Conversations with the Bookless – Patrick Shawn Bagley

A couple of years ago Jeff Vandermeer ran a series of blog posts called Conversations With the Bookless. The Conversations with the Bookless series was designed to showcase those writers who are up and coming, who don’t yet have a collection or a novel out, who are making their names known writing short stories. With Jeff’s blessing I will be continuing the series here at BSC over the next couple of weeks, but with a focus mostly on mystery/crime fiction.

From the first generation successes of Anthony Neil Smith, Victor Gischler and Sean Doolittle that came out of Plots With Guns to the later success of zine author/founders Sandra Ruttan and Russel McLean to a lot of others the online zines have, over the years, proved to be a fairly successful and fertile ground for emerging talents to launch a career, highlight their own work and showcase the work of others.

These writers are the next generation and it will be interesting in the next couple of years to see which of them will make it and which will stand out.

Nothing else to say really except to end with a quote from the original series.

The fact is, if you don’t have a book out, it’s harder to get attention and it’s harder for reader attention to crystallize around you. I hope these interviews introduce readers to some of the great talent that, in the coming years, will be amazingly and bountifully bookful. — Jeff Vandermeer

    
When you talk about writers who are right there on the cusp of getting published and earning wider recognition then Patrick Shawn Bagley’s name is right there near the top of the list. So, on the count of three, let’s all push at the same time. Ready?

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What is the value and purpose of short fiction in mystery/crime fiction for you personally and overall for the form and genre?

It challenges me. Short fiction is tough to write. I’ve been harping on this for a while now, but it bears repeating. I don’t hold with the conventional “wisdom” which says short stories are practice for the “real work” of novel-writing. A short story is more like a poem, in that there is no room for slack. Every sentence, every phrase, has to pull its own weight. I find writing short fiction more demanding than a novel. It’s a separate discipline. It makes you a stronger writer—and while you will carry that strength over into your novel writing, don’t kid yourself that short fiction is somehow less important.

When I was in high school, I wanted to be in a band. I didn’t know how to play guitar, but a couple of my buddies were looking for a bass player. They asked if I could do it. I said, “Yeah, I can play bass.” I’d never even held a bass, much less played one. My thinking was: a bass only has four strings so it must be easier than guitar. No problem. Try telling that to Jack Bruce! I found out soon enough that, in its own way, becoming a good bass player required just as much work as learning guitar. Short stories are like that. They seem like they should be easy. They’re not.

The mystery/crime field is so crowded that short stories can be viewed as a sort of showcase for your talents. Print magazines, anthologies and e-zines present a pretty good cross-section of the genre. Say a reader is in a bookstore looking for new (or new to him) authors. Maybe he finds a novel that interests him and recalls reading a short story by the same author. If he liked the short, I figure he’ll be more inclined to buy the novel. I bought Scott Wolven’s Controlled Burn collection based on one of his stories from Plots with Guns. It was the same with Christa Faust, Tony Black and Russel McLean; I got hooked on their short fiction and that made me want to read their novels.

There’s also the fact that people’s lives are increasingly hectic. Short stories may be the only thing they have time to read.

    
What’s your favorite story written by someone else?

I can’t pick just one, so I’ll go with every story in Richard Yates’ Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.

    
Who are your influences and what is your unlikeliest influence?

I read so widely that it’s hard not to be influenced by it all—and much of my reading probably affects my writing in ways I don’t even begin to understand. The list changes somewhat over time, since we’re always growing as readers and writers, but my main influences are James Lee Burke, Charles Portis, Flannery O’Connor, Walter Mosley, Dennis Lehane, Cormac McCarthy, Jim Thompson, Annie Proulx, as well as poets like James Wright and Baron Wormser. The last few years, I’ve been heavily influenced by William Gay, Scott Wolven and Daniel Woodrell. Those three guys just blow me away.

Flannery O’Connor is probably my unlikeliest influence. At least, people always seem surprised that I admire her. A thread of darkness runs through all of her work, even as her characters struggle for some kind of happiness or redemption.

    
What do you most value in the fiction you love?

The best fiction, regardless of genre, is an exploration of what it means to be human. Most of the time, that entails a great deal of loss and suffering peppered with small moments of hope or contentment. More than one person has pointed out that I don’t write happy endings. As far as I’m concerned, there is no such thing as happily ever after. I prefer happily for a little while because some other problem or some new desire always comes along. We’re all restless. Once we get what we thought we wanted, it’s never long before we want something else. The desire for the thing is greater than the thing itself. That’s what keeps us reading and writing.

    
What issues or ideas about fiction have been foremost in your mind of late?

Most of my fiction is about rural life. Right now, I’m most interested in characters who feel trapped because they’re poor or their family has a certain reputation. Your options are limited when you live in a small town, but it becomes worse when the neighbors have already formed a notion of who you are. It is tough, if not impossible, to break free of that. I want to write about characters who fight against their “assigned” lot in life, even they lose.

Writers and wannabe-writers who do not read enough piss me off. They say, “I don’t have time to read” or “I’m a writer, not a reader.” Bullshit. You should read more than you write. There is a whole generation of would-be writers coming up now who have no grounding in a literary tradition. Everything they know comes from TV and movies or licensed crap like Star Wars novels. Am I the only one who finds that frightening?

    
What do you like most about short fiction?

A good short story hits you hard. It forces a visceral reaction, but it also works subtly. You find yourself thinking about it long after you’ve finished reading. I don’t often get that from a novel.

    
When did you start writing short fiction and what prompted you to do so?

I’ve been writing since I was eight or nine years old, long enough that I can’t remember what got me started. I don’t think there was a single cause. My grandmother always told stories. She taught me to read when I was four. It’s hard to recall a time when I did not write or make up stories in my head. My first efforts were short stories. They were maybe three pages at most, but they felt like epics at the time.

    
Of your stories, which is your favorite; the one that showcases best your abilities?

I think they’re all brilliant while I’m engaged in the writing, but then I finish them and the shine wears off. Even after publication, I find things I’d like to change. Right now, Pandora is my favorite because of the character’s voice, though the plot is nothing to rave about.

    
Do you have any short story publications forthcoming?

Just one, but it’s a biggie. My story “Welcome to Wal-Mart, Motherfucker” is coming out in Jen Jordan’s new anthology, Uncage Me (July 24 from Bleak House Books). It was a challenging departure for me because the narrator is a 15 year-old girl. Uncage Me is full of writers I admire, like Victor Gischler, Christa Faust and Scott Phillips. There are also some people you’d call “up and coming.” And John Connolly wrote an introduction so scholarly that I had to read it three times just to take in all the ideas. How cool is that?

    
How do you plan to rectify your booklessness?

I have a great agent, Renée Zuckerbrot, who also represents Kelly Link and Harley Jane Kozak. While Renée works to sell my first novel, Bitter Water Blues, I’m writing another one. Bitter Water Blues is a standalone, but the new novel is intended as the beginning of a series. It mixes detective fiction with a sort of New England gothic feel, which I don’t think anyone has done before.

    
_{Patrick Shawn Bagley blogs at Bitter Water Blog.}