An Interview with Jeremy Robert Johnson (Part 1 of 2)
For over a decade Jeremy Robert Johnson has been making a name for himself as one of the most inimitable figures in literary horror writing; as Chuck Palahniuk says of his work, “A dazzling writer. Seriously amazing short stories. While I read them, they made time stand still.” His stories vault off high conceptual premises (body modification, parasites, cosmic horrors, nuclear apocalypse, etc.) and they don’t splash down until they’ve completed a mesmerizing display of acrobatics of genre, invention, and language. And while those feats would be enough for most horror writers to rest easy, JRJ’s stories go further, each imbued with a heart and pathos that drives the reader onward. You simply care for the characters, and because you care, their fates are much more harrowing and horrific.
With his new book, Entropy in Bloom, JRJ has amassed a greatest hits of his short stories into one awe-inspiring pantheon of his work, capstoned by the phenomenal novella “The Sleep of Judges." Published by Night Shade Books, EIB has been making the rounds of bookstores across America, satisfying the itches of old fans and latching onto new ones like a certain parasitic Susurrus.
JRJ was kind enough to take some time away from his busy to schedule to answer some questions about his writing process, literary labels, music, and, of course, tacos. Here is...
Part 1 of 2:
1. With what I’m sure is going to be a strong success with Entropy in Bloom, hopefully you won’t have to worry about this question any longer, but for those of us that still do: How do manage your time between your day job and your passion job? And of that writing time, how do you manage creative writing as opposed to business writing (marketing, promoting, etc.)?
The key is take all of your neurosis and anxiety and coffee and channel those things into focused effort. Make daily lists on post-it notes and don’t sleep until those lists are clear. Wake up earlier than you want to everyday. Use Freedom to block social networking and get intermittent dopamine from self-control.
I try to do a blend of tasks each day in each of the fields I prioritize. So first I’m a dad, then I’m a husband, then I’m a physical being who needs to stay healthy-ish, and then after that I’m a writer. And if I do okay at all four of those things in a given day, I sleep okay at night (until 3am when I wake with torturous anxiety).
I allocate marketing/administrative writing career stuff to the morning hours, then write while my kid is at school. I’m trying to push the balance of effort toward actual production because otherwise I have a tendency to do the other, easier marketing and research stuff. That’s why it used to take me five years between books. My new goal is a book every year or two until I either give up the ghost or my compulsion to write, at long last, evaporates.
2. Many of your fans are already familiar with your ties to music, such as your work with The Mars Volta's Bedlam in Goliath; what role does music play in your writing life? Does it have any influence in terms of themes, styles, tones? Do you use it to get a certain mood a story may require? (I’m thinking of a point in my own life when I was listening to Amputechture a lot and found the phrase “Stuffed the voice inside of God, Mirror to the Animals” cycling through my head, which helped me find the voice of a particular character I was trying to crack.) Anything in particular stick out?
Music is integral to my writing, and I design playlists in advance of starting any project. I listen for music which matches the feelings I’m hoping to evoke, so it can change pretty radically with each project. Two books ago it was mostly Spark Master Tape. Last book it was Polish Witch House. Still trying to figure out what music works for the next thing…
3. To me, good writing is good writing, good stories are good stories, regardless of the label. As your writing has a foot in both worlds (literary and genre), why do you think it becomes so important for the lit world to try and categorize literary works (the perceived “high art”) from genre works (“pop art”)? And what do we lose by drawing these boundaries?
The parasite of commerce has attached itself to art and flooded it with bad neurochemistry insisting it sell itself and concern itself with return on investment. It’s a persistent parasite, despite being bullshit at heart.
Genre comforts people and reflects their sense of themselves and their community, but it also definitely keeps people from experiencing art they’d dig. Always makes me think of what Andre 3000 said on OutKast’s “Humble Mumble”: I met a critic, I made her shit her drawers/she said she thought hip-hop was only guns and alcohol/I said "Oh hell naw!" But yet it's that too/You can't discrimi-hate cause you done read a book or two.
It takes courage to read widely because you have to acknowledge that you’re going to waste some time and encounter some shit you hate, but sticking to your little pocket of experience in anything is a fast way to get your brain and interest in existence to atrophy.
4. I feel like most of the literary writers out there have forgotten that they didn’t start out reading Beckett and Faulkner, they started, like most of us, reading genre fiction. Why do you think it became popular for those writers to then revile “genre” fiction or any story whose climax isn’t just an epiphany? (Just a Lacanian castration? A mark of their maturation?) And, more importantly, do you think the tides are starting to change, especially as more conventional “literary writers” have dove into the genre game themselves à la Ben Percy or Brian Evenson?
I think it’s great that a lot of the traditional modes in publishing are kind of melting down or mutating, and that genre might be seen as less valuable than it used to. With most of the folks you’d associate with literary/genre crossover, I just see that as bright people embracing the art that makes them feel something, and using all the tools and influences at their disposal.
5. You recently holed yourself up in a hotel room until you had finished a new story. (I believe you said you like to do that when you feel you have about 15,000 words left?) What does your path of creation typically look like? And what happens if that 15,000 turns into 30,000? I guess what I’m asking is at what point do we get worried and start to send in tacos, more red bull, and/or consider it a burgeoning Jack Torrance situation?
I start slow with any kind of story, finding the tone first and considering the plot elements second. So the first 15,000 words of a novel might take me two months. Then, when I obsess long enough that the path through the story sort of unfolds in front of me, I can write much faster. It helps hugely once I’m excited about the ending, because then I have a focal point I can look at and say, “How do I make that ending count? How do I make that land with as much emotional resonance as possible?”
I won’t do a hotel session until I know the ending and have a limited estimate for how many words it might take to get there. I once wrote 20,000 in three days, but then had to go back and cut 9,000 of that for the piece to work. That was painful.
As a general policy, always send more tacos/beer/red bull.
Check back tomorrow for Part 2. (Teaser: there are references to Forest Gump, manually creating glaciers, and octagons.)
--A.V. Bach is a writer and musician living in Chicago, IL. He holds a BA in English from Syracuse University and an MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. His fiction has been published in the US and UK in such literary journals as Gone Lawn, Kerouac’s Dog Magazine, and Gargoyle. You can purchase his debut novel, “Eisenstein’s Monster,” here, through Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or you can order it through your local bookstore or library.