinberg.

As for the usefulness of short stories to a writer’s career, I think it has to be artistic rather than opportunistic. You should write short stories because you love them. They have their own merit. There are things you can only do in a short story. Sadly, they do not reach the size of audience that a novel can reach, but I think they do impact their readership very strongly. People who love short stories, really love short stories.

From a bystander’s point of view, it seems you went from writing short stories, to having a novel ready, to picking up an agent, to getting a major book deal quickly. Seemingly within a matter of weeks. What was that like?

I quit my movie job in January of 2001 to begin writing fiction. I sold my novel Cycler in February of 2007. In the intervening six years I wrote two other novels and twenty or so short stories only three of which ever sold. So it definitely doesn’t feel like an overnight success to me. It feels like a long overdue break. But then, I’m impatient like that.

You mentioned that during the writing process it’s good to have a community of peers, like your former writers group Altered Fluid, or your new contemporaries in the YA field.

As a member of Altered Fluid it wasn’t merely the critiques, which were extremely helpful, and the writing tempo that really is above and beyond what almost all other writing groups have, but the shared experiences of colleagues that are going through the same things in the industry with submitting, editing, seeking out representation, etc. The community aspect is most valuable.

Talk about the process of writing. Do you enjoy longhand, typing, or other means of getting the words on the page/screen?

I had visions of writing Cycler by walking about Southstreet Seaport and dictating it into a tape recorder. At the end of the day I’d play that tape into a computer which would use voice recognition to put it all in a file, and then I would manually do line edits. The technology simply isn’t there, though.

Long hand writing and edits do indeed slow down the entire process and give your mind time to think of aspects that simply would not occur with the speed of editing on a computer.

Do you outline at all?

Initially I outline, I find that it helps to organize my thoughts, but once I start writing the outline goes to pot. I planned out Cycler-2, but the characters just refuse to follow the outline. After I begin writing, an outline is just a vain attempt to impose an order that just won’t hold.

How has the fact of a paid deadline altered any of your writing processes?

Other than the nagging sense of doom and failure, it’s had almost no impact. I basically try to forget about the deadline and just write. Thankfully, I’m writing faster and faster all the time, averaging about 3500 words a day. My deadlines, so far, have all been quite manageable. I’ve met writers who have to churn out whole novels in three months and that gives me the hives. I don’t think I could ever do that.

You have said that you are all about symmetry; you like to switch your mouse from left to right hand. You don’t like to play softball anymore because you’re limited to throwing with one hand. How does your need for symmetry translate into your writing?

There’s an inherent symmetry between the protagonist and antagonist, or at least there should be. A writer should love their antagonist as much as their protagonist so that both sides are well represented. I don’t believe in good and evil, but in misguided intention. As a writer, I take the main idea, the “good intentions” of the protagonist and develop a fully realized argument for the “bad intentions” of the antagonist. Only when both sides of the story are fully realized does the reader have the ability to make a conscious decision as to their loyalties to the characters.

Cycler deals with opposing ideas in that way, does it not, regarding gender?

Cycler has strong ideas of gender; how it can be a prison where we are all forced by society to choose sides. In context of the fully developed antagonist, I had to have a character that sees gender as only black and white, male and female, right and wrong. I came to really love the character even though I despise what she stands for because by putting my beliefs up against hers the entire argument of gender in the book was better developed. I was then able to explore gender, how it could be both male and female and neither male or female, and figure out a way to exist in a black and white, opposing, world.

Was the duality of your character(s) in Cycler a problem for you at all? There are those who would say that a man can not convincingly write about a woman’s experiences, and conversely a woman can not know what a man goes through enough to write of it. Am I correct in guessing those notions are entirely too simplistic and had no bearing on the writing of the book?

