Michael Solender is known to everyone who visits A Twist Of Noir, where you can find many fine examples of his chiselled dark stories.  If you don’t know what I mean check out ‘Seventy-two Hours Or Less’.

He worked for years in Corporate America as a Human Resources professional and is now giving worthy attention to his creative output that ranges from noir to music reviews. He is a consummate professional in his approach to writing and manages to achieve an edginess in his prose that is built on a carefully refined technique.

Michael met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about theatre and insects.

Scroll to the end of the interview for more links to Michael’s work..
.
.
.
Your stories often contain detailed descriptions of physical processes and use the alien menace of insects to achieve their effect. Why do these two themes preoccupy you?

Process fascinates me. I like understanding how things work and how they are put together. When writing I like to create strong visuals. Sequence of actions and activities are important to me in developing scene and character. What I don’t do is describe motivation or purpose behind these actions or the why behind the process. I leave this for the reader to assign.

Early on as I started to get feedback on my pieces people shared with me all sorts of wild and way out theories behind what they thought was going on in my characters’ heads. Outlandish notions of why people did things, what they were thinking and what must be driving them. Stuff so out there that I could never have possibly imagined it.

I quickly came to realize the power that lies in what the reader brings to one’s work and how, if provided a template that was detailed enough, the reader would project all sorts of their own motivations, thoughts and emotions upon the framework that I laid out. That is what makes a story so satisfying for people, they bring their own sensibilities and experience to everything they read. People don’t want things so detailed that they can’t fill in some blanks on their own.

The same is said for insects or alien menace. These are blank canvases for people to project their own fears and insecurities upon. I try to be descriptive in terms of shape and form but don’t want to suggest what they mean to my characters or the readers. That is up for them to conjure up. The fear and horror of the individual reader will be far greater than anything I can assign. Why not let them do the hard part of frightening themselves?
.
.
.
In Franz Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ travelling salesman Gregor Samsa wakes to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect and the story has been interpreted as a dramatisation of alienation. Imagine you are one of the readers you mention, what outlandish things do you see in insect tales and what do you find frightening?

I interpret Kafka’s Samsa as embodying more than alienation with the external world. Anyone who finds himself a monstrous vermin has in effect met the enemy and the enemy is he.

Who amongst us does not find the prospect of unlocking our core hidden self, our most base desires, peccadilloes and peculiarities as perhaps the most frightening and disgusting discoveries we can make? Exploring and enjoying behaviors and beliefs that conventional society finds abhorrent does not make for a well socialized citizen. Most of us can keep these in check.

I worked for many years with a behavioral psychologist who was a well researched expert in the field of psychological assessment. Large firms retained him to evaluate executive candidates for selection and promotion. He also did a fair amount of public sector work and evaluated law enforcement candidates.

He often spoke of the incredibly fine distinction between the psychological profiles of successful law enforcement personnel and sociopaths – the difference he said was very slight between people who thought about and were fascinated with non-normative desires and those who acted upon them.

My own fears are probably run of the mill and pedestrian. Wild animals, large or small frighten me upon initial discovery, especially if I don’t expect to see them.

I wrote a Halloween story a while back called Orange Dot. It was about a suburban couple who liked to take their morning walks through the neighborhood quite early before they day got going. This couple, like my wife and I, walked their neighborhood in the dark and were confronted by all sorts of things that bump in the night. Fear doesn’t appeal to the rational brain; it is only the irrational part of me that fears something will jump out of the woods to harm me.

The greatest fear I have is of drowning and the ocean. I used to be a very strong swimmer but have become a bit soft in my advancing years and a few years back my wife and I had a scare in Mexico after she got caught in the rip current. One moment she was right next to me and the next she was fifty yards away and trying to swim directly in, the worst thing you can do as it tires you out and pulls you under.

I ran along the shore line to the point where she was and swam out to get her, when I reached her she was exhausted, throwing up and almost drowning. I had her swim parallel to the shore, where I could keep her afloat, holding her hair tightly and swimming with her until we made it back in. It was the most afraid I have ever been, I really thought we were both goners.
.
.
.
Do you think that large corporations eliminate identity in their workers?

Work and self actualization are not mutually exclusive. A small number of individuals can find that their work is satisfying, innervating and perhaps even noble. I envy them. Most people I know work to live and definitely do not live to work.

I am afraid in my experience the overwhelming majority of people are trapped into careers and jobs that not only create an environment that stifles individual creativity and individual voice but goes further than identity elimination and can drain one’s very soul.

Large organizations are the worst because the infrastructures that are created become so cumbersome and institutionalized that it becomes almost impossible for those in power to recognize their inefficiencies and often, contrarian outcomes to stated corporate goals.

For almost thirty years I was an “organization development professional” much of the time for Fortune 500 corporations. I was often called upon by senior management to help shake things up, change the status quo and work with organization leaders in aligning their goals with those of the corporation.

It became a lesson in futility for me. I had the opportunity to interface with those on the frontline, who were rightfully distrustful of management and rarely asked for their input even though they interfaced directly with the customer. I also dealt with top executives who often didn’t trust the workers to think for themselves and prescribed everything down to the minutest actions.

Functional groups often had competing, not complimentary goals and reward systems. All this leads to work-arounds and self preservation, people end up abdicating their thought process and quit voicing their opinions. To protect what little sanity they have left, they take lane of least resistance and end up becoming a mindless droid, it is so much easier to do this than continually piss up a rope.

For me I could find pockets of change and success, though in the end the system is simply too powerful to be changed from the bottom up, even top down efforts only succeed less than twenty-five percent of the time. The average tenure of a Fortune 500 CEO is less than five years, what does that say??
.
.
.
It indicates you are inside a power structure. To what extent do you think the basic tenets of power and rule advocated by Machiavelli in ‘The Prince’ apply today in the politics of big businesses and the way they are structured?

Machiavelli gets perhaps an undeserved bad rap as people are quick to forget, or don’t recognize that the time and place in which he lived was quite tumultuous and did not lend itself to democratic principles.

Don’t get me wrong, he’s not a guy I’d like to have over for dinner nor do I subscribe to the cruelties he advocated in the name of protecting the state, I just think we need to keep in mind that Florence at that period in history was quite chaotic and he was advocating tactics that could bring some sense of order to the chaos – not dissimilar to martial law or what we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Business is NOT a democracy and I never have advocated equal “voting rights” amongst workers and management. The Machiavellian “my way or the highway” management style is dead. The contemporary business leader understands conceptually that participatory management will lead to results more aligned with management outcomes than the stick.

The real problem, in my mind is not between management and the worker, it is between management and itself. Today’s organizations set up inherent competition between Marketing, Operations, Info Systems, and Finance etc. The mini-Machiavellis come in the shape of department heads who won’t play nice with their peers and/or act in the best interest of their functional groups even when that is at odds with the overall business goals. Ie: “I’m not going to give up headcount, even though I don’t need them and the dollars could be better used elsewhere. If I lose these headcount, I lose power…”
.
.
.
Which writers do you admire and why?

