What’s in a Name?
An Interview with D. F. Lewis
The career of D. F. Lewis is certainly one to be envied, with over 1,400 stories published in little over fifteen years, and the special Karl Edward Wagner Award presented to him by the British Fantasy Society in 1998. His published collections include Only Connect (written in collaboration with his father), The Weirdmonger’s Tales, and The Best of D. F. Lewis. He also wrote the novella Agra Aska, published by Scorpion Press in 1998. Presently, D. F. Lewis edits Nemonymous, a rare breed of magazine/anthology in which all fiction is published anonymously, and which was inaugurated last November to critical acclaim. I conducted this interview via e-mail in late July 2002.
Luís Rodrigues: At what age did you start writing professionally and what authors were most important to you at the time? Did they play a significant role in your career choice?
D. F. Lewis: I don’t think I’ve ever started writing professionally! Well, I’ve not earned any money from it. I’ve written creatively all my life—off and on. Student poems during my university years in the late sixties—when I also founded a pretentious Dada art thing called the Zeroist Group. We even got a grant for it! I think maybe Nemonymous was born (parthenogenetically) at that time! I am always interested in breaking down barriers towards the ‘pure art’... pretentious or what? Ah well. Whatever the case, I wrote a novel-length accretion called The Visitor in the early seventies, inspired by the fiction works of John Barth, by H. P. Lovecraft (whom I encountered at an impressionable age, having been at school with an HPL fan, Michel Parry, who became a noted anthologist in the seventies)—and by Astrology (which I’ve now lost interest in). And other influences too numerous to mention. In the early eighties, I wrote the novella Agra Aska. Seemed the culmination of various influences at work (Robert Aickman, Poe, Ligotti, Lovecraft, Elizabeth Bowen, Charles Dickens, John Fowles etc.), and was the only thing I really wrote when my children were young. Everything I’ve ever written was on an amateur basis, even when I started submitting stories (inspired by Agra Aska) in 1986 and went on, somehow, to get loads of them published in all sorts of outlets (amateur and professional). It was a sort of mania, obsession—which unaccountably stopped last year with the autonomous (?) emergence of Nemonymous.
Luís Rodrigues: People today may be a little unaccustomed to established authors who deal primarily in short fiction, especially when they are as prolific as yourself. What is it in short fiction that appeals to you?
D. F. Lewis: Stories, at their best, seem to be the purest form of the fiction art—cut to the bone. Even my novel-length works are aspirationally accretions of such items. It just seems the natural way to write fiction—bringing it nearer to reality itself (rather than just suppressed disbelief), as if you’re tapping into a reservoir (Jungian?) of discrete ideas that underpin life itself. So-called novels seem more amorphous, more fabricated.
Luís Rodrigues: Besides, tapping into the Collective Unconscious is particularly important in horror literature…
D. F. Lewis: Yes—and let’s be honest, I see Nemonymous (as it progresses) as a single ‘horror literature’-orientated anthology (an episodic one)—yet with discrete elements of mainstream-literary, magic-realism, fantasy and absurdism as constituents towards that synergy.
