What are you working on?

It’d probably be easier to say what I’m not working on. In the past, I’ve had a bit of a problem hearing “no,” but that’s been mitigated somewhat by an even bigger problem, which is a decided personal bias toward saying “yes.” I’m also a little weird about quitting something once I’ve started it.

So, I still maintain a law practice, teach a full college course load and, despite relinquishing most of my interest in Potemkin Media Omnibus, Ltd. (the parent of Foxhead Books) I spend a significant amount of time working on various projects there.

Oh, there’s also marriage, fatherhood, an effervescent case of peroneal nerve palsy, a bucketful of appalling eccentricities, mildly enfeebling psychological issues, and a list as long as your femur of stuff I meant to get done before now.

You know what? Even if it means going without sleep, I’m still pecking away.

My pal Paul Kerschen once said, “The Work is what saves you.”

He was right, wasn’t he? I don’t think you’ve explored the full extent of what it means to take on the writing life as a discipline, in the religious sense of the word, if you don’t take his meaning, gut-level, right away.

This thing we do: it’s a calling, or a curse, or maybe an illness; the node in our brains that makes most of us crazy is also probably to blame for creative genius in those possessed of it. The compulsion to craft narratives and reduce them to symbols others can decode for edification, or amusement, isn’t a choice. If we couldn’t write, we’d probably have to be put down.

I’m reminded sometimes of the scenes in Quills where the priest overseeing the asylum punishes the Marquis de Sade by depriving him of paper and ink, stripping him naked, and tossing him in a dungeon pit — the dungeon proper wasn’t bad enough for the padre, apparently. Using his finger as a stylus, and his feces for ink, the Marquis continues work on his opus. That’s an example ad nauseum, of course, but I think it sums things up pretty well.

I feed the beast with what moments I can skim from life’s continuing crises. It’s taken the better part of a decade longer than I’d planned (much longer than I’d hoped), but the projects I began upon the choice to take myself seriously as a writer look to be approaching completion, either from authorial execution, i.e., the proverbial killings of darlings on a manuscript scale, natural death from old age, or, hallelujah! — publication.

Now we’re in the anxiety ridden waiting-for-reviews-to-arrive phase with Digging Up The Bones, a collection. I’m particularly proud of that book. It’s a violent bundle of curses; fun to write, hard to sell. It’s cathartic to see it inked and bound.

It’s a vindication, as well. Half a dozen publishers flirted with the manuscript to the point of public indecency, but ultimately passed for one of two reasons, or a combination of the pair: too dark, or too hillbilly. Of course, this was Manhattan talking out its ass a decade before Cajun vampires and Justified’s Harlan County hijinks brought hill-country sexy back.

My agent said, “Don’t worry. Everything in its time.”

I resented that, damn it, but he was right. That time wasn’t right for Digging Up The Bones. The manuscript has since steeped, cooled, and set. In terms of time and focus, the remove provided space to return to that world with fresh eyes, better to subject the text to several more thorough revisions. The book’s thematic structure rose to relief, and I was also able to bring to bear what refinements in craft a decade’s maturity might have provided.

More importantly, in the intervening years myopic Big-Pub gagged on its own business model. The industry is going out in a well-deserved gluttony induced gut-rupture not seen since Diamond Jim Brady. Crooked record companies can claim Napster blindsided them, but the Big Houses have no excuse. Technology walked right up, said howdy, and pantsed the sorry lot. Hundreds of boutique and mid-size houses like Roundabout Press, my publisher, have flourished in place. It’s a good thing for readers and writers alike.

Having put Digging Up The Bones to bed, I’m wrestling, in turns, a trio of novels that will eventually cry uncle, whether they like it or not. They’re ostensibly unrelated, except each is driven by personal neuroses, terrors and obsessions stemming from negative experiences with fundamentalism, amplified as a young adult charismatic trying, and failing, to untangle subjective but tangible brushes with the Divine from the shit-sandwiches many religious folks demand be served as side-dishes to bliss.

At this point, the novels seem to explore resurrection, recurrence, and prophecies’ endearing, amusing habit of coming to pass in ways those most concerned with them would never, perhaps could never, imagine.

But who knows? Novels are mysterious, uncooperative animals. I’m logorrheic and sometimes dump several thousand words at a sitting. Yet, it’s often the case characters toddle out of the cabbage patch with their own ideas about how things should unfold and render 15,000 hard-won words moot.

As with our own world, once characters’ deeds disrupt the time and space surrounding them, the consequences continue so long as a medium carries them forward. When characters start freelancing, the creative aspect of my job as a writer ceases and my role is to take dictation and get the fuck out of the way.

That’s when magic happens, in that meditative state where writers channel those stories the universe itself is demanding we relay. Even if nothing useful comes from the prose, it’s a worthwhile exercise. Again, writing is a discipline. Every discipline has means to cultivate a presence of spirit in disciples.

