Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology (36 page)

The Multiple Voices Inside Your Book

22
Warmed and Bound
Contributors Answer 3 Questions

by Jay Slayton-Joslin

Originally published 7.22.11 on
JaySlaytonJoslin.com

1.) Tell me about your story: what relevance it holds to you, personally, and what you were trying to achieve with it?

Caleb J Ross
: Click-Clack is honestly one of the best things I have written. It’s a culmination of everything I try to accomplish with storytelling. It is grotesque, heartbreaking, meta, and full of the sort of velvet prose that keeps me, as a reader, engaged and me, as a writer, interested in continuing this whole author thing. I truly think this story represents a next step in my life as a writer.

Sean Ferguson
: Inside Out is the story of a celebrity addressing America as he dies right before their eyes.  You follow his rise and fall from stardom, how he’s come to be bleeding out on camera, and how all of that is actually connected.  We live in a time where regular are made into superstars for being contestants in competitions of survival in places where people already live.  They’re famous just for the sake of being famous, or born into money, or married into money.  There are so many people in this book, the good people behind this book, they’re way more interesting and deserve the attention far more than these fake reality stars.  That’s what Inside Out really is, my contempt for the mainstream.

Anthony David Jacques
: At the time, I was writing stories inspired by music, focusing on the mood or aesthetic that a song or album achieves. Being an audiophile and musician as well, the project made for an interesting mash-up of two of my passions. Much of my writing music ends up being instrumental, and that held true for many of the stories. Not so with this story. I was listening to Team Sleep, a side project lead by Deftones’ frontman Chino Moreno. It’s actually quite fitting as musical inspiration for this kind of fiction since a lot of their music is inspired by Edgar All Poe, or the Jonestown Massacre. As I was listening one afternoon, the line “Your skull is red” in the eponymous song really stuck out to me. I hit repeat and started writing a scene about someone’s skull, thinking about the reality of it, the bones, the structure, what might drive someone to getting more acquainted with another person’s skull, and it developed into this story. A lot of the atmospheric cues and sensate details come from other Team Sleep songs as well, not necessarily the words, but the feelings.I wanted to capture the mood of the album, and I’m pleased with how everything has turned out.

Gordon Highland
: I can’t resist a good twist, and there are a couple in my story, “Headshot.” Same goes for the metafictional aspect, where it begins as a script and then smash-cuts into a traditional narrative, nonlinear though it may be. This duality allowed me to contrast two different styles of writing: the tightly-focused just-the-facts reportage of camera and sound against a more fluid voice without such restrictions. My tendency to write characters who are media-types continues here, with a Hollywood producer who hasn’t had a hit in awhile thrust into a “bottle” scenario with a pair of women at opposite ends of their careers who’ve both been exploited by him.

DeLeon DeMicoli
: “Blood Atonement” was inspired by Ronnie Lee Gardner. Gardner was on trial for the 1984 murder of a bartender. During his trial, an accomplice slipped him a gun. He attempted to escape and killed an attorney. He was convicted and given the death penalty. Gardner did the unthinkable and chose to die by firing squad. Out of 35 states that had the death penalty, Utah was the only state that had firing squad as an option. The state also allowed death row inmates to choose their method of execution. But, that changed in 1994 when legislators made lethal injection the standard method of execution. Those inmates convicted before 1994 still had the right to choose, which meant no one could stop Gardner’s decision. Deciding to choose firing squad as a way to die had put a fear into me that I had not felt in some time. Seriously. I had a hard time sleeping. I would daze out thinking about Gardner while my wife’s mantra “What do you want for dinner?” lingered in the background. After reading several articles on Gardner, I had a helluva time accepting the fact that he chose to be shot. Wouldn’t it be more painful than lethal injection or the electric chair? After doing some more research, I learned firing squad was a painless way to be executed. There were rifles pointed at your heart. Surely there was no way these marksmen could miss. Death was instant. Well, what about other methods like lethal injection and the electric chair? With lethal injection, if the drugs were not injected properly or if someone was not given the correct dosage, they could awaken if the anesthesia wore off, but remain paralyzed and suffocate. With the electric chair, there have been instances where men needed to be electrocuted multiple times. Some of those men caught on fire. Then there’s public hanging, but that’s so ancient and wild west. We’re civilized people now…right? Maybe the firing squad wasn’t a bad  choice?Another interesting fact was how this tragic incident occurred in the Mormon state of Utah. Fundamentalist Mormons believe the only way to resolve your sins is to spill your blood on the ground and offer it as a sacrifice to God, or blood atonement. Gardner was a Mormon, and I wondered if this was his last opportunity to be right with God.

