An Interview with Dale Bailey
Jack Slay, Jr.: Has any one book had an especially big impact on your writing?
Dale Bailey: John Crowley’s Little, Big, I think, is the novel that really changed my understanding of what fantasy is, what it can do. He takes so many chances in that book, and it works at so many levels, as pure story, as metaphor, as metafiction, as an examination of the problems of modernity and the loss of the rural life. The writing is stunning. It simply begs to be read aloud, and I have read large sections of it aloud, once again to the distress of family and friends, no doubt—though maybe not, because the writing is just so beautiful. It’s virtually encyclopedic in its knowing deployment of fantasy tropes and ideas. As far as I’m concerned it proves beyond a doubt that the best fantasy stands in accomplishment at the same rank as the best literature period, and reading it really caused me to raise my own ambitions as a writer. I think it’s a masterpiece.
Jack Slay, Jr.: How big a connection is there between earning a Ph.D. in English Literature—all those years of studying mostly canonical lit and reading all that theory-addled criticism—and your writing?
Dale Bailey: Well, as I said, all the theory drove me back to fiction writing. I despise that stuff to this day—see it as pure intellectual gamesmanship, a very different enterprise than the honorable profession of practical criticism, which seeks to enlarge our understanding of what makes books and fiction really a worthwhile enterprise—and which should I think be written in such a way that you can understand it even if you don’t have a Ph.D. in English.
Reading the canonical stuff, however, is wonderful training for a fiction writer. Hemingway has a lot to teach about the power of leaving things unsaid. Faulkner really showed me that the people and places I knew in West Virginia were legitimate subjects for fiction. Things like Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight helped me to understand how archetypes underlie so many of the stories we feel compelled to tell. So that experience was central to the writer I’ve become and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Jack Slay, Jr.: I’ve always admired the fact that you sort of bucked the system when you wrote your dissertation on the use of the haunted house in American fiction and then had it published outside of the academic circle (by Bowling Green State University Popular Press). How do you see American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction slotting into your canon?
Dale Bailey: Well, I wanted to do something that bridged the ivory tower worlds of canonical fiction and the world of genre where I had read and written so much—and the topic of the haunted house struck me as a perfect way to do that because you could start with Hawthorne and Poe at one end and wind up on the other with people like Stephen King. The book tries to erase the lines people draw between those two worlds.
The other thing I tried to do was write the book in a very accessible way—and I’m proud of that. I think people who don’t have a lot of background in literary studies, who don’t have much theoretical knowledge, can follow the book’s argument without any trouble. So in some sense I see the book as very much in keeping with my short fiction, which, as I’ve said, tries to bridge the gap between genre and literary fiction.
That said, I would disagree that the book was published outside the academic circle. It was published by a university press, and by perhaps the leading press in the field of pop culture studies, so it was outside academia only to the extent that pop culture itself stands outside the academy.
