Fantastic Metropolis

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.

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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 4^th 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jack Slay, Jr.: The Fallen is being released this month. Tell us about the novel.

Dale Bailey: The Fallen is the story of a young man who returns home following his father’s suicide to the small Appalachian town he grew up in. Once there, he finds himself immersed in a variety of mysteries—not only the mystery surrounding his father’s death, and how it may or not connect to a series of other deaths in the town, but the larger mysteries of his own past, his own identity. Including, I should add, the mystery of just what he may or may not have encountered as a boy while exploring the abandoned coal mines which honeycomb the earth under the town. Structurally, it’s very much a suspense novel with strong supernatural elements—not purely horror in the sense that I’m far less interested in scaring people than in just keeping them turning the pages. I hope it works at multiple levels—that it works as plot-driven suspense and horror, while maintaining that sense of resonance that I try to achieve in my short fiction.

Jack Slay, Jr.: Do you see the novel as a culmination of the themes and ideas that have been working in the stories? I know that the novel had its origins in a story called “Giants in the Earth” (which was, in fact, the working title of the novel).

Dale Bailey: It’s not the culmination in the sense that I will never again return to those ideas, but certainly it gathers in many of the strands that appear in my short fiction. It has the Appalachian setting, the economic hardship and stoicism you find among those rural people, and of course it has the same kind of focus on family, especially on fathers and sons, that you see in the short stuff. I think the one element that sets it apart is that it grapples with issues of faith and unbelief—the essentially unknowable nature of the universe.

But I strongly suspect I’ll keep coming back to that same basic material. I think a lot of writers tend to tell the same kinds of stories over and over again, not because of a dearth of imagination but because those are the themes and locales that move them. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think that drinking from the same well enables you to enrich and explore those ideas further.

Jack Slay, Jr.: Finally, tell us what you’re working on now.

Dale Bailey: I’m working on another novel right now, a book tentatively called Dreamland. It’s a haunted house novel, so to some extent it’s rooted in my academic work on haunted house fiction—an attempt to develop and explore from a fictional angle some of the ideas I touched on as a critic.

Jack Slay, Jr.: What can we expect from Dale Bailey in the near and distant future?

Dale Bailey: In the next year or so, I have a couple new stories coming out in F&SF, plus the Golden Gryphon collection. As for new writing, the first priority is the new novel. When I finish that up, I have several short stories I want to do. There’s also a collaborative mystery novel that I need to get back to, plus several other novel ideas I’ve been mulling over. There’s plenty of things I want to do. The problem for me is finding the time to do it all.