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Every Saturday we will bring you links to articles from around the web featuring members of Portland’s lit community. Please feel free to pass along any you come across as well, by emailing us at portland@readinglocal.com, and we will include them in next week’s edition of Short Stories.
Canticle (Tor) author Ken Scholes is interviewed over on Rising Shadow:
The Psalms of Isaak is based on the short story “Of Metal Men and Scarlet Thread and Dancing with the Sunrise.” What inspired you to write this series?
The story itself was intended for the mechanical oddities issue of a magazine but they closed to submissions before I finished. I wrote in my work notes that I hoped to tell more stories with those characters but I really had no sense at the time that I would. The story was accepted at Realms of Fantasy and when it came out, the art they’d commissioned for it (linked at my website) hit me like a brick. Allen Douglas’s painting of Isaak weeping in the impact crater was very powerful and I realized when I saw it that there was more to Isaak’s story than I had thought. So I set out to write more short stories and eventually, on a dare from my wife and Jay Lake and at the encouragement of many other friends, I sat down to write Lamentation.
Studio One has a lengthy interview with Zachary Schomburg co-author of OK, Goodnight (Future Tense Books):
FF: Scary, No Scary begins with a prologue poem. Was this your publisher’s idea or did you intend for the book to be prefaced this way?
ZS: “Scary, No Scary” was the first poem I wrote for this manuscript. It is that world’s big bang, so it seemed natural to make it the book’s prologue (it was my idea—all mine!) It establishes something: the walk through the woods, the attempt to find Home, the night, the loneliness, the ambiguity, the choices.
Marc Acito’s essay “Becoming a Gladiator? Watch Out For Side Effects” is up on the NPR website:
adult biographies focus on the dissolute, the people who do life-threatening drugs and die half-naked on the toilet. This is the world I wanted to know about. The pill-popping, bed-hopping lives of Elvis and Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe. While my classmates were obsessed with amphibians, I learned about amphetamines.
My latest favorite in the genre is Gladiator: A True Story of ‘Roids, Rage and Redemption. The title alone made me want to read it — boy meets drugs, boy loses mind, boy finds peace. It’s almost mythological. Indeed, I hadn’t even heard of the author, Dan Clark, who went by the name “Nitro” on the TV game show American Gladiators. Clark’s story is as compelling as it is pathetic and uplifting, a tale of someone so desperate to make it big he literally makes himself big. Nowhere in literature will you find a more apt metaphor for our American obsession with success than steroids.
Dale E. Basye, author of the “Heck” series, is interviewed over on Kinder Scares:
KS: What fictional character would you most like to punch in the face?
DB: My first impulse is to say Tiny Tim, because-as a sweet, infirm little boy-he probably wouldn’t put up much of a fight. But then it hit me (not Tiny Tim) that this being a fictional character who would unlikely cause me grievous physical harm, I’d say Conan the Barbarian (who, sadly, won’t be on NBC much longer) because he is really strong, intimidating and monosyllabic, and it would be fun to punch him in the face, then quickly shut the book before he had a chance to pulverize me into something that Hamburger Helper couldn’t even help.
Invincible Summer author Nicole Georges is profiled and interviewed on the San Francisco Examiner:
S.A. You teach art classes to the very old and the very young. How are the classes and teaching processes similar and different?
N.G. I teach kids (4th grade & up) about zines & comics, and I also do a zine workshop with senior citizens each week at a senior day center. The kids are really excited about zines & comics and are just stoked, ready to go. Once you hit about middle school or high school, they are a little more reluctant to express themselves because they have the gift of self-consciousness, which 4th & 5th graders seem to lack creativity-wise. The senior citizens don’t really care about self-publishing. They are excited to have people to tell their stories to and they are always happy to have the latest issue of our zine—it makes them proud. But as far as being invested in radical underground publishing? No. The seniors I work with are not about to contribute columns to MaximumRocknRoll after we’re through with them. They’re ready for BINGO!
Image credit Book People.
