Fantastic Metropolis

Jack Slay, Jr.: Many of your stories (“Touched,” “Home Burial,” “Giants in the Earth,” for example) and The Fallen are set in the Appalachians of West Virginia, among the hardscrabble lives of miners and their families, their often desperate situations. How important is the concept of regionalism to your work?

Dale Bailey: In my West Virginia stories, I’m writing less about a world that I actually knew growing up than a world that took vivid shape in my imagination, both through family lore, and, to a lesser degree, through some formative reading influences. The experiences I had growing up in West Virginia were probably not that different from the kind of experiences people of my generation would have had in other semi-rural places. The town I grew up in wasn’t a mining town, and my parents weren’t miners—my folks were both teachers.

The West Virginia I tend to write about is, I suppose, a kind of historical fantasy, fleshed out from my father’s recollections of growing up in the thirties and forties—his stories of those Depression and war years significantly shaped my imagination—and from my own reading—specifically, Davis Grubb’s wonderful and beautifully written suspense novel, Night of the Hunter, and Breece D’J Pancake’s mainstream short stories, both of which are set in West Virginia.

But I think the specifically rural nature of my characters is more crucial than their roots in Appalachia. In “Touched” and some of those other stories set in Appalachia, what I’m realizing is that I can write about rural, working class people in a meaningful way. Lots of writers helped shape that perspective, both in genre—I’m thinking particularly of Clifford D. Simak and Ray Bradbury—and in the mainstream, including figures as stylistically diverse as Faulkner and Raymond Carver, both of whom often wrote about working class people who don’t really have the language to articulate their lives. I find that there’s a lot of power in the stoic, self-sufficient ethic of those rural people.

Jack Slay, Jr.: Putting together your story collection (The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories to be published by Golden Gryphon in 2003), you commented about how difficult it was to choose what to include and what to omit. What stories do you see as the backbone of your career, the most important in terms of your development as a writer?

Dale Bailey: Definitely the stories that are set in Appalachia—“Touched,” “Quinn’s Way,” “Home Burial.” Those are the stories where I started to find the material that mattered to me. I think as the stories got longer—I’m thinking especially of “The Anencephalic Fields” and “Death and Suffrage”—I began to learn to plot a little better. But I also sought to include those stories that seemed to me somehow resonant.

Jack Slay, Jr.: Do you have a favorite story?

Dale Bailey: It’s a little like choosing between children. There are things I like about all of the stories—even the ones I would rank as nearly complete failures. But I think in certain stories all of the elements gel more fully—plot and character, a certain resonance which perhaps moves in the direction of theme—though as a writer I’m suspicious of theme, which my students too often simplify into message. I’m thinking particularly of “Touched,” “Death and Suffrage,” and a recent novella, “In Green’s Dominion.”

Jack Slay, Jr.: I’m glad you mentioned in “In Green’s Dominion,” because I know you struggled for months to produce that story (which appeared in 4 installments at Ellen Datlow’s Scifiction in July 2002). You strike me as a maddeningly meticulous writer. Say something about your work process.

Dale Bailey: I tend not to write in distinct drafts. Instead of writing the full story, then going back and fixing it in subsequent revisions, I tend to polish and revise constantly as I go, constantly fiddling with the language. This means that the process can be quite slow. One of the most difficult aspects of Clarion was the occasional challenge issued by the instructors—“Write a story in one night,” that kind of thing. I focus quite a bit on the language, especially the sound of the language. I do a lot of reading aloud, much to the distress of innocent family members, I fear.

“In Green’s Dominion” seems to me a case in point, a story that is very much about language, both in the writing itself and at the level of metaphor—a story that inquires into the way language informs and shapes our understanding of the world, its strengths, but also its limitations. The story took a long time to write—the earliest incomplete drafts reach back to about 1993, but I never could seem to find the way through it—though I kept coming back to it year after year. For me, I think that’s an important part of the process, letting the idea ripen until I finally discover the story I’m trying to tell.