Ed Bryant -- Colorado Bedrock

by Don Kinney

If ever there was an foundation in the Denver fiction writing community, Nebula Award winner Edward Bryant, Jr. qualifies as such. His influence and support of writers like Dan Simmons, Lucy Taylor, John Stith, Connie Willis and others makes the Front Range of Colorado an area with a fertile speculative fiction writing community. For many years Ed has been helping writers mine and develop the vein of skill and talent they possess.

Edward Winslow Bryant, Jr. was born in Wyoming in 1945 and spent his formative years on a ranch -- receiving his MA from the University of Wyoming in 1968. One of his saddest days was when he was told that the family was moving to a city. He has since become the consumate urbanite but he’s still a Western scribe no matter what he writes. There’s an openess to his stories that show the reader a slice of a larger world. A world of danger: “While She was Out” -- magic: “Fetish” -- wonder: “The Thermals of August” -- death: “Flirting with Death” -- and a mixture of all of those themes and elements: “Shark”.

Mainly a short-story writer, Mr. Bryant’s collections include AMONG THE DEAD AND OTHER EVENTS LEADING UP TO THE APOCOLYPSE (1973), CINNABAR (1976), WYOMING SUN (1980), PARTICLE THEORY (1981), TRILOBYTE (1987 chap), NEON TWILIGHT (1990), DARKER PASSIONS (1993). A collaboration with Harlan Ellison resulted in the short novel PHOENIX WITHOUT ASHES (1975) which was to chronicle the television show Starlost but arrangements went completely awry (as are detailed in Ellison’s introduction to the novel.) Ed has also edited an anthology of original stories and poems 2076: THE AMERICAN TRICENTENNIAL (1977).

Don: What was the impetus that made you start writing?

Ed: The only answer I have for that is, I started writing because that was something I could do. I discovered pretty early on in school that I had some facility for the written word. None for spoken words, but definitely some latent skill was there for putting words together on paper and it was something I could do that felt good. I have to admit I was writing for quite a while before I made that intuitive leap that writers eventually make; when it suddenly comes clear to them that everything they’ve enjoyed reading -- and I certainly was a voracious reader who enjoyed a lot of different things as a kid -- had to be written by somebody. That there were stories out there that maybe nobody else would ever write and so I would have to write them if I were to enjoy them.

D: Is the process of writing still enjoyable for you?

E: Yeah, it’s still enjoyable. Although there is a huge dichotomy in answers to almost every question asked in an interview with a writer -- in this case, there are many people who love the process of writing and then there are those writers who loath the process but enjoyed the feeling of having written. To a large degree, I’m in group two. I love having finished work, I love having a body of work behind me, I love having it to look at ... but I really hate the process of writing.

D: Is that always true?

E: The last time I remember a story appearing painlessly and throwing it out and it ending up pretty much, when it was published, the way it was when I composed it, I was a senior in high school. That’s a long time ago. Most of the rest of the time, it’s a slow, brick by brick process but sometimes the writing goes faster. Having said that, I want to add that while I don’t like the process of writing all that much -- it’s a challenge, it’s something that’s difficult -- I do enjoy editing and tweaking. I like taking the rough draft and trying to work with the nuance of what I’ve said and what I’ve tried to say and trying to make those jibe.

I edit two ways. I edit on the screen ... I use a computer. When I first started writing as an adult, I used the typewriter. I was never big on cursive writing, partly because of legibility. So now I write with the computer, but my preferred form of editing is on hardcopy. There’s a sort of kinesthetic feedback with sheets of paper and making marks, that in some eyes is hopelessly antiquated, but the bottom line is that’s what works for me.

D: So when was your first fiction sale?

EB: My first professional sale was in the summer of 1968 when the first of the stories I had originally written for Clarion was bought by Harlan Ellison for AGAIN, DANGEROUS VISIONS. The stories I’d workshopped previously at Clarion were all rewrites of college stories. I’d written a fair number of stories in high school and college and there was one quasi-professional sale in college. I had placed third in the Cavelier Magazine Collegiate writing competition. At that point Cavelier was sort a mid-range men’s magazine and actually had some class at the time. While I didn’t win any money, what I did get was a year’s supply of men’s toilet articles which came in little gift packets. I recycled them as Christmas and birthday gifts for my younger brothers and for my father.

D: You’ve been writing for LOCUS for quite a few years. How’d you first get the job?

