Hey Nicky, thanks for dropping in for a natter. I’m always banging on about looking for more non-American writers to publish in STP; as an American living in Spain, maybe we can consider you an honorary European. How did you end up living in Barcelona and how does it compare to the US?
I’d be honored to take on that honorary status! How it happened is a long story but the short answer is a typical one: “came for work, stayed for love”. As comparisons go, it’s been so long that I don’t have a good sense of what day-to-day life is like in the US anymore, and there are people there who I miss dearly, and my life would be immeasurably better if I could see them and hang out with them on a regular basis. In general, though (and even leaving aside the dire political situation), I‘d say life here compares favorably, very favorably.
As well as being a writer of oddball fiction, you’re also the drummer in the rock ’n’ roll band Scandal Jackson. How did Scandal Jackson form? Do you have any good touring stories?
Scandal Jackson was formed before I was a member, but I’ve been around most of its existence. Basically, it’s a group of five dudes who are old enough to know better but who nevertheless get together once a week to drink beer and make noise and compose songs and then when we accumulate an EP’s worth of stuff we book ourselves some studio time “as a treat”. We don’t gig much and have only played outside of the greater Barcelona metro area once that I recall, so no good tour stories.
All my tour stories would be from a previous band a long time ago. If I told you we listened to music on cassette tapes in the van and used printed Rand McNally road atlases and occasionally had to stop at payphones to get directions, that should give an idea of how long ago. So long ago, in fact, that a no-name band on a tiny indie label could feasibly tour on the other side of the pond not once, not twice, but three times. (This was how I first came to Barcelona.) It was another time! An accident of historical junctures and material conditions and luck allowed me to do what they call “livin’ the dream”, and the thing is I don’t really remember my dreams so I also don’t have many stories about those times either, unfortunately.
You first graced the pages of STP a few years ago with your story “Clarinet”. I hesitate to call “Clarinet” a horror story, but it’s nonetheless shot through with a kind of disquieting anxiety. Where did the idea of this enigmatic, menacing character and his preternatural instrument come from?
The enigmatic, menacing character with the preternatural instrument is me! I taught myself the alto sax first, which I squawked on for a bit, and then I saw a clarinet in a pawn shop, the case of which some previous owner had spraypainted gold and the paint was worn off in spots to reveal the green plastic underneath, and it looked really cool so I bought it. I still keep that case on the shelf, although the horn inside is unplayable. There were a couple of tours where, in my spare moments, I’d take the clarinet out on the street and busk for loose change. I was not very good, only partially knew my way around the fingerings and could barely keep the thing in tune, but on a good day, I’d make enough for a sandwich or a pack of cigarettes, which was handy.
I was living too “in-the-moment” to keep a consistent journal, which is something I regret now, but the interactions between the clarinetist and his victims straight from actual experiences recorded in a surviving notebook of mine. Then, as often happens, a random sentence popped into mind which opened up other story possibilities, in this case the one about, “That mad horn-blower, that itinerant chaos demon!” and the story grew from there, with some fictionalizing of course (i.e., switching some locations, i.e., the praying couple were in Athens, GA not Cleveland, OH, and the person in the window who asked if I knew Auld Lang Syne was not an old poetess but just a random dude and did not invite me upstairs lol).
Music is about as close as I come to believing in actual magic—like, you mean to tell me some people used these complex instruments to create waves in the air and those waves have traversed space and time to affect my psyche or make my body move a certain way? Madness. At the same time, though, for a lot of people out there (despite AC/DC’s arguments to the contrary) rock ‘n roll, or music in general, is indeed noise pollution, or at least it has to the potential to be (something which becomes particularly clear when you’re playing music out on the streets for money). Sound, devalorized as a violation of silence. So while I wasn’t thinking about it explicitly in those terms (I was more just trying to write something cool about a weird guy), I think that weird double valence of music-as-magic vs. sound-as-pollution was especially suggestive to me.
As you can probably tell by the giant block of text above, “Clarinet” is one that’s still close to my heart, and having it published in Seize the Press was a huge honor and a vote of confidence at a time I sorely needed one, which I’ll always be grateful for.
You returned last year with your lizard queen sci-fi “Manywhere, Manyone, Manything”. It’s the only thing of yours I’ve read that I think has an old school adventurous space-faring sci-fi vibe. It has that signature Whitley strangeness to it of course, but what prompted you to write this kind of pseudo-pulpy science fiction?
