You are often seen hiking in the New England mountains. What’s the most awesome thing you’ve encountered there?
The view from Mount Willard looking south down Crawford Notch on a clear early autumn day.
I was a Boy Scout and so picked up the hiking habit early. I continue to be active outdoors year-round because the endorphin high is my drug of choice these days. I jog between fifteen and twenty miles a week and try to compete in at least one 5K or 10K road race a year. In the summer I wake up and swim half a mile first thing. In the winter I usually reach for my snowshoes or cross-country skis. All this exercise is actually a career move; I do my best story doctoring when I’m out of breath.
If you could have a drink with a dead SF writer (not a friend), who would it be?
I’m tempted to say Paul Linebarger, aka the great Cordwainer Smith, but instead I’m going to sidestep this one just a bit. Raymond Chandler famously had no use whatsoever for science fiction. In a letter near the end of his life he wrote a vicious parody of a scene from an imagined SF story, and ended the note with this question: “They pay brisk money for this crap?”
But many science fiction writers have been influenced by Chandler, and I am one of them. In fact, I’ve read and reread all the novels and stories, most of the letters, and several of the biographies. I’ve paid homage to Chandler more than once in my fiction and intend to do it again.
In addition to being a bit of a snob, Chandler was also an alcoholic, so I realize that drinks might be a chore. After all, I am an SF writer and have been sober now for some twelve years. But hey, I’d be willing to fall off the wagon for an evening if it meant connecting with the man who had Philip Marlowe say, “I needed a drink. I needed a lot of life insurance. I needed a vacation. I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat, and a gun.”
How Irish are you?
Other than my brazenly Hibernian name, not very. The ancestral Irish immigrant arrived on these shores before the Civil War. On my mother’s side, however, I’m second-generation Hungarian. My grandparents were born there and English was their second language.
But a kind of ersatz Irishness did impact my life. I attended the University of Notre Dame, of Fighting Irish football fame, in part because my dad followed their team. I think it was his oblique way of paying homage to our heritage. For the record, Notre Dame and I did not get along. Why did I choose an all-male school at the height of the sexual revolution? It’s still a mystery to me! As soon as I realized my mistake, I loaded up on extra courses so I could graduate in three years. This was easier than it sounds; I was an English major.
Ever do hack work?
After escaping from Notre Dame, I started Real Life in the mail room of an architectural engineering company with offices throughout New England. As it turned out, what was most useful to this company was my ability to write comprehensible sentences. This skill, I discovered, was thin on the ground in AE firms. I began translating building proposals from engineering into English, and then writing press releases and promotional materials for the office I worked in, and then for the entire company. By the time I retired at the ripe old age of twenty-seven to write full time, I had the title of coordinator of public relations.
Early in my career I would have loved to write Star Trek novels, but I never found out what buttons to press to wrangle an invite.
You were at Clarion twice. Did you graduate or did they kick you out?
I flunked denouement. Thankfully, they let me make it up.
Back in the early days of Clarion, when it was still at Michigan State, attending more than once was rare but not unheard-of. But when I went the first time, it was drilled into us that the rule was one and done. For most students Clarion is an overwhelming experience. It certainly was for me. Not only did it vastly improve my command of the craft, but it validated my outrageous dream of becoming a writer. The magic of the workshop is that when smart people—your instructors and your fellow students—treat you like a writer, you convince yourself that they must be right!
And then the six weeks are over, and you return to your job and your real life. You have to work extra hard to catch up at work and on your relationships at home. Then the rejection slips land, and you doubt—what were you thinking?—and you find yourself deep in the dreaded post-Clarion depression. Happened to me, big time. I sold one silly story (that I have since struck from my bibliography) after Clarion and then there were months and months and deadening months of nothing. My career in public relations took off and consumed my fiction writing time. As I watched the dream fade, I wrote an impassioned letter to the late Glenn Wright, then Clarion director, begging him to break the rules and let me return to try to regain my momentum. That letter was probably the best writing I’d done since leaving East Lansing, and when Glenn passed it on to Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm, they agreed.
They probably shouldn’t have, although I doubt I would have had the same career, or maybe any career, if they had turned me down. One and done is a sound policy, although it is the case that several talented writers have attended the six-week Odyssey Writers’ Workshop and then have gone to one of the Clarions. And Clarion grads have received degrees from the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA program where I used to teach or gone from Stonecoast to Clarion. In any event, I did the workshop again. I realized later that one important outcome of going was that it killed my career at the architectural engineering company. They were willing to accommodate one six-week leave of absence, but a second one two years later was too much.