I’m drawn quite often to traditionalists and playwrights.

Theodore Dreiser is a classic American author who wrote my all time favorite book, An American Tragedy. The story is that of an ambitious young man who comes from very little means and a poor background, gets introduced to power, wealth and society and is ultimately ruined by betraying the values he was brought up with. It builds like a rambling freight train and leaves such a rich and lush trail of pain and devastation. Dreiser is a master at tapping into readers psyche and exposing rawness that we all can summon given the right framework. I reread this book every year and never tire of it.

David Mamet is a genius. No one writes better dialogue. Many have seen his plays, films and now television. I suggest they read the plays, Oleanna and Glengarry Glen Ross. Brilliant pitch, tone and fire. He is a masterful craftsman and uses talk overs, interruption and emotion better than anyone I know of.

Garrison Keillor is a native Minnesotan and someone I grew up reading and listening to on the radio. I have many times been to see The Prairie Home Companion in St. Paul. The man knows satire and is a fine, modern day Mark Twain. He is biting with his wit and spot on in his critiques. He is a frequent book reviewer for the New York Times and provides wonderful insight.

Jim Thompson is a classic noir writer and was one of the best pulp fiction writers going. Nothing More Than Murder is my favorite Thompson tome though he has tons of great work available including $.99 Kindle downloads of short stories. His earlier work is darker and draws heavily on his own alcoholic troubles.

I bought a Kindle for my wife but have commandeered it and am just starting to dedicate more time to novels as I have gotten away from reading as much as I would like, I need to make time and will, especially for the classics.
.
.
.
David Mamet’s dialogue is effective because it has complete authenticity within highly dramatised situations. Do you think his play ‘Oleanna’, which dramatises the power struggle between a male professor and his female student within a patriarchal power structure, works because of or in spite of this?

This is precisely the reason it is so effective. The male dominated power structure, particularly in the academic setting where this play takes place is firmly entrenched and the reader/audience brings with them an implicit understanding of the “rules of the game.”

That a younger and supposedly naïve student can completely turn this paradigm over upon its heels and use sexuality as a power device not only in the subtle context of a one on one relationship but in the larger societal context of abuse of power and authority makes the climax of this work so very powerful.

Athol Fugard is another playwright who is extremely effective in using this technique. Bar none the most incredible stage experience I ever was part of was witnessing Master Harold and The Boys, a story of power, subservience, race and societal convention. Like Mamet, Fugard is skilled at dialogue and can almost lull his readers into complacency with seemingly banal discourse then out of nowhere BAM, he socks you in the gut.

I was witness to one of those once in a lifetime theatrical events that had Mathew Broderick and James Earl Jones on stage in of all places the venerable Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Fugard is a contemporary Becket, his work stands alone and should be both read and experienced.
.
.
.
Samuel Beckett used a very different dramatic technique with dialogue that is stripped back and heavy use of symbolism. How do you think the effect of his writing differs from a playwright like Mamet?

This is spot on. What you are speaking of is the difference, the literary difference, between implicit and explicit.

Beckett, while not at all being coy, was metaphoric, obtuse and symbolic in much of what he wrote. Scholars to this day debate the meaning behind his classic Godot and he was famous for letting people interpret it however they chose.

Mamet is beyond direct – his dialogue is abrupt, clipped and completely in your face. There is no debate in what comes out of his characters mouths. The mystery comes in the next response or the reaction and series of reactions between antagonist and protagonist. Mamet employs an ingenious device in which he flips roles between strong and weak, antagonist and protagonist, male and female, seemingly at will. It is not random but very deliberate. Suspending a sense of control is required for engaging in Mamet’s work because it is precisely when you think you understand, you don’t.

With Beckett, you never understand, until you think you do and then you’re not sure.

They are both master head-fuckers.
.
.
.
The English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham, who inspired utilitarianism, designed a prison building called the Panopticon, which allowed an observer to observe all prisoners without them knowing they were being watched, as if they were under the scrutiny of an omniscience. Do you see any correlation between this and big business management, and if so could these power structures be the cause of much pathology in the work place?

Look, I’m not out to paint all business with a broad big-bother brushstroke, but people are naive to think that actions they take in their lives are anonymous and outside the purview of their employers.

The Wall Street Journal reported that over 70% of employers use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to background check candidates for employment. Most all large and even many small companies utilize screening software for email. People are naïve to think that personal data they maintain on work computers is safe from their employers view or is even in fact their data.

It’s too simplistic to reduce the Us vs. Them equation down to the little guy and the big-bad employer. The research and my own personal experience in the area of employee dissatisfaction shows the overwhelming majority of employees think of their boss as “management” – invariably workplace violence is between coworkers, colleagues and/or subordinates and bosses. It is not as random as one might believe.

There are contracts, implied and explicit we enter into when we work for an organization. The first and the most very basic is that individual freedoms are subordinated to the organization. People know this and for the most part are OK with it, they get compensation for this in exchange for their consent and labor they provide. Where employers start getting into trouble is in not recognizing where they have abusive management, believe me the signs are there whether in excessive turnover, employee complaints or a host of other signs that many employers choose to ignore. That’s when people start taking matters into their own hands and break the social contracts – usually with unproductive outcomes.
.
.
.
Thoreau felt strongly enough about slavery to go to prison, when he refused to pay tax because the revenues contributed to the support of slavery. In his work ‘Civil Disobedience’ he argues that people should not permit governments to overrule their consciences and he encourages people not to become acquiescent and enable governments to make them the agents of injustice, do you think he was right?

Morally he was right unquestionably. As a matter of practicality however, behaving outside of the laws of sovereignty where one is domiciled is problematic at best. I agree with his stand and advocacy for people to rise up not only against injustice but in all matters of government actions that don’t further the social agenda of the people.

When individual citizens decide that certain laws are unjust or taxes shouldn’t be paid or they should have three wives it gets very messy. This is called anarchy. The arguments Thoreau made at the time regarding morality and conscious are the same ones being made today by anti-abortionists.  You see where I’m headed, I’m sure.

It is not simply a question of right and wrong it is by what standard, whose morals and ethics and how much room for compromise exists. This entire business about Quran burning is an example of those self righteous individuals who believe in their heart of hearts they are right. This does not make it so.  Given the everyday divisiveness that exists in our society (re: Democrats and Republicans) it is no wonder that where religion, values and beliefs are involved, the  “my-way-or-the-highway” school of thought seems to trump reason, logic and tolerance every time.

Gandhi had it right, you must change the system from within, demonstrate your civil disobedience in a nonviolent way, absorb the consequences of your actions and soldier on.
.
.
.
Do you think Cole Porter was a poet?

Porter was one of the very few Tin Pan Alley composers that was also a lyricist. He was most definitely a poet, a student of verse, meter and of course rhyme.

I’d sacrifice anything come what might / For the sake of havin’ you near / In spite of a warnin’ voice that comes in the night / And repeats, repeats in my ear: / Don’t you know, little fool, you never can win? / Use your mentality, wake up to reality. / But each time that I do just the thought of you / Makes me stop before I begin / ‘Cause I’ve got you under my skin.

