James Dorr
combines the charm of a gentleman born in the US South with the wiles of a
near-New York City upbringing, the canniness of a one-time New England
resident, and the guile of an outwardly stolid Midwesterner. Or so he says. It is known that he was born in Florida, grew
up in New Jersey, went to college in Massachusetts, and currently lives in
Indiana. He is a short story writer and
poet working mainly in dark fantasy and horror with forays into science fiction
and mystery, and has previously worked as a technical writer for an academic
computing center, associate editor on a city magazine, a nonfiction freelance
writer, and a semi-professional Renaissance musician. In addition to three prose collections and
one of poetry, Dorr has had nearly 400 appearances in publications ranging from
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine to Yellow Bat Review.
He also has a
cat named Wednesday, for Wednesday Addams in the original 1960s TV show The
Addams Family.
Wecome to the blog, James.
How has your
environment affected your writing?
How has it
not? But environment is more than just
the things around one, it’s the noticing of these things -- the close
attention. Travel can be a part of it,
but there’s also research, and the leisure to visit the library. For instance, in the title story of my latest
book, the action at the end takes place in the Boston, Massachusetts area where
I lived for about five years. But the
story starts in San Francisco, where I’ve never been, yet through research --
even if it may have ended up being condensed into just a few sentences -- I
hope I’ve made it seem as alive as the locations later on. But then there’s also the environment of the
mind, the completely made up, influenced in part by the things one has
read. In my own case I’ll cite The
Complete Greek Tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (say
what? For an explanation -- and why you
might read these too, if you haven’t -- see my introduction to Telling Tales
of Terror: Essays on Writing Horror
& Dark Fiction, Kim Richards, ed., Damnation Books, 2012); The
Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe; Ray Bradbury’s The October Country and
The Martian Chronicles, et al.; I Am Legend by Richard Matheson.
. . . The list goes on.
Give a short
synop of your most recently published book.
Art and
creation, Medusa and creatures of the sea, blood-drinking with or without
foreign entanglement, musical instruments fashioned from bone, Cinderella and
sleeping beauties, women who keep pets, insects and UFOs, ghouls as servants
and restless undead. And Isis herself as
both weeping mother and vulture-winged icon of death and destruction. These are among the subjects that inspire the
seventeen stories (plus opening poem) in The Tears of Isis, my latest
collection published last May (2013) by Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing ( http://perpetualpublishing.com/the-tears-of-isis/. Citing the book’s blurb, “the Elizabethan
poet Sir Philip Sidney spoke of art as ‘making things either better than nature
bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature,’” and so in
The Tears of Isis I hope will be found both the beauty that Sidney and
others admired, and also the grotesque, the strange and bizarre.
How much of
yourself is hidden in the characters in the book?
The Tears of
Isis
has an overall theme on the link between beauty and destruction, of art and
death, even beginning with a poem and ending with a story that are both about
sculptors. I don’t sculpt myself, but I
used to do some illustrating and I still cartoon a little. I also play music. I write poems. I like to perform at readings. In short, I relate to the artistic side of a
number of the stories’ characters, whether directly or indirectly -- as well as
the problem solving side, because that’s a part of the creative process
too. But at the same time, I also face
the destructive (including self-destructive) side of creation, for example the
isolation it forces when one must concentrate on a work in progress.
What challenges
did you face while writing this book?
For The Tears
of Isis, part of the attraction was that I’d have a free hand from start to
finish, the only “restriction” being that it had to total at least 60,000
words, in contrast to previous fiction collections for which I simply supplied
a number of stories for the publisher to choose from and, from them, construct
the actual book. So I had to learn to be
an editor: to look at a large number of
stories and narrow them down to a manageable few, and then to look at these as
groupings from which I could choose what I thought might be an appropriate
theme, in this case the idea of art and beauty as holding within themselves a
destructive aspect (and thus beginning with a poem of Medusa as sculptress, at
least symbolically turning her models into stone, while the closing title story
comes back to another sculptress who leaves her own trail of victims behind
her). From there the challenge was to
select individual stories that I could order in such a way that each might seem
to flow into the next in at least some aspect -- even if completely different
in other ways -- offering readers a wide variety in themselves, yet adding up
to a greater unity when the book is taken as a whole. That is, hopefully, leaving readers with a
feeling that what they’ve just read amounts, in some way, to more than just a
few evenings’ entertainment.