And the other outcome was that I finally passed denouement. As that second Clarion was coming to an end, I was pulling all-nighters to finish a story. I remember that it got critiqued on the second-to-last or maybe the last day. Damon and Kate, who founded Clarion and who always team taught the last two weeks, were writers in residence. The story was about an ambitious woman scientist who, against her better judgment, participated in an unspeakable experiment and in the process, all but wrecked her marriage. After much techno-mayhem, she alone was left of the research team; the experiment had succeeded at a horrific cost. In the denouement, she retreated in a daze to her office where she found a dozen roses from her estranged husband—a peace offering. In the version I workshopped, she decided impulsively to take the bouquet, go to him, and leave everything else behind. It was a bland conclusion to a There-Are-Some-Things-We-Are-Not-Meant-To-Know story. In her critique, Kate story-doctored my ending. She suggested that I have my hero toss all but a single flower out, stick that one in a bud vase, and sit down to write up the experiment, which would make her the new director of the lab. All it took was two sentences and one red rose to transform the piece into a chilling and powerful Scientist-Loses-Her-Soul story. This story—“Death Therapy”—was my second sale (which in my doctored bibliography becomes my first) and was reprinted by Terry Carr in his The Best Science Fiction of the Year #8.
And I’ve been story-doctoring in Kate Wilhelm’s honor ever since.
One sentence on each please: Nisi Shawl, Colin Meloy, Star Trek, Dr. Johnson.
Nisi Shawl once washed my feet at a party, which deeply puzzled me; much later I realized that I should have been washing hers.
Colin Meloy is someone I had to look up because sometime in the early 2000s I stopped paying attention to rock music and filled the reclaimed cognitive space with jazz and audiobooks.
Star Trek is ultimately more of a force for good in SF, although very few fans realize why the transporter is murder.
I’ve been to Dr. Johnson’s house, sat at his desk in his library, and thought about him but left no wiser than when I entered.
What is your favorite city? Why don’t you live there?
New York, New York. I’m holding off on the move until my play is produced on Broadway.
My Jeopardy answer: romantic comedy. You provide the question:
What is the least understood genre?
You were on and once ran the New Hampshire Arts Council. How did that come about? What was it like?
My first involvement with the NH State Council on the Arts was when I applied to be on the Artists in the Schools roster. I was in the process of getting divorced and was casting around for a way to earn money to support my writing habit that didn’t involve bagging groceries. I proposed to visit schools around the state to get kids to write and think about science fiction and the future. To do this I had to convince the council that a) I was an artist and b) I could teach. Back then in my experience writers and especially SF writers did not necessarily think of themselves as artists. Indeed, as I later learned, some arts councils in other states were turning SF writers down for roster spots for writing on the wrong side of the literary tracks. Not New Hampshire. I will admit that I learned to teach writing on the job. There were days when I waltzed in and was like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society and others when I was like the saddest substitute teacher ever to lose control of a class. But I got better, and I liked the kids. I was actually getting more residency offers than I could accept when the professional staff approached me about serving on the council itself, which was composed of arts-friendly people from the business and non-profit communities, arts donors and a couple of working artists, one of whom was leaving. I was honored and said yes, so the governor nominated me. The councilors are something like a board of directors; we met monthly to oversee the professional staff, set policy and approve grants—all for no pay. I loved it! Part of the job was to travel around the state listening to artists and arts organizations and finding ways to help them connect with audiences. I was twice nominated to four-year terms on the council and in my last two years I was elected chair, which meant that I traveled to a number of national conferences representing our little state. I might still be on the council, had I not joined the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA program. There just wasn’t time enough for both.
What I learned as a councilor is that the arts are destined ever to struggle in our capitalist system. The vast majority of artists are among the working poor and many worthy arts organizations regularly face economic ruin. What government support there is never balances the books.
Arts organizations try to make an argument for better and more reliable support by talking about the arts economy and its collateral benefits. Towns with an active theater community are more likely to have upscale restaurants and posh housing stock. Streets with art galleries tend to draw the Rolex crowd. There’s merit to this, I suppose, but for me the best argument for supporting the arts is that they represent the soul of our culture. Alas, our soul does not fit into a cell on a spreadsheet.
What drew you into writing plays? The money or the fame?
Both. And still waiting.
I started writing plays by accident. Back in the day I was on the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts’ Artists in Schools roster, which meant I traveled around the state talking about science fiction and fantasy and helping kids write stories. From 1989 to the early 2000s, I worked with K–12 kids in more than fifty NH schools and ate more bad lunches than I care to remember. Pizza day washed down with a carton of chocolate milk! American chop suey and a mealy apple! As an unexpected bonus, I was invited to join an ambitious theater residency with the goal of getting the students to write, stage, and present a new play to the community. It was a magical experience. My fellow artists gave me gentle nudges when I strayed off course, and in part because of their expectations, and in part because of the kids’ enthusiasm, we pulled it off. Word of what we accomplished traveled around the state and we did similar residencies around the state. After several, I tumbled to the notion that if seventh graders could write a creditable play with my help, I might be able to do it myself.