EB: There’s a generational answer to that question. I started writing reviews _____ for MileHi Futures, the magazine that was basically a catalog and house organ for MileHi Comics. The editor at the time, Leanne Harper, asked me if I would like to write reviews and get paid a nominal sum. Partly I took the job because I realized at that point that I was really burned out reading science fiction -- which was what most of my recreational reading was at that time. I knew if I was going to continue to write in the field, I had to keep up to some degree with what other people were doing. The pleasure had been leeched out of it due to overexposure to the genre. The first ground rule was, if I was going to review it I would read the whole thing. I wouldn’t just review from press releases or reading the first and last scenes and skimming through the rest of the book. Thanks to MileHi Futures I started reading science fiction, fantasy and horror again.

I did that for several years, during the late-Seventies. In the early-Eighties, Tappan King (editor of TWILIGHT ZONE MAGAZINE), had been reading my reviews and asked me if I’d be willing to write reviews for TWILIGHT ZONE MAGAZINE, following in the footsteps of people like Thomas Disch and Gahan Wilson. I was quite flattered. They also paid a very healthy amount of money. When TZ went under, Charles Brown of LOCUS and said he had enjoyed my reviews in TWILIGHT ZONE and would I like to continue as a regular reviewer for LOCUS. Charles mentioned that clearly, TZ had been paying me far more than I was worth, so he cut my salary. He basically scaled back my salary to what the other LOCUS reviewers made. Charles has an ascerbic way of putting things so I was properly put in my place. I’ve been reviewing books for LOCUS for seven-and-a-half years and overall for a bit more than a decade and I haven’t burned out yet. I continue doing it instead of going to tiresome parties and people ask me, ‘So, have you read anything good lately?’, I can sit at home and answer those questions. I don’t flatter myself that I’ve got the ear of millions, but I do know that there are a number of people in the field who read my reviews and that’s fine. Sometimes they disagree with me, sometimes they agree -- in both cases I’m flattered when people mention it.

What does reviewing do for me besides earn me a pittance? It helps to keep me current with what other people are doing since I’m primarily a writer and secondarily a reviewer. The other thing it does, which I feel strongly about, is that reviewing is one of those tools that helps me as a writer. I don’t pretend to be a critic. I’m not a structuralist, I don’t go back to my critical theory classes from graduate school to utilize those tools for my reviews. I’m not a critic, I’m strictly a reviewer but at the same time I do want to say something analytical about why I generate the opinion I do. Then I can apply this particular skill to my own fiction.

D: Who are your favorite writers in mainstream or genre?

EB: Mysteries are one of my great recreational reading pursuits. Over in mainstream I just discovered a fellow named Chris Offutt -- who is the son of longtime fantasy and science fiction novelist, Andrew J. Offutt. It’s always interesting to see writing ability seemingly to pass down from generation to generation. Look at the Benchly’s ... three generations, Nathanial, Robert and Peter. One could be snotty, one could argue that the gene pool is getting shallower as you go from one generation to another. But you also look at people like Jen Kerouac, Jack’s daughter and John Cheever’s daughter, and they’ve become well published. Is there a genetic predisposition for writing? Saul Bellow’s son, Adam, went to a Clarion workshop and has he developed into a SF writer? Apparantly not. If there was a genetic predisposition (if there is such a thing) toward writing, you would think Adam Bellow would have had it.

Digressing away from the new talent question ... to get back on that track... In some ways it’s always a tough one to call. I admire some individual works but I don’t necessarily know who will go beyond that terrific first novel or that really spectacular short-story to continue to generate a creative body of work. But Chris Offutt seems to have talent -- there’s a real darkness there (part of the reason I like his stuff) that was exhibited in his earlier work. His first novel is called THE GOOD BROTHER and he’s also done a personal memoir and a collection called KENTUCKY STRAIGHT. There’s a Florida writer named Vicki Hendricks whose first novel was called MIAMI PURITY -- she’s sort of James Cain for the 1990’s. It’s a wonderfully noir, incredibly dark novel about relationships and murder. I don’t know what else she’s written other than her chapter contribution to the NAKED CAME THE MANATEE collaborative novel from a group of South Florida writers.

Speaking of South Florida, another of the Miami Herald writers who has impressed me greatly with their work is Tananarive Due. Her first novel was THE BETWEEN and I thought it was a first-rate piece of dark fantasy fiction. What I liked were two things, one was, Tananarive is African-American and she has drawn upon her background in creating the characters who populate her novel. That’s still something that’s pretty unusual in this field, there are not many African-Americans in horror and dark fantasy. For that matter, there aren’t that many non-white authors at all. It’s always refreshing seeing new points of view being brought in to this area.

