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Jack Dann is probably one of the busiest, most prolific authors on
the planet. Over 85 of his short stories have been published to date
in such prestigious forums as Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction
Magazine, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Playboy,
and many anthologies such as The Complete Masters of Darkness
(Dennis Etchison, ed.) and Snow White, Blood Red (Ellen Datlow
and Terri Winding, eds.). His bestselling novel The Memory
Cathedral earned an Australian Aurealis Award, and Da Vinci
Rising, a novella adapted from the novel, won the Nebula Award. In
addition, Mr. Dann has written, edited, or contributed to over four
dozen novels and anthologies. And that's all just the tip of the Jack
Dann iceberg.
To categorize Mr. Dann's work as "sci-fi" is a gross
oversimplification. Mr. Dann's work, in fact, spans the whole of the
speculative fiction genre, ranging from the fantastic as in The
Glass Casket for Snow White, Blood Red to the magic realism
of his short story Marilyn. His most recent novella, The
Diamond Pit, falls mostly into the magic realism genre, with a
dash of fantasy and a pinch of adventure sci-fi thrown into the mix.
Based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's novella, The Diamond as Big as the
Ritz, The Diamond Pit (which has been nominated for both
the Nebula and Hugo Awards) follows the tale of Paul Orsatti
accidentally stumbling across "the fanciest, most comfortable
jail in the world" in 1923 - an entire mountain made of one big
diamond, from which the mountain's owner will let no man ever leave.
Mr Dann's characters, seemingly ordinary people thrown into
extraordinary circumstances, exude a certain Everyman quality that
makes their stories at the same time utterly surreal and yet somehow
believable. A tough trick to pull off for sure, but one which Mr. Dann
seems to navigate with complete ease.
Besides writing and editing, Mr. Dann teaches writing workshops,
delivers seminars and lectures, and makes convention appearances. In
his spare time Mr. Dann likes painting farm houses and indulging
whippersnapper young assistant editors for e-mail interviews.
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Rose and Thorn (R&T): How and when did you decide
to become a writer?
Jack Dann (Dann): In 1965 I almost died from peritonitis.
I spent four months in hospital, and I can still remember lying
in my bed, stoned out on Demerol, one hand in a bowl of ice and
the other resting on a copy of Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. I
have always loved Hemingway's autobiography of his lost youth in
Paris. Somehow, it seemed to hold the promise of my own future.
In those drugged moments away from the pain (the doctors had
given me a 5% change of surviving), I promised myself that if I
survived I'd do something worthwhile. And in the years
following, I looked for that something to do. |
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I found it in the late 60's when I met George Zebrowski, Pamela
Sargent, Gardner Dozois, Jack Haldeman and Joe Haldeman. George and
Pam lived in my hometown, Binghamton, New York, and George was
determined to be a writer. His enthusiasm was infectious. Perhaps we
could become writers. It wasn't long before we were sitting on
opposite sides of a table in his dining room and writing on old manual
typewriters. We sold those early collaborations to Galaxy's sister
magazine Worlds of If, and I knew then that I was going to be a
writer. I imagined that since I had almost died, I'd somehow been
given a second chance. And I wasn't going to waste it. I'd take
chances, live on the edge, and somehow transform myself into a writer.
35 years later, I'm still taking chances.still living hard and fast
and on the edge. And somehow.still writing.
R&T: Could you please share with us a story or two about
some of your successful - and not-so-successful - attempts at becoming
a published author.
Dann: I was lucky, as I sold all the early stories.
A few years passed.
I purchased a house for pennies at an auction, had a family, and was
going to write a novel every three months. I wrote three chapters of a
novel called Starhiker, an outline for five more novels (ah, the
optimism of youth!) and submitted it to a publisher. My (potential)
editor said he wanted to buy them, and so I did the logical thing: I
proceeded to write and live on my credit card until the promised
contract (and advance) arrived. After I was in deep to my credit card,
my editor told me that the project had gone "to committee"
and had been turned down. He was disappointed, but there wasn't
anything he could do.
Not to put too fine a point on it: I was screwed.
I was sitting on the porch of my new house a few weeks later. It was
deep summer, a stinking hot night, when a door-to-door salesman
approached me. We chatted, and he told me that he wanted to be a
writer. He was only selling cable television until such time as he
could hone his writing skills to a publishable level. I told him that
I'd teach him how to write if he'd get me an introduction into the
cable company. I did, in fact, give him writing lessons, and he did,
in fact, get me a job in the cable company as a door-to-door salesman.