It takes a bit more than male anatomy and psychology to scare me away. I’ve written from the point of view of aliens, of sentient software programs, of religious fanatics, of anthropomorphized cultural entities, all of whom were vastly more different from me than a man. But I’d be lying if I said that writing from a male point of view is identical to writing from a female point of view. Especially in Cycler, which is very much about gender, I am exploring what it feels like to be male and female. And I had so much fun doing that. What I’ve always tried to shy away from is any notion of an essentialized maleness or femaleness. That’s one of the challenges of Cycler, exploring gender without bogging down in boring dualities.

Was the idea initially to write a YA novel due to the popularity of the subject matter, or was it the best way to deal with your subject of gender roles — to set it in the young adult life when we are becoming aware of “how we should act” based on our gender?

I never knew the category of YA existed until I started meeting science fiction writers who were suddenly being shelved in the YA section. I’m not an expert in publishing, but my sense is that it’s a new category. My original idea for Cycler dealt with the main characters at age twenty-five. But as soon as I started writing it I realized all the juicy identity stuff was being shoved into the backstory, so I simply backed up and wrote it from the teenagers’ points of view. In the movie version, I’ve backed it up even further to show the first day that the cycling began.

From what you have said it sounds as if simply telling a story is not enough for you.

Storytelling is the foundation of any good novel and I think it’s actually a very rare talent. Plenty of writers get by on killer premises and witty style. But effective storytelling is all about structure. It’s very mechanical, almost architectural. When you can marry that structure to a framework of ideas, then the novel can transcend pure entertainment. The trick, in my opinion, is to weave these ideas invisibly into the story so that they are discovered, unraveled by the reader. My goal is to seduce my reader into a compelling narrative that whittles away at some preconceived idea and leaves them with an uncomfortable but somehow intriguing gap in their sense of the world. I want them to close the book and have a head full of questions. I’m not interested in merely diverting them for a while or helping them fall asleep. Nor do I want that from the books I read. I want to be unsettled, challenged. I want to close a book and say “I never thought of that before.”

What else do you have planned beyond Cycler and its sequel? More YA books? Will you delve more into gender, or are there other themes you wish to explore?

I always have a backlog of projects itching to be realized. First in the queue is a novel called Steal the Future, which is about teens and surveillance. I’ve written the first draft, but it needs to be put through its paces. Next in line is my long-festering science fiction musical, Upload/Download, for which I’ve written about ten songs but have yet to bang out a script. I’m also toying with the idea of fleshing out my short story, “The Perfect Man,” into a screenplay. And I’ve just begun making notes for a post-apocalyptic teen adventure set in Brooklyn. The thing is, by the time, I’ve moved on to my next project, I’ll have hatched several more potential projects. Most of them never make it out of the larval stage. My hard drive is clogged with larvae.

And finally, what is the one question I did not ask you that I should have, that you thought “Wow, he really missed the point and should have asked this!”? (and of course, what’s your answer?)

I think you asked some great questions. The one question people always ask me that you omitted is: “Why did you quit the film business?” And my answer would be because it’s boring, trite, and nobody makes good movies any more.

For more information about Lauren & Cycler, visit:
http://www.laurenmclaughlin.net/

Other interviews by Devin Poore:
A Conversation With Stephen Segal, Creative Director of Wildside Press

Devin Poore’s website:
http://www.devinjpoore.com/

© Copyright 2008 Senses Five Press

Sybil’s Garage No. 5
A spectrum of stories and poems from the past, present and elsewhen
	$4.95	More info »

by Devin Poore
to the sound of “Greet Death” by Explosions in the Sky…

As published in Sybil’s Garage No. 4

Stephen Segal serves as creative director for the Wildside Press magazine group, including Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, and H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror. I first met him at ReaderCon in 2005 where he was pitching a new magazine concept titled Earthling. After that, we continued to run into each other at conventions, conferences and readings. Our conversations always revolved around speculative fiction and media, how to get it out to a wider audience, why we would even want to try.