One of my all time favorite stanzas. Absolutely LOVE the highlighted lyric.

When my wife and I honeymooned in New York City in 1992, we went to the Carlyle and saw Bobby Short. His entire repertoire was Cole Porter. He has long since passed but it was one of our all time favorite evenings.

I’m a sucker for romance.
.
.
.
Michael thank you for giving an extremely thoughtful and insightful interview.

For a sample of just a few of the many rewarding Michael Solender links, try these:

Michael’s blog ‘Not From Here Are You?’, affectionately known as ‘The NOT’, is here.

In addition to ‘Seventy-two Hours Or Less’ on ATON, here are some other good examples of Michael’s work: ‘Pewter Badge’ at Yellow Mama and ‘Bug Lady Audio’ at Cast Macabre.  His essay ‘Unaffiliated’ will be published at blairpub.com in early October.

Michael’s an editor for these two Full Of Crow publications  On The Wing and MiCrow.

And he’s staffer and contributor at Charlotte Viewpoint and a columnist at Charlotte Observer.

Sarah-Jane Stratford is a horror and fantasy writer with a difference.

Her novel ‘The Midnight Garden’, subtitled ’a Millennial novel’, is about vampires who have lived 1,000 years.  They are called upon to fight Hitler’s Third Reich.  The paperback comes out in the US on 28^th September.

Sarah-Jane studied medieval history at the University of York in England, where she wrote a thesis about women in the manorial court system which gave her an appreciation for the modern era. Although she loves the UK she now lives in New York City.

She has also written plays and screenplays, and her script ‘The Tale Of The Torturer’s Daughter’ placed her in several contests and got her an agent.

She is a lover of theatre and is currently working on two stage plays as well as writing the next set of millennial adventures.

She met me at The Slaughterhouse, we picked out a bottle of Passac-Leognan, then we spoke about vampires and history.
.
.
Do you think that romance always needs a dark flower at its heart?

Absolutely. Specifically, the Amorphophallus titanum, aka the “carrion flower,” which smells like decomposing flesh. And the garden doesn’t get weeded as often as it should. I may be carrying this metaphor a bit too far. Or possibly not far enough?
.
.
Tell us about the influence of medieval history on your writing.

While my degree is in medieval history, I would say that my influence comes from a much wider historical scope. History, along with mythology, is the original source of our stories. For me, whether I’m writing something serious or funny, with or without a fantasy element, I almost always turn to the past as a way of limning the present. History, if we pay attention, has to power to inform us as much about ourselves as about our forebears, recent or distant. To take a pop-cultural example, television’s ‘Mad Men,’ about the world of advertising in 1960s New York, has a comparatively small but devoted fan base and inspires discussion in a wide variety of milieu – referenced in op-ed pieces, magazine articles, and academic papers; as well as, of course, advertising. The accuracy of the show’s history shapes the drama and the characters. It also illuminates aspects of ourselves. History, in whatever guise, creates a prism through which to see both past and present with a clarity that can – and sometimes should be – disquieting but also revelatory.

So I set my personal writing bar kinda low.

In truth, my main service is always to the characters and their journeys. And that is where my knowledge, understanding, and love of history come to bear the most powerfully during the writing process. I could in no way pretend to tell a true story about a character in a given period if I did not know the true history. Or rather, I could pretend, but everyone would know it and would – rightly – give me a lot of grief for it. So history helps me get at the truth.

And then, perhaps sounding like a vampire myself, it gives me a lot of material from which to pilfer. It is tremendous fun to take a bit of history and really turn it on its head. I’m not sure what any of my former professors would say about it – I’ve issued a preemptive apology – but I definitely have a very jolly time.
.
.
What do vampires represent in your fiction and is their immortality a way of animating history?

Ah-ha, you’ve uncovered my secret! Like many (possibly insane) historians, I’ve fantasized about either a TARDIS or similar means by which I could just go and investigate certain chapters of history first-hand. Preferably without picking up strange diseases. There is something of a piquant appeal in the notion of living repositories of history, right here, who could tell us honest, first-hand accounts of historical events – if only we knew how to access them. Conversely, the vampires are sometimes frustrated by their inability to acquaint the humans with finer points of history – namely, where present activity is repeating steps that lead to catastrophe. The vampires can participate in the human world to great extent, but there is always a distinct, if invisible, veil between the two. If it’s to be penetrated, both sides must be open to the possibility.

Enchanted as I am with the concept of “living” history in the shape of vampires, it’s most crucial to me that they are real characters. While they are not human and the pace of their lives moves differently from humans, they nonetheless have many human attributes. It’s these attributes that guide them through the story. And yet, as non-humans, I find it fascinating to juxtapose them against inhumanity. For me, locating vampires in the midst of World War II creates a prism through which to contemplate the nature of evil, and what it means to be truly “human.”
.
.
Tell us about your time in LA writing screenplays.

AKA: my lost wilderness. I grew up in LA, and it was not my intention to return, but I surprised myself by making inroads in the film world – surprised because I am at heart a theatre and book person – and wanted to pursue that. I won some contests, got an agent, had a lot of meetings – it seemed to be happening and I didn’t want to question it. Moreover, I didn’t want to question how well the writing was going. I really loved writing screenplays – it’s so disciplined. I’d never worked in such a way, balancing technique and creativity and never losing sight of either. Which is to say, I’d been doing it wrong before, but that’s fine. I was fast, but also efficient. I loved dialogue, but learned not to let it overwhelm a scene. Despite having been writing since childhood, taking classes, and being in writers groups, it was only here when I learned how to embrace the rewrite process and be brutal about cutting anything that wasn’t working – even if I loved it. I soon found that what I wrote to replace the excised text was better because it served the story more completely. This may all be almost revoltingly obvious, but it’s one thing to realize all that in a seminar situation and another when you are angling for a job. Nothing quite like raising stakes to get you on your game.

Ultimately, my theatre-and-book loving heart told me I’d wandered in the wilderness far too long and so I moved to New York – the right thing to do, since within a year of so doing, I’d sold my first book. However, the time spent in LA was not for naught. My former agent, who is now a producer/manager, helped me get my literary agent. Several of the people I knew in the film and TV industry were able to help me in a variety of ways on the road to publication. They always tell you how crucial it is to maintain contacts and not burn bridges – turns out, they’re right.
.
.
What do you think vampires represent to our psyches and in what ways is that tied up with their appeal?

Vampires have classically been a representation of human darkness, if not outright evil. They appear human, but are without souls. They live in darkness. At best, because of their animated corpse state, they might be considered simply shadows of a self, but nonetheless malignant.

Being human, that which frightens us also fascinates us. The vampire myth endures because we want to see what lies in the shadow realm. Darkness is foreboding, but tempting. After all, it’s in darkness that dreams occur. Possibly, if we take a step into darkness and survive, we’ll better know ourselves.