I'd never sold anything in my life, and the first time I went out
knocking on doors, I was quaking with fear. The company was running a
fifteen-day free trial on Showtime or HBO. I knocked on a door. An old
man answered, and quaking and shaking I said, "Hello, sir, my
name is Jack Dann, and I work for Newchannels Cable Television, and
we're offering a fifteen year free trial on Showtime or HBO."
He was overjoyed.
"Fifteen years? That's pretty good, sonny. I'll take it."
And then there was the time I tried selling cable to an elderly woman
who was mostly deaf. She thought I was from the "bagel"
company, and chased me down the street, demanding a free bagel.
To segue back to Starhiker. I did, in fact, sell it. I sold it to
Laser Books, which was the science fiction imprint of Harlequin Books.
I finished the novel.but instead of it taking three months, it took
me a year. I suppose wasn't cut out to write adventure novels, as I
kept getting bored and injecting wild philosophies into the novel to
make it more interesting to write. The editor, who was a consulting
editor, thought the book was too up-market for Laser and sold it to
Bobbs-Merrill books, and I eventually ended up selling it to Harper
& Row, who bought it back from Bobbs-Merrill.
I didn't write the five sequels, and I got over the idea that I could
write book after book every five minutes.
It would later take me six years to write my Leonardo da Vinci novel,
The Memory Cathedral.
So much for that idea of writing a book every three months!
R&T: Your writing often dips into several sub-genres:
speculative fiction, magical realism, fantasy, just to name a few.
What draws you to write in such an imaginative realm?
Dann: I guess I'm a difficult writer to pigeonhole, and
commercial publishing is about categorization. I remember hearing
Harlan Ellison telling audiences that he was a writer, not a science
fiction writer, not a fantasy writer, not this kind of writer or that
kind of writer, but a writer. At the time I didn't understand why he
was fussed over it, but now I do understand. Categories are walls, and
if one gets categorized as a horror writer, a fantasy writer, a
science fiction writer, those walls can be pretty impermeable. If a
"mainstream" (another category for the genre of contemporary
fiction) author writes a work of speculative fiction, it is reviewed
and sold as "a novel". So it was that years ago Kurt
Vonnegut, a science fiction writer by most categorists' definition,
argued that he wasn't a science fiction writer-he was "a
writer". But to do that, alas, he had to denigrate the genre.
I love the genres.I love genre fantasy (as written by practitioners
such as George R. R. Martin, J. R. R. Tolkein, and T. H. White),
science fiction, historical fiction, magical realism; and I'm proud to
write within them. My problem is that I write what interests me, which
is sometimes in one genre, sometimes in another, and sometimes in none
at all. That could be a publishers' nightmare, but I've been very
lucky: HarperCollins in Australia publishes my major work under their
Flamingo imprint, and people buy my stories as "novels".
Science fiction and fantasy people are aware of what I'm doing, so
I've been lucky in keeping that important part of my audience.
Let me give you an example of my problems with category. I wrote a
novel about Leonardo da Vinci called The Memory Cathedral. I've been
very fortunate, in that the book reached Number One on The Age
Bestseller list in Melbourne, and it was selling well as.a novel
about Leonardo da Vinci. Never mind that it could be categorized as an
alternate history novel. The novel won an Australian Aurealis Award,
so my publisher affixed stickers onto the covers of the next edition.
The stickers read "Winner of the 1996 Aurealis Award for Best
Fantasy Novel". I went into my favorite bookstore a week later,
and saw that the book was missing from the center rack. I asked what
happened and was told that people who read historical novels and
biographies want everything to be "real". The sticker said
"fantasy", and readers stopped buying it. (I know that's an
overgeneralization, but the books did go off the center shelves
everywhere.) A novella length adaptation won a Nebula Award, and so my
publisher made another sticker, one that could be pasted over the old
one, and that simply read "Winner Nebula Award and Aurealis
Award". The Memory Cathedral immediately reappeared. Most
bookstores here had copies in the fiction and in the science fiction
sections, but mere mention of the word fantasy lost me a large portion
of my audience. Readers select by categories.and I'm simply not a
category writer, even though I write in various categories. I wish
that I were. Categories can help writers gain and build their
audiences.and can be a writers' bread and butter.