From our first meeting, I realized that someone should be writing down what Stephen had to say. Last year, prior to one of the fall KGB Fantastic Fiction readings in Manhattan, Stephen and I sat down to put this to paper. Incidentally, at the same time, Crispin Glover was being interviewed on a door stoop across the street. Stephen and I have yet to decide if that was a good or bad omen.

To start off on a less than serious note, an employee under the Wildside banner wanted me to ask you why you decided to give up the motion picture martial arts career. Along those lines, do you have many OFFICE SPACE, Michael Bolton-type moments with your name, even though you do pronounce your last name differently?

It’s funny — the bad jokes had finally tapered off a few years ago, and then, inexplicably, they came back worse than ever, despite the fact that Steven (spelled differently) Seagal (spelled differently) hasn’t actually been making any new movies. Yes, it’s a rare week when some bank teller, checkout clerk, or peruser of my business card isn’t moved to laughter by my name. I’ve long since grown past being irritated by it, though — hey, if something as simple as that can brighten someone’s day, far be it from me to rain on their parade.

I should point out that there’s also a Steven T. Seagle who writes some terrific comic books, and I’m occasionally asked more seriously if that’s me. Nope! I am Stephen Harry Segal, the Atlantic City kid turned Pittsburgh journalist turned speculative-arts creative director.

First real question: you started out as an Arts and Entertainment editor in Pittsburgh, which is a far cry from working at Wildside Press as manager and creative director. Or is it? While in Pittsburgh, how much of your job dealt with entertainment of a speculative nature? And if the job itself did not deal with it, were you able to turn it in that direction at all? And how much of that experience with the “regular” entertainment scene can you bring into play with your new position at Wildside?

I’ve thought about this a lot, because I’ve noticed how many of the most interesting sf authors today are current or former journalists: Gaiman, Doctorow, Scalzi, Sterling…

On the broadest level, basic reporting experience can be a great education. Your job is to meet lots of interesting people of all kinds and talk to themabout their lives. How cool is that? Is there any quicker way to come to appreciate, first-hand, such an incredibly broad cross-section of society? In seven years writing and editing for Pittsburgh’s alternative newsweekly and city magazine, I got to know artificial-heart scientists and 80-year-old blues musicians, millionaires and shit-poor kids itching for a better life, sleazy artists and open-minded ministers and honest politicians. And it’s hard to immerse yourself in getting to know real people without being forced to throw away lots of preconceptions about “these” people and “those” people. You come to understand that it’s a lot more helpful to approach the world with questions than with assertions — and that, to me, is the heart of all speculative fiction: the question, the “What if?”

To answer a different part of the question: As a lifelong science fiction and fantasy reader, I always felt that the field got short shrift in the mainstream media. So when I became part of the media, I tried to do my part to cover our unique art form just as seriously as I would cover music or theatre or filmmaking. I had the most fun doing it at the alternative newsweekly, because obviously s.f. has been an “alternative arts-based culture” every bit as important as, say, punk rock or hip-hop — and yet I found it was rarely talked about in that way. So that’s what I’d do. The week Samuel Delany was coming to town to give a university lecture, for instance, we ran a cover story about the close thematic links between science fiction and surrealist art. More importantly, I’d try to make sure that as frequently as possible, every issue included some casual, passing reference to a touchstone of s.f., just as another pop-cultural reference carrying the unstated implication that hey reader, you maybe oughtta know what we’re talking about.

Today at Wildside? The main area of overlap is that I’m working with our editors and contributors to introduce more nonfiction into magazines that identify themselves as fiction magazines first. It’s a simple matter of audience awareness — people today are far more accustomed to reading nonfiction magazines than fiction magazines, and giving potential new readers a whiff of comfortable familiarity makes it a lot easier to lure them in to be captured by the far-out weirdness of our fantastic universe.