That’s in part the idea I had in creating my own vampires – the idea that darkness has the power to illuminate if you’re willing and open to the possibilities. Some of my inspiration is from medieval ideas of the self – the concentric circles thereof. The individual was located within a house and the circles moved out to village, to farm, to forest and then beyond. The forest, as we know from fairy tales, is not a place to venture lightly – and best avoided altogether. It’s dark and one can get lost – forever. One of the ways in which a man must prove himself before he could become a knight was to venture into the forest alone and triumphantly return. You are stronger for having survived the darkness.

The forest is also a place of romance. But it is a dangerous romance, because of all you cannot see. I think a strong appeal of vampires, whether of the classic pure evil variety or those that are more complex and have something that might yet be called humanity about them, is that they are sensual. Dark ages mythology would have us fear the sensual, but we nonetheless wish to explore it.

It’s worth noting too, I think, that in medieval plays, the representation of evil was usually funny. Part of this reflects the idea that to laugh at one’s enemy renders that enemy less potent. It also meant you paid close attention to what evil was doing – perhaps you might envy the devil’s freedom to joke, be rude, be sexual. You could enjoy time with evil, but at play’s end, good was triumphant. These were religious pieces, but they had the same effect as a Greek play – that of catharsis. Our relationship to vampires is an outgrowth of this – we can enjoy them, envy their power, their eternal life when they seem to enjoy it – but we ultimately turn away from the temptations of our darkest selves to live a bit more in the light.

In the modern era, this isn’t religious, but absolutely humanist. We have accepted and even embrace sensuality, so now I think the more specific fascination with vampires is their ability to walk on the edge. The dark remains enticing, as does the notion of this romantic eternity. We know we’re mortal, we know youth fades – so much harder to accept in a youth-driven culture – we know that while we can let loose, we can’t run wild always. The idea of those who can, therefore, will always burn bright. The vampire is in some ways the beast within – and I’ll end by saying that I think it’s an open question as to just how “beastly” that beast is.
.
.
You love the theatre and mention Shakespeare as one of your favourite writers. Do you think his enduring appeal lies not just in his poetry but in his insights into the extremes of good and evil as they exist within human nature?

Yes.

But you probably want me to elaborate. Put most simply, Shakespeare told the truth. The truth about the entire spectrum of who we are as humans, and all of which we are capable. I think that it’s less about the extremes he highlights and much more about the nuances he illuminates that renders him so universal and immediate and relevant, even all these years later. We can see the whole of ourselves in his plays.

That’s part of why my vampire characters are so besotted with Shakespeare. While they remember their humanity and are, of course, keen observers thereof, they find in the plays exquisite delineations of that to which they are so closely bound and yet are so irrevocably not. They have feelings, they can love, but they don’t have souls – and so here is laid bare the human soul for them to truly know.

It’s complex, and I must say I love the contradictions. The vampires love the human world – theatre, art, music, science, literature, mathematics – love and need it. Not just for physical sustenance, but so much more. They love so much in humanity, and yet they kill. But they do condemn war – not merely because it cuts into their food supply, but because they know that humans have a choice. One group does not have to wreak havoc upon the other. Humans don’t need the blood of other humans to survive. We have the capacity to be above such violence, and yet we keep unleashing it.

Which both the vampires and Shakespeare understand, even if they don’t accept it. There is a heartbreaking inevitability about some of our actions. There always has to be the hope, however, that in studying these contradictions of ourselves, we come to comprehend it and from comprehension, we come to find ways to be more of our best selves, as we know exists, and rise above our worst selves, though knowing that exists as well. I think in telling the truth of ourselves, Shakespeare argues that we must strive to be our whole selves, even with our flaws. We are a labor that is worth the effort, even when we fail.

And the poetry is lovely too.
.
.
Do you think that at the heart of the vampire myth is a sense of tragedy?

I really think it depends upon your perspective. Someone who was human dies and loses their soul, which is a terrible tragedy. They are then forced to literally prey upon other humans to maintain their unnatural life, which is both tragic and ghastly. Youthful innocence is cut down in its prime, for no reason than to feed the living dead.

Although soulless, vampires need not be void of awareness, and can even be conflicted about the parameters of their existence. I was interested in exploring layers – the idea that they could enjoy their life not because they took pleasure in their evil, but because there were genuine joys to be had in their world. Light in the darkness. In my view, that light is love. While much of the focus is on the love between attached vampires, it can also be the love of friends, or of art. But it’s this that enables you to have a long life, and perhaps grow less monstrous. My vampire characters are mindful about choosing their prey – they stick to the demimonde and anyone whom they think won’t be missed. It’s cynical, but effective. When they find love, the method of maintaining life is rendered unimportant. They have to eat, of course, but it’s the least of their pursuits.

I was also interested in the idea that there might be an element of personal freedom in the vampire world greater than that they knew as humans. That stems in part from the medieval portrayal of the devil, as mentioned earlier, but I wanted to go further. A human woman in ancient Britain would have few or no resources for education, but as a vampire, the world of books is open to her. Jews and homosexuals, persecuted as humans, find acceptance amongst vampires – although on entering the world, they not so much relinquish religion as their faith relinquishes them. They are still part of a group hated and feared by humans, of course, but now they have the advantage of supernatural strength and other abilities, so they are not easily targeted. It’s a kind of liberation, even though they are consigned to darkness. They learn how to see in the dark – and find a lot to see.

Personally, I consider death to be less of a tragedy than a life lived without love or happiness. Overall, the vampires agree.
.
.
Do you think that ultimately you are a romantic writer?

Well, I certainly am a hopeless romantic. With all appropriate emphasis therein. But I prefer to eschew labels. If I start labeling myself, then next I might start pigeonholing myself and then where will I be? I’m a writer, full stop. This novel has a powerful romance at its heart, but it’s also historical, fantasy, and a thriller. I’m working on a play that is a satire about censorship and sedition. I’m planning a novel about World War I espionage and theatre, as well as one about a medieval woman’s quest to restore her family’s name and honor in the midst of fighting demons and the plague. And somewhere in there is going to be a jolly comedy or two as well. I like to be open to all stories and write the characters who come to me.

To be honest, I had never expected to write a vampire story. It was very different from everything I had written before. I was more influenced by ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ than I’d thought and was so fascinated by the possibilities inherent in locating vampires in World War II, I put aside everything else and ran with it. Rightly so, as it turns out. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s when characters speak to you that strongly, you do well to listen.

I do think, though, that there is a stronger common thread in all the various projects on which I’m working than might be immediately evident. I tend to prefer historical settings – the past gives us so much about the present. I also like the clothes. I’m interested in strong characters trying to navigate complex situations, whether that’s defeating an enemy or falling in love. My goal is always to tell their stories as completely as I can.

And of course sometimes, I just want to go a bit mad and have some fun.
.
.
Given the impact of feminism in the modern era, do you think as a medieval historian, that if modern men behaved as Castiglione recommended in his book ‘The Courtier’, it would work nowadays?

I think the first thing that must be pointed out is that men did *not* behave as Castiglione advocated – the book is instructional but also idealistic. Chretien de Troyes was romanticizing the world of the knighthood, not documenting it. Both Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace are considered as writing mythology, not history. The reality of behavior in so far as love and marriage are concerned (and the two did not coincide as often as one would like), was far less romantic.