What do you
think is the greatest lesson you’ve learned about writing so far? What advice
can you give new writers?
The first thing
is character, even if sometimes it may not seem apparent. A. J. Budrys defined the first three elements
of a story as a Being (character) in a Situation (environment)
with a Problem (motivation). It’s
the solving of the problem (or failure to solve) that becomes the story. But what makes a character is the author’s
getting into his or her (or its, especially if it’s a villain -- it could be an
alien or a sentient monster) head. To become
that being, see through its eyes, hear through its ears, smell through its
nose, feel with its feelings -- themselves influenced by the being’s
environment too -- and convey those feelings to us as if you were yourself the
character. This is the meaning of “show,
don’t tell”: Telling is an author’s
description of a character; showing is the author’s conveying an understanding
of what that character feels and does and why.
And one more
lesson is persistence. Victory comes not
only to the bold, but to those who keep at it, the same as a character in a
story, suffering defeats (rejections) and disappointments but still striving
forward until a goal has been reached.
And then realizing that that’s just the first goal.
Can you tell us
your future writing goals/projects?
Last month, as I
write this, I sold a story called “Casket Girls” to the electronic magazine Daily
Science Fiction, a vampire tale relating a legend of New Orleans, which was
the location of 2013’s World Horror
Convention. So in a sense, that was my
“What did you do on summer vacation?” story.
In a larger sense, though, I’ve been working on a series of stories
that, somewhat like the late Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronlcles, add
up to a sort of quasi-novel. Set in the
“Tombs,” a huge necropolis and its environs on a far-future, dying Earth,
sixteen of these have been published already in various places, including three
(two reprints, “Mara’s Room” and “River Red,” and one, “The Ice Maiden,” for
the first time) in The Tears of Isis, and another, “Raising the Dead,”
is scheduled to be out in White Cat Publications’s steampunk anthology Airships & Automatons. While I’m currently continuing to treat these
as separate items, writing and marketing them as stand-alone stories, I may eventually
start to look into a book publication for these as well, possibly with a larger
publisher.
Then another
project of sorts, of which The Tears of Isis is itself a part, is to
start getting some of my older stories back into print, often in anthologies
that sound intriguing in themselves, but are unlikely to pay as much as might
be appropriate for an original story.
This, of course, has something to do with the economy too, but I’ve been
writing long enough that I don’t want some of my earliest professional work to
be forgotten.
And then, of
course, I’m writing new stories -- and lots of poetry -- often these days
fairly short and tailored to the internet market, of which “Casket Girls” is a
recent example.
Where can folks
learn more about your books and events, and are your books available in print
and ebook formats? (please provide the buy link for easy reader accessibility)
I have four
full-size collections, more information on all of which can be found by
clicking their pictures in the center column of my blog, along with several
single-story electronic chapbooks and a slew of individual fiction and poetry
appearances, some of which can be found on my Amazon author Page, http://www.amazon.com/James%20Dorr/e/B004XWCVUS/ref=la_B004XWCVUS_pg_1?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_82%3AB004XWCVUS&ie=UTF8&qid=1382916681
My first two
(mostly) fiction collections are Strange Mistresses: Tales of Wonder and Romance and Darker
Loves: Tales of Mystery and Regret
from Dark Regions Press, which are available in print via Amazon, et al., as
well as directly from the publisher by clicking
http://www.darkregions.com/james-dorr/
My third,
all-poetry collection is Vamps: A
Retrospective, from Sam’s Dot Publishing/White Cat Publications, and can be
found in both print and ebook editions at http://www.whitecatpublications.com/products-page/poetry/vamps-2/
My newest
collection is The Tears of Isis which is available in print and
electronic forms from Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing, as noted above, as
well as on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon UK. The local (American) Amazon site is located
at http://www.amazon.com/The-Tears-Isis-James-Dorr/dp/0988748843
Then finally
there’s my blog itself for up-to-date information on sales, books, etc., as
well as an occasional sample poem or story at http://jamesdorrwriter.wordpress.com
Wishing you the best of sales in the new year, James!
