An Interview with Dale Bailey
I first met Dale Bailey in the Ph.D. program at the University of Tennessee in the fall of 1991. I was in the final throes of bulling through a dissertation on Ian McEwan; Dale, filled with spit and vigor, stood on the threshold. Though we were on polar ends of the program, we eyed each other warily, as do all graduate students, as potential combatants in learning. Then, not long after that initial meeting—surely by accident because such admissions are unheard of in the hallowed halls of the ivory tower—we confessed an abiding fondness for Stephen King, for science fiction and dark fantasy. That moment sealed our friendship.
Life with Dale has been a series of adventures: games of office baseball, midnight rumors of broken phones dumped into the Tennessee River, great quantities of beer, the occasional scotch, raucous road trips to various conferences, more beer, and some of the best unencumbered conversation I’ve had with another human.
In the past decade I’ve watched—with much pride and perhaps more than a little envy—Dale’s writing career blossom. Ten years ago Clarion unleashed him. Now–with more than a score of stories and novellas published in various respected magazines, an academic treatise on the haunted house published in 1999, and The Fallen, a dark contemporary fantasy, just released by Signet—he stands on the brink of one of those remarkable careers, a writer who leaves his mark on a genre, a writer who makes a genuine difference.
Dale Bailey lives in Hickory, NC, where he teaches at Lenoir-Rhyne College. He is married to Jean; together they have a daughter, Carson. They share their lives with a passel of cats, most, naturally, named after literary figures.
Jack Slay, Jr.: You have a most interesting pre-writing career, one of those rare cases where you seemed destined to be a writer from the very beginning. How did those early forays into writing influence your current writing—or influence your concept of writer as career?
Dale Bailey: I knew I wanted to write almost from the moment I started reading, and I think that’s because reading offered such a compelling alternative to my daily existence as a scrawny kid with thick glasses—an existence in which I was all too frequently bullied. I expect you’d find that a lot of writers share those kinds of experiences. And writing very quickly became a way of extending the imaginative play of reading.
From the first I wanted to be a publishing writer, too—it wasn’t a private thing, and I think that’s in part because I grew up in a family of English teachers, and writing became a way to earn adult approval. I used to write little books and illustrate the covers and staple them together and pass them around—this was when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade. When I was in 4th grade (in 1977), I had written the first third of a fantasy novel which my teacher submitted to an arts contest sponsored by the Bulgarian government as part of the International Year of the Child. I think everyone involved was surprised—I know I was—when I was chosen as one of the ten winners from the US, and I think that was a formative experience as well: when I went to Bulgaria, I had a very brief taste of what it was like to be a celebrity. It was a surreal experience: police escorts, television interviews, literally mobs of people turning out to see this group of young writers, artists, and musicians from around the world. And I’m sure that kind of attention reinforced the desire to write. I know that when I came back I immediately started submitting fiction to the sf magazines, and I continued to do that throughout my adolescence.
I’m not sure that those influences shaped the kind of writer I became, but I’m sure they had a profound role in forming and reinforcing the ambition to write in the first place.