The other aspect is that, as art director, I’m willing and eager to look waaaaaay outside the narrowly defined field of “fantasy art” for artists of all kinds who are doing awesome, mind-bending work that’s as unexpected, unsettling, and exciting in their own way today as Kelly Freas or Margaret Brundage were 50 or 60 years ago.

I’m often surprised by the unwillingness of people to deal with speculative entertainment because of what I can only broadly label as the “geek culture” associated with it. I was speaking with a neighbor last weekend about Cormac McCarthy’s fantastic book THE ROAD and when I told her the premise she said “I don’t read sci-fi” with the same speed and distaste as someone might say “I don’t watch porn”.

Yeah, it seems to me that that sort of vehement, visceral reaction usually comes from one of two places:

(1) As you say, some people are turned off by the fanaticism of geek culture — usually because they think of themselves as smart people but desperately fear being associated with the classic nerd stereotype, a key component of which is being laughed at by other people. See Exhibit A, “Urkel.”

(2) They pride themselves on being realists, and so they sneer at the “silliness” they perceive on the surface of any kind of fairy story, whether the fairies in question are elves or aliens (or angels, depending on whether they’re semi-honest atheists or hypocritically religious “realists”).

The former person is simply tragically insecure, too worried about being mocked to stand up and enjoy what they ought on their own terms. The latter person is missing the point — failing to understand that mythic narrative and imagery can be wielded with equal force in the service of either escapism or societal engagement.

(Or both. I’ve been saying ever since September 11 to anyone who’ll listen: I wish Berkley would release a new anniversary edition of DUNE onto the general fiction shelves, with a grand, full-scale marketing push but not one word about “science fiction classic” anywhere on the package. Instead, the cover would read something like: “The most important novel of our time — DUNE — a prescient tale of desert warfare, religious terrorism, and ecological catastrophe.”)

But now we are seeing the success of SPIDER-MAN and other superhero movies, acclaim for shows such as HEROES, LOST and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, with more and more speculative books showing up on the “What’s New” shelf at Barnes and Noble. Is this a sign of the genre making itself more general and middle-of-the-road, palatable, or is the audience at large now simply more willing to accept what has always been there?

A bit of both — with the note that it’s not because the genre is making itself more “middle-of-the-road” or “palatable” in terms of content, but in terms of presentation. As far as the book world goes, I suspect a lot of credit is due to the success of the approach taken with Gregory Maguire’s books. WICKED wasn’t aimed at the fantasy market, despite the fact that it’s not only pure genre fantasy through and through, it’s Fanfic, for Pete’s sake. But Harper Collins recognized that it was a wonderfully written story with the potential to push the primal mythic button in the brains of a huge audience — and they gave it the sort of crossover marketing support it deserved. As a result, fairytales won back some of the adult cache they’d lost over the past century.

Similar story with SPIDER-MAN. The movie was, for all intents and purposes, utterly faithful to the comic-book source material — which was hugely popular to a general audience in 1965 but considered a primitive, juvenile medium by the average adult American in 1995. Our culture just had to wait for visual-effects technology to catch up with the fantastical requirements of the story, so that the appealing tale could once again stand up to the suspension of disbelief.

Speaking of visual updates, we have noticed some changes in design and presentation of some of the Wildside magazine titles, specifically WEIRD TALES, since your arrival. Is there more of that to come, and what are the specific reasons for those changes and updates?

It’s the first rule of magazine publishing: Have an identity. There are way, way too many magazines of all kinds out there on the bookstore shelves for a publisher to be able to get away for long with producing a magazine that isn’t uniquely appealing. So we sat down and looked at the Wildside magazines after I arrived, and we decided that their looks weren’t quite evoking their distinct editorial missions — and we needed to address that.

