Fantastic Metropolis

Rick Kleffel: Does reality influence your fiction? That is, do you read a news story—or have an experience—and tell yourself you want to use some portion of it in a story?

Robert Freeman Wexler: Everything influences my fiction, news stories, overheard conversations, music. In Springdale Town started with me going to a movie alone, in Great Barrington, MA (where I was living at the time), and finding the place empty. No one to take money, no one at the concession, no other patrons. I took out my notebook and started writing about someone who can’t find any other people. Later, someone came out to run the ticket booth, and people came to see the movie. It was probably only ten minutes of being alone, but that was enough to get me going.

Rick Kleffel: Do you think that you’ll eventually “work out the weird” and write literary fiction without altering reality?

Robert Freeman Wexler: Anything is possible, but I doubt it. I’m not interested in realism. I’ve only had one story published that isn’t a fantasy (“The Secret Bag,” in The Journal of Experimental Fiction), but it isn’t realistic either.

Rick Kleffel: Your work thus far seems to have been building up steam in terms of length, with In Springdale Town, your novella, being the longest work yet. Do you know how long a piece is going to be before you start it?

Robert Freeman Wexler: I usually know whether something is a novel or a story. Springdale started shorter and grew. My first novel, which I wrote before Springdale although it’s being published later, started as a novel. The first draft was longer and each draft after that was shorter.

Rick Kleffel: You’ve just sold a novel to Prime Books. What can you tell me about the novel without having to kill me?

Robert Freeman Wexler: The title is Circus of the Grand Design (excerpt), and it’s about a guy named Lewis who joins a circus (with that name) after an incident that makes it necessary for him to leave town in a hurry. He works as a publicist, and that’s what he thinks he’ll be doing for the circus. Everything is more difficult and mysterious than he expected.

It’s kind of a combination of Michael Moorcock and “Dr. Who” (the campy British TV series about a time-and-space-traveling busybody). I love Moorcock’s multiverse, the idea of all these alternate versions of our world floating around somewhere. And from “Dr. Who”, the idea of something being different on the inside than it is on the outside (Dr. Who’s vehicle looks like an old English phone booth, but on the inside…).

In my novel, the circus train doesn’t travel on normal tracks (if it has tracks at all), and doesn’t visit places that exist in Lewis’s world. Lewis seems to be the only one among the circus crew who notices all the unusual things; he attempts to explore the train and decipher its mysteries. He’s somewhat of a man alone, but he does interact a lot with the rest of the crew. And he gets involved with the earth mother goddess Cybele.

Rick Kleffel: What was the genesis of the book?

Robert Freeman Wexler: During my lunch break from my job at the time, I was reading Angela Carter’s Fireworks collection. I finished the story, “The Loves of Lady Purple,” put the book down, and this novel popped into my head. I went back to my desk and wrote an outline, then started working on it the next day.

The book doesn’t take anything specific from “Lady Purple.” More like it caused a re-arrangement of my brain (the story is about a marionette that comes to life, so maybe reading the story made my brain come to life). I had also recently finished Carter’s Nights at the Circus—that’s a more obvious influence, both being circus novels, and when I was writing the first draft I thought of Lewis as a descendent of the character Jack Walser from Nights at the Circus.

The first sentence of “Lady Purple”—“Inside the pink-striped booth of the Asiatic Professor only the marvellous existed and there was no such thing as daylight” is an incantation, and an invitation to enter and leave disbelief outside. I would like for my writing to be able to do that too.

Rick Kleffel: Do you do a lot of re-writing on your short stories? Did you find yourself approaching the novel differently?

Robert Freeman Wexler: I rewrite everything a lot, novel and stories. I’m hoping that what I’m working on now requires less rewriting because I have a better idea of what’s happening.

Rick Kleffel: And what are you working on now?

Robert Freeman Wexler: A short novel about a sculptor in present-day New York City who becomes obsessed with a 19th century painting and its painter. Almost finished. It’s fairly straightforward, though there are two sections of a journal kept by the 19th century painter. The first journal section, a stand-alone story, will be appearing in the anthology Polyphony 4.

Rick Kleffel: Thanks!

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Rick Kleffel edits The Agony Column, a webzine of book reviews, news and commentary. He writes reviews for Cemetery Dance magazine. His fiction has been published in Grue, DeathRealm, Winter Chills and most recently in The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases.