| A Conversation With Jeff VanderMeer | ||||||||||||||||
| An interview with Matthew Cheney | ||||||||||||||||
| June 2004 | ||||||||||||||||
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VanderMeer's stories have been appearing since the late 1980s in a wide variety of publications, everywhere from Freezer Burn Magazine to Asimov's Science Fiction. His poetry and short-short stories ("flash fiction") have been collected in The Day Dali Died from Prime Books. His acclaimed book City of Saints and Madmen collected a series of stories set in the vividly-imagined city of Ambergris, while the setting of VanderMeer's first novel, Veniss Underground, had first been explored in short stories, some of which are collected in Secret Life. Where did the idea for a comprehensive collection of your short fiction come from? How did your relationship with Golden Gryphon Press begin? 
I can't remember exactly how I hooked up with Golden Gryphon, but I know I'd been jonesing to have a collection come out
from them ever since I saw the beautiful job they did with the Andy Duncan collection. Given that my output of short fiction has dropped
dramatically in the last five years, as I've pursued longer and longer works, a comprehensive collection is well past due. Also, I'd been
rather hasty in the early years of my career and often sent work to lower tier markets out of impatience at the long response times of
other markets, and also, perhaps, from selling myself short. So there are many stories that not many people have seen but that I believe
are deserving of attention.
Marty Halpern at Golden Gryphon gravitated toward the longer stories for Secret Life, leaving the shorter stories with no real
home. Several of these, including "Henry Dreams of Angkor Wat," are among my personal favorites -- that one in particular for its
surrealism mixed with political overtones. So I asked Prime Books if they'd be interested in a book of basically "flash fiction and
poetry." I like them as companion volumes. Maybe ten years down the road, I'll take the best of what's in those two collections and
combine it with new fiction, like "Three Days in a Border Town," probably my favorite of my short stories, which will be out
in Polyphony 4 soon.
It's a story set in the far-far future of Veniss Underground. Even the meerkats and fleshdogs are all gone, existing only
as holographs. A series of border towns. Rumors of a vast inland sea, the last above ground body of water on Earth, otherwise,
desert. A religion built up around a moving city, technologically-advanced, that few have ever seen. A quest that rises out of
that. It's the start of a story cycle that will form a mosaic novel when I'm done.
It's very instinctual. One thing I've always excelled at is pacing. I generally have a very good sense of how long a scene should
last for best dramatic effect. So when I start to think about the shape of a piece of fiction, it's usually obvious, based on how many
scenes I see in my head, what length it might be. I don't outline or anything like that -- I find that too mechanical.
I did not use an outline. The stories organically accreted one to the next and the overall story structure existed solely in my head
and was arrived at as naturally as possible. Many of the Ambergris stories have come to me as if from a dream, in that they often arrive
fully formed and I often feel as if I am just dictating something someone else has told me. Now, I do retroactively outline, after
I've finished a story or novel. And a retroactive outline reveals the skeleton of the piece to me, and lets me know if anything is out of
place -- if the story is missing a rib or something.
I can't really write on demand, so it was whatever I was working on at the time. I did take "The Compass of His Bones" as a personal
challenge -- the ending of that story had evaded me for ten years, so I sat down and ground it out, and the ground it out again... and the
funny thing is, I think the difficulty, the sheer bloody-mindedness it took to excruciatingly find the core of that story served a
purpose -- it made the ending of the story much more visceral. I was, on the level of creation, going through what the character is going
through, and it kind of gets into the text.
I was taking a lot of classes in Latin American history at the time, at the University of Florida. The accounts I read in those
classes, often first-hand conquistadore accounts, meshed in my imagination with my own memories of Peru and Mexico. Those stories
were a result. The hummingbirds come from an occurrence in Peru that I talk about in the story notes in the collection.
I wrote more sections to entertain my co-workers, originally. Then I wrote "The Pen" section and it occurred to me that I had a short
story composed of vignettes. I liked the idea of interludes for bits and pieces that fit into the narrative but didn't actually tell
stories, really. The whole story is one long digression anyway, so...
