A Brief EMail Interview with Jude Walter Mire and Russell Working
This coming Monday, we have two featured readers from the Chicago area.
Jude Walter Mire is the other half of the killer-works.com dynamic duo: we met the (or rather, his) “better” half of the duo—his fiancé Jill Cooper–last month. A Twilight Tales “regular,” he’s also currently serving as our CEO.
Russell Working is a staff reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the author of the short story collections Resurrectionists and The Irish Martyr.
Following are their answers to our interview questions.
Let’s start with the basics, what is your story called, and can you give us a brief description of it?
Jude: The story is called “Green Sky Dogs” and it’s about an alien expert visiting an exotic planet where the formerly benign native inhabitants have gone murderous. He’s got to figure out why they’ve done so and how to stop it. A bit of mystery in a sci-fi setting with an ample dousing of horrific imagery.
Russell: I will be reading from a novel-in-progress I am calling Evil Onions. It is about a young Russian immigrant working in a deli on Devon Avenue who recognizes one of the customers as the hit man who assassinated his father over a decade ago in the Pacific port city of Vladivostok.
What inspired this story, or what inspires you to write in general?
Jude: This particular story was inspired by watching nature programs and thinking about what would happen if you added a degree of intelligence and ritual to some of the instinctual things animals do. And then, collide it with a human element. Typically, I’m inspired by all sorts of things. I generally start with some random image, or a scene, that comes to me and then let it ferment in my head for a couple of years. Over that time, as I look at the world around me, or get other ideas, I let them sort of magnetize, to the ideas I’m cooking. When they’ve grown enough stimulus from the world around me, then I start ironing out plot, character arcs, etc… and write them. So everything has the potential to be inspiring, in the right projects.
Russell: I lived in Vladivostok for five years, and there were a number of political and mafia-style assassinations while I was there. One method was dangling a stick of dynamite outside the window of the victim and blowing him up in his bed. A sniper gunned down a mafia boss with a high-powered rifle outside a casino. A husband and wife were buried alive. Anyway, all this was part of the imaginative background.
Then several years ago in Bolingbrook, a customer entered Chika’s Food Market, an African store in a strip mall, and recognized the manager as an alleged perpetrator of the Rwandan genocide. At the time I was reading Joyce Carol Oates’ What I Lived For, which begins with the murder of a father on the front steps of his home. Something sparked, and I scribbled a note to myself about it. It was nearly two years before I got back to it and began the novel that I am working on now.
Jude, you are in the middle of some real changes in your life, has this made writing easier or have the changes left you wanting for more time to write?
Jude: Well, lots of changes led to very little writing time. But, with all the things on my plate, I’ve recently made the jump and left the full time work force in favor of part time. The decision wasn’t made exclusively for getting me more time to write, but it’s a very good side benefit!
Russell, you write for the Tribune, does that impede or promote the creative process?
Russell: Perhaps I should first address journalism more broadly, since I have worked at a number of papers–also as a freelancer abroad.
On the plus side, journalism can be immensely inspiring. It throws you into unfamiliar settings and forces you to listen to the stories of people you might never talk to otherwise. In my latest collection of short fiction, The Irish Martyr, a number of stories grew out of my reporting. “Dear Leader” is the story of a refugee who escapes North Korea and places herself in the hands of a broker who sells her as a wife to a Chinese farmer. I interviewed such a woman when I was in Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in 2000 and wrote a newspaper story about her. But afterward, she continued to haunt me, and I tried to imagine her life in fiction. The title story of The Irish Martyr was based on a reporting trip I made to Egypt in 2002 (it makes sense if you read the story). “Perjury,” a child’s perspective on a father’s arrest for rape, was inspired by working the police beat in a small Oregon town, although it is set in Washington state. Many of the stories begin like that.
However, journalism–and the Chicago Tribune especially–tends to be indifferent to good writing, or outright hostile to it. What journalistic editors do think of as outstanding prose is often distressingly bad. The right editor can teach a young writer to craft strong declarative sentences; but large newspapers tend to have half a dozen editors pawing a big story, and however skilled any given editor might be, the contending and contradictory impulses of these story bosses tend to knead the prose into something with the texture of a hunk of dirty Play-Doh that a group of preschoolers are rolling around on the floor.
