Jeff VanderMeer Interview
Jeff VanderMeer is a veteran of the literary speculative fiction wars. A writer, editor, publisher, columnist, reviewer… you name it, and Jeff has done it, and for more publications than I care to list. What’s more, he is an individual among individuals—a unique voice in both his own writing and in his editing/publishing.
So it was with great pleasure (I’m an admirer!) that I got to ask him a few oddball questions about his new collection, City of Saints and Madmen, as well as some other things that I’ve been wondering…
Gabe Chouinard: Jeff, it’s always a pleasure to talk with you, and being able to interview you is, I think, even better. So, on the heels of your trip to England; how are you?
Jeff VanderMeer: Energized—first a wonderful dinner with China Miéville, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Darren Nash, Dave Mathews, and Mark Roberts in London and then a long weekend with Storyville, a writer’s group I belong to, on the northeast coast of England. I’ve come back from England with a horrible cold, insomnia, and an intense desire to write.
Gabe Chouinard: It has to be something about the climate, or the landscape; just something about Europe in general makes me want to write! I completely understand Graham Joyce’s decision to move to Greece in order to write his first novel. Foreign landscapes are condusive to creativity, I’m sure. Think so?
Jeff VanderMeer: Two things are at work. First, the obvious stimulus to the senses of unfamiliar places. Second, that the place you live in always looks different when you come back from such a trip. England is for me a kind of second home—I feel very comfortable there and would love to live there someday. The sense of history is so much deeper than in the United States. The atmosphere. Everything. I believe that a good writer finds something new even in a blade of grass in his or her backyard, but there is an undefinable catharsis to travel that I do love.
Gabe Chouinard: You have a collection out now, City of Saints and Madmen—a trade paperback from Cosmos, and soon a limited edition hardcover from Prime—that gathers together various stories and assorted pieces set in the world of Ambergris. What can you tell me about this collection?
Jeff VanderMeer: Ambergris is a fantastical city somewhat akin to a combination of Victorian London and a Southeast Asian city. Nothing supernatural or magical occurs there, but it is definitely surreal. The city itself becomes a kind of extra character. The trade paperback collects the core four novellas in the Ambergris cycle. The hardcover includes an additional 45,000 words of new fiction, copious amounts of artwork that add to the text rather than illustrate it, and a number of metafictional flourishes—not least of which being that the cover includes a vignette as do the front and back cover flaps. I would also note that at least one story experiments in a way that has rarely if ever been attempted before. I’m rather smugly happy about this.
Gabe Chouinard: It is definitely a living, breathing city. Did you set out to consciously feature the city that way, or did it grow like that, so to speak?
Jeff VanderMeer: Ambergris has always, since it first popped into my head, been complete. When I add to it now, I often feel as if I am reporting on an existing place. I do also make a conscious effort to incorporate the more bizarre pieces of the real world into Ambergris. I’m always secretly delighted with the guesses reviewers make as to what I imagined and what I stole from history.
Gabe Chouinard: This is truly an ambitious project. How long have you been writing about Ambergris? Is this a Tolkienesque lifelong obsession for you? Is Ambergris central to your “oeuvre?”
Jeff VanderMeer: I have been writing about Ambergris since 1992 and it has slowly devoured my other fictional output. It is unclear at the moment whether it will become a lifelong obsession or come to an end with perhaps ocassional returns to it. Ambergris has been central to my growth as a writer since 1992, in that it has allowed me to explore a number of themes and ideas. The setting can be used for almost anything and therefore it doesn’t constrain me even as it imposes its own rules. I’ve been lucky that this has occurred, since I now write within a kind of surreal dark fantasy niche which is more instantly identifiable than before, when I would write mainstream, SF, fantasy, and experimental stories. I still write the same types of stories—they just all have the same setting now.