It should also be pointed out that “courtly love,” to the extent it existed beyond the poetry by which we know it, took place expressly outside of marriage. Marriage, particularly for anyone attached to a royal court, had nothing to do with love. While some couples did end up loving each other, it was usually by luck. The marriage of Edward III and Philippa of Hainult was widely documented as a happy one, but he still took a mistress. Courtly love may have had a sexual aspect, although this would have been very dangerous for the woman, but is generally viewed as aspirational for all. It’s a charming idea – giving poor knights a chance to rise by their virtue and women in loveless marriages a chance to enjoy admiration.

While there have been those quick to criticize feminists for prompting a coarsening of behavior and manners – criticism women have endured since at least the nineteenth century – I think this comes from those who would idealize and romanticize history, rather than actually know it. The institutional inequality of women, much the same as that of other minorities, created much damage. In the middle ages, a man might beat his wife half to death and, if punished, was usually just levied a small fine. Eleanor of Aquitaine was Queen of England and powerful in her own right, but Henry II still had the power to imprison her. We swoon over the romances as portrayed in the novels of Jane Austen, but must bear in mind that she was often being highly satirical of her social sphere. While she clearly saw the best marriages as those where the couple are truly in love and have as the basis for that love an equality of emotion and intellectual capacity, if not education, there is no question but that the husband is very much the head of the household and the superior. The wife may be a partner to him, but she is always his dependent.

More recently, as we’ve just marked 90 years of women’s voting rights in the States, we are reminded that one of the arguments against equal suffrage was that a married woman did not have legal standing of her own – her husband represented her. And if I may bring up ‘Mad Men’ again, whilst of course it’s fictional, it’s still an accurate portrayal of behavior and women’s standing and options. A man might have courted a woman with lovely manners (which didn’t tend to display themselves so much after the honeymoon), but neither of them were conditioned to think of themselves as equals.

I’m of the opinion that lovely manners and equality needn’t be mutually exclusive. To the extent society has allowed the teaching of manners and expectation of polite behavior to go by the wayside has been to its detriment. But to blame feminism for as much is, at best, inaccurate. I’m a strong, proud feminist, but I value manners too. I and all the women – and men – I know want to be treated with respect and consideration. Being of a literary and theatrical bent, I also love when someone sings to me, and would be thrilled with a poem. Heck, I even love to cook and wear slut-tastic heels – occasionally at the same time. Which I regard as highly deserving of poetry! Bottom line: equality is erotic and manners are hot. Let’s all get on that, people!
.
.
Do you think that for very different reasons to those intrinsic within the history of modern gender liberation, many women in the West are enjoying loveless marriages, and if so why?

Good grief, I hope not! What on earth would be the point? I suppose there are very odd ducks of both genders who “enjoy” loveless marriages, and far be it from me to judge if they’ve found something that works for them. That sort of arrangement is referenced in Alan Bennett’s ‘The History Boys’ – “A husband on a low light, that’s what they want, these supposedly unsuspecting wives, the man’s lukewarm attentions just what they married them for.” Which used to be a standard arrangement for both men and women who had few other options if they wanted to be respectable or safe – especially if they were gay. The whole point of fighting for gender equality – and now marriage equality – is so that we’re all free to choose the lives that make us happy. I think what most humans want, wherever they are in the world, is some measure of happiness, peace, and love. I reference that in the book, actually. The individual can define as much for themselves. I’m hardly being original – there’s a reason Thomas Jefferson included “and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence.  Jefferson, and John Locke before him, were being quite radical. We sometimes forget that Enlightenment thinking remade the Western world. The very notion of all humans, no matter their social stratum, being endowed with unalienable rights, and one of these being the right to pursue their personal notion of happiness, had never before been part of a common dialogue and was certainly not the part of any national document. This was part of the shot heard round the world, I think, because it’s this idea of individual human rights that have prompted people to struggle against oppression of all kind.

On a broadly practical level, loveless marriages are a major feature of history. Marriage for most people was conducted strictly as a business arrangement. If you were royal, there were crucial political factors to consider. This was why those who could sought at least an idea of romance elsewhere. Even by Jane Austen’s time, when more people could marry for love, practicality was still an issue. In ‘Pride & Prejudice,’ Charlotte Lucas marries the pompous ass Mr. Collins because it’s the only way she can gain a measure of independence. She knows full well she is entering into a loveless match but explains that she’s not romantic and “happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.” While this says a great deal about her as a character, it says just as much about the realities of the time period, especially for women. Later, at the height of the Victorian era, studies suggest that there were four prostitutes for every man in London. This is also the time when love and the sanctity of marriage and children begins to prevail in British and American common philosophy, but single men were not enough to keep those prostitutes in business, so however much some husbands were extolling the virtues of home and motherhood, their money was definitely somewhere other than their mouths.

What liberation movements – economic, as well as social and political – have accomplished is giving women the ability to leave such unsatisfactory arrangements without open stigma or the risk of total poverty. I rejoice to say that I don’t know anyone who feels they must enter into, let alone stay, in a loveless situation because there are no other options. That can often be the case in circumstances *without* liberation movements, but not in places where women have equal rights and protection under the law.

I do think that relationships can be complicated, to say the least. I think a lot of people don’t recognize that marriage, or just long-term exclusivity, requires effort. There are those who say that when it’s right it’s all easy, but my own opinion is that it’s not so much that it’s easy but rather that it’s work you both enjoy and thus it feels easy. There’s a reason why so many plays, books, and movies end when the couple agrees to be together, whether we see a wedding or not. Once you shift into the business of being together, it’s different. Different in a better way, when it’s a real commitment and both people are completely in the room, but that place of being more serious and really forging a life together is just that – serious. Even Shakespeare doesn’t showcase that many married couples. The Macbeths are certainly a strong, loving couple, but perhaps not good role models. Gertrude and Claudius love each other, but…yeah. Both Othello and Desdemona and Leontes and Hermione were happy couples until in each case the husband turned into a lunatic douchebag. And Adriana and Antipholus of Ephesus need to kickstart their romance to remember how happy they are.

Honestly, despite how deep some of the cynicism can run, I think the modern artist who’s best delineated the hard truths about living lives together is Stephen Sondheim, another of my artistic heroes. His musicals are brilliant, but they’re only “light” in the sense of being illuminating. The lead character in ‘Company,’ who is so frightened of commitment, at last sings about what that means:

“Someone to need you too much,
Someone to know you too well,
Someone to pull you up short
And put you through hell.

Someone you have to let in,
Someone whose feelings you spare,
Someone who, like it or not,
Will want you to share
A little, a lot.”
Among other things – and it’s right that the song is called “Being Alive.”

Which is a tad ironic when I reconsider my vampires in that frame. The love between Brigit and Eamon in ‘The Midnight Guardian,’ is deeply romantic and stays strong even over many centuries. Like swans, when they find the right partner, they mate for life. It’s been suggested that I depicted their love as too idealistic, without showing the natural ups and downs they would have, but although they can love with the intensity and depth of humans, they are not human and that does make a difference. They don’t have to worry about much in the way of life’s business. They don’t get sick, they don’t age – they can even still fit into the same clothes they wore when they met, and that was in the 12th century.

