Know a Nominee, Part Fifteen: Gregory Frost

 
Welcome to today’s “Know a Nominee” update, the interview series that puts you inside the minds of this year’s Bram Stoker Award Nominees. Featured today is Gregory Frost, who’s nominated in the category of Superior Achievement in Long Fiction for his novelette, “No Others are Genuine” (Asimov’s Science Fiction, Oct/Nov 2013)

DM: Can you please describe the genesis for the idea that eventually became the work for which you’ve been nominated? In the case of a work wherein you’ve written multiple stories (like a collection) please choose your favorite part and discuss.

GF: In the case of my novelette, “No Others are Genuine,” I was participating in a group book signing at a shop called Between Books, where I was approached by a small-anthology editor who asked if I would consider contributing a story for her steampunk-themed anthology. And it was one of those weird moments where the second she said that, I thought “Victrola.” My grandmother had owned a Victrola VV 100, a big floor-standing cabinet with little doors that opened top and bottom. So I wrote that down in a notebook, and then over the next months attached other ideas to it. For some reason I started out wanting to set it in a Danish boarding house. Don’t ask me why. In any case, it went nowhere after that, and I did not meet the deadline for the steampunk anthology.

Then, the following spring, Richard Butner invited me to attend Sycamore Hill, a peer workshop in North Carolina where you bring a written story—often something in progress or broken, or a story where you know you’re stretching, doing something you haven’t done before. So that forced a deadline upon me, and the deadline made me jettison all the steampunk trappings save that the Victrola was still “it.” And then I started reading up on the history of phonographs, Edison cylinder players, the wax cylinders themselves, and suddenly the Victrola was gone, I was in 1893, and my boarding house had landed in Chicago. The rest of it, the people, Eustace and his mother, just sort of turned up.

DM: What was the most challenging part of bringing your idea to fruition? The most rewarding aspect of the process?

GF: The most challenging part was probably sitting at a table and taking the critiques from writers like Karen Joy Fowler, Nathan Ballingrud, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Christopher Rowe, et al. The other thing, for me, about a Sycamore Hill, is I feel like I owe them a very good story. This one didn’t even have a title when I arrived. It was called “wax cylinder story” and I asked the group for any title recommendations. When it came to Alan DeNiro, I think he started his comments with “You should call it ‘No Others are Genuine.’” Bingo. Andy Duncan was also there, and as everyone took their turn, he was making notes on his copy of the manuscript of things they said and kind of his gloss on them. So in the end his copy became my Rosetta Stone for revision. It was immensely helpful. I would like to have a clone of Andy travel around with me whenever I’m in a writing workshop.

That’s also one rewarding facet of it—getting vetted by a group that sharp; but probably most rewarding was when Sheila Williams bought it without a moment’s hesitation. It was the first story I’d sent to her as editor of Asimov’s and the first I’d sent to the magazine itself in over a decade.

DM: What do you think good horror/dark fiction should achieve? How do you feel the work for which you’ve been nominated work fits into that ideal?
GF: I like to experience something I haven’t met before. That’s perhaps asking a lot, but I confess I like the frisson of the weird that comes in a new package. I mentioned Nathan Ballingrud, whom I met for the first time at that workshop. I’ve been reading his collection, North American Lake Monsters, and it’s filled with exactly that sort of originality. Everybody should be reading that collection.

Here I tried to give the reader an experience of another time and place, but also a fiend they haven’t met before, a horror that I hope hangs with them at the end, in that moment of suspension where we don’t know what’s going to happen next. I’ve become fond of stories that strike the emotional climax and then stop, leaving the reader propelled and suspended. There’s a short story author, Richard Bausch, who’s a genius at that effect. And one of my favorite horror novels, The Search for Joseph Tully, by William H. Hallahan, executes that suspension superbly, too.

DM: I’m curious about your writing and/or editing process. Is there a certain setting or set of circumstances that help to move things along? Where do you often find yourself getting stuck, and why?

GF: My process is utterly 19th Century. I write initially with a fountain pen. It’s chaotic, sometimes it’s a lot of mumblings, trying out imagery, or the same paragraph over and over, or writing out what I’m about to write—notes to self on the way to discovering the draft (a lot of that). It probably makes no sense to anyone but me. But then, I contend that everybody’s process is unique to them, and that “how to write” books that tell you, “You must write exactly the way I do” are crap. No, you must write the way you do, and a lot of the learning curve is discovering what that looks like for you.

Where do I get stuck…in middles. But middles comprise about 5/7 of your novel or story, so of course you’re going to get stuck in the middle. There’s what my friend Maureen McHugh calls the Dark Night of Despair, which she places about 2/3 of the way into a novel, where you lose your nerve. You look forward and it’s blank, unwritten, and you look back and it’s a bleak wasteland that needs so much revision. That’s where a lot of writers give up. The ones who don’t are the ones who finish and get published. So remember kids, finish your Wheaties.

DM: As you probably know, many of our readers are writers themselves. What is the most valuable piece of advice you can share with someone who may be struggling to make their way in this life?

GF: Tell the best story you can, use all your voices, and steal from everywhere and everything. Celebrate every day you make the time to write, because there’s never going to be time to write. You have to do it anyway.

DM: What are you most looking forward to at this year’s Bram Stoker Awards/WHC (if you are attending)? If not attending, what do you think is the significance of recognitions like the Bram Stoker Awards?

GF: I wish I were going, but the awards and my end-of-semester teaching duties are at odds, and I will have to miss it.

About Gregory Frost
Gregory Frost is the author of eight novels and well over fifty short stories of the fantastic—everything from dark thrillers to high fantasy to science fiction. His latest published novel is the YA-crossover Shadowbridge duology—Shadowbridge & Lord Tophet (Del Rey/Random House), voted one of the best fantasy novels of the 2009 by the American Library Association.

In the short fiction category, as well as “No Others Are Genuine” (on the HWA ballot) his novella, “Vulpes,” rounds out the braided sf-horror anthology of novellas, V-Wars, edited by Jonathan Maberry (IDW); his short story “The Dingus” opens Supernatural Noir, edited by Ellen Datlow (Dark Horse Books); his collaborative novella with Jonathan Maberry, “T.Rhymer,” can be found in Dark Duets (HarperCollins, January 2014), and his novelette “Farewell, My Rocketeer” is to feature in the forthcoming “Rocketeer” anthology from IDW in tribute to graphic artist Dave Stevens.

He is also a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, edited by Edward James & Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge University Press) with an essay on Slipstream fiction. He currently serves as the Fiction Workshop Director at Swarthmore College and will be leading off the teaching roster at the UCSD Clarion workshop this summer.