But I've been cursed, I suppose, in that I keep getting interested in
subjects that fall out of category or rest uneasily in more than one,
such as The Memory Cathedral. I've been very lucky to have publishers
and editors who believe in my work, which has allowed me to write
these books. My last book was Jubilee, a retrospective collection of
my short fiction, and it reveals my penchant for writing across
genres. The novel before that was Counting Coup. (Bad Medicine in
Australia.) That was a road novel set in the United States. Counting
Coup has an underlay of magical realism, but most of that material was
taken from my own experiences. Before Counting Coup was The Silent, a
novel about an adolescent caught up in the Civil War. And there are
science fiction novels such as The Man Who Melted, Starhiker;
Junction, and High Steel (with Jack C. Haldeman). Except for High
Steel, which is straight science fiction, they are experimental genre
sf novels.
But there is a strain of the fantastic in all my work. I believe that
what we think of as magical realism is really an essential part of our
lives and experience; and for me, as a writer, elements of the
fantastic allow me to give greater depth to my characters and (when
and if I succeed) help reveal some ontological truth, which I believe
is what good fiction is about.
I'm fascinated by the numinal, and that seems best expressed through
the fantastic, whether it is fantasy, science fiction, or magical
realism. We used to call it "sense of wonder". I get that
"sense" when I'm reading John Fowles, J. D. Salinger,
Elizabeth Bowen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I get it when I read Zoe
Oldenberg, John Crowley, Greg Benford, Robert Heinlein, Howard
Waldrop, Gardner Dozois, Neil Stephenson, William Gibson, Michael
Swanwick, Kate Wilhelm, Gene Wolfe, R. A. Lafferty, Edgar Pangborn,
Ursula K. Le Guin, John Crowley, Carol Emshwiller, Rosaleen Love, and
George R. R. Martin.
And lastly, I love science fiction. I love those huge dreams and
finely wrought explorations of inner space-and those genre writers, to
take a jibe at Kurt Vonnegut, man, they can write!
R&T: Do you think there's a theme, or themes, that permeate
your work?
Dann: Yes, I seem to be fascinated with the nature of time and
memory. My early novel Junction is a homage to Jack Vance's brilliant
story "The Men Return". Philip K. Dick said it "is
where Ursula K. LeGuin's Lathe of Heaven and Tony Boucher's 'The Quest
for Saint Aquin' meet," if that helps categorize it. It's about
the nature of time and indeterminacy. I suppose that Proust's In
Search of Lost Time is an influence, although I promise, I've never
spent thirty pages describing a kiss.
R&T: Your recent acclaimed novella, "The Diamond
Pit", was an homage to F. Scott Fitzgerald's story, "The
Diamond as Big as the Ritz". What other writers influence you?
Dann: Salinger is an influence.my short story "Going
Under," about the resinking of the Titanic-an adaptation from my
novel The Man Who Melted-is a homage to Salinger's "To Esme With
Love and Squalor". I would say that John Fowles is an influence,
as well as Jorge Luis Borges, Jerzy Kosinski (his introduction to The
Painted Bird gave me the idea for The Silent), Mark Twain (again, see
The Silent), J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Gardner Dozois, Joe
Haldeman, Brian Aldiss, William Kennedy, Henry Roth (author of the
brilliant and little-known Some Call It Sleep), Edgar Pangborn,
Theodore Sturgeon, and I could go on and on, but, mercifully, I won't.
R&T: "The Diamond Pit" shares many parallels with
its muse, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," and yet they
remain two distinctly different stories. How much of your story did
you write purposely parallel to the Fitzgerald story, and how much of
it was simply you as a writer putting your own spin on the same story?
Dann: I've loved "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" for
years, and wanted to write something of a homage. Fitzgerald wrote
that story in his youth, and it's a-how shall I say it?-young story;
but I saw implications that I wanted to explore in more depth. When I
first read the Fitzgerald story, I was interested in the pilots who
were shot down and imprisoned. They were given every luxury, but
imprisoned nevertheless. I thought there was a good story to be told
from the point of view of an imprisoned pilot, and once I started with
that, the story.wrote itself. I use the background of "The
Diamond as Big as the Ritz," but my story and Fitzgerald's are as
different as can be. As Nick Givers wrote in The Magazine of Fantasy
& Science Fiction, "Dann prefaces the story with "Homage
to F. Scott..." but "Diamond Pit" is really the
Anti-Fitzgerald tale. This starts with the titles: Fitzgerald creates
an image of immeasurable, unimaginable wealth, while Dann evokes an
unbreakable, inescapable prison, the negative to Fitzgerald's
positive."