Still, it’s love that can give them so much strength and longevity – “gives to every power a double power” – and that’s a big part of what inspired me. It’s the candle they light instead of cursing the darkness. And that is some happiness worth the pursuit.

.
.
More links:
.
‘Midnight Guardian’ will be available in November in the UK.  Click here to pre-order at amazon.co.uk.

Follow Sarah-Jane Stratford on Twitter at twitter.com/stratfordsj

Pamila Payne is a noir horror writer, and she is more than that. She is an original voice conducting an ongoing narrative search in the darkness.

For fifteen years she’s been living with a group of dead guys at the Bella Vista Motel. She acts as a channel for their voices.

Her writing explores the themes that lie at the core of horror. She inhabits the twilight where the edges of reality blur.

I invited her to The Slaughterhouse and she accepted.

We spoke about ghosts and otherness.
.
.
Scroll to the end of the interview for more links to Pamila’s work.
.
.
In what ways do you think a person may be haunted in their lives?

Human beings are haunted by their impending death.  Every one of us.

We are all so temporary, but our minds seek the illusion of permanence to overcome the horror of that truth. Happy people have an above average ability to forget.

Haunting is the imposition of memory.

To remember an experience or a person without consciously seeking that data in our minds can be a kind of haunting.  Especially if there is much emotion attached.  The image of a face comes unbidden, the sound of a voice, the smell of skin.  In truth, we are only alive one moment at a time.  Memories can only come from the past.  We link to ghosts.  There are ghost versions of ourselves in the minds of others.  Memories are synaptic cobwebs brushing our faces.

Regret is the wailing banshee of memory.

A person can be haunted more deeply by feeling they should have done something differently, or made the attempt, or spoken from the heart, or just shut the hell up and waited for the moment to pass, than by any non corporeal entity.

Love haunts.

If we love someone, the desire to be connected to them doesn’t go away with absence. They come into our minds, freely, no invitation needed.  If you can totally forget someone you thought you once loved, chances are, it was a strong case of like.

Artists are mind wombs.

Fictional characters are a unique sort of ghost.  They pass out into the material world through one human mind, like a birth.  And then, if they are lucky and compelling, they come back into countless other human minds and become known.  They develop into real people in the sense that they are known, their stories and their personalities are known.

At some point, all of us become memories.  So who is real?  Does a person who possesses a temporary body for a finite lifetime have an advantage over a person who is known by thousands, maybe even millions, and will live for as long as people can call their image to mind?  I think real is all relative.

We are beings made of will.

If you look at a dead body, especially if it was someone you knew, it’s hard to believe the thing that lies there was ever a person. The reason people so often remark that a corpse looks like a poorly rendered wax dummy version of the person they knew is that very little of what makes us who we are has to do with the meat body we inhabit. The spirit animates matter.

Look at that dead body again.  Reverse engineer it.  Imagine what kind of force it would take to make that thing a person again.  Imagine what kind of force it took to make that thing a person, ever.  It’s not just a matter of physical function, the machinery can be running, but once the spirit is gone, the person ceases to live inside the body.  If you see a body on life support it’s very much the same as looking at a corpse, except they are warm and pliable.

Unless the spirit is still there.  Unless the person inside still somehow managed to retain the will to live inside their injured body.  Rare, but it happens.  And that’s my point, it is the will of the spirit to inhabit our bodies that makes us go on being who we are.  Elderly people who have reached advanced age with the good fortune to posses healthy, functional brains can burn more brightly with personality than they did in their youth, because the body fades back and ceases to distract from the spirit behind the eyes.  The strength of will animates matter that in the end is no better or worse than tree trunks or any other collection of cells.

I find it impossible to believe that something strong enough to animate a body simply ceases to exist once it leaves.  I don’t have religious ideas about where the soul goes, but I believe it exists as a specific entity. If the spirit is strong enough to animate a human body, surely it can come back to whisper in our ears.
.
.
.
Do you believe ‘Rebecca’ is an illustration of what you are talking about and do you think love and all we mean by love invokes haunting?

I do think Rebecca is an illustration of the haunting power of love, but not in the usual romantic sense. The person most haunted by the love she felt for Rebecca is Mrs. Danvers. She is the one who can’t let go and for whom the memory of Rebecca is a painful spectre, but not in any supernatural sense.

Rebecca is not a ghost story.  It’s a story of psychological and emotional torment.  Each of the main characters are tormented by their own thoughts, fears and feelings, and in turn torment others, willingly in the case of Mrs. Danvers, unwillingly in the case of Maxim de Winter.

The second Mrs. de Winter, our poor dear heroine narrator with no first name, torments herself as much or more than she is tormented by Mrs. Danvers and her mostly unaware husband.  Aside from her horrible sense of inferiority to Rebecca, our narrator suffers from an exquisite over awareness of her surroundings, her feelings, and interior thoughts.  Her senses, self consciousness and memory are fine tuned to the point of agony.  Her imagination verges on channeling.  I have always identified very deeply with that character.

Nothing supernatural happens in the book or Hitchcock’s film.  I love Hitchcock, but the film is not much more than the Cliff Notes version of the book, with the salient points mashed up to make for good popcorn eating.  The unabridged audiobook read by Anna Massey is fantastic, by the way.

But…  I believe what you were really asking was, is this how I meant to say love haunts?

Well, yes.  And no.

Love and all we mean by it is a very broad subject.  I think the very act of loving someone creates an opening in the psyche for the loved one to come in that we lose control over.  It doesn’t have to be romantic love, it can be love for a friend, a child, even animals for some people.  Nor does it have to be requited love.  The oneway road can be quite treacherous.

Another thing that I find interesting speaking about the novel Rebecca is that Manderley, the mansion in the story, though not a traditionally haunted house, is as much a character as any of the people. It is also being held in thrall to the memory of its mistress. There are parallels to my own stories in the sense that the Bella Vista motel is very much an active character, though in my case, there are supernatural elements.

It is safe to assume that Maxim and his second wife will be haunted by Manderley for the rest of their lives and makes the point that it is more than possible to be haunted by the memory of places, too.
.
.
.
Do you see Bella Vista as a physical map of subconscious forces?

Yes. I look at it several ways. The Bella Vista motel is a physical form where the subconscious compulsions, memories and spirits of the people who live and die there attach and embed.  It is like a coral reef.  As the psychic debris pile up, the physical place becomes more spiritually and emotionally treacherous, dangerously easy to get lost in, to become trapped.

Bella Vista is also a character, a kind of mind that experiences and replays trauma, a personality that feeds off of drama. As a character, Bella Vista is a playful sociopath.