As writers are disciples of the Word, the simultaneous dissolution of artistic ego in a broth of imagination, text, and soul is nothing less a religious observance. It’s our means of prayer. It’s also the only condition I know of holding comparative value to what I know as religious ecstasy. It’s more subtle, of course. But it’s as powerful, often more profound, and the results longer-lasting.

How does your work differ from others of its genre?

I’m not really in a genre, I don’t think. I mean, I’ve explored everything from Orthodox Jewish drug smugglers to cannibal murderers to the Antichrist. Maybe dick-lit? — or whatever they call the opposite of chick-lit, where people are high and drunk and break things and call each other names and do drastic, sometimes senseless things. I suppose I’ve more than once exposed an underdog flipping futile middle-finger fuck-yous at indomitable authority. One major thread running through my work is a fascination with people behaving badly. There’s this attraction I’ve got to terrible, soul-shattering scenarios; one difference from my fellow travelers might be a tendency — many times to my detriment — to throw little sardonic wink-nudges against the suffering.

I’m a student of Joss Whedon, a master, who said, “Make it dark, make it horrible, but for God’s sake, crack a joke.”

Why do you write what you do?

It’s an attempt to glue shards of my shattered personality together. I come from a long line of folks suffering various levels and flavors of crazy, but I’ve been lucky enough to admit that and am a good boy when it comes to taking my meds. That doesn’t mean I’m not still trapped between Saturday night and Sunday morning, though.

As I mentioned, I come from a faith tradition — actually, more than one — raised Southern Baptist, then I shifted over to the charismatic Assemblies of God, then became a flat-out tongue-talking Pentecostal madman. For a brief period, I studied to become a Pentecostal minister.

Of course, the whole time I was chasing girls like a priapic goat, taking drugs and booze like I had a checklist to work through, and writing fiction that would get me kicked out of any pulpit short of the Unitarian Universalist.

I’m fascinated by the notion of Jesus-as-the-Word, and probably have stitched together my own little heresy from the first chapter of John’s gospel:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. John 1:1–11 KJV

It’s only through that understanding of Christianity, and reality, that I can explain me to myself.

Bite-size heresies of a personal nature have made me sympathetic to rebels, radicals, and Occultists. I’m very cognizant of sexy evil — its power, its consolations, and the base urges we all share leading that direction. I’ve been more or less able to keep those urges in check, but they’re strong enough I have to keep an eye on personal inclinations to mayhem. It’s like that old college freshman lit-crit truism about Milton’s Satan being more fun than his counterparts. There’s no denying that, is there?

From childhood on, I’ve been fascinated by the stark differences between what people say and what they do, what they claim to believe and how they behave, and the dualism inherent in my faith — the Madonna/Whore thing, the striking difference between the God of the Old/New Testaments, our Christian claims to love coupled to our shameful and dominant impulses toward wrath, intolerance, and violence, etc., etc.

My favorite piece of writing, ever, is John’s Apocalypse, or Revelation. It internalizes these contradictions; plus, the language kicks me in the balls every time I read it. Consider:

And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters. And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword: and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength. And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death. Revelation 1:15–18 KJV

It’s batshit, brilliant, wanton, psychedelic, and undeniably the product of frenzied intercourse with Divinity.

Some of my most intense spiritual experiences have occurred in places, and under scenarios, received American Evangelical and Charismatic doctrines preclude. I’ve internalized those contradictions, and I know, at some unconscious level, that writing, as a pursuit, is an attempt to reconcile them.

One foot in the dark, another in the light, straddling shadows — you see lots of things worth scribbling down.

How does your writing process work?

Music: I have playlists keyed to mood and, in some cases, topic. I fire one up, clamp the headphones on, and shut out the world.

Light: I need to write in the dim; usually, I work by candlelight, or under blacklight. There’s something ambient and otherworldly about those hues. It’s also in keeping with my thesis that writing is a discipline, in the spiritual sense.

Scent: Incense. Usually Nag Champa brand Agharbatti. The smell makes me feel displaced from location and time. Orientalist? Yes. But it’s my nose, and my brain, so whatever. I’ll be Orientalist.

Duration: Four hours, minimum. One to get in, two “over there,” one to get out.

View: I like to set my word processor view to A5 page size and format, as it helps me envision how a printed page containing the prose might look.

Once set up, I close my eyes, stretch my arms out, and fall backward into the joy of the enterprise. It’s The Work that saves me.

Colette Sartor’s loveliness is exceeded only by her talent, wisdom, and intellect. Among other places, Colette’s work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Kenyon Review Online, FiveChapters, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, and the Harvard Review. She won the Nelson Algren Award, a Fugue Prose Award, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, a Reynolds Price Short Fiction Award, and honorable mention in Best American Short Stories. Colette is an alumna of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received a prestigious Truman Capote Fellowship. She was senior fiction editor at the prize-winning Pif Magazine. She has taught creative writing for over a decade; currently, she teaches at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. Colette has it, a mastery of language, presence of soul and conjuror’s power that drives her peers mad with a whipsaw of adoration and envy.