An Interview with Dale Bailey
Jack Slay, Jr.: I know you, too, as a superb stylist, one who agonizes over every word, one who rewrites and rewrites a sentence until it reverberates with exactly the right beat. And as a consequence, I know you’ve been criticized a couple of times as being a plotless writer, one who focuses more on the lyricism rather than the heroics of character. How do you answer this criticism? How important is plot in the scheme of your writing?
Dale Bailey: I suppose it’s a valid criticism. I think my short fiction especially depends as much on mood and atmosphere as anything else. The novel is different: as a suspense novel, it has to be plotted, of course, but it took me a long time and lots of false starts to hammer the plot out, and even then I tried to focus as much on the language as I would in shorter pieces. I think in a piece that’s working well, you ultimately can’t separate language from story; everything becomes completely intertwined. But you’re right, for me, it’s very much about getting the language right.
Jack Slay, Jr.: Part of your style is the incorporation of a vast, myriad vocabulary (I see those strange, rarely used words like tiny atom bombs of knowledge detonating amid your prose). I’m stealing this question from Jeff VanderMeer: Do you have a favorite word?
Dale Bailey: Today it’s vertiginous.
Jack Slay, Jr.: And tomorrow?
Dale Bailey: Crepuscular. It pays to enrich your word power.
Jack Slay, Jr.: How would you classify your writing? Or better: what sort of fiction do you see yourself as writing? Do you see yourself as a genre writer?
Dale Bailey: I think I’m definitely a genre writer—I’ve written very few pieces that would appeal to purely mainstream editors, and I really love genre fiction. I find it in many cases more exciting than mainstream contemporary fiction. Yet I try very much to infuse my work with a certain mainstream sensibility. By this I mean that I try to be constantly aware of the language in a piece of writing, and of the metaphorical dimension latent in most fantasy ideas. One of the writers I’ve always admired is Hawthorne, because for him the supernatural, the fantastic, were very much metaphors for the inner life. In Hawthorne’s fantasies—“Young Goodman Brown,” “Rappicinni’s Daughter,” “The Artist of the Beautiful”—you learn a great deal about what it means to be a human being. Everything is metaphorically charged. I admire that quality wherever I find it, in writers from the traditional canon, like Hawthorne, and in writers working in genre today, people like Lucius Shepard.
Jack Slay, Jr.: What about your reading influences? I know you read a lot of mainstream and mystery/crime, but your stories are wholly in the sf/fantasy field. How much did your father (who also holds a Ph.D. in English Literature and taught for more than thirty years at Concord College) influence what you read and, in turn, what you write?
Dale Bailey: I read very broadly, especially in fantasy, science fiction, and mainstream fiction, with a generous side of mystery. I think my early immersion in fantasy—my father introduced me to Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and Edgar Rice Burroughs when I was seven or eight, and I discovered people like Robert Silverberg, Stephen King, and Harlan Ellison for myself a little later on—shapes the kind of ideas I have to this day. Bradbury’s short fiction was an absolutely formative influence—I can remember reading and re-reading his collections when I was in fifth and sixth grade. My later reading in the mainstream and in the literary traditions you study in graduate programs probably shaped the way I approach those ideas.