I’m not the most well- or widely-read person by a long shot in pulp SFF terms, but I’ve loved a good old-fashioned Weird Tale since before I knew was Weird Tales was—Conan, specifically, I devoured as a kid (those Lancer/Ace paperback collections with the Frazetta covers, classic stuff). But “Manywhere, Manyone, Manything”, probably comes more from my love of Clark Ashton Smith, to be honest. In particular stories that kind of blur the line between the “SF” and the “F”, for example “The Door to Saturn” (like a buddy-cop film about two enemy wizards who literally go through a door to fucking Saturn) or “The Seven Geases” (in which a problematic sword-and-sorcery guy gets repeatedly humiliated by supernatural creatures, including some lizard-people doing science experiments in an underground lab, it rules very hard). Of course there’s other influences mixed around in there, but I think that’s the primary one.
Deep down, I was really just trying to write a story about the feeling of being far from home in time and space, but “Manywhere, Manyone, Manything” ended up needing much more torture and alien sex than those stories typically have.
Your newest story is “The Last Spiderbox” in Cosmic Horror Monthly, about a young artist trying to make it as a spiderbox sculptor. There are some interesting themes about the nature and purpose of art, and reflecting on creating art in a world full of horrors. Did you come to any conclusions in the process of writing this story, or are you still trying to figure out the answers to the questions it raises?
Nope, still trying! But OK, to answer that, let me start by saying that I am the kind of nerd who likes to have “done the reading” when listening to a podcast. One I like is called Game Studies Study Buddies (I don’t even like videogames but I like their podcast), and when Fredric Jameson recently passed away they did an episode on his essay “Post-modernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, which I had never actually read. And as I was “doing the reading”, I scribbled down a bunch of notes, including this bit: “Left-cultural producers and theorists—particularly those formed by bourgeoise cultural traditions issuing from romanticism and valorizing spontaneous, instinctive, or unconscious forms of genius–…have often by reaction allowed themselves to be unduly intimidated by the repudiation, in bourgeoise aesthetics and most notably in high modernism, of one of the age-old functions of art—namely, the pedagogical and the didactic” … which neatly gets at one of the doubts that inspired “The Last Spiderbox”. To some extent, that repudiation of the pedagogical and the didactic is the aesthetic water the protagonist of the story and all of us really are swimming in without even recognizing it as water (although our protagonist is exhorted to repudiate other things as well). But what happens to that resistance to the practical, the programmatic, dare I say the political, when in our process of swimming around in those ‘bourgeiouse cultural traditions’, we are confronted with things like, say, the settler colonial state Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people? What is the coherent response expected of us as “left-cultural producers”?
Personally, I can’t think of any way to answer that question better than Vajra Chandrasekera’s blog post from November 2023, “Every Throne Must Fall” and I encourage everyone to read it now if they have not already.
“The Last Spiderbox” started as a very different (much worse) story—different title, different setting and characters, different concerns—which Chandrasekera’s essay inspired me to ‘untrunk’ and revisit, to put those little gene-modded spiders to another kind of work. “The work that must be done by art,“ he writes, “[…] is located in the contact it makes with the conditions of its production, which in our time and our field is an intermingled machine of the industrial and ideological.” In the end, though, it’s hard to shake the feeling that a short story is one drop in the bucket. Insufficient? Yes. Better than nothing? Also maybe yes. The order of those terms may just depend on one’s emotional state, like there are some days I’d say, “It’s better than nothing, but insufficient” and others when I’d say, “It’s insufficient, but it’s better than nothing”. In any case, as soon as the Paypal comes through, I’ll be passing the payment for the story to one of countless crowdfunding efforts for Gaza, so hopefully the story can be an unambiguous good to the world in that way, if nothing else.
I’m a regular reader of your newsletter, Short Story Rex, which does what it says on the tin. What are some of your favourite short stories you’ve recommended since starting the newsletter?
Glad to hear you’re reading and enjoying the newsletter, and doubly glad issue 12 of STP is out for me to read and recommend stories from! More than favorite stories per se, I have my list of favorite writers I’ve recommended, which will surprise no one who reads SSR: for example, you got your Grimes’s, your Camilla Grudova’s, your Ha’s (just to name a few from the G-H section).
Mainly, what I’ve always tried to do is keep a space for not the necessarily the newest, latest stories published each month but for stories from the recent and not-so-recent past, to “extend the half-life” of short stories, which tends to be vanishingly short. So in that spirit why not check out the first story I ever recommended on the newsletter: Violet Allen’s “The Venus Effect”? Or ”The Cave” by Liliana Colanzi, or ““Mountain” by a writer named Trevor Bonas who I’m not sure has ever published anything from outside this one story in Propagule. And going way back in history, I will never shut up about Sherwood Anderson’s “The Dumb Man” or Cordwainer Smith’s “A Planet Named Shayol”.
Cheers again Nicky, was cool to get to chat to you about your work.
Thank you so much for the invitation!
NM Whitley is a writer, teacher, musician, and translator whose work has appeared in Seize The Press, Gamut, Short Fiction, JAKE., The Café Irreal, Propagule, The Barcelona Review, and others. For more, go to linktr.ee/nmwhitley.