One way of gauging who impresses me is when I say, “Who is it that will have me buying their future work, whether I know anything at all about it?” At one point, several years ago, I would say Clive Barker, Gene Wolfe, Harlan Ellison, would be that. The newer people? Tananrive Due is a good example. Vicki Hendriks, again. Whatever her second novel is, I’ll buy it and read it. In horror ... Roberta Lannes is somebody whose first collection -- THE MIRROR OF NIGHT -- I’m in the process of reading and reviewing. Roberta is someone who is becoming an “overnight success” after ten years of writing -- which is pretty standard for writers in any area. I first noticed a her story “Goodbye Dark Love” in Dennis Etchison’s CUTTING EDGE anthology eleven years ago. It was just a few pages long but it was an incredibly powerful, extremely dark story. When I read it, I knew that this was somebody I would pay attention to, whatever work followed. Roberta is someone who has not yet sold a novel but certainly, along with her short fiction, I’ll be looking for her novels when they come out. A few years ago I would have mentioned Poppy Z. Brite, but thanks especially to EXQUISITE CORPSE, I think she’s vaulted into a greater position of prominence in the marketplace so I can hardly call her a brand new writer.

Brian Hodge, Elizabeth Massie, Lucy Taylor are people that I will automatically pick up whatever they publish that is new. There are writers such as Douglas Clegg, who’s not new, and everything he writes is not necessarily something I love a lot, but when he publishes a piece of fiction such as “Whitechapel” in the LOVE IN VEIN anthology -- that just knocked me out. That gives him a bunch of credibility in my book and I will keep reading his work even if the next six examples of it don’t measure up to the excitement generated by that particular story. Just on the basis of the effect of that first story.

Something I believe very strongly is, that the work of writers of talent doesn’t necessarily appear in a smooth, gradually ascending curve. A good writer, I feel, will write bad, to so- so, to competent work and then once in a while, their reach will exceed their grasp and they’ll try for something new. Sometimes it will fail abysmally, and sometimes it will draw upon resources that they probably didn’t even know they had and write something really good. Then they’ll wonder, `How the hell did I do that?’.

A story that strikes me as that sort of thing is P.D. Cacek’s “Metalica” (appeared in HOT BLOOD -- Fear the Fever.) It’s another story that’s a tour de force. It’s a better story than I think Trish is ordinarily capable of writing at this point in her career. The real point is, when a writer creates one of those pieces of fiction, then she or he knows that even if they can’t duplicate that achievement tomorrow or the next day, they are clearly capable of doing it. It’s just a matter of consolidating their gains and working up to that point again and then leapfrogging ahead. It truly delights me when I see writers do that sort of thing. What I think it does for the writer, is to get that person a kind of instant window into what they have waiting for them. I know sometimes writers suffer from genuinely affecting and sometimes debilitating feelings of insecurity. They say, ‘Gee, I wrote this really interesting, or complex, or powerful thing but, Gawd, what if that’s the best thing I’m ever going to write? What if I can never match that again? What if everything else is a long, slow slide downhill?’ That may happen once in a while, but for the most part, 99.9 percent of the time, it’s not going to happen. When someone writes a story like “Metalica” it means, ‘Shoot, someday, I will not only be able to write that well again, I’ll write better than that.’

D: You started as a SF writer, then moved toward dark fantasy. What was your first story in the horror genre?

EB: I know exactly at what point it changed. Much of my science fiction had been very dark. In my first collection, AMONG THE DEAD, there’s a lot of darkness in that fiction. Nothing’s that outright horror but nothing that is cheery storytelling.

Around 1985-86 I was in an elevator with Kirby McCauly, the agent and editor. Kirby, when he was a younger agent, working in Minneapolis, had been very kind to me. He had given my first collection some good reviews, then recommended that AMONG THE DEAD appear on Stephen King’s list of 100 Exemplary Horror Books -- which is one of the appendices in DANSE MACABRE. Kirby was putting together the DARK FORCES anthology when I ran into him in that elevator at a con. I screwed up some courage and said, “Kirby, can I send you a story for DARK FORCES?”. I sent him a story called “Dark Angel”, a piece about revenge and contempoarary witchcraft. That was the watershed mark when I was a predominately a science fiction writer and then edged over into dark fantasy and horror. One of the things that enters into that changeover though, is at that point in my career, I felt that I was spending too much time in science fiction living in my head. The stereotype is that science fiction is a more cerebral form of storytelling for the most part. Horror, of course, is extremely visceral approach to storytelling.