I started by adapting stories into one acts that got produced in local black box theaters. As you and I both know, it’s kind of a thrill to sit in an audience that is enjoying your play. Some of my theater pals talked me into writing a couple of full-length historical plays. One was “I Have Not Yet Begun to Fight” about local NH hero John Paul Jones and featured an onstage battle between Jones’s frigate Bonhomme Richard and the British Serapis. At one memorable performance, when the British captain called out at the climactic moment, “Sir, do you surrender?” the actor playing Jones blanked on his lines, replying simply, “No.” Perhaps I should have taken that as an omen of how my theatrical career would go. But I did write another full-length play called “The Duel” which had a nice four-week run in two of the biggest theaters in the state. It was about the encounter between Hamilton and Burr but with an alternative history twist. This was long before Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. At the end of the first act, both duelists miss. In the second act, New England has seceded from the Union and the Civil War breaks out fifty years early, with Burr and Hamilton on opposite sides.
Since then I have limited myself to one acts and especially ten-minute plays, of which I’ve had maybe a dozen produced around the country.
You often teach writing. What’s the hardest thing for people to learn? What’s the easiest?
Endings are definitely the hardest and the most important. I’m no Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke, but I’ve always aspired to proclaim three laws of my very own. How about these? Jim’s First Law: All great stories have great endings. Jim’s Second Law: A story which reads great until its flawed ending is just an okay story. Jim’s Third Law: A great ending will overshadow the flaws of a story which is otherwise just okay.
The easiest thing about writing is also the easiest to overlook. The only way to have a career as a writer is to send your stories out. Actually, this one isn’t all that easy, because writers are good at finding reasons not to submit their work. Fear of rejection is the big one, but obsessive rewriting is almost as debilitating. As Valéry wrote, “A story is never completed, merely abandoned.”
You do and sell Audible stories. How does that work?
I began reading aloud to my kids as a stay-at-home dad, classics like Clifford the Big Red Dog and The Cat in the Hat. When we graduated to the Oz series, I began to do voices. I remember casting the Wizard as a very broad W.C. Fields and the Scarecrow as Ernie from Sesame Street. As my career as a writer progressed, I was delighted to discover that fans at SF conventions would show up at readings to hear me pretend to be the characters in my stories. Readings are my favorite part of cons and I’m grateful to write in a literary community which honors them as a hallmark of its culture.
I’m kind of a gadget guy and I used to record my readings on cassettes and copy them for friends. When recordable CDs came along, I would run off dozens, some of which I sold but most of which I gave away at cons as promotion. But during the astonishing rise of the iPod and mp3s and podcasting and the downloadable audiobook, everything about recorded fiction changed. I was an early podcast adopter with my Free Reads podcast, which featured me reading my backlist of published stories. But one of the smartest career moves I ever made was to talk Jacob Weisman at Tachyon Press into letting me record and podcast my standalone novella Burn, which he was about to publish. I posted a new chapter every week on Free Reads, and Burn got more than twenty thousand downloads in its first twelve months. I am convinced that it was the podcast rather than the print version that earned my novella its Hugo nomination and its Nebula win.
Meanwhile, Free Reads caught the attention of Steve Feldberg, who was keen to acquire SF for Audible.com. He approached me about transferring some of my Free Reads content to the Audible store and recording more of my stories. Lots more! Eventually I recorded and produced fifty-two short stories, novelettes and novellas for Audible, which were packaged into four collections or “seasons” under the titles of James Patrick Kelly’s StoryPod One, Two, Three, and Four.
Alas, it was such a monumental task and the post-production took so much of my time, that I gave up my regular podcasts, both Free Reads and StoryPod, in part out of exhaustion. These days I mostly let the pros publish my works on audio, although I still get behind the microphone from time to time.
What kind of car do you drive?
My current set of wheels is a 2014 Honda CRV, but that is just quotidian transportation. My thrill rides have always had fewer than four wheels. In my twenties I itched for a motorcycle, but my wife at the time was adamantly opposed. Years passed—decades!—and in midlife I was musing about this forgotten two-wheel dream to my dear wife Pam Kelly when she shrugged and said she had no problems with motorcycles. I hadn’t known this about her! Six months later, I swung my leg over my first bike, a Honda Rebel 250cc, which was fun but underpowered. Subsequently I moved up to Kawasaki Vulcan 400 and then to a Suzuki VStrom 600. A year ago, I decided that safety trumped buzz and made the jump to three wheels. My Can-Am Ryker 650cc is a trike with two wheels in the front and the drive wheel behind and a happy science fiction writer on the seat in between.
Do you ask Siri or use a map?
