Fantastic Metropolis

For some writers, prose is a means with which to construct an analogue of reality. For Robert Freeman Wexler, fiction is a means with which to de-construct reality. Yet his stories have such a strong sense of linguistic integrity, it’s hard to believe that he isn’t reporting his experiences from a parallel universe.

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Rick Kleffel: Robert, what sort of fiction first drew your interest as a reader?

Robert Freeman Wexler: The usual kid stuff—Hardy Boys, Willard Price’s adventure books (brothers Hal and Roger go off to capture wild animals for their father’s zoo animal distribution company). I found a copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s Reach for Tomorrow and a book called something like 12 Classics of Science Fiction lying by a ditch near the railroad tracks. That was probably the first adult sf I read. I grew up in a house full of books. And some cousins owned a bookstore called The House of Books. So I never had a lack.

Rick Kleffel: And which writers made you want to write yourself?

Robert Freeman Wexler: No one really. Although I read a lot, I don’t think reading is what made me want to write. Realizing I wanted to be a writer happened in college, but I can’t point to anything specific.

Art and music were probably more of a factor in setting off my imagination. One of the things I wanted to do was figure out how to translate into fiction the late ’70s early ’80s punk rock I was listening to in college. How to capture the rawness, or the individualism, but without the prose looking amateurish. Not knowing how to play bass or guitar can work in music, but not being able to move words into their proper configurations doesn’t quite do it.

Later, after college, I discovered Angela Carter and J.G. Ballard, and Patrick White. I remember looking at the beginning of White’s novel, Voss, and knowing I couldn’t do what he was doing but wanting to try.

Rick Kleffel: You obtained a degree in journalism, and worked as a journalist. What led you to this decision?

Robert Freeman Wexler: I’ve never really worked as a journalist. No one would hire me.

I chose journalism because I decided I wanted to be a writer but didn’t know how to go about it. I had never connected books with the people who wrote them. I didn’t know people could be writers.

During college at the University of Texas I wrote for the student paper’s entertainment section (with a student body of 45,000 to 48,000, plus faculty and staff, we had a pretty good daily paper, which was a lot of fun to work for). After college, I wrote some feature articles here and there, but that was it for journalism.

Rick Kleffel: You attended the Clarion workshop. How was this experience? Tell us the gory details.

Robert Freeman Wexler: Complex. Nothing gory. An intense group of naked (metaphorically) writers suffering from sleep deprivation and too much togetherness.

Rick Kleffel: Would you recommend Clarion to would-be writers—even if they don’t intend to write science fiction?

Robert Freeman Wexler: I wouldn’t recommend Clarion to people who aren’t interested in writing fantasy, horror, or science fiction. They would gain something from the intensity of the experience, but the whole thing is set up to produce genre writers. Someone who doesn’t read the genre and isn’t interested in writing it would be lost. But it wouldn’t happen. Someone like that wouldn’t have heard of Clarion.

Even someone like me, who has read a lot of genre, might have a hard time at Clarion because of its orientation toward a more traditional type of genre writing. I’m sure some of my instructors didn’t think I had much future in the genre (one comment from an instructor during our conference was that it was too bad I hadn’t lived in the early 20th century, when my writing style might have been more appreciated; and another said that since I was living in New York City, I should go to Borges lectures where I could try to meet literary editors). This isn’t what I would call an effective teaching method.

But I also had some very good and generous teachers, with whom I’ve since stayed in touch, and my overall experience there was great. One important thing for someone to consider is whether you are firm in your concept of who you are. Not how good you are—because everyone who goes in probably has an inflated view of that (which thankfully levels off after a week). But what kind of writer you want to be. What things make you want to write. Everyone there is vulnerable, exposed, and it’s easy to be swayed by a sort of genre-beast group-think. Which isn’t done consciously (talking about my own experience of course)—there wasn’t someone threatening me unless I turned toward the middle, but I did come out of it with my sense of what I wanted to do having become somewhat muddled, and it took me some years to settle back into trusting myself, trusting my sense of knowing what worked best for me.

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.

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.