I think that maybe a voice in me told me that it was the right time in my life to try and change my approach in the way I wanted to tell stories. Forcing myself to look at the world in more emotional and visceral terms.

D: Who were your influences as a SF writer and then when you moved to dark fantasy?

EB: Before I even read, I was read to by my maternal grandfather when we lived on a cattle ranch in southern Wyoming. He was a retired New York attorney who was living in the west with us because he had been a big Zane Grey fan and he wanted to be part of the west in the time he had left. I can remember sitting in his pickup-- sorta like going through the woods to grandma’s house -- except, in this case, it was going through minor woods to grandpa’s house. He would read to me from books such as ALICE IN WONDERLAND and THE WIND AND THE WILLOWS. I was getting some interesting childrens fiction but it was still fairly sophisticated childrens fiction. Then, when I started reading on my own, like a lot of halfway bright kids, I quickly graduated from very simplistic children’s books, to the adult section. Since I started reading science fiction early on, two of my big writers were Andre Norton and Robert Heinlein. I write nothing like Robert Heinlein, my politics aren’t like Robert Heinlein’s -- doesn’t matter. People are surprised to hear that Robert Heinlein was one of Connie Willis’ influential writers. Similiarly, he was mine. I loved his juveniles.

But Andre Norton was even more my favorite. She had a grasp of adventure that worked well for the kind of reading I wanted to do. Along with these adult science fiction novels I was also reading books such as Freddie the Pig series. Sort of ANIMAL FARM for kids as written by Walter Brooks. Then there was, I can’t remember her name, but the woman who wrote the Miss Pickerel books -- MISS PICKEREL GOES TO MARS -- and the woman who wrote THE WONDERFUL FLIGHT TO THE MUSHROOM PLANET. I used to love those a lot.

In junior high, my solace was to sit in the back of the bus and read Famous Monsters of Filmland like many other young white boys with no lives. I worshiped that magazine. In the late-1950’s, I read Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg and they’ve been influences in my writing. In the late-50’s Harlan and Robert were publishing lots. Sometimes, between them, Bob and Harlan would fill an entire issue with stories under their own names and under house names and psuedonyms. At this same time, my parents would take me to Denver and I would haunt old used magazine stores. That’s when I discovered Jack Vance, Jack Williamson ... also C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Edmund Hamilton. All of these were pulp era writers who at that point were still writing. There was something about the adventure and imagination and the sheer power of their storytelling which I really liked a lot. They were influential but I’m not sure I can explain why since most of my writing has not been star-spanning adventure storytelling.

Harlan and Silverberg both -- I kept thinking at the time that they both wrote many very entertaining adventure fiction but, to me, Bob was sort of a representative of head- centered adventure and Harlan was heart-centered adventure. It was ice and fire and both were polar points which were symbolic in my reading.

I won’t say there weren’t any influences from outside the field of fantastic literature but it all sort of merged -- people in the genre and people outside the genre. Whether it was Kafka or Steinbeck ... William Seroyan or even books that I was forced to read in school. Against all my better instincts I actually liked some of the assigned books -- Melville, Stephen Crane. Like many writers I ended up with a real hodge-podge of influences.

D: Favorites of your own work? Favorite stories and novels by other writers?

EB: In the horror field, I have three as exempla: Shirley Jackson’s THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, Richard Matheson’s HELL HOUSE, and Dan Simmon’s CARRION COMFORT. All of which I admire because of the level of writing, the quality of storytelling and the fact that all three simply fascinated me. To mention one specifically, CARRION COMFORT -- one of the reasons I liked it, wasn’t because Dan was my friend, because I thought it was a supreme technical achievement to have a dark fantasy suspense novel that could be 1400 pages in manuscript and be essentially a one-sitting novel. That’s a tough accomplishment in this MTV oriented age. Jackson and Matheson I have always loved for the very perceptive, incisive way each, in his or her own way, takes a look at the underside of peoples’ experience. They find their way in the darkness very very well.

