An Interview with Steve Rasnic Tem
I’ve wandered a bit far from your question, haven’t I? But, at heart, we’re talking about genre here, I think. My reading never led me to think in terms of genre—I was more interested in figuring out the best way to deal with my own materials, the things I cared about, how to go about creating the Steve Tem genre. When horror or fantasy or whatever fits into the mix, that’s fine, but they’re not essential ingredients for me.
Jeff VanderMeer: What does collaboration with Melanie Tem, your wife, entail? And what do you get from that collaboration that you don’t get from writing solo?
Steve Rasnic Tem: Leo and Diane Dillon used to talk about there being a “third artist” when they collaborated, and I think that’s the way it is with us. We imagine this third writer, and that’s the person who creates these stories, at least when they work the best. It’s not my internal voice speaking the words on the page, and it’s not Melanie’s—it’s someone else’s voice. And that seems to be true whether Melanie starts the story, or I start the story, whether she writes the female character or I do, whether we go back and forth scene to scene, or build it incrementally, each of us writing a bit, and then rewriting the other’s work until our personal voices sink into the language, and that third voice works its way out, and by the time it’s finished we have no idea who wrote what.
Jeff VanderMeer: How has your fiction changed over the years?
Steve Rasnic Tem: In the early days I think many of the stories were like dark little fables, twisted little fairytales, with lone, paranoid characters. The Kafka influence was pretty heavy. With a bit of Calvino and Borges thrown in. And structurally, I’d say a lot of them were on the conservative side. Their concerns were the concerns of a young man in his twenties, early thirties: dealing with women, finding a life partner, creating a place for himself in the world. And a good many stories were about a disturbing childhood recollected, being a powerless child in a world full of not-so-trustworthy adults.
Then there came the time the concerns in the stories shifted to those of a young parent, trying to understand your kids, learning what it takes to be a good father, dealing with all the fears of parenthood, including the fears and passions that go so far past reason, but which almost every parent recognizes. I think some of those stories are among the most nightmarish of my work, and their structure reflects the strong interest I had at the time in dreams and in lucid dreaming.
The last few years my process has gotten looser—I write far more improvisationally than ever before. I’m more willing to take risks with structure and expectation—because, after all, what do you really have to lose? And the subject matter of the stories often has to do with the concerns of a man past fifty, thinking about what has and has not worked in his life, reaffirming for himself how much he loves his family, brooding over the future, the limitations of the body, trying to pull together threads of meaning.
Jeff VanderMeer: Your experimental novel from Subterranean has been in the works for some time. What sparked the idea for the novel and in what way is it experimental?
Steve Rasnic Tem: The Book of Days is experimental in terms of the way it was written—whether that make it experimental as a novel I’m not so sure. It’s structured as a diary. A very strange diary, a diary of the imagination, but a diary all the same.