Stephen Graham Jones
: These are just a lot of the people I grew up with. And, I’ve been through that workman’s comp machine, and it’s rusty and hates you and spits you out much worse than you were before, so I guess I was kind of digging into that some, yeah. Though I guess this story kind of cued up in my head as a riff on that Robert Frost poem, which is all famous and taught and canonical, but I’ve never seen the difference in it and a Ratt song, really, where Stephen Pearcy’s singing about how hung he is or something (though I could be thinking of interviews for that particular bit, I suppose). So I kind of wanted to write a version of it that I could understand. And then of course there was a poker game and beer drinking, suddenly — neither of which I know jack about either, so had to feel through, like with the poem — and dancers making house calls, and a birthing class, and maybe that’s the relevance: I remember when I went through that birthing class, there were a lot of no-shows, so the teacher let me take home like eighteen deli sandwiches, which was so, so great, because I was so, so broke at the time.

Tim Beverstock
: The Weight of Consciousness started out as an idea called Diminished Returns. I wanted to write a story where each section used half the words of the previous one (500,250,125,50,25 etc) and have the narrative told retrospectively via a series of answer phone messages. While this idea didn’t translate over to the final story, the sense of timing remained by using the six paragraphs to break up a 24 hour period. Keeping the sentences clipped, the descriptions precise, and using an equal amount of words in each paragraph helped create a sense of weight in the build up to the end (hence the story title).

Bob Pastorella
: “Practice” is based on true events that happened to me several years ago. Everyone knows ‘that girl’; the girl who is so normal and sweet on the outside, yet inside she is boiling over with crazy. You end up caring for her even though you know you should walk away. No, you should run away, but you don’t, because we all have this altruistic instinct that makes us believe no matter how messed up someone is, we can help them, so we try, without a clue as to what we really should do to help. For all we know, we could be doing more damage than good. Then the worst thing happens, you fall in love with her. How do you love someone who is so self destructive? I wanted to get that sense of helplessness out of Marcus, that he really didn’t know what to do to help Shelly. I also wanted to show that no matter how well we think we know someone, what we’re seeing is merely the tip of the iceberg.

Richard Thomas
: It started with a discussion I had with the editor, Pela Via. I had a couple stories sitting around, showed them to her, and in the end we decided to write something brand new. I wanted to give her the opportunity to tell me exactly what she wanted, and craft a story just for her, and this anthology. I’ve been a big fan of Nietzsche for a long time. I recently discovered a quote of his and it drove the story. It’s where I got the title “Say Yes to Pleasure.” Here’s the quote:”Did you ever say yes to a pleasure? Oh my friends, then you also said yes to all pain. All things are linked, entwined, in love with one another.” That got me started on the idea of love and hate being so close to each other, how we have to love, we have to care, in order to hate something or someone. Otherwise, we just don’t care, we ignore the situation, or person, and move on with our lives. It got me thinking about how we can’t choose the people we fall in love with, so what if there was a tragedy, and the man who caused the horrific accident ended up falling for the victim, the woman. How would that play out? Would that secret hold, would it ever be revealed? Wouldn’t it just EAT AWAY at you? In the end, something had to give, something had to break. And it did.