The motel is also a gateway to self discovery.  Journeying to one’s dark places is dangerous, but not impossible to return from stronger and wiser.  Subconscious forces are real and powerful.  Going through life without shining a light down there is much the same as trying to walk across a dark room filled with an unknown number of snakes. You might make it across the floor to the bathroom in the middle of the night without stepping on one… but not being able to see them doesn’t mean they won’t rear up and bite you.  Of course, some people have more snakes on their floors than others.  Some of us build terrariums.
.
.
.
Do you believe that states of possession exist and if so how would you define one?

I believe that states of possession exist on many levels.  That is a very deep subject and it’s a good thing that you limited me to one definition, because I could go on and on about it.

As a writer, I know I sometimes become possessed by my fictional characters.  I’m not a total believer in the notion that our characters are nothing more than aspects of ourselves.

Certainly, that is true to an extent, more so for some than others—people who “write what they know,” as the saying goes and are basically reproducing their friends and family, or rewriting their childhood.  And I don’t say that with any derision, there are deeply affecting and interesting stories created that way.  It’s also true that creation is a function of imagination.  The brain is a wonderful model builder and can pull elements from many sources.

Some of what I write comes up from my basement, out of my imagination and is all me.  But some of it just isn’t.  I feel my characters moving around in my brain quite apart from myself sometimes.  It can be awkward.  A lot of my characters are male.  Not very nice males.  When I spoke of a mind womb earlier, I meant that we share space in our minds with these fictional people.  Just as every human being comes out of a *1 woman’s body, every fictional character comes out of a human mind.

Writers talk about getting characters out of their heads all the time, though probably, not many see it as possession.  Being deemed “Fictional” may be more about not having a legitimacy granting meat body of their own to inhabit here in the material world, but it doesn’t mean a character isn’t a person.  Fictional characters are just another kind of illegal alien who must enter into marriages of convenience for access to this world.

If we go back to the idea of spirit, or soul, whether you believe the assignment of a soul to a human body is an entirely random shuffling and dealing of the cards or according to some preordained cosmic hierarchy, *2 the result is the same once we get here.  We get plunked into a body and we’re stuck there for life. Sometimes we end up in a family (or more uncomfortably, a body) where we are totally alien.

If as writers we are inspired to write characters that are totally alien to us, how do we handle that?  I think it can be very unsettling, like having a baby that looks and acts like nobody in the family.

Learning to submit, to get out of my characters way and allow them to speak in their own voice, to just give in and let them come into the material world without judgement and censorship was one of the hardest lessons I ever learned about writing.  That can be very difficult for people who have the need to be in control all the time.  I think that may be where a lot of what we call writers block comes from.  It’s a power struggle.  You want your characters to think and speak and behave according to your moral judgement, opinions and outlook.  You want them be actors who deliver the lines you write and hit their marks on cue.  But they may have other ideas.

I think we have been taught to fear and resist possession as a totally negative, unnatural and evil state, (which it surely can be) however, that’s not always so.  In the case of artists, a very positive symbiotic relationship can develop.  As with most relationships, it’s about respect and balance.

*1 Yes, there is cloning and in vitro etc, and perhaps one day soon women’s bodies will no longer be the sole entryway for human babies.

*2 And if you believe that there is no such thing as a soul or spirit and that all organisms are nothing more than a collection of sophisticated organic machinery with electrical impulses running through them, no disrespect to you, but that’s a whole other conversation.
.
.
.
William Burroughs posited that the word is a virus, do you believe in curses and if so do you think they are word viruses?

Leave it to a writer to see words as threatening viral entities… William Burroughs’ theory that words could be and had been used as weapons, especially recorded spoken word, was very apt and rather prescient. That was an interesting part of his whole cut up theory, that recordings of speeches made by authority figures and politicians could be cut, spliced and remade into new recordings with entirely new context. This has been shown to be possible in amusing examples of YouTube videos, perhaps it has been done for more nefarious purposes as well.  I think Mr. Burroughs would have been delighted and appalled by the creative examples of depravity and satire offered up on YouTube, it’s a shame he missed it. I’d love to hear the rant that would probably have resulted.

Words have always been used for evil as much as for good.

We’ve moved into a strange stage of altered representations of reality between what’s possible with photo and audio/video manipulation software and the gleeful efforts of a vast and eager populace who love to repeat and share even the most outlandish lies.  Even a casual user can rework reality in what used to be considered mediums of proof.  But really, it doesn’t even take tricky video skills these days, a simple old fashioned press release or an amateur gossip blogger or even a sham news organization like Fox can lob a word bomb out and away we go.

A curse, pure and simple, is an assertion that someone is due to experience harm and how the harm will come about.  A curse is also a contract.  The cursed must play their part and believe they are cursed, or the thing will not work.

A virus is a self-replicating organism that depends on outside means to introduce it to a suitable host environment, where it then reproduces itself and affects the host according to its design.

I suppose you could say a curse is a kind of word virus.  A biological virus can be foiled by a strong immune system.  A curse can be foiled by strong common sense.

I think Mr. Burroughs’ idea of a word virus was on a bigger societal scale, but did rely heavily on the transmission aspects of viral entities.  (I can only chuckle at what he might have thought of Twitter, and share buttons…) Words in and of themselves contain no power, just as a virus outside of the proper host environment is null.  But the interpretation of words by human minds and the willingness to act as vectors for those words has resulted in more harm and horror than any biological disease.  Words are much harder to defeat when they reach epidemic proportions.  The big lie technique of popular opinion control is in full swing on many levels right now.

A curse is very personal and is always the resort of a coward with delusions of grandeur.
.
.
.
Is the Bella Vista a real place?

The Bella Vista motel is based on a real motel that I visited in Texas in 1993. The name of that motel is lost to me now, but my Bella Vista becomes more real the more I write about it.  The story of what happened to me there and how it inspired me to begin writing the Bella Vista series is on my website in the Memnoir section.  The town of Ozona is real, but I doubt the rotary club would approve of my version of it, which is decidedly fictional and not a very flattering likeness.  I’ve always been fascinated by the underside of Americana, the small town folksy image of good God fearing people who present that Norman Rockwell sweetness at first glance, but are capable of casual evil in their day to day lives.
.
.
.
Do you see ghosts and if so what do you believe they are?

What are ghosts?  They are the unknown, undefinable element.  They are persistent thoughts that take on a life of their own.  They are memories that become parasitic.  They are collections of cellular debris that get trapped in our atmosphere like smog.  They are traumatic energy that intensifies into will.  They are non-corporeal life forms that joyride on our material plane.  They are long distance messages.  They are souls that refuse to or don’t know how to move on.  They are persons.

Seeing ghosts… that question is difficult.  As much as I’ve blathered on already, that’s a very personal question for me.  I have exposed myself by relating my experience in the motel on my website, and though I don’t exactly regret it, I do get a sort of squirmy feeling about it.  There’s this trade off, between wanting to be known for one’s work, becoming known as a writer, and wanting to retain a certain level of privacy.  There’s a side of me that would like my work to answer all the questions.  Have I seen ghosts?  Read my stories.  But people always want more, don’t they?