It can also be a grind to write all day and try to do it as an avocation as well.
I tend to write fiction early in the morning, before work. Then I return to the story at night, after my four-year-old is in bed, and I find it has had time to ferment in my subconscious mind all day.
What sorts of stories are you drawn to when you find yourself wandering the aisles of bookstores?
Jude: I really like indefinable genres, and that doesn’t mean urban fantasy. I like stuff that is wildly creative and difficult to categorize. If a story has elements of the mythic, science, horror, and does it all in a place that actually feels new and invigorating; I love it. I like not being able to answer when people ask “What is it about?”. I am a huge fan of the writers of the 60’s who opened up hard science fiction with psychology and surrealism. I want to be carried someplace new. As a result, I usually shy away from traditional fantasy and horror archtypes.
Russell: I tend to look for books that have been recommended by reviewers or friends I trust. I also prefer to read a book that grabs me immediately. That is how I discovered War and Peace, one of my favorite novels. I picked it up in an English-language bookstore in Paris when I was in college, and I was hooked on the first page, where the society lady Anna Pavlovna Scherer greets a prince arriving at her soiree with a torrent of words comparing Napoleon to the Antichrist.
Have you ever been given any advice about your writing that has been either very helpful, or so out there that you can’t imagine ever following it?
Jude: Roger Zelazny says to “follow your demon”, meaning that there’s that little voice that says “what if…?” that will take your story away, into unexpected places. I think that’s great advice. Very often, it seems the strangest and most creative ideas get snuffed in favor of the tried and true dependable patterns. Tried and true is done, follow your demon. The advice I could never imagine taking is from Stephen King. He says when the story seems like it’s stuck, put all your characters names into a hat, pull one, and kill them. I like killing characters, but that seems a tad too random for my style of writing!
Russell: Not long ago I read an article by a writer who was the father of a toddler. He recommended stealing time to write in small doses when possible, even if you can’t always get in the long stretches of writing time. I liked the idea, because I use a similar approach at work to make myself more productive. For example, if I have to leave for an interview in 15 minutes, what can I do with this time? Maybe make a quick phone call, look up a fact I need or send an e-mail. The same approach can work for fiction, as a supplement to more serious writing time.
After hearing what you’ve prepared for your featured reading, what do you hope the audience takes away with them?
Jude: It’s all about escapism, going someplace else. I hope when people finish anything I’ve written that they feel like they’ve gone someplace new, and it’s got enough leeway for them to be able to daydream a bit about it. Ask their own “what if”? questions.
Russell: I hope everybody has a good time.
Finally, is there any advice or insight you can offer the readers of this interview about the process of writing?
Jude: Well, there’s the standard “don’t give up, stick to it, never surrender”. Of course that applies. But, specifically, I’ve got two little tricks that help with scenes. First; music matters. If your music fits the mood of the scene it flows a bit more naturally. Don’t go nuts with it obviously (”I can’t write my circus scene, I have no calliope music!”), but it can really help keep you focused. Think it doesn’t matter? Try writing a tender first kiss set in a puritan village while listening to GWAR. Secondly; incomplete ideas make authors want to write. Soo… here’s what you do. Buy a half dozen books and don’t read them. When you’re feeling like you can’t write, pick one up, open to a random page, and start reading. Now, shut the book exactly halfway through page when you’re five pages in. Don’t read to the end of the paragraph! Don’t read to the end of the sentence! Don’t go back and see what happened! I’ve discovered, that the reaction most authors have to the abrupt “killing” of a storyline is to rail and resist the incompleteness. It makes you feel like you need to do something to fix it. Take that feeling, and immediately pick up your story and use it. It’s surprising how well it works.
Russell: The photographer Robert Capa once said, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” For me, at least, it helps to get away from my computer and talk to people who are doing the things I am writing about. I interviewed the owner of a Russian deli on Devon for my current novel, and I have mentioned some other stories above. I also did a lot of reading in a US District Court case dealing with the Russian mafia. I am not suggesting I am unique in this; just saying the idea of using journalistic techniques, such as interviews and research, can be helpful for fiction writers, too.
We hope you’ll join us on Monday September 15th at Mystic Celt (3443 N. Southport) to hear Jude’s and Russell’s fiction, and perhaps more discussion!