Edward J Rathke
: Hm, I wrote this story almost two years ago, which is longer than I thought, but, time being what it is–persistent–it tends to get away from me, so a lot of the impetus to write it and the inspiration behind it may be wholly fabricated by now, but I’ll try. At the time I wrote it, I was manic, writing ten shorts a week, easy, just flying on the keyboard, and, I thought, getting better with each passing word. This was kind of the peak of that creative burst, I think, if I remember correctly. It was the story I was most proud of, anycase, and ended up being rejected a dozen times before Pela snatched it up. I was trying to achieve what I’m still always trying to achieve: beauty. Aesthetics, really, are the most important thing for me when it comes to writing, and, more than that, it’s typically about a singular image that I need to get down just right. For this story, the first sentence I wrote–though it never appears in it–was, ‘The sky was on fire and everyone hid,’ and the rest just kind of came from that. Though I’m constantly failing, never reaching the bar I set, I like to think I’m getting closer. So the goal was to create something beautiful, though this was happening at a time when I was being, say, a bit reckless with my love, to put it a certain way. So, the nature of the story, the infidelity and sorrow of it, I think that’s some of the reality of my life that accidentally found its way to the page and took over, as it always sort of does. So special meaning? Maybe a way to process what my mother calls my immense desire for unavailable women.

Nik Korpon
: I wasn’t really trying to accomplish anything with the story, other than shifting the reader’s perception every couple hundred words. I thought it’d be cool to have a real short story that’s constantly changing shape. And I always seem to be writing love stories, so there’s that. The genesis of This Will All End Well was from a story I heard on NPR, actually, with a guy who fought in World War II. It was winter and they were clearing out bunkers, just burning them down. He came across a Nazi with a broken back lying in the top bunk, begging not to let him die in the fire. The guy pulled him off the bed and dragged him up the steps, all with a broken spine, and left him in the middle of the field for his countrymen to find him. I kept seeing that image of his feet smacking on the concrete steps, his vertebrae grinding against each other.

Amanda Gowin
: This is the first story (that I’m happy with) I’ve written with no definite answers. It’s very linear, but as far as love stories, there are no resolutions. Its genesis was an epiphany about a very strange tree – and by getting the story out of me and into a containable form, I hope it became something beautiful and less frightening.

Nic Young
: My story came out of a workshop led by Jack Ketchum, called Writing From The Wound. As you can imagine he placed a great deal of emphasis on getting close to your own traumas and fears. The story I submitted is true. It’s my biggest wound. At the time of writing I was simply trying to follow Ketchum’s instruction to climb into the scary parts of the past and bring something back. It was cathartic. I cut it down a lot while editing for Warmed And Bound, and I think in it’s current form it’s quite focused on how excluded the boy feels.

Chris Deal
: In Exile is the story of two people and how they drift apart. Honestly, that’s the oddest path I’ve ever taken to get to a story. Maybe a sentence a day for three weeks, then a little more, then showing it to people who hated it, then someone saw something good inside. Got twisted and rewritten a lot, now it’s here. All I wanted was to have fun with a different voice.

Doc O’Donnell
: My story, “If You Love Me”, is one of the most personal, most non-fictional, most confronting stories I’ve ever written. It was one of those ones that was hard to write, not because the story and what I wanted to achieve wasn’t clear, but because it was so close to me and it was difficult to revisit the emotions, the characters. See, I had a crazy, manipulative girlfriend a few years back–didn’t we all?–and I went through a situation very similar to this with her, not to mention a slew of other shitty scenes–I mean, I could probably write a short story collection of the fucked up shit that went on in that relationship, and, I suppose, maybe I will someday. But, as of right now, I think this one is about as much as I can handle. Unlike the protagonist of my story, I don’t have her name scarring my body–not anymore, anyway–but I am missing little bits of flesh over my body. The story, at its heart and soul, is a scary love story. It’s about a man that is at a point so low that he is easily manipulated into proving his love for a girl–a girl he likely shouldn’t be giving his love to, a girl that is, quite clearly, taking that love and using it against him because she’s a horrible little bundle of S&M. The details are raw, uncompromising. I guess, what I really wanted to achieve was that sense of hopelessness. That feeling of knowing you shouldn’t be doing something but, at the same time, knowing you’re going to do it anyway; it’s the mistake you know you’re not meant to be making. And I think we’ve all been there at some point or another. Maybe not with a pyhsical blade to the skin, but, perhaps, you, metaphorically, swallowed that blade and let it damage you from the inside out.