Lit Up Interviews: Meet Our Team
A Few Words With Ray, Our Poetry Editor
This is a recent photo of me (I’m the one pictured on the shirt):
This photo of me is from when I was really young:
Bio: a writer who often chews more than he bites off.
Either Or
(Please highlight or underline your choice)
- Tea or coffee
- Hot or cold
- Movie or book
- Coke or Pepsi
- Toilet paper — over-the-fucking-top or under
- Morning person or Night owl
- Shower or bath (I don’t like to slosh around too much in my own filth.)
- City or country I’m a little bit country and a little bit rock-and-roll.
- Social Media or book
- Paperback or ebook
Would you rather
(Please highlight or underline your choice)
- Would you rather be in a room full of snakes or a room full of spiders?
- Would you rather have an endless summer or an endless winter?
- Would you rather have constant nagging pain or a constant itch? It’s what I’m used to.
- Would you rather only be able to have sex in a room full of bugs or no sex at all ever?
- Would you rather always be an hour early or be constantly twenty minutes late?
- Would you rather live in a haunted mansion or live in a un-haunted cottage?
- Would you rather lose the ability to read or lose the ability to speak?
- Would you rather have one real get out of jail free card or a key that opens any door?
- Would you rather go back to age 5 with everything you know now or know now everything your future self will learn?
Under the Spotlight:
- Where were you born?
Ouray (pronounced: YOO-ray). - Tell us your first memory or something vividly you remember from Lit Up.
The magical description “The Land of Little Tales” was the first thing that captured me about Lit Up — the first thing I noticed about it, even before I processed the wonderful words “Lit Up” on the masthead. “The Land of Little Tales” charmed and delighted me out of all sensible proportion then, and it still does now. - Did you like school? No, I did not.
- Do you hear from your readers much? What kinds of things do they say?
Yes. Yes, I do. I regularly hear from readers. Very often they say the sweetest, most thoughtful things — things which have the power to bring me to my knees. Here’s one of the most recent messages I received — one which brought me to me knees when I first read it and which still brings me to my knees — from a literature professor who's been kind enough to read some of my books:
I’m in the middle of your book. Things I love so far: I love that you use the female pronoun, not many authors do. I love that you use first person as if you are talking to me, I love that you specify the importance of who and whom (I once got a job because I used whom correctly in an interview, no lie). I love that reading your book makes me want to try harder, I love that you make it seem attainable to become fascinating, I love that you encourage us to broaden our vocabulary ( I keep an ongoing vocabulary list. I have added some of your words to it in previous books; words that I should use more often. I added “soporific” today). I ordered another copy today to give to my sister for Christmas. She needs it. Please keep writing. I still remember feeling that excruciating pain when Gap Toothed girl broke her ankle and kept dancing. No kidding, my foot hurt for her.
5. What literary pilgrimages have you gone on?
When I was twenty-years-old, I drove alone to California to meet a poet I admired — a man named Karl Shapiro. As it turned out, Mr. Shapiro had just left for New York City — a permanent move — and that is where he died. I never did meet him. But his literature has meant and continues to mean a great deal to me, and it always will. He showed me early on, much as W.H. Auden showed the same thing to Karl Shapiro, that poetry, even the most sophisticated and articulate of poetry, can and should use language that’s idiomatic and perfectly natural in its syntax and vocabulary. More than any other person, except perhaps my dear dead dad, Karl Shapiro also showed me that vocabulary-building, far from being an incidental point of pride, grows the mind.
6. What is the first book that made you cry?
Green Eggs and Ham.
7. Does writing energize or exhaust you?
It is never difficult to paint — it is either easy or impossible. Said Salvador Dali.
8. Have you ever gotten a reader’s block?
God, no.
9. What do you think makes a good story?
Purposeful progression, pointed toward climax, combined with some element, however small, however large, of the unexpected.
10. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer?
The Riverside Shakespeare, which is not inexpensive.
11. What authors did you dislike at first but grew into?
Eudora Welty. Barry Hannah. William Faulkner to some extent. Vladimir Nabokov most of all. I do still intensely dislike Lolita, but there’s so much more to Nabokov, whom I regard as one of the greatest stylists in the English language. I’ve often thought what a shame it is that Lolita is the thing he’s best remembered for, if he’s remembered at all. Pale Fire, which I just yesterday finished rereading for the fifth time in my life, is the strangest, most unbelievable novel I know of. Nabokov himself regarded Pale Fire as his greatest literary accomplishment, and I agree with him about this.
12. What’s your favourite under-appreciated novel?
A Trip to the Stars, by Nicholas Christopher. After that: Veronica, also by Nicholas Christopher.
13. What does literary success look like to you?
Capturing something beautiful on the page.
14. How do you select the names of your characters?
I admit it’s a delicate art, very seductive to me, though I don’t pretend that I’ve come close to uncovering all its intricacies. I do believe a part of the secret can be found in the process of developing the psychology of one’s characters — even before putting pen to paper, when one is still thinking about the people who will populate the story, ruminating over them, trying to devise ways in which to project them via the written word. Developing a character’s psychology, in turn, is mostly a depiction of motive. What drives the characters? What moves them? The deeper down one goes into their fictional psyches, the more these character come alive and move and breathe inside you, the writer, inside your mind and heart. The character’s name, meanwhile, looms. It broods — an encapsulation of what one is striving to make real, an embodiment of the fictional persona. It has, however, happened to me as well, on several occasions, that the name of the character came first into my mind before I had any concrete idea of the personality of the character, after which, the character and the character’s motives took shape at least partially as a result of the name I’d chosen. And once, several years ago, I wrote an entire story inspired by and based entirely upon a name: Brandy for a man. I regard this subject as complex. I regard this process as complex. I could say much more about it. Just incidentally, did you know that the name Copperfield came from a sign Charles Dickens saw on a London shop? Chuzzlewit likewise.
15. Do you hide any secrets in your books that only a few people will find?
Yes. Many. Many, many. The fact is, I hide more secrets in my books than could ever be aesthetically justified. It is, I confess, something of an obsession.
16. Share something your readers wouldn’t know about you.
I’ve got a basketball jones. I always have. Ever since I was a little baby, I always be dribbling.
17. Share something fun or interesting.
Gattaca is one of my favorite movies of all-time. In my opinion it’s also the most underrated movie of all-time. I’m not necessarily an Uma Thurman or Ethan Hawke or Jude Law fan in particular — I like all three of them just fine — but I loved them and their characters in this movie. I welcome the opportunity to share a photo. I welcome the opportunity also to recommend to any readers who have not ever seen it this wonderful, well-written, well-acted, impassioned movie, which isn’t science-fictional, though a little futuristic (not much), and which is also a masterpiece of plot-theme synthesis, and whose theme is meaningful and beautiful and profound. Gattaca is a movie from which all fiction-writers can learn a great deal. It is by no means a recent movie, but I regard it every bit as timeless as Bladerunner, or anything else.
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I’m the author of ten books and counting. I’ve been both traditionally published and also self-published. I write fiction and non-fiction. My latest book is a novel called Neck Between Two Heads: a story of civilization and superstition and it tells the story of a modern-day Apache man named Jon Silverthorne who uncovers something extraordinary deep within the network of caves that lace the earth beneath the Baboquivari Wilderness, some fifty miles south of Tucson.