Favorite short stories, ones that haven’t let me go: Clive Barker’s “In the Hills, the Cities”. I like a lot of Clive’s material, but that particular story I think is, if I had to pick a best story out of all six volumes of THE BOOKS OF BLOOD, it would be that one. Partly, I think, not because it’s grisly or gruesome, I’ll leave that to stories like “Midnight Meat Train”. “In the Hills, the Cities” has the advantage of being powerfully and affectingly about relationships and about how the darkness affects those relationships.

At heart, I’m still somebody who, even though I can’t always practice it in my own writing, I can try, but I can’t always achieve it and I’m sorry for that. I still believe in the principle of having your cake and eating it too as a writer. That you can have accessibility, you can have adventure, you can have distraction and entertainment _and_ you have character interelationships, you can combine both the external and internal worlds in your fiction and make them work. I think it all comes together beautifully in “In the Hills, the Cities”.

Another story that I think is a modern classic and I’m not sure anybody else recognizes it, except for me since no one has ever talked about it in reviews. Lucy Taylor’s story “True North”. Most of Lucy’s fiction is about the dark side of human relationships -- especially abusive relationships. That’s what “True North” is about, the relationship between a young girl in South Florida and her aunt, whom the girl perceives as perhaps her only way out of a truly nightmarish existence. A lot of Lucy’s work is more explicitly gruesome, more explicitly violent than this story. But to me, “True North” is the story of hers that has the truest path right into the center of the heart and I love it for that reason.

Another story I’ll mention because I’ll never get it out of my head, is Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” which is a modern classic that’s been reprinted nine zillion times. That’s one of Harlan’s stories that again, goes directly for the heart. Basically it’s a story, and of all things, I’ll compare it to Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam political strategy, because you read that story and your heart and mind will follow. A brilliant piece of work. I don’t mean to talk about it too much because if you take an earlier story of a writer as an example of the “best” of something, then you run the risk of sounding like people who forever praised Issac Asimov’s “Nightfall”, which is a first-rate piece of science fiction. But thirty years later, I’m not sure Issac was totally happy to hear people say, ‘Y’know, the greatest story you ever wrote was “Nightfall”.’ The implicit phrase was ‘Are you ever going to write something that good again?’. So you have to be careful about comparisons and Harlan is somebody who continues to write really good work so I don't want to make much of what is a comparitively earlier story but as far as I’m concerned it’s one of those stories of the Twentieth Century.

As far as my own work? Early fiction ... probably a story I wrote for Damon Knight’s ORBIT anthology, a story called “Shark”. “Shark” is a relationship-based piece of science fiction about a very peculiar relationship between a man and a woman. Wherein, in a future war, the man who is a marine biologist is separated from his lover who has her brain surgically removed and implanted in the body of a Great White shark and is co-opted as a weapon in that future war. The story is about the eventual, if I can put it this way, meeting and reconcilliation of these two people after years have gone by. This was a story that was better than I knew how to write at the time. I’ve always been proud of that story.

I have to go for favorites since I have no idea where quality enters into my own fiction -- that’s pretty much determined by other people. I’m something of a fan for the story I did for THE BOOK OF THE DEAD zombie anthology, “Sad Last Love at the Diner of the Damned”. I started out writing that story to be grisly, gruesome, literally gut-munching, explicit horror and as I wrote the story, I realized that this story, like others, was not exempt from delusions of quality. So I wanted to write about relationships and what I realized I was really writing about was not so much, ‘Yes, the dead come back to life and they want to eat you and me.’, but rather, I was writing about a young woman in a small town who felt out of place in where she had effectively lived all her life among zombies and now the zombie metaphor was getting a little more literal than anyone had expected. I wanted to write a story that was both viscerally repellant to most readers and yet compelling and poignant I hoped, and funny, I wanted it to have humor. As far as I know, I succeeded.

The third story I’m proud of is a story of dark suspense called “While She was Out”. It’s become one of my most reprinted stories. It’s about a young woman, fighting with her husband, who leaves the husband and the kids one day and goes off to the mall to shop just before Christmas and runs into four sociopathic young men, is obliged to learn about violence and killing in the interest of survival. It’s a story of acute violence, but it’s a story in which I never wanted to get away from the idea that at heart it was still about relationships and about people’s inner life when it has to be reconciled with the most extreme examples of external life.

D: When did you feel you found your writing voice?

