An Interview with Dale Bailey
Jack Slay, Jr.: You attended Clarion East in 1992—and came away a writer changed. There you met writers like Jim Kelly and Nancy Kress, but you also met, more importantly I think, Kris Rusch (then editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction), which led to your first sale at F&SF. Just how important have Clarion and Ms. Rusch been to your writing?
Dale Bailey: I think Clarion was the second watershed moment in my writing life. I applied there partly on a whim–to give writing one last shot after ten years without a sale—and partly in reaction to the kind of elitism and emphasis on literary theory that I perceived in my first year of grad school. But the experience proved to be crucial. The exposure to a group of people who took writing seriously was invaluable. And I also learned a great deal, very quickly, about what I’d been doing wrong in terms of writing salable fiction. I’m sure that Clarion really sped up the process of development for me by years.
Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith taught the third week of Clarion, and Kris bought the first story I ever sold, “Eidelman’s Machine,” which I had written the week before. I think Kris was in some very practical ways a crucial person in my career. She taught me a lot about story structure, she bought the first story, and then, over the next few years, she continued buying my stuff for F&SF. Beyond that, she provided the introduction to my agent and she read an early draft of my first novel, and gave me an enormous amount of feedback on how to approach the revision.
Jack Slay, Jr.: “The Resurrection Man’s Legacy” seems to be another turning point in your writing. That was one of the first novelettes you sold to F&SF (in 1995) and the first time your name appeared on the cover. It was nominated for the Nebula. In many ways, that seemed the first, official “Dale Bailey” story: a balanced emphasis on both style and story, the introduction of many of your favorite themes (father and son, coming of age, the fantastic blended with the commonplace). It also introduced that poignancy that infuses so many of your stories, a sense of longing, of something forever lost. How important do you see “Resurrection Man” as being?
Dale Bailey: I think that story was crucial in lots of ways, certainly in steering me a fair amount of attention. The Nebula nomination provided the impetus to start a novel. And the story itself, I think, also played an important role in enabling me to sell my collection to Golden Gryphon. I think it is fairly characteristic of a lot of my work—the emphasis on family, the integration of traditionally fantastic themes with a rural setting, that poignancy which you describe, and so on.
I would argue that those elements came together before that, however, in “Touched,” my second story to see print, in 1993—though this probably wouldn’t be obvious to an observer since several of the subsequently published stories had actually been written before “Touched.” But “Touched” was the first story in which I ever tried to use the places that I had known, and it’s also a story about family, and the ways they both empower and imprison us.
Jack Slay, Jr.: It’s also the only story of yours that has been optioned for film, right?
Dale Bailey: Right. Right now it’s under option to Twentieth Century Fox.
