Lucius Shepard: The Concord Free Press Interview

Lucius Shepard is the author of dozens of works of fiction—from fantasy to science fiction to more literary works—all informed by his supernatural intelligence and relentless empathy. On the eve of publication of his novel A Handbook of American Prayer by the Concord Free Press, novelist and CFP Founder Stona Fitch interviewed Shepard at length about his work and life. 

SF: How do you define yourself as a writer?

LS: Truly, I don’t often think about this. I’ve written for all manner of reasons. I’ve written out of desperation, for money, for art’s sake, for love, because I had nothing better to do, and so on. I write now because it’s the only thing I do that anyone is likely to pay me for, and because I love telling stories. I like the craft that goes into creating visual effects, psychological effects and so forth. I like manufacturing certainty, ambiguity, and everything in between. I like learning about writing by writing. You could say that over the years it’s evolved from a preoccupation to an addiction.

If you’re asking in what context do I see myself, as a post-modernist or modernist, a genre writer, a slipstream writer with a pinko agenda—I’d say I try to serve the needs of the story I’m given to tell and let that stand. Writing is an extremely uncomplicated thing for me. Kind of like high-end carpentry. If you needed a door, I might just be able to build you a nice-looking one that keeps the bugs out yet let’s good light in.

Often when reading a review of something I’ve written I’m startled to see a reviewer reference a paragraph I wrote because, though I recall having written it, it seems unfamiliar, perhaps smarter than I remember. . .and then when I view the paragraph in context of the page and the reviewer’s assertion that it states the essence of some theme in the work—that startles me, too, because I hadn’t clearly perceived it at the time. I’m not trying to pass myself off as a savant. That’s not the case. I know what I’m about to a great extent, but it doesn’t concern me, or, better said, I don’t want it to concern me. I suppose this is an example of magical thinking, the reliance on the notion that if I knew what I was doing I wouldn’t do it half as well. Yet lately it’s occurred to me that I may be completely wrong about this, that the more knowledge one has, the more precise and fluent the work.

SF: What inspired you to tackle so many different genres?

LS: I enjoy writing different types of things. Simple as that.

I started out as a science fiction/fantasy writer. My wife sent a partial manuscript into a genre workshop that lasted for six weeks and I was accepted. I think she wanted me out of the house, because my band had broken up and I was moping about, watching a lot of Christian programming on TV. Jim Baker was starting to speak to me, despite his obvious reptilian brand of hallelujah juice, and I was tempted to cast reason aside and give prayer a shot. And then I thought if this cretin (Baker) could do it to me, why couldn’t I do it to someone else? I began to consider religion as a career alternative.

Anyway, the science fiction/fantasy genre was where I got my start. I enjoyed writing genre stuff, but not all the time, and gradually I began to branch out into general fiction. I really like playing with genre convention and (so-called) restrictions, yet I appreciate liberation from them as well. I’ve never felt easy staying put in one particular slot, which hasn’t endeared me to publishers. 

SF: Graham Greene divided his novels into groups by intent (entertainment), vs. genre. Looking across the wide-ranging books you’ve written, how would you categorize them?

LS: I don’t look at my books as a taxonomy—I see them as a history. I never had any formal training (unless one countenances my father’s tutelage as such) and I started publishing before I had a clue as to what I was doing and learned on the job. Many of the genre pieces seem amateurish now, but I like certain of them as much as anything I’ve done. Some of what I’ve written was less serious in intent, at least more cynical than others, but I’ve never given less than my best effort at solving the narrative problems they presented. People may consider certain things I’ve written as entertainments, but to my mind all fiction writing is entertainment, from the Twilight books to Richard Powers.

SF: You seem to have avoided the literary-industrial complex. Intentional?

LS: I wasn’t much of a student—I kept dropping out and heading for parts unknown. I was, I believe, about a tenth-semester sophomore at the University of North Carolina when I finally followed my freshman advisor’s advice. He had asked me what I wanted to do in life and I said that I wasn’t sure, but I thought I wanted to be a writer or a rock and roll musician.

“Okay,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

What I liked about the university environment were the parties, the drugs and alcohol, and the wide variety of girls who were, like me, into fooling around. I didn’t much care for the academic part of things and I had no great thirst for knowledge. No plan, nothing. Sometimes I regret not having acquired an academic vocabulary, but not so much. My learning has been chiefly experiential, the product of traveling around and talking to people and experiencing new things. I wouldn’t have done as much traveling if I had gone the academic route and I feel I would have regretted that more.