EB: I don’t know if I’ve found my voice yet but there’s a similar thing. After I started selling fiction, I spent close to a decade asking myself the question, virtually every day, ‘Are you a writer or not?’. After ten years I realized that I was no longer asking myself the question. I decided that by default, yes, I must have become a writer. In terms of voice, I think it’s something that evolves just as I evolved as a human being. I know that other people have picked out continuing themes in my work which probably impinge upon however my voice is defined. I know for example that a number of people have looked at my work and in their opinion that what my work, more frequently than not is about concerns people who are searching for love and are having a real hard time in that quest. That it’s right up there with the Holy Grail perhaps. The actual voice itself? I do know this, that early on I probably tried to emulate those early influences -- ranging from Jack Vance to Cordwainer Smith to Harlan Ellison. I suppose when my own voice appeared, was when I started drifting away from phrasing things the way the writers I admired would phrase things. The only conscious thing I did was try to strip down my voice to get rid of the other influences. Talk in whatever conversational way I could that was not deliberately evocative of peoples whose work I loved.

D: Why do you devote so much time to helping new and established writers in the Colorado writing community?

EB: I figure the more people I help out, then ultimately the more times they’ll dedicate a book to me which will be a comfort in my declining years.

I think, in a sense, because of going to the Clarion writers’ workshop the first time it was held, back in the summer of 1968 -- I was getting out of graduate school and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. As I mentioned earlier, that’s when I sold a story to Harlan for AGAIN, DANGEROUS VISIONS. That was the first time I really thought that maybe, just maybe I could sell something else and something else again and do this full time. Something I came out of the Clarion experience understanding was that while writing is a solitary occupation that you do in your own room usually with the door shut. At the same time, the process of writing and working as a writer can drive you crazy if you’re completely thrust upon your own resources. I learned that I was enormously helped, not just by Harlan, but by other people who were at that workshop. People such as the editor Judith Merrill, writers such as Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm and Fritz Leiber and Robin Scott Wilson. And some of the people who came as guests like Samuel R. Delaney. And some of my fellow students who turned out to ultimately be really good writers -- whether they were writers who made an initial splash and have not been heard from much lately like James Southerland to people like Robert Thurston and Vonda Macintyre who have gone on as long as I have, writing professionally. I got so much help from all of these people and especially the professionals getting started, they were always willing completely to share their expertise and help where they could to give me feedback on my work and suggest markets and all of that. I guess I was taught that it’s a good idea to try and pass some of this along to other people. So that’s part of why I continue to work with the workshops. I’d like to be able to pass along whatever advice and help I can give. I’m under no delusion I can solve someone else’s writing life problems but I can give advice, for better or worse. One of the other reasons I stay in workshops and various teaching situations is because it’s very much like my reviewing, I discover when I work with other people’s writing and try to figure out what isn’t working and what is functioning and figure out what suggestions I would make. This is cultivating skills that again, I can direct back to my own storytelling so I’m not wholly altruistic. I anticipate all the way to the end that I’ll be learning about writing. I’ve seen a few writers who seem to have felt they’ve learned everything there is to learn about storytelling, about writing and didn’t take me long to realize how delusional they were.

D: So how does it feel that you’ve helped people with advice during their early years like Connie Willis, Dan Simmons and Lucy Taylor?

EB: On one level there’s a genuine ego component because I know how many writers workshops no one ever succeeds in anything in writing. Whereas in workshops I’ve been in, a lot of really good people have developed. However, I’m not crazed enough to believe that I created these talents, I think I’ve been very lucky in terms of my associates in these enterprises. It’s my belief they would have succeeded just fine on their own. I think at its best, the workshops help to shortcut the time it takes to work things out on your own. If you’re a good writer, you’ll be a good writer, it won’t matter if you’re in a workshop or not. But if you can learn in the space of two years what otherwise you would muddle through in eight years, why the hell not? It gives you more time to write the things you genuinely want to write. If I help shortcut the process for a variety of writers, that’s great. Earlier I joked about having books dedicated to me but I’ll have to admit, Connie, Dan, Steve Tem, other people, at one time or another, have dedicated books to me and it’s one of those friendly gestures that you value from your collegues and friends. I don’t discount that sort of warm and fuzzy reaction at all.

D: What’s the most important skill, tool or attitude that a writer can develop?

EB: I urge people to pay attention to their own passion when they write. Because, particularly in the current marketing climate, where there’s been this change in commercial fiction toward this franchise work -- whether it’s Star Wars, Star Trek , B5, Highlander or gaming-related fiction -- I will fully admit that when I see the writer of the stature of Elizabeth Hand write the novelization of the first episode of Millennium or when I see Terry Bisson writing the novelization of The Fifth Element. There are other good writers writing novels based on all the various science fiction series and I will trust them that they will try to invest their work with some quality while they are obeying the injunctions of the owners of those properties to play according to the rules and to take other people’s creations and turn them into competent prose.