I revised quite a bit, and Marty Halpern helped me focus on that task by suggesting dozens of his own edits. The thing is, when you're
18 or 19, you've got the youthful energy and the stupidity to attempt just about anything, but your craft is still somewhat underdeveloped,
so I'd say the earlier stories are the most revised. But there are other issues, too. For example, in a story like "Flight Is For Those
Who Have Not Yet Crossed Over," which I wrote when I was about 26 or 27, I was still over-describing characters. The main character's wife
is over-described. By which I mean, the reader should meet the writer half-way much of the time, and I'd left no space for the reader to
come in and imagine this woman. Not only that, but in the circumstances under which she's described, by a tired husband coming in the door
at three in the morning, it's ludicrous to think that he'd stand there and absorb every detail of her. So things like that changed. I
wouldn't say there were structural changes so much as very intense copy editing. Some adjectives were cut and verbs or nouns replaced with
stronger, more exact word choices. Sometimes a bit of awkward wording would be changed. For the longest time, in "Secret Life," I had a
line that read "And wept, for the face she turned up toward him was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen." Which frustrated me,
because it was so damn awkward, but it wasn't until revising for the Golden Gryphon collection that I realized all I had to do was delete
the word "thing." A one-word change that makes the sentence more invisible for the reader, so they can focus more fully on the emotion
being expressed. But I'd be fooling myself if I said that I don't still commit stupid errors at the sentence level from time to
time -- and that's why you go back and revise time and time again, whenever you have the chance. Although there certainly are stories
where you can destroy the inner life of the story by making things too precise.
First person narrators should not always write pitch-perfect prose. Sometimes the violence -- physical or mental -- described by a
story requires rougher edges. There's such a thing as being too civilized or intellectual in your approach. A rough oil painting is as
effective as a precise, photo-realistic portrait, sometimes more so.
I only write, for the most part, about places I've been to. I traveled to many countries as a child, and I supplement that with
research, but the core resonance of the real-world settings is taken from my childhood memories. The Ambergris setting is also taken
from my childhood memories -- just recombined, chopped up, fragmented, and put back together again. A woman chopping the head off a carp
in the Ambergrisian "Dradin, in Love" is from the Chinatown in San Francisco. The women in hunter uniforms trance dancing in that same
piece is something I witnessed in Bali.
As for writing about other cultures, I don't know how I do it exactly, but being exposed to some pretty wild things in other countries at an early age seems to allow me to conjure up other cultures. One thing I never do is write about some white guy entering another culture. I think that often leads to condescending fiction. Veniss, on the other hand, is straight out of Bosch land, the most purely fabricated setting I've created. Its psychological truth comes out of the fact I think we're headed in that direction.
I think we're headed for massive, planet-wide ecological devastation followed by the ultimate collapse of civilization as we know
it. Nothing in George W. Bush's agenda or the absolutely retarded propensity of most of us monkeys to buy SUVs and do other things
counter-productive to our own survival makes me think otherwise.
In a sense, the stories, except for "Balzac's War," exist in a slightly parallel universe in that some of the events/information
in Veniss Underground don't support them. But they're close enough. I wrote most of Veniss after all of the stories except
for "Balzac's War." The first Veniss story, "Ghost in the Machine," I wrote at age 15 and it's up
on Infinity Plus, but it's so removed from the reality of the other
stories that I didn't want to include it in the collection. One other story, "Flesh," comes off as a cheap Aliens rip-off
without the aliens, so I didn't include that one, either. I always loved the Cordwainer Smith stories and a lot of Ursula K. Le Guin's
stranger short fiction, and I think the early Veniss stories were influenced by that. Of course, the first part of Veniss
Underground is a send-up of cyberpunk, too.
I've never been able to collaborate with other writers, but I started collaborating with my mother, who is a painter and illustrator,
when I was growing up. She would illustrate my stories. Since then, I've enjoyed "collaborating" with artists. I met Scott Eagle through
my wife and her magazine The Silver Web, which for ten years published stunning surreal art and fiction (fiction that really needs to be
collected in a best-of sometime). I loved how he combined aspects of the old masters with modern technique and collage. He liked my fiction
because of its visual aspect -- specifically, that images in my fiction seem to have a kind of charged presence, they resonate. And he
has done some amazing work for my books. Just stunning. We finally were able to buy his art for City of Saints & Madmen, and it's
just luminous. The quality of the light in that painting is unreal.