So never having finished undergraduate work, that pretty much cut me out of doing graduate work. But even if I could have gotten around that, I doubt I would have thrived in a MFA program. I have problems with authority figures, and I would have seen my professors as such and tried to get over on them in some way, instead of letting them mentor me. It might have been a good thing to do, if for no other reason than it would be nice to have teaching to fall back on. I’ve enjoyed what little teaching I’ve done. But que sera sera.

SF: You’re remarkably productive. Did you have any down periods when you weren’t writing? If so, did you find it difficult to not be focused on a book?

LS: I don’t think I’m all that productive, but I’m as productive as I am because I had to make a living at this business from the very start. I had no backup plan and I haven’t held down a real job for thirty years. Because I made some lousy career choices, I’ve had to write too quickly at times, to write things I wouldn’t have ordinarily done. There’s been far too much of that. But to answer your question, I’ve had periods when I just sat around and chewed food and watched TV. I’m pretty lazy, really. Yet then I look at those times as essential for back-brain thinking, so maybe it’s okay to be lazy. And I am happiest when I’m writing. I don’t know what would happen if I won the lottery, though. I’d like to believe I’d keep working at it, but who knows?

SF: Name some of your favorite authors/books that readers may not have heard about.

LS: I’ve always thought that despite being a fairly famous book, winning the Prix Goncourt, being published in the US in a Vintage edition, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco is underappreciated. A mosaic novel about the history of a shantytown built near an oil refinery on the island of Martinique, it’s a great book that deserves a place on the shelf beside Marquez.

Straight Through the Night by Edward Allen. This is a beautifully written novel about a guy named Chuck who works for a New York City meatpacking company. It examines how racism breeds in the workplace and is told (as one reviewer puts it) with “a Celine-esque malevolence.” This book knocked me out when I read it in the early 90s and I expected more from Allen. But after a second and, to my mind, less satisfactory novel, he appeared on the TV show Jeopardy and then vanished. I’ve since learned that he teaches at the University of South Dakota and published a book of poems a few years back. But basically his career was one of those weird literary disappearing acts that pepper the American landscape.

SF: What advice would you give younger writers?

LS: Take the cash and flush the credit cards. And, of course, write your ass off.

SF: Publishing has changed a lot since your first novel came out. Is it a better or worse time to be a writer?

LS: I suppose it’s a great time to be a writer if you write vampire porn or stuff about paranormal teddy bears. Probably not so much if you want to do literary work. If you’re a serious writer in today’s market, if you want to be, as Gregory Corso put it, a

starscrewer, and you have the strength to persevere, to endure the vicissitudes of the small press, then this is fine time to be a writer. The small press seems to be thriving, despite the economy, and I notice a great many talented people breaking in that way. Then there’s the boom in ebooks. And in profitable self-publishing. Currently that seems to be working mainly on the low end quality-wise—endless strings of zombie and dark fantasy books, et al. But this may change.

The downside is that mainstream publishing has gotten to be increasingly like Hollywood. They’re scared to take chances, they’re looking for stuff that’ll fly out of the store like crystal meth. So they’re less likely to invest in someone who’s interested in working a stylish surface and has a point of view more sophisticated than that of a donut. Editors aren’t looking to guide careers, to nurture writers, to develop an audience—they’re searching for a new JK Rowling. You can’t blame them, their jobs are on the line, but it’s sad.

These are generalities, of course. There are always exceptions and people have been testifying about the end of publishing since before I started writing and it hasn’t happened yet. 

SF: What are you most proud of in your writing career? Any regrets?

LS: I’m happy with the two books the Concord Free Press is publishing [Note: The CFP’s ebook imprint, the Concord ePress, is also publishing a new edition of Shepard’s Viator]. And I think the book I’m working on now is going to be something I won’t be embarrassed by. Regrets? Oh yeah. A lot of wasted time and effort, dumb attempts at trying to write something commercial. Conversely, I regret passing up offers I’ve had to do something commercial. For instance, back when I was starting out an editor offered me and another writer 50k each to start a series. I’d do a science fiction one and the other guy would do fantasy. I turned it down and the other guy accepted. That was George RR Martin and his project turned out to be the best-selling Game of Fire and Ice, the thing that’s now an HBO show. Of course, there’s no guarantee I would have done as well as George, but when times have been hard, I’ve cussed myself out for letting that chance slip away.

I guess the thing I regret most is the problem I’ve always had about whether to go for the loot or the glory. I thought I could half-ass it, play both sides of the street, and maybe I could have if I’d been more persistent. But that’s the hard way. If you have options, the best thing to do is decide on a goal early on and just go for it. It’s taken me a while to get that straight. 

SF: Your childhood sounds kind of rough. Can you describe it? How did it influence your writing?

