Phil Jourdan is an author and musician from Portugal, living in the UK. The Goat is a literary goat.

Chewing the Page

The Mourning Goats Interviews

By Phil Jourdan

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2012 Phil Jourdan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78099-589-2

Contents

Editor’s Introduction………………………………………………1Introduction: Confessions of The Goat………………………………..2Stephen Graham Jones……………………………………………….4Vincent Louis Carrella……………………………………………..23Craig Clevenger……………………………………………………46Michael Kun……………………………………………………….595 Questions about Author Promotion with Caleb J. Ross………………….74Rob Roberge……………………………………………………….77Paul Tremblay……………………………………………………..95John Langan……………………………………………………….105Donald Ray Pollock…………………………………………………119Stephen Elliott……………………………………………………127Chad Kultgen………………………………………………………134Chelsea Cain………………………………………………………142Rick Moody………………………………………………………..150Joey Goebel……………………………………………………….157S. G. Browne………………………………………………………169Christopher Moore………………………………………………….177Nick Hornby……………………………………………………….184

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Stephen Graham Jones

What comes to mind when you hear “Mourning Goats?”

Mourning Doves, the ‘goats of morning,’ which is, I don’tknow — regret? Morning Glories too, a plant that’s alwaysconfused me. Or, in this novel I just wrote, The Gospel of Z,there’s these goats in it, which could definitely be said to bemourning. Saddest goats ever. Don’t even want to be thinkingabout them. Except I love them, also. And then I guess I somehowspider over to that old strange short film, “Adonis XIV,” maybe itwas called? Exterminating Angel kind of stuff. With this ram.Probably one of the more influential things I’ve seen, now that Iactually think about it. Have never shaken that movie off. Notsure I want to.

It Came from Del Rio came out on the 23rd of October andThe Ones That Got Away came out the 16th of November, thesame year. While teaching full-time, how do you find the timeto write?

Man, for me it’s more like, how do I find the time to stay sane.Which is to say that writing, for me, it’s just trying to make theworld make sense. Be that with bunny-headed zombies orinsurance office politics or whatever. Writing for me’s makingthis plastic world up, thinking I can play in it, do whatever Iwant, have some fun maybe, except then, before I can help it,there’s all this real stuff happening, I’m stuck back in a corner,and all I have to get out of this place anymore’s a pen. I keepthinking I’m going to ‘graduate’ as a novelist someday, and havethis arm-length distance between me and the stuff on the page,where I can just move it around like chess pieces, analyze thisevent, that angle, be all objective and longseeing. Have a monocleand cane too, while I’m at it, yeah. But no, no such luck on thatkind of distance so far. It’s why I write fast, really, because thesestories, they always get that bad kind of real to me, where I’mdreaming them, where I’m losing the lines between them andnot-them, and so I type faster and faster, trying every door. Andthen, when I finally get out, I feel great for a week, maybe eventwo weeks, I’m happy, the world’s divided up as it should bebetween things that happen and things that I know can’t behappening, but then, yeah, then I’m sitting on some bad-ideabench in a worse place I only meant to walk through, and I’mwriting down … not a premise for a story, those are easy, but avoice that wants to tell a story. If I listen to it too long, too, thenI’m back inside another book, going as fast as I can. Wash rinserepeat.

However, I don’t mean to be all romantic about writing either,don’t want to set it up as ‘the lonely, tortured novelist battles xamount of demons, reaches into the fire to pull this story out,’any of that. I mean, I see people everyday doing real work. Itmakes me completely aware that writing, it’s hardly real work.It’s fun work, I just always fall too deep into it. Or jump, yeah.With never any idea how deep this is going to get this time.

I loved your short story book, Bleed into Me, so I’m reallylooking forward to The Ones That Got Away, also, thedescription of It Came From Del Rio sounds amazing, what canyou tell us about the two?