I don’t go around like the child in The Sixth Sense seeing dead people everywhere.  But I have had some very intense experiences, and the death of someone close to me at a young age affected me deeply.  Some of my experiences involved other still living people who I would not want to disturb or hurt if they were to read my accounts.  I also have no wish to invite contact with them.

It all gets tangled up with what I feel I have a right to relate as a writer and how much consideration I feel obligated to give to others.  You pay a price writing nonfiction about real people, you leave a trail for them to find you and create a hole in the fence.  Some of the small flash stories that I wrote on Six Sentences were inspired by personal experiences.  They were like tiny memoirs and I realized, I’m not ready to write like that.  My fences are there for a reason.

I can’t remember the exact quote or who said it it, but something like, writing fiction frees you to tell the truth, comes to mind.  I write fiction because it allows me to give full range to my thoughts, feelings and desires.  I can draw from pure imagination and I can also put the way I felt, what I saw during an actual experience into a fictional account and feel no obligation to shelter or apologize to anyone.  As far as my fiction writing is concerned, I will write what I want to and what wants to be written, according to my own standards and no one else’s.

I do have standards, however, despite being a horror writer.  Going back to the idea that some fictional characters are entities, (which by the way, I didn’t mean to imply that’s an original thought, other artists have postulated that theory much better than I) just because I believe they are people who want to be known in our material world, doesn’t mean I believe they have divine right to come through whomever they choose.  Unless one is a child, or a person in some way being held against their will, all relationships are consensual.  I have said no to characters that I just couldn’t live with giving voice to.  And with me, no means no.  As writers, and artists of any kind, it’s absolutely our right to choose.
.
.
.
Do you think that schizophrenia inhabits some of the same places of otherness we have been discussing, and if so how do the schizophrenic’s visions differ from those of someone not suffering from what are perceived to be delusions by mainstream psychiatry? 

I think much of what is characterized as mental illness inhabits some of the same places of otherness we have been discussing.

It’s been said that artists make money from the products of their insanity.  I’d be happy to agree, if I could get paid.  This is another question that could generate pages of discussion, but I’ll try to be brief.

Schizophrenics cannot negotiate the disparity of what’s going on in the material world their bodies inhabit and the visions and thoughts they experience in their minds. The really severely ill people simply can’t navigate through the duality of inner and outer experience.

The judgement of all mental illness comes down to degrees of functioning within society.  Are you able to hold down a job or generate income in some legally recognized way, maintain some sort of indoor residence, care for your personal hygiene, feed and clothe yourself?  Good.  Congratulations, you are deemed sane enough, with allowances for eccentricity based on how far you stray from the norm in any extracurricular activities. You can wear your tinfoil hat or display your vote for Sarah Palin button with pride, as long as you meet the basic criteria and maintain your credit card payments.

The important distinctions are the ability to function and the ability to differentiate between unusual visions and the usual state of being. Sanity means being able to understand that something unusual is happening and having the power to separate yourself from what you see.  Extra points for being able to derive meaning from it and turn it into a painting, a film or a book.
.
.
.
What do you think are the main differences between dangerous women and dangerous men?

I don’t think there is a lot of difference, I think it’s just that we’ve learned to attribute gender to certain characteristics.  So, for example, it’s more shocking and unexpected when a woman is a stupid thug, but any sensitive grade school kid will tell you, girl bullies have hard fists, too.

It’s always the unexpected that gets you.  Cold brutality that is thought of as a male attribute, and the underhanded emotional cruelty that is thought of as female are especially devastating when they are co-opted by the opposite sex.  You see this a lot in corporate environments, women behaving like tyrants, abusing power in order to intimidate and men using emotional manipulation to avoid taking responsibility.

I think the most dangerous people are those who can project an aura of harmlessness, kindly demeanor, polite behavior, friendly smiles, but who make it their life’s work to cause harm in anonymous ways.  So basically, managers, corporate executives, politicians, bureaucrats, anyone who makes decisions that negatively affect others without bothering their own conscience.  Civilized modern society has trained and nurtured armies of sociopaths who do more damage sitting in front of a computer creating control freak policies or enforcing mass cruelty than even the most brutal serial killers.

To me, one of the worst and most abusive human characteristics is the urge to control and limit the freedom of other people.  To go back to William Burroughs, he wrote at some length and very colorfully about the petty urge to mind other people’s business and always be right.  To assume that your beliefs and tastes should be imposed on all other humans, and their right to self determination should be denied if they disagree with you, that is certainly an expression of evil and is unfortunately engaged in with equal vigor by both sexes.
.
.
.
Tell us about the effect spoken word and audio narration have had on your writing.

I’ve had a lifelong love of oral storytelling and reading aloud.  I was a child who wanted more than anything to hear stories and would sit still and listen for as long as people would indulge me.  As soon as I learned to read, I read aloud every day.  I was raised by my elderly, religious great-grandparents. My grampa was a minister and we read from small books published by our church that had a page or so of psalms or little parables meant to begin and end the day at breakfast and dinner time.

Storytelling in my family was just a natural component of conversation and what came about when people got together.  Hearing stories about how things were “in the olden days” was fascinating to me, and still is.  I love listening to recorded interviews from the library of congress or anywhere I can find them.

I remember discovering a local radio station when I was a kid that played old radio drama recordings and feeling like I was time traveling while listening.  I had vinyl records of folk tale collections that I wore out.  When books on tape started happening, it was like they were made for me, but all those cassette tapes… And then there came the iPod, and an audio junky found her crack pipe.

I’m not joking.  At last count I had more than six hundred audiobooks.  I listen to books every day.  If I really like the narrator and the story, I’ll listen to books over and over the way people listen to music.  There are certain narrators that I seek out and will listen to almost anything they read because I love the sound of their voices.

Listening to stories read aloud engages a different part of the brain than reading the written word.  As a writer, I find that the way the story sounds to me is always more important than how it looks.  I’ve taken to using dictation software to create some of my work and certain pieces, like Roy’s New Eye for example, were written specifically for narration.  (Though that piece has a decidedly comedic edge to it and is meant to be an homage to classic radio horror stories.)

I started taking voice acting classes some time ago and have been gaining technical skills and acquiring equipment.  I’ve begun narrating stories with a goal of going professional.  I wrote and recorded a short flash piece titled, To Be Together Again, that I posted on my blog recently which I think is one of my best short stories.
.
.
Pamila thank you for giving an interview that is not only original but honest. You have said so much here.

The bulk of my stories are available on my websites, though I do have two stories on Powderburn Flash, one up at The Journal and one on At The Bijou. 

The story at The Journal, She Got Hers, is one I think really represents the horror aspects of Bella Vista well. 

Currently, I’m editing a Bella Vista Motel novel entitled, The Ballad of John Daniel.  It’s the story of a local kid from Ozona with a beautiful voice, whose dreams of leaving Texas to become a professional musician are derailed when he picks up part-time handyman work at the Bella Vista Motel, and falls victim to its dark mystery. 
.
.
My own links are my blog, Bella Vista and my main writers website, The Bella Vista Motel. 

My audio short story, To Be Together Again is here.

And on Twitter, I am @mspamila.