LS: My father was a Brit-o-phile who loved to poke his nose in the air and quote lines from Joyce, Synge, Milton, etc.—a househusband who had nothing better to do than to screw with me. He fancied himself a literary sort. He been educated at Queens College in Dublin and had an infant literary career that he never pursued for some reason—he talked about it in terms of a great tragedy that would never be mine to know. He knew a lot of literary people and published in the same magazines as they did. He had a letter from William Carlos Williams congratulating him on my birth. It seemed authentic, but I don’t put it past him that he faked it, because he faked things quite a bit. 

For example, he wrote stories that he passed off as mine and sent them to Collins Magazine, an English children’s magazine, when I was very young. He said he wanted me to be a writer and forced me to read the classics, Greek histories, Shakespeare and such starting when I was five years old. To enforce his rule he whipped me every day and locked me in closets and so forth. When I was fourteen he came at me with his fists and I knocked him out.

I’m sure he had reasons for what he did, and I suppose in some twisted fashion he had my best interests at heart, but I never knew anything about him apart from the fact that he seemed to enjoy being a tyrant. After I lashed out at him, my parents claimed I was uncontrollable and persuaded a doctor to sedate me with drugs, under the guise of giving me a flu shot in my home in Daytona Beach FL. 

I woke up in a straitjacket in the back of an ambulance in Westchester PA, the site of a private hospital, the Devereaux Institute. The Institute consisted of a four-step program that specialized in dealing with mentally disturbed teenagers—the steps were incarceration in a hopeless ward (I spent the first six weeks sleeping between an old man named Louie who ate cigarette butts and a hydrocephalic Greek kid); an idiot farm where one did crafts all day and fed ducks and sang childish songs (I preferred the hopeless ward, because I could talk to the orderlies there, whereas the staff at the idiot farm had a patient manner and a soft voice and said shit like, Yes, we understand, and Now, Lucius, you put that two-by-four down, or there’ll be consequences!; a reform school-like prison farm; and a stage I can only describe as Hell High, a school where most of the students were depraved little monsters, the offspring of wealthy parents who found dumping them there was easier than actual parenting. 

SF: Holy shit.

LS: Exactly. My parents were not wealthy, so I felt no connection with anyone in the place—in fact, I remained angry and alienated for my entire stay at the Institute, refusing to talk to clinicians, moving back and forth in the system until at last I managed to persuade one of my relatives to intercede for me. After the better part of a year I was released into his custody. At this point I probably should have been locked up. I threatened to kill the relative who’d sprung me, and I wasn’t woofing, I was dead serious. I was demented, furious at the world, alienated from the human race. 

When you’re in a place like that, minor incidents become magnified. One day the orderlies in the hopeless ward asked what Florida was like, and I told then, among other things, about this water-skiing elephant they had in Cypress Gardens. The orderlies started treating me different after that, seeing this detail as evidence of madness. I told them it was a baby elephant and the skis were pontoons, but they wouldn’t believe me, so I wrote my mom and asked her to send a post card with the picture of the water-skiing elephant on it. They had them in every Florida souvenir shop. But my mom never sent the picture. She had abandoned me to my father’s clutches years before—she pretended not to notice what was going on, she had important canasta games to attend, and was so used to averting her eyes and ears, she did so in this instance. It cost me the only two friends I had in Devereaux and caused me, ultimately, to have a minimal relationship with her.

Once I was out, I ran away and made it to Europe, where I became a minor-league smuggler and drug addict, got married at 19 in Spain, lost my wife in an highway accident, bottomed out again, went to Afghanistan and dried out, returned to the States with a gun and a pound of hash, got busted, did short time in Rikers Island. Prison straightened me out a bit. After my release I was more cautious and not as full-on insane as when I went in, but I was by no means stable or healthy, either. I became a terrible person, a bad man, a user of people, a violent son of a bitch. I think I started to grow out of that along about the end of my second marriage.

So yeah, I guess you could say my childhood influenced me in every possible way. I expect you could trace everything I’ve revealed about myself in this interview back to my relationship with my father. All of a sudden there I was in my early thirties, with rock and roll a dying possibility and with all that iambic pentameter in my head and a bunch of stories to tell—I didn’t have any option other than doing what my father had wanted, becoming a writer. But still I resisted it for a while.

SF: Describe your career in rock. Did you enjoy being a musician vs. a writer?

LS: I enjoyed writing songs and performing, but those pursuits only occupy about three or four percent of the time spent in keeping a band together. Making sure the sax player had extra reeds and that everyone showed up on time for a sound check, enduring long hours in the practice room with people laughing at your ideas until at last they get it, breaking up fights between girl friends, between musicians, between roadies, between band members and the audience, dealing with scum-of-the-earth club owners, constantly dealing with personalities, sleeping six to a room on the road...that was a nightmare.