In that order, The Ones That Got Away, it’s all horror stories.Stuff that really and truly scares me. I’m always telling mystudents that you can render no emotional landscape youhaven’t, to some degree at least, experienced. It’s how you knowthose contours, the slope and sway of the land, can make it realfor your reader. But that’s not to say that you’ve got to go onsome murder spree in order to write like Chelsea Cain, either.However, we have all — ‘to some degree’ — destroyed anotherperson, yes? Effectively, figuratively at least, ‘killed’ them. Be ityour mom, disappointed you stole the earrings her first, realhusband gave her (and her never outing you), or a dog youaccidentally caught with your bumper, whose five-year-oldowner you could see standing in their lawn in your rear viewmirror. I mean, that, that’s horror to me, and I guess that’s thevein I was tapping in The Ones That Got Away. The scary things,finally, they’re not the slobbering toothed beasties in theshadows, they’re the decisions we make, and then have to livewith. Or try to live with. But this isn’t at all to say that there aren’tOld West zombies and Near Dark vampires and ghosts andworse in Ones. There are, and more. But there’s also rabbits andgas pumps and high schools. There’s our world, this world, theplace we live, wrapped around this terrible, terrible stuff. Andpeople trying to make it through to the other side. And, if I hadto cite any influences for this collection, it’d have to be a comboof King and Ketchum, maybe. Or, when I think horror, the stuffthat’s formative for me, that I’m trying to do each time I have ablank page before me, I’m back in The Girl Next Door, as much asI’d never want to be. I’m back in “The Jaunt,” my hair turningwhite in the space of that crossing.

For It Came From Del Rio, though, man, I think I’d just foundJoe R. Lansdale when I wrote that. Mike Shea at Texas Monthlyhad told me I should really look some of his stuff up. So thankfulfor that rec. Lansdale’s stuff, the confidence and ease with whichhe tells his stories, it’s — I wanted to say infectious, but, really,like with Vonnegut, it’s intimidating. But if you can get over that,you can maybe write a novel set down on the Texas border, witha dad come back from the dead, a dad whose own head kind ofwears out, so he has to do what people on the border do:improvise. Find a giant bunny, take its head. The obvioussolution, really. And, yeah, I mean, there’s meteor radiation,there’s chupacabras — I’m so fascinated by those dog-things thatwere showing up back then — there’s revenge and reconciliation,and, because I’d just been reading Dracula and Frankenstein, it’sepistolary too. And I guess probably nostalgic as well, as I usedto live down around Austin, a little place called Wimberley, andfor a lot of years in a row I was always hitting the Texas BookFestival, but somehow, probably because I usually flew in, Inever made it back out there. When I’d been there it had beeneighth grade for me, I mean, so, my memory of it’s eighth-grade,and all the eighth-grade magical stuff that’s going on, that youdon’t want to mess up by seeing from an adult angle. Maybe Iwas afraid to go back there, could only go back as a bunny-headedzombie. Sounds ridiculous, but that may actually be it.Well, that and my wife at the time was telling me that I neverwrote any love stories. So, with Del Rio, I kind of tried, and kindof failed. A book or two later, though — Flushboy and Not forNothing (Dzanc, 2013, 2014) both — I think I got it closer to right.But, too, ask me and I’ll say all my stories are love stories. I’m acomplete sap, wholly sentimental. Just, sometimes the loveaffair’s with a truck, or a knife, or a song, or a place. In It CameFrom Del Rio, that place is South Texas. A big piece of me’salways going to be there.

I noticed that the only book you have out on Kindle isDemon Theory, is this a choice or are the others coming? Whatare your thoughts on e-readers?

Yeah, I hear with Demon Theory the notes are even kind oflinked, yeah? That’s cool. All for it. I mean, I’ve got it on myKindle (felt so loserly, buying my own book, yes), but seem to bevery poor at actually paging through it. Same with the audioversion: can’t really listen. It’s too strange. But, no, it’s not been achoice for me either way. With Demon Theory, I was surprisedwhen it showed up e-, and audio. And, It Came From Del Rio,Trapdoor’s definitely going e- with it — they may just win any e-bookwars that happen to happen. Very slick model, they’ve got.And Kindle (Kindle 2), or its app on my phone, it’s by far mypreferred way to read. I mean, I’m reading Handling the Undeadnow, forever after everybody else, solely because it wouldn’t beavailable in digital version. It’s why I’ve yet to read Bolano, too.Paper books to me, they’re wonderful treasures, great artifacts,and I like that I can get them wet and use them for stairsteps anddoorstops and flykillers, forget them on airplanes, all that, but,when I want to ingest a text, lose myself in the words, thendigital’s the quickest way to complete immersion. I can go somuch faster that way, fast enough, I suspect, that my criticalfaculties break down the slightest bit, and I’m reading the text atthe speed necessary to record it in my head more as anexperience. Reading on my Kindle feels so much more vital,anyway. But, no, I can’t mark up the text like I’d like, I can’t drawunicorns in the margins, I can’t read comics, can’t hit Wired, anyof that coolness. But the tech’s making all the necessary strides,I’m sure. And I can draw unicorns in lots of other places for thetime being.

