Fantastic Metropolis

Rick Kleffel: Your fiction isn’t easy to categorize or even describe; it’s more of a “You have to read this story!” experience. Do you avoid genre tools; say futuristic settings, or inventions, or supernatural entities?

Robert Freeman Wexler: I wouldn’t say I avoid anything. I’m not particularly interested in writing about futuristic settings or gadgets. But that could change any time. I don’t want to say “I will never…” because anything is possible.

When I started writing, I considered what I was doing to be more reaction against K-Mart realism than against genre. I wasn’t thinking about genre at all. I still don’t think about genre when I write; I write what works for the piece I’m writing, and I write what reflects my interests and obsessions (caves, surrealism, food…). I tend to have solitary characters who are unable to feel comfortable among the rest of humanity. The “man alone” story. I tried to push that to an extreme in Springdale, so I could go on from there and have some very social characters. The “man (or woman) alone” story is innately disturbing, maybe because the act of reading is solitary and the reader would prefer that the characters interact more with other people and are uncomfortable when the characters are alone.

Rick Kleffel: Your works thrive on a very deep sense of mystery. For example, the short story “Valley of the Falling Clouds” grabs the reader with a description of a world that’s not quite our world, but certain elements suggest it might, at least, once have been our world. But that’s not the point of the story. When you’re writing a story, are you trying to create the mystery or unravel it?

Robert Freeman Wexler: Unravel. Because I have no idea what is going to happen.

Rick Kleffel: Let’s discuss “The Valley of Falling Clouds”. What did you start this story with?

Robert Freeman Wexler: An image of these solid clouds rolling down and wrecking this guys house. I didn’t know who he was, or under what circumstances clouds would do that… And that was where I began the story (with some flashbacks to show who the man was). That was the wrong place but I stuck with that for a while.

Rick Kleffel: Do you know more about them than we see in the story?

Robert Freeman Wexler: All I know about the clouds is what Rex (the point-of-view character) knows. I didn’t postulate a plausible reason why clouds could solidify and fall from the sky. I like to throw contrasting images or things together to see what happens. Usually, that thing becomes my association for the story—rather than the title I think of the thing, the cloud story, the bread story, the painting story…

Rick Kleffel: How much of a story do you understand in your mind before you start writing, and how much do you discover as you write?

Robert Freeman Wexler: I know very little. I have a situation of some sort, and a character to go with it, but I have no idea what is going to happen. I have to keep writing, and at some point, close to the end, I see where it’s going.

Rick Kleffel: Your stories are also intensely based in characters. You seem to enjoy extending the influence of the character’s perceptions into the “real world” that you create for the characters with your prose. Can you comment on the joy you seem to take in bending reality for your characters?

Robert Freeman Wexler: I don’t know if I’d refer to it as joy. The way I write, bending reality, is the way I have to write. I don’t know how to do it any other way.

Rick Kleffel: As far as reality goes, in the PS Publishing novella In Springdale Town, you insert lots of “real” external texts into the narrative. Did you design the look of these inserted texts?

Robert Freeman Wexler: Did you think those were real?

It was the publisher’s idea to do them on the side, rather than as footnotes. I was too close to the work at that point to have thought of doing them that way, so it’s great that Pete Crowther suggested it. I like them much better on the side. I did the actual page layout (it’s what I do to earn a living).

Rick Kleffel: Are they evidence of your journalistic work creeping in?

Robert Freeman Wexler: No. More from wanting to play with form. And I had recently read Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, which is filled with footnotes about a fictional philosopher with whom the narrator is obsessed.