I have many thoughts about maps, all joyful. I never hesitate to ask Siri for directions and I always program long distance destinations into my car’s GPS, if only to know when I’ll arrive. On the other hand, I love to ride my motorcycle down back country roads until I am completely and gloriously lost. When I get home, I will then try to retrace my trip on Google maps. Google’s satellite view, by the way, still feels like science fiction to me. I have spent happy hours peering at the Appalachian Mountain Club trail maps planning hikes for my wife and me to take. USGS topo maps fill me with delight. I have two historical maps hanging in my office and two more elsewhere in the house; I regard all of them as works of art.
I’m totally a map guy.
You and Kessel did a number of anthologies for Tachyon. How did that come about? How come I never made it into any of them?
Wait a minute! Your story “ The Cockroach Hat” was in our Kafkaesque, pal.
I may misremember, but our editing gig probably started when I wrote my column about slipstream in Asimov’s Science Fiction. In any event, Jacob Weisman somehow got the notion that I knew something about slipstream and floated the idea of an anthology. My first reaction was that I hadn’t read widely enough to pick the right stories, and so after consulting John Kessel, we came back to Jacob with the idea that we would be coeditors. I note here that I regularly talk to Doctor Kessel about matters of business and craft, since he is far wiser and taller than I am. Our idea, for this and most of the subsequent anthologies, was that we would not only choose the tables of contents but that we would discuss the commonalities of the stories. We had arguments to make about slipstream, Franz Kafka, cyberpunk and postcyberpunk, and the singularity which we made in the introduction to each book. While some saw these books as attempts to establish a canon in various subgenres, we never did. We were just trying to provide context and start conversations around some wonderful stories and writers.
My personal favorite of these books was The Secret History of Science Fiction in which we sought to demonstrate that, purely in terms of craft and conceptualization, there was no appreciable difference between genre SF and the mainstream crossover SF. Because John and I have shared this core belief since we first started typing professionally, it was cathartic to make our case.
We had a great six-year run between 2006 and 2012 with these thesis anthologies. I’m not exactly certain why we stopped. Maybe it had something to do with Jacob passing on all the new ideas we pitched to him. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that editing was stealing time from our writing. Or maybe it was poetic justice for not including “Bears Discover Fire” either in Feeling Very Strange or The Secret History.
Three favorite SF movies? Three deplorables?
If I define “favorite” as films that influenced my thinking about our little corner of genre, I’d say The Matrix for its immersive VR, Alien for its workers’ spaceship, and Galaxy Quest for being the best Star Trek film ever. Of course, this list represents a cruel betrayal of the fanboy who grew up consuming the stale cheese of Creature Features. He wouldn’t have hesitated to cite Forbidden Planet, the first and best King Kong, and The Day the Earth Stood Still, since he watched them over and over and over again. Because I sat uncritically through so many bad SF movies at an impressionable age, I now have very little tolerance for the deplorables in recent release. I have no use for most of the recent Star Wars products. I sat through Interstellar only because I was with friends and I saw maybe half of Ad Astra on a plane last year.
My True or False Question: True or False?
There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Did you read SF as a kid? What was the first story that lit you up?
I read all the SF in the children’s section of my hometown library, especially the Two Toms (Tom Corbett and Tom Swift), often more than once. Then I asked the librarian’s permission to cruise the adult stacks. (Fun fact: my pal Elizabeth Hand was probably just a few steps behind me. We grew up in the same town and have since compared notes about our many hours in that library.) So yeah, SF and I were not exclusive, but we dated heavily all through my teens. It’s interesting, given my career as a short story writer, that I don’t remember encountering any SF magazines until I got to college.
First story that lit me up? The truest answer here is The Wizard of Oz. Or rather all the Oz books, not only the L. Frank Baum novels but the sequels written by Ruth Plumly Thompson and John R. Neill. Is Oz SF? Well, I would argue that there is no robust definition of SF anymore, nor perhaps should there be. In the world I write in, SF now stands for speculative fiction and includes fantasy, horror, slipstream, weird fiction and on and on. But if I pretend that SF means stories about science or space or the future, then “A Planet Named Shayol” by Cordwainer Smith in The Best of Sci-Fi 2, edited by Judith Merril.
Our colleague Rachel Pollack once said, “Anyone who thinks guilt never helps anything has never been a writer.” Was she onto something or just being a contrarian, as is often her wont?
As a survivor of an unrelenting Catholic education—kindergarten through college—I feel the shadow of guilt, earned and imagined, every day of my life. Not sure that it helps much, however.
Do you remember The Whole Earth Catalogue?
You realize that we date ourselves talking about such things, and SF is properly a young writers’ genre, but of course I remember it! As I remember Our Bodies, Ourselves, The Mother Earth News, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Firesign Theatre, Zap Comix, Hair, and Easy Rider. How could I not? I was an eyewitness! I wrote “The First Law of Thermodynamics”!