I think it's important to develop a consistent voice, but to employ multiple styles if you want to be able to tell a wide range of
stories. If you're really getting into a character or setting, then the texture of that particular story has to be different than the
texture of any other story you might write. For example, "Three Days in a Border Town" and "The City," which is collected in Secret
Life, are both set in the desert. A baroque, pseudo-Victorian style would not be appropriate. I wanted a stark, dry style, stripped
down, with fewer descriptors. Whereas the Ambergris stories work because they are a confusion of images, these new stories work because
the simplified style allows each image to carry a specific weight and to gestate in the reader's mind at a slower pace. Although I repeat
myself thematically, I want to keep finding new ways to tell stories that best fit the characters and situations in those stories. And
the only way to do that is to be flexible.
The easiest one is to note the different ways in which non-fiction is structured, the different forms, and then apply one of them if
the characters or plot of a story demand it. Other than that, though, it's pretty subconscious at this point. A voice will come out of
me, and it'll just happen to be told in an unconventional way sometimes. That is, however, the result of years and years of allowing myself
to be open to new ideas on a conscious level. Now, it's just kind of automatic. The downside of all of this is that sometimes I'll think
of a story and there will seem to be four or five equally good ways of telling it. Usually when I sit down to write it, though, one dominant
method comes to the fore as being the best, for a variety of reasons. And when I say it's subconscious, I mean too that you have to allow
yourself to write what your body and your hands want to write -- that you don't edit yourself into conventional approaches by being too
conscious of what you want to do. It's not that writing is mystical, but the best writing taps into something not quite rational.
At the time, I hadn't been writing much non-Ambergris short fiction and I really wanted to finish the story. I had such a strong sense
of anger and frustration at not finishing it that I had to turn it into something. There was no guarantee that it might become something
publishable, but I wanted to do it anyway. So I harnessed the anger and it wound up making for a story that I think is better than if I'd
finished the original story thread. I don't see any connection to "The Strange Case of X" -- it's just in the same general subcategory of
postmodernism. Although it's worth noting that postmodernism translated through fantasy becomes something a good bit more traditional. After
all, "Strange Case" reaffirms the reality of the fantasy world.
Why Should I Cut Your Throat? is an exploration of fantastical fiction through reviews, essays, interviews with writers like
Jeffrey Ford, and what I guess could be called "career" pieces, like my tell-all about the making of City of Saints. Each section
will be prefaced by a different "convention report," although these are more like New Journalism pieces with the convention at the center
of what often becomes digressive and a meditation on many different topics. So the collection will start with "Why Should I Cut Your
Throat," a convention report from my first convention, and then end with a convention report on one of the last conventions I attended. I
think it will create an interesting effect.
I had thought I'd finish The Zamilon File before Shriek: An Afterword, but it turned out the other way around. Shriek is done now -- a strange family chronicle set in Ambergris -- and Zamilon File, which is a short novel also set in Ambergris, I'll now focus on finishing. I can't describe Zamilon File really, except to say it will take the form of a secret agent file on a particularly troubling espionage case. It will be much more graphics-intensive than City of Saints and much more experimental in structure. It will also contain texts that are encrypted but still make sense on the surface -- stories, in other words, that can be read two ways. A portion of Zamilon File surfaced in the fake disease guide in my disease entry -- most of the journal entry in that entry is in Zamilon File, in an altered context. I'm excited about Zamilon File because I think it will be one of the greatest adventure/spy stories ever told. Think Burroughs and Alasdair Gray collaborating with Nabokov and a code breaker from World War II. Or don't. Like I said, I can't really describe it properly, except I'm going to have to become a lot better at encryption between now and finishing it.
Matthew Cheney teaches at the New Hampton School and has published in English Journal, Failbetter.com, Ideomancer, and Locus, among other places. He writes regularly about science fiction on his weblog, The Mumpsimus. |
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