It sounds like you’re teaching some pretty interestingclasses at the University of Colorado, Boulder, what are some ofyour favorite?

Ridiculous as it sounds, I’m still completely in love withteaching fiction writing. Each and every time, I learn something,the students teach me something. I don’t mean each semester,either. More like each class meeting. A complete rush, and whollya scam that I get paid for it. But shhh. To say it cleaner, I guess,articulating stuff about stories to the students, making itdigestible, learnable, it improves my own fiction. And they’re notjust teaching me what not to do either, of course. A lot of the timethey’re doing stuff I hadn’t even considered.

But, I also teach some lit, and that’s a complete blast. I’ve donethe Haunted House — the genre’s so elegant — the Slasher, whichI needed about fourteen more years in that semester to say everythingI wanted to say, and, now, The Zombie. Which, even whenI wrote Del Rio, I seriously knew very little about zombies. Theyliked brains, used to be dead? Okay, check, check. But now,studying all the different flavors of zombie kind, well, first, it’s sohelpful when talking Del Rio, because now I can see what I wasdoing, but, second, it’s turning out that the zombie genre’s just aselegant as the Haunted House, as the Slasher. There’s taxonomiesand tropes and archetypes and it all matters, is all part of thedynamo that drives the story. Loving it. Hope soon to teachwerewolves and vampires. Need to be figuring them out as well.Which — all my lit classes, they’re never me walking into theroom, having a clutch of answers and some pedagogical vehiclewith which to deliver those answers. No, I come in withquestions, with “how does this work?,” with “why this, notthat?,” and over the course of the semester we try to tease aparta set of answers. Or, we get our hands bloody, and try to pullsomething recognizable up from the operating table.

You received your Ph.D. in Creative Writing at Florida StateUniversity, in two years; can you explain how you did it so fast,and what your thoughts are on the teaching of creative writing?

Only reason I did my Ph.D that fast was — well, first, it wasthat I was on University Fellowship, so didn’t have to teach,could overload on hours, but, more than that, it was that Floridamade me very, very nervous. Let me add another ‘very’ there. Wehad a dog back then that needed walking a lot, and so I’d take heron these rambling journeys, me reading the whole time, or, atfirst, trying to read anyway. But, there were all these freaktacularbugs everywhere, each of which I thought was definitely goingto jump on my face, suck my eyeball juice out. And spiders, man,there were webs taller than I was. And, and sometimes I’d stallout at fences, look down these grassy slopes to real true livealligators, little ones just chasing frogs, but watching me as well,telling me ‘later, bub. You’. I’ve never been so terrified. Which — whereI hunt, there’s grizzly sign everywhere, they’re going tosleep later and later these last few years, their tracks on mytracks, blood on their tracks sometimes, me often carryingsomething dead around, and, yeah, that definitely doesn’t notsuck, and there’s wolves all over too, and just endless trees tofreeze to death in, and series of guns in my hand that I don’tremotely trust not to shoot me, but, still: it’s not Florida. So, I sayit was the bugs and the gators and the spiders, and it was, thatwas what pushed me through FSU so fast, but it was also thatFlorida was very squishy, very green. And, I was raised in WestTexas, didn’t even know how to swim until forever. It was likeDune planet, pretty much. Of course I’m fundamentally terrifiedof water. Too, though, my biggest dream — okay, aside fromspace travel with kind of nice aliens — it’s to see a real whale. Justsurfacing, breathing, rolling back under. Would be completelyand absolutely magic. However, closest I’ve been to being on areal boat’s the ferry by the Golden Gate Bridge. Which I rode justto ride, same as I rode the streetcar earlier that day. I didn’t seeany whales. Was the only one of the whole ferry, I think.

