From The Library: Joe Hill
Posted by ElizabethGenco on Thursday, February 1 2007 at 11:59 am
If you read my blog, then you’ve probably heard me rave on about Joe Hill. My darlings, I only rave because he’s really, really good.
Being really, really good will get you a reputation and public endorsements from others whose “really, really good”ness is already firmly established (I can still see Ellen Datlow in my mind’s eye, calling out a parting shot of “read Joe Hill!” to a crowd of specfic fans at KGB Bar after a reading), but, publishing being what it can be, building a following of readers is a little trickier. Joe’s first collection of short stories, 20th Century Ghosts, was published by a lovely English small press and is now sold out, I believe (though I did manage to nab two copies, and no, you can’t have one). Ergo, too-few people found it, read it, and became rabid fans.
This is about to change. Amen.
In other news, I love these interviews because I get to ask people about all my favorite subjects.
You seem to have a thing for ghosts. Why do ghosts matter?
You’ve probably heard Faulkner’s famous line: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” In stories, ghosts are always a case of the 
past staining the present.
In the book I’ve got coming out, Heart-Shaped Box, the hero is a jaded, burned-out rock star named Judas Coyne, a guy in his fifties who has spent years and years riding the pop culture rollercoaster. Almost as a publicity stunt he winds up buying a ghost from an internet auction site – it comes in the form of a haunted suit, which UPS delivers in a black heart-shaped box. And it isn’t long before Jude begins to find a spectral old man stalking him, the previous owner of the suit, and a very bad kind of spirit. But even before he bought this ghost online, Jude was already a haunted man. He’s haunted by a whole lifetime of questionable choices, by the memory of bandmates dead and gone, a lover he misused, an abusive father he fled as a boy. In the course of Jude’s struggle to deal with this very real, very bad ghost that’s coming after him, Jude also has to deal with all those other personal ghosts. So if I like to write about ghosts, then at least in part it’s because they create the right environment to explore the way a character is shaped by his past.
What is your first memory of writing?
When I was four I wrote my name all over the walls of my parents’ house in Bridgeton, Maine. I tagged everything.
My earliest professional submission was a comic script I sent to Marvel, at the age of twelve. They had a book, The Marvel Try-Out, with a Spider-Man story in it. The story didn’t have an ending and prospective writers were asked to script the last few pages. I spent four days writing my ending to the story. I got back a form rejection, but Jim Shooter, Marvel’s then-editor-in-chief, scribbled a short, unreadable message across the bottom. I kept that rejection in my pocket for weeks, and treated it like holy writ.
After I was all growed-up, a talent scout at Marvel, who had read some of my short stories, asked me if I wanted to write an eleven-page Spidey story, for Spider-Man Unlimited. They took my script, and it was illustrated by the late Seth Fisher, and it turned out pretty well. It was a great experience – like opening a door and stepping into one of my childhood daydreams.
How ’bout reading?
We’re back to comics again. Probably the earliest thing I can remember reading was one of D.C.’s ghost comics about the Phantom Stranger. Although I’m sure I read stuff before then: picture books and so on. I remember reading the Little Big Books, those thick hardcover adaptations of the classics, with all the illustrations inside them. I think I read The Three Musketeers that way. And The Man in the Iron Mask.
My favorite early memory of reading comes from probably when I was about ten or eleven. I was allowed to stay up an extra hour, as long as I was in bed reading. And I discovered I could read a Sherlock Holmes short story in exactly an hour. So I read one a night for a little over two months (it took four nights to read the novels), until I had read them all. I was mad for Arthur Conan Doyle. I had a deerstalker cap I liked to wear around my bedroom.
What does your workspace look like? What do you write on?
I have a little office with a desk and an office chair, and another chair to read in (except I never sit and read in it – that chair is really for the cat) and a couple bookshelves with reference materials on them. When I’m feeling creative and getting some writing done, the place tends to get very disordered and sloppy-looking, piles of manuscript and books everywhere. When I’m stuck, I clean the place up, just to have something to do. If I’ve been stuck for a while, the office gets very tidy and sterile and unlived-in looking. A certain amount of creative clutter is a good thing.
I write on a MacBook Pro most of the time. Except sometimes I get sick of the internet and email and I put the computer away and write on an enormous cast iron IBM Selectra III. I’ve got a whole fleet of Selectras. One of these days I’m going to write an entire novel on one. A typewriter can’t compete with a computer when it comes to revising something, but when you’re working on your crappy first draft, I think you could argue they actually have some advantages over computers. For example, when it isn’t going good, if you’re working on a typewriter you can’t just switch over to your browser and waste a half hour on Friendster. You’re forced to sit there with the empty page, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
You seem to like to make lists, what with the LibraryThing thing and the extensive recommendations on your website (which I just killed an hour and a half pouring over — thanks, dude). So here’s one for you.
What, in your opinion, are the top five most important books for aspiring horror/magical realism/dark fantasy writers to read and learn from? I’m talking the stuff that’s really worth studying and picking apart.
You’re right, I do love lists – I’m not sure the listing mentality is such a great thing, but it seems to be my thing. I probably spend too much time advertising my opinions about books and movies and comics and so on.
I could make a list of five favorite stories in the genre of modern fantasy, but I’m not sure that would be the same as books aspiring writers should read and study. I think if you aspire to write in that genre – in any genre - you should relentlessly track down the stuff that most powerfully speaks to you on a personal level. Give yourself permission to let your tastes form organically. Because the books that really set your imagination on fire are the ones you’re likely to learn the most from. Beware of expert opinions, and lists of required reading. I learned a lot from Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing tales, and Jack Finney’s I Love Galesburg in the Springtime, and Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen, and John Bellairs’ The House with A Clock in its Walls, and Harry Potter. Those are books that popped my fuses, but only for my own weird particular reasons, which may or may not apply to others.
Bonus round: your top five movies, same terms.
Mm, I have to give the same non-answer to this one I gave to the last. That said, anyone looking for a current double feature could have a hell of a good time with Pan’s Labyrinth followed by Children of Men. One is set in the past, and the other in the future, but both are very much about the politics of the present, and both offer up very rich, very fable-like narratives of wonder and terror.
Category: From the Library
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Posted Thursday, February 1, 2007 at 12:25 pm
[…] The latest FROM THE LIBRARY is up, an interview with the amazing Joe Hill. Check it out, if you please. […]