R&T: You moved from the United States, where you were born
and raised, to Melbourne, Australia six years ago. Could you talk a
little about why you did that? How has that affected - or not affected
- your writing? How often do you return to NY?
Dann: Actually, I've been in Australia for about nine years.
I'm originally from Binghamton, New York. To make a long story short,
I met my wife, writer Janeen Webb, at the World Science Fiction
Convention in San Francisco. Janeen is an Australian.
Three months later, I was living in Melbourne, Australia.
Big changes, but with every year I find myself living faster and
faster and enjoying the hell out of life.
Australia has had an interesting effect on my writing, in that once
you become an expat, once you live abroad rather than visit (visitors
take their own 'atmosphere' with them; expats have to lose it), you
become a stranger, an outsider everywhere, and yet, by the same token,
you're at home everywhere. But the world feels stranger.
I remember a few years ago when I landed at the Broome County Airport
outside of Binghamton, and I heard the baggage handlers talking.I
remember thinking that they had such strange accents. Then I realized
that those strange accents were my own! The upstate New York drawl.
Since I've been in Melbourne, I've been writing about.America.
Perhaps distance has given me perspective; perhaps not, but I seem to
be obsessed with writing about my home country and culture.
I get back to the States a few times a year. Usually once or twice;
sometimes as many as four times. Last year, however, I didn't get back
at all. I was buried in work. This year, I hope to get to LA and New
York and a few places in between. I usually tell people that I live in
Melbourne and "commute" to LA and New York.
R&T: In the grand tradition of your unique and creative
style of injecting bits of the fantastic to everyday things and
people, you are currently working on a story about James Dean - that
takes place after the accident that killed him. Could you please tell
us a little bit about that? What else are you working on now and what
can your readers expect to see next?
Dann: The working title of the James Dean book is Second
Chance. It's about the life of James Dean after his accident, and I'm
working with iconic personages such as Marilyn Monroe, Jack Kerouac,
Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, William Burroughs, Elvis Presley,
and, of course, James Dean. It's alternate history, but, for me, it's
an exploration of our culture. It will be published by HarperCollins,
and if you want to get a sneakpeek (in Australia, we'd say
"stickybeak") at the kind of material I'm working with, take
a look at my story "Ting-a-Ling" in Al Sarrantonio's
anthology Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction.
Second Chance will be bigger than The Memory Cathedral, which was
200,000 words. It's my attempt at writing the great American novel.
(We-ie., writers-all try that, you know!) After Second Chance? Well,
I'm contemplating a novel version of "The Diamond Pit."
R&T: Besides writing short stories, novellas, and novels,
you also edit some fantasy and sci-fi anthologies. How does being an
editor affect you as a writer, and vice versa?
Dann: I do a lot of anthology editing, and I also act as a
consulting editor for TOR Books; I'm always on the lookout for
Australian talent, especially. I've just edited an international
horror anthology called Gathering the Bones with Dennis Etchison and
Ramsey Campbell. Each one of us edited 50,000 words of fiction from
our respective countries. I bought Australian stories, Dennis bought
US stories, and Ramsey bought from writers in the UK. I think it's a
very strong anthology. HarperCollins is publishing it in Australia and
the UK; TOR is the US publisher.
I see editing and writing as being very different.yet of a piece.
Many writers are also editors and anthologists; the writer/anthologist
is a grand tradition in science fiction: Damon Knight (the Orbit
series), Robert Silverberg (New Dimensions), Terry Carr (Universe),
Harlan Ellison (Dangerous Visions). Writers have to learn considerable
analytical skills, if they are to survive; and I bring many of those
same critical skills to work I'm editing.
I've been very lucky as a writer, and editing is one of the ways I can
give something back.
R&T: You've won so many awards: Nebulas, Australian
Aurealis Awards, World Fantasy Awards - does there ever come a point
for you when it gets to be "old hat"? Does winning ever get
boring for you?
Dann: No, it's never "old hat". Perhaps that's
because I haven't won nearly enough awards!