November 1st, is the first day of NANOWRIMO, do youhave plans for this year? What’s come from these in the past?

I’ve never NANOWRIMO’d, but I always try to get mystudents to. I did finish Demon Theory over Thanksgiving in1999 though, if that can count. But, no, I don’t do it. I have donethe three-day novel contest a couple of times, though. That’smore my speed. First time out I jammed down a hundred andfifty-two pages, I think, but didn’t win. Second time, I wrote TheLong Trial of Nolan Dugatti, then withdrew it from considerationso Chiasmus could publish it. I’d guess I wrote Del Rio in four orsix weeks, too — almost a month? — but Ones, no, that wasn’t allat once, was piecemeal, across about five years. I don’t see howyou can do a collection any other way. You’ve got to have a lot ofmisfires, I mean, a lot of tangents so you can figure out whatyou’re maybe really trying to say here.

Social media is everywhere these days, and you have a hugepresence on it, how do you think social media is changing theway we communicate, especially the way authors are currentlyusing it?

I think it’s allowing us to collapse that distance betweenauthor and reader. I get hit up all the time on Facebook, I mean,people telling me their cool stories about finding one of mybooks, meeting a girl or guy because of it, and, that’s what it’sabout, for me. Sure, cashing a check is nice, but connecting withpeople — isn’t that why we write in the first place? Why I doanyway. I mean, because I rarely can in the meat world. Stick meat a party or a dinner and I won’t know what to say, or how tosay it, or when to say it, and usually just end up in some storyspace in the corner, running through junk in my head, trying tocrib it down on napkins for later, because I’m going to show allof them.

What are the top five most influential books to your career?

King’s It, definitely. Every time I sit down, it’s to write thatbook. And every time, I fail. Erdrich’s Love Medicine, too. Havenever read a book so true, I don’t think. Martel’s The Life of Pi,not because it’s brilliant, which it is, but because it’s got heart. Somany books are … not afraid to try to connect, to reach out, butafraid to try, have it not work out. Like not telling a joke becauseyou think it might not be funny, yeah? Ketchum’s The Girl NextDoor, because it’s completely unafraid, never looks away, yet alsonever panders, and has just as much heart as Pi. Maybe more.Love that book. And, a fifth, um, um, okay,The Things TheyCarried. Probably generic or typical of me to pick that one, but,just because everybody else likes it, does that mean I’m supposedto be cool and say I’m past that? Nope. That book still destroysme, in the way that only fiction can: to build me back up better.And, sixth, since you asked, Vizenor’s Bearheart. You know howDavid Foster Wallace says Blue Velvet was his — his Blue Velvet?In Philip K. Dick terms, his disinhibiting symbol, I guess youcould call it, or, talking texts, ‘disinhibiting narrative.’ Except forDFW it wasn’t the actual story, I don’t think, it was the singlenessof vision, the fidelity to an ethos, something like that. This iswhat I get from Bearheart: something that’s so completely itsown thing that it has just a touch more reality than everythingelse on the shelves.

One of my favorite quotes of yours is, “write yourself into acorner, and give it all away with each line,” would you mindgoing into more detail, or giving an example in your ownwriting?

Was just listening to the Farrelly Brothers installment of thatscreenwriter interview series The Dialogue, with Mike DeLuca — knowit? Anyway, they say that too, or one of them does. Was sohappy to hear somebody besides me preaching it. But, yeah, ifyou only write into places you know how to get out of, thenyou’re never going to have to push yourself. Example:Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, a kind of oddly compelling book.There’s this line about halfway through, something that ends achapter like “And then the most surprising thing happened.” Or”unexpected,” something like that. Anyway, man, always do thatto yourself, always kill the character you’re most attached to,always, if you’re Card, burn the Mother Tree, make us think thestory’s over, that it can’t possibly go even one step farther. Andthen take it all the way around the town. What you’re doing isleading your reader into a truly imaginative space, one beingcreated, guessed at, on the fly, one you discover together. It’swhat real storytelling can be, when it’s honest, when it’s sincere.
(Continues…)Excerpted from Chewing the Page by Phil Jourdan. Copyright © 2012 by Phil Jourdan. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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