FANTASY MAGAZINE was the easiest, because its mission is very straightforward: It’s the magazine incarnation of our Prime Books imprint, dedicated to highly literary, intellectual, myth-driven fantasy, and propelled by the great talents of emerging next-generation writers who may not be familiar names yet — but will be soon. Our editor, Sean Wallace, had a very clean, modern, elegant look in mind when he first launched the magazine, and we’ve simply tried to streamline and develop that, making it a bit more typographically sophisticated so the visual style matches the literary style. The look works well for FANTASY, I think — it’s much more visual than the digest-sized F&SF, and much more fiction-centric than the glossy REALMS OF FANTASY.

With HP LOVECRAFT’S MAGAZINE OF HORROR, we decided that the original logo was coming across as too psychedelic — and even though that was one valid interpretation of the Lovecraft aesthetic, we thought the horror motif would resonate better with readers if we found a look that was simultaneously grittier and classier. So we went with the blown-up metal-type look for the logo and the headlines — and then we redesigned the interior pages around the concept of vertical lines and centered symmetry, which gives a very understated, subliminal sort of ancient-stone-tablet vibe that I think is even more appropriate to Lovecraft. The final result, hopefully, is a magazine that exudes moody, Lovecraftian darkness while standing out as very different from all the movie-horror mags that clutter up the newsstand.

WEIRD TALES has been the big, exciting challenge, because the original incarnation from the 1920s through the 1950s was so incredibly influential, launching not only Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard but Ray Bradbury and even, for Pete’s sake, Tennessee Williams. And the current incarnation, which is now almost 20 years old itself — while it’s published hundreds of outstanding stories by great writers like Ligotti, Campbell, and Lee, as well as oodles of terrific artwork by the likes of Barr, Fabian, and Rowena — has suffered over the years from the difficult realities of small-press publishing, changing ownership several times and never quite getting a handle on the modern demands of circulation and marketing. So we wanted to put together not just a new look, but a whole new vision for WEIRD TALES that incorporates all the best aspects of the recent run that our subscribers enjoy, while more consciously evoking the groundbreaking, subversive, counter-cultural mission of the original 1920s magazine, and simultaneously reaching out from the newsstand to fresh, young, new readers in the 21st century who may not yet self-identify as “fantasy readers” or “sf fans” per se. Goth kids, punk kids — they would love WEIRD TALES just as much as the devotees do if they noticed it and picked it up, but until now they haven’t. We want to fix that.

How to do that? Well, obviously, the fiction is still the heart and soul of the magazine. We’re bringing in Ann Kennedy VanderMeer as our new fiction editor, starting with the October 2007 issue. Ann is not only an incredibly cool person and a terrific editor, but she straddles both the traditional and the avant-garde sides of the genre. The surrealist-fiction magazine she founded and ran in the ‘90s, THE SILVER WEB, published several of the same authors and artists that WEIRD TALES was featuring — and at the same time, also reached far outside the sf establishment to find creative people who were producing works of speculative literature and art from very different perspectives. We don’t want to replicate THE SILVER WEB, but we do want Ann to mix up fresh and unexpected brews of strangeness, building upon the context of the Weird Tales tradition.

We’re restructuring the nonfiction content, too, in a way that I think old and new readers alike are really going to enjoy. First off, we’ve taken senior contributing editor Darrell Schweitzer out of his old duck blind hiding behind the editorial “we” so we can spotlight his insightful musings about fantasy in a first-person-singular bylined column, dubbed “The Cryptic.” The actual editorial, “The Eyrie,” will now run much shorter — just a page or so — so we can add a new, rotating guest essay titled “Weirdism,” devoted to the weirdness of real life. The debut installment is a piece by Caitlin R. Kiernan, marking her first WEIRD TALES appearance. We’ll be refocusing anew on conducting interviews with fantastic creators of all kinds, we’ll be including nifty historical notes on a page titled “Old Weird, New Weird,” and we’ll be launching a couple of art-centric series that I won’t spoil just yet, except to say that I don’t mean writings about art.