R&T: So you win awards, edit anthologies, give workshops
and interviews, speak at universities and conventions, and yet you
remain such a prolific writer. Since so many of our readers are also
writers, I simply must ask -how do you find the time for everything?
Dann: In a word-or, er, two words: I don't. I guess I just try
to meet deadlines, try not to say "yes" so much when I'm
asked to speak, and I do whatever I can to protect my writing time.
I'm not a fast writer by any means. I'm one of those writers who must
research everything until it seems to seep into my bones. I'm finding
that I'm not getting out to the opera enough. Not seeing enough
movies. Not going to enough openings. Not tasting enough wine. Not
traveling to all the places I fancy. Hmm.I think I really do have to
start saying "No". (But then I wouldn't be doing this
interview!)
R&T: When do you write?
Dann: I try to start first thing in the morning, usually get
foiled (the telephone and housework are the writer's enemies), then
try again, and again, and again; and I keep trying throughout the day
until I've got something workable. I enjoy having written.the actual
writing is what's difficult. But I do it every day. To repeat the
hackneyed phrase: "Writing is 10% inspiration and 90%
perspiration." But then there are those days when the hands fly
over the keyboard, when the characters whisper in your ears, when you
see it all clearly, and fiction writing becomes something like the
spiritualists' automatic writing.
R&T: Have you ever had writer's block, and how do you
handle it?
Dann: Yes, I have writer's block every few months. I consider
it a normal part of the creative process. When I'm writing, I'm using
up material; pouring it out, so to speak. When I get used up, I can't
write. That's my cue to start putting back.to start reading
voraciously, going to films, art museums, giving the subconscious a
wallow. After a week or two, I'm "cookin'" again.
R&T: What does the writing life mean to you?
Dann: Ah, that's a question that could contain multitudes! For
me writing is a way of being, a way of living, a way of seeing. I
believe that any craft opens the creator to life, but it also narrows
and focuses, and so I've taught myself to see as a writer. In a sense,
I've become my craft. It's a terrific way to live.
R&T: Lastly, do you have anything you'd like to share with
or tell our readers?
Dann: I think people admire artists and writers for their
perceived freewheeling lifestyle and their presumed input into the
culture. Most writers and artists live on the edge, often on the
financial knife-edge, but I'm not talking about that.to spend a life
in art, if that doesn't sound too pretentious, involves being willing
to fail. I bet everything on every novel, put myself out there, back
out on that proverbial edge. It was easier to do when I was in my
twenties and thirties, when life felt like it would be eternal. It's
more difficult now, but the buzz is greater. To live on the edge, to
be willing to fail.what the hell; it can't get much better than
that!
Visit Jack Dann's website at: http://www.eidolon.net/jack_dann
Read an excerpt of The
Diamond Pit.
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Counting
Coup
by Jack Dann
List
Price: $24.95
Our Price: $17.47
You Save: $7.48 (30%).
Hardcover - 304 pages
Forge; ISBN: 0765301857; 1 Us Ed edition (October 2001)
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Dreaming
Down-Under
Edited by Jack Dann and Janeen Webb
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Price: $17.95
Our Price: $12.57
You Save: $5.38 (30%).
Paperback - 560 pages
St. Martin's Press; ISBN: 0312878125; 1st Tor pb edition
(January 2002)
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More Books by Jack Dann
While not nearly as prolific as Jack Dann, Meredith Morgenstern
nevertheless has had a good handful of short stories and essays
published all over cyberspace and even, once, in the real world.
Her first short story on the Internet, Rites of Death, won Morbid
Outlook's (www.morbidoutlook.com)
Ghost Project in May of 2001, and her personal essay, Rooting for
the Home Team, was first published in The Pink Chameleon (http://www.geocities.com/thepinkchameleon/index.html)
and then republished in the Winter/Spring 2002 Issue of - wait for it
- The Rose and Thorn. She has also been published in Savage
Night (www.savagenight.com)
and The Long Trip Home (www.thelongtriphome.com),
and Dovetails' Journal for Interfaith Families.
She is currently working on a buddy comedy sword and scorcery dark
fantasy vampire road trip historical novel that should be finished
some time in the next hundred years or so. She lives in New York City
with her houseplant and brand new air conditioner, loves to travel the
world, and is a member of the International Women's Writing Guild, www.iwwg.com.
Have comments you'd like to send the interviewer? Please e-mail Meredith
or you may fill out the form below:
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