My feeling is, with the possible exception of Thomas Disch’s novelization of The Prisoner, nobody is ever going to make a really great piece of fiction out of that because it is, by definition, unoriginal. That’s the long way of saying, especially to newer, younger writers won’t simply say, it’s impossible to do stand-alone books they’re solely my creation, take place in my own universe, generated from my own body of experience and perception and therefore the only thing I can do is to start creating franchise work for other masters. No, I want writers to say, I don’t care what the market is, I’m going to write something that I care desperately about and to invest that kind of feeling in their work. I think that it may not be as easy, but, sooner or later, as I said before, good work is going to out. Someone will publish it, someone may or may not read it. I say putting your passion into your work is critical because anything less is artistic suicide on the part of the writer. I don’t look down on anybody who writes franchise fiction (for want of a better term) but I do worry about people who would decide only to write franchise fiction.

Heck, I wrote a novelization -- the novelization of the Starlost TV series -- which was not television’s highest moment. But I’m proud of the novel I wrote and I’m glad that I did. There are other similar projects I would probably happily embark on if I were offered them. That should never be the foremost motivation. It’s a cliche but ultimately the good writers are always writing for themselves. They may be aware that other people may be stimulated and excited by what they are writing but ultimately the ideal reader that you’re aiming at is yourself.

D: How did you become friends with Harlan Ellison?

EB: It was through the Clarion writers workshop. Truth to tell, the reason I went to Clarion was primarily because Harlan was billed as one of the teachers. I’d read all the people who were going to be teachers there but Harlan was the one I most wanted to meet. I found his work to be the most exciting from all the professionals that were going to be there. Meeting him would have been enough, it was icing on the cake that he liked the story I had written. I’d actually written it the week before for Fritz Leiber and Fritz hadn’t really liked the story but he said to save it to have it critiqued next week when Harlan was there because he thought Harlan would like it. Fritz was a very astute gentleman. He was right, Harlan did like it and bought it for the anthology. But as well, at the end of the week, he said that he was impressed with my work and would be welcome to visit him in Los Angeles if I ever made it there. That was the beginning of it and we’ve remained friends in the two-and-a-half-decades since.

D: Upcoming work being published -- ‘97-’98?

EB: My collection FLIRTING WITH DEATH which Rich Chizmar and CD Publications is going to be publishing in hardback with a great set of illustrations and a cover by Alan Clark and introduction by Dan Simmons. As with a lot of specialty press collections -- or at least what the publisher hopes for -- is a reasonable complement of original fiction. I’ve already completed an original novelette for the book and I’m doing at least one more -- about a third of the way through. The story’s about typical suburban living in a city very much like one I in which I live where a middle school is afflicted by vampires who suck the intelligence right out of you, instead of blood. Which is a theory many educators would sympathize with. So I’m hoping to finish that up soon.

The other major project that I’m embarking on is a spec feature film script but then isn’t everybody? I’m trying to do a nice, poignant, sentimental Christmas drama about a family and about the prodigal brother who comes home. Yeah, yeah, I think some of my thunder was beaten by John Cusack and Gross Pointe Blank. I think I can ring enough of a change on the particular situation so that it’s still a project I want to do.

As for the reprint of my collection PARTICLE THEORY. I haven’t heard from my publisher (Alan Newcomber of Voyager Books -- also known as Hypatia Press) in quite a while. He’s been planning for a few years now to do the first hardback edition of PARTICLE THEORY which would not only reprint the stories from the Pocket Books edition from the ‘80’s but would have a sprinkling of newer stories to bring it up to date as a sort of historical overview of my work. It’s got an introduction by Connie Willis.

Short stuff that will be coming out: “Ashes on Her Lips” in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s SIRENS: Stories of Demon Lovers from Harper Prism. There are many markets I want to write stories for but it remains to be seen which deadlines I’ll meet. One that I definitely will work on soon is for a dynamite anthology that I’ve been invited to submit to -- original stories based on James O’Barr’s THE CROW graphic series. After blowing the deadlines for the Michael Moorcock Elric anthology and the Neil Gaiman Sandman anthology I’m determined not to screw up the chance to be in the Crow anthology.

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