How much of your work towards luring new readers to the medium is focused at the existing adult demographic, and now much is focused towards grabbing the attention of young readers, where it seems that the affinity with the speculative is most likely to take hold? You once told me “You build new audiences NOT by initiating them into the existing arcane rituals and clubs, but by simply entertaining them and winning them over”. Isn’t that most prevalent when looking towards young readers?

It sure is. Just think about your own journey into sfdom for a minute, and you’ll realize that the organized structure of Fandom-with-a-capital-F is almost certainly the last thing you discovered, and thus the least important. Taking me as an example — and forgive me, these are approximations — I fell in love with DOCTOR WHO and STAR WARS and SUPERMAN when I was 5, D’AULAIRE’S BOOK OF GREEK MYTHS when I was 7, Madeleine L’Engle and C.S. Lewis and STAR BLAZERS when I was 9, Asimov and Tolkien and Marvel Comics and giant Japanese robots when I was 11. At that point, I leapt into my father’s bookshelf full of Heinlein, Clarke, Norton, Varley, Doc Smith, spent junior high devouring them all — and I was confirmed as a lifelong lover of the fantastic. It wasn’t until high school that I discovered STAR TREK conventions, and not until after college that I entered the world of organized literary fandom.

So what does that suggest? To me, it suggests a couple things. First, that us grown-up literary sf fans damn well better embrace the onscreen “sci-fi,” of all flavors, that first grabs the attention of children with its glorious imagery. Whether that’s FLASH GORDON or STAR WARS or TRANSFORMERS or AVATAR, it’s a starting point from which the connections to increasingly mature works can be nurtured, and we shouldn’t mock it just because we’re perversely embarrassed that we used to have kid tastes when we were kids.

From a publisher’s perspective, it reminds us that, as an industry, it’s incumbent upon us to make sure that every generation has their own material to enjoy as they grow through those stages. On the one hand, that means making sure the truly timeless classics don’t appear stale (e.g., in the 1950s Asimov’s robots may have been illustrated somewhat fancifully by Freas’ generation, in the 1980s they were illustrated photo-realistically by artists like Michael Whelan, and in the 2010s they probably ought to show a lot more anime influence). On the other hand, it means that we’ve got to remember not to only publish sf for ourselves. For me, that’s been one of the most exciting challenges with repositioning our Wildside magazine titles, particularly WEIRD TALES: working to ensure that it’s not just appealing to people who already know the cultural history of WEIRD TALES, but to an entirely new generation who ought to be able to discover the magazine for the first time and fall in love with it fresh, just like so many teenagers did in the 1930s.

You mentioned that DUNE is relevant to the state of the world today. In the past many have argued that the Cold War and the uncertainty it bred was responsible for the rise of Science Fiction and Horror in ‘50s and ‘60s. How much of the current social, real-world climate do you look to highlight in your book and magazine content. Do you seek it out, or does it just naturally bubble up out of the community?

Well… I think the best social commentary in art is the stuff that puts itself there through the artistic requirements of the work, rather than overt political propagandizing. But these days, I’m just a creative director, not an editor. Come back and ask me that question again after I launch EARTHLING, and I’ll have a much, much longer and more interesting answer.

You come across as one of those people who is never satisfied with “good enough”. Let’s say it is the year 2012: where do you see the Wildside magazines?

Hmmm — prognostication is dangerous. But I can tell you where I think the Wildside magazines ought to be in five years with a bit of luck. WEIRD TALES should have at least doubled its current circulation, by reaching out to new and younger audiences through new distribution channels — and that doesn’t just mean more retail stores, but also a truly awesome Web presence that takes online sf into currently-undreamed-of places. FANTASY MAGAZINE should be a well-established market where writers working in serious, sophisticated fantasy can know that they’ll find an enthusiastic audience. And H.P. LOVECRAFT’S MAGAZINE OF HORROR should not only be wowing horror fans as the niftiest literary-horror magazine in print, but also as the online starting point for anyone who’s making any sort of foray into the Lovecraft Mythos.

For the field in general, where do you see speculative fiction, and entertainment in general, in the year 2012? Will advances in technology, especially the web, allow the medium to reach those that have no inkling of what exactly is available?

By the year 2012, I expect that narrative storytelling will undergo a convergence of all media, and will hitherto be composed by intelligence-enhanced cyborg monkeys and transmitted through touchpad sensors in our socks. At least, I hope so.

© Copyright 2007 Senses Five Press

Website of Devin Poore.
Website of Stephen H. Segal.

Sybil’s Garage No. 4
Digging deep into the substratum of the weird.
	$1.95	More info »

Interview by Lauren McLaughlin
to the sound of Sufjan Steven’s Decatur or Round of Applause for Your Stepmother and Aimee Mann’s Little Bombs and Calexico and Iron & Wine’s A History of Lovers and Yo La Tengo’s The Whole of the Law and Ella Fitzgerald singing Why Was I Born and The Winterpills, and lots of other good stuff…

As published in Sybil’s Garage No. 3

Do you listen to music when you write? What kind of music?
I’ve gotten a little superstitious about listening to music when I write. Once a story is going somewhere, I keep listening to the same music whenever I work on that story. It seems to help me keep in voice, and alternatively, if I need to make some kind of dramatic shift, I’ll go and put on something different to shake myself awake, out of that particular set of rhythms. When I’m starting a story, I try to listen to music that’s going to help evoke a certain emotional space or speed or kind of complexity or spareness or loneliness that I want to access for story reasons. I guess it’s like inviting a story to dinner — you want to seduce that story into doing what you want it to do, and so you have to set the mood with the right music.

Aimee Mann is great for working to. Other favorites — Hem, Rufus Wainwright, Emmylou Harris, Patsy Cline, M. Ward, Magnetic Fields. Those are still my standbys. For a long time I was listening to Summer Teeth, one of Wilco’s CDs. Stupid or too-obvious lyrics drive me insane when I’m working. Mixes with singers and bands like Jenny Toomey, Sufjan Stevens, Postal Service, The Rosebuds, Neko Case, The Decemberists, Yo La Tengo, Mayumi Kojima, lots of others!

For the last year or so, I’ve mostly been writing in cafés, and then I mostly listen to conversations at other tables. I get paranoid when I have my headphones on in public.

When did you decide you wanted to become a writer? Did you ever consider another career, perhaps as a performance skydiver?
I didn’t do anything as active as deciding that I wanted to be a writer. For one thing, I didn’t feel like I was the final authority on whether or not I was anything like a writer. (I’m a timid soul.) I just kept writing stories, because becoming a veterinarian seemed as if it involved too much dissection, too much memorization, too much work. The place that I’ve always felt most at home was in a group of people, or one on one, talking about books or short stories.

After I was already fairly invested in writing short stories, I took a geology course and passionately wished that I was a geologist instead. Library work always seems appealing, and I miss being the new book buyer at Avenue Victor Hugo in Boston. I took a course on writing musicals in college, but dropped out because I couldn’t seem to figure out how to write lyrics that were worth anybody’s time, including my own. Topiary has always seemed like a good occupation, comparable in some ways to writing short fiction. For a long time I took lessons in watercolors, and I loved that — the blotty, sketchy, all-your-sins-right-there-to-look-at aspect of it.

You don’t seem like the 9-to-5 type. Did you ever have a corporate sit-in-the-cube-for-eight-hours-a-day job?
No! Never! I had a noon-to-ten bookstore job, but that didn’t involve wearing pantyhose. Some days I forget to brush my hair. I don’t think I’m cut out for a job where you have to look professionally tidy. I prefer working in my pajamas and taking showers after lunch. And I know how lucky I am.

Interview by Matthew Kressel
to the sound of “Time on my Hands,” a pop song from the early 1930s…

As Published in Sybil’s Garage No. 3.