To exemplify the kind of thing you have to deal with, I noticed once that one of my musicians had become surly, truculent. Since it hadn’t yet affected anything, I pretended not to notice and let him stew. Finally one day he came to me and said, How come you write all the songs, Lucius?

Early on I would have gone into a song and dance about how it was because I was the only person willing to put in the time and energy, because I WAS the writer for this band, who could do it better?, etc., etc., but this would only have exacerbated the issue. Instead I said, I don’t know, man. Why don’t you write one? I never heard anything more from him about it, but that’s the kind of juvenile, high-school crap you have to deal with 24-7.

So the career…I wrote some good songs, had some minor successes, played with some great people, backed up guys like Luther Allison, had some dangerous fun and a ton of frustration, drank and drugged in a string of armpit bars, and in the end burned out on show biz. If I had it to do over, I’d take a few steady guys, people I could trust, and get in the studio rather than trying to have a working band.

SF: You’ve held a number of terrible day jobs. Care to share some of them?

LS: The job that most aggravated me was a two-man gig I had sealing driveways. I busted my tail every day for 12 hours and after work I’d have to wash the gunk off with gasoline. I kept telling my boss, this old WWII vet, that we needed someone else and at last he hired a guy who had just returned from Vietnam. Thereafter they passed the time swapping war stories while I sealed the driveways.

I’ve worked as a bouncer, a correspondent for Blue Cross, informing senior citizens that they hadn’t filled out the proper forms (need I say, not much fun?), and a bozo, one of those guys who sits behind a wire screen over a tank of water and insults people at carnivals, encouraging them to throw baseballs at a target so as to dunk him. Probably the most interesting job I had, at least in terms of its theatrical potentials, was working as a janitor at a power plant that was transitioning from coal to nuclear power. The union was being sued at the time for not admitting blacks (this was in Michigan, during the 70s) and so the plant hired 30 some workers (most of them black and several white guys, including me) through a temp agency to do the work of two union workers. The supervisor told us to look busy or stay out of sight, there was so little to do. 

We turned the place into a blue-collar theme park. We hooked our jump suits to tracks that ran along the ceiling between ranks of enormous roaring coal mills, hoisted ourselves up about twenty feet above the floor and had mid-air races along the aisles. The constant vibration shook down pumice-like concrete dust from the ceiling and the more artistically inclined among us competed to create the most intricate designs in the dust by using vacuum carts. A crane lifted a wire cage up to clean the interior of the chimney and at lunch we’d go up in pairs and have fistfights inside the cage as it swung in thirty-foot arcs a hundred feet above the ground, smacking into the side of the cage. 

In between the fourth and fifth floor there was a crawlspace. I investigated and found it populated by guys reading, sleeping, smoking dope, and drinking. One of them told me, “Man, this gig is great. We can do anything we want. We even had women up in here last Christmas.”

You’d think the plant staff would have been worried about thirty-odd idiots under the influence and wandering through rooms filled with millions of dollars worth of computer equipment, but no one seemed to care, although we spoke loudly about the damage we were tempted to do. I slept all day, played with my band at night. It worked well for me for a while, but before long I grew disaffected with how comfortable I was getting and gave the job up.

SF: When did your interest in Central America begin?

LS: My mom was a Spanish teacher and used to take student groups down to various Latin American countries, so I first went down when I was five years old. We returned frequently after that, and by the time I was on my own I felt more at home in Guatemala and Honduras than I did in the States.

The last decade or so I’ve been on and off involved with some charitable projects down there. For one, the Colombian cocaine cartel (Don’t believe the sauce that it’s all better in Colombia nowadays) uses the Honduran lobster fleet to help smuggle their product in among lobsters that are brought in through Alabama, where there is virtually no oversight. They bring in Honduran lobster, which is like selling blood diamonds because the divers are treated horribly. They’re mostly Mosquitia Indians, and they’re coerced into making up to 17 or 18 dives a day in 120 feet of water with faulty equipment—the industry basically uses them up and throws them away. Down on the Mosquito Coast you meet dozens of young guys who can’t grip your hand, because they’ve all been afflicted with the bends, and there are plenty who’ve been catastrophically paralyzed. They’re on their backs in the dirt and if they don’t get up they die from organ failure, skin breakdown, etc. Causes like this and the plight of the cane workers who are being systematically poisoned by Dow and the people at Flor de Cana have kept my interest in the region high over the years.

SF: You seem to have an affinity for outsiders (hobos, criminals, etc.) in your work. Do you see it as a chance to give them a voice?

LS: I don’t believe the disenfranchised have a limited viewpoint or even that they’re necessarily outsiders. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault wrote that “...from the very outset, the criminal is at the heart of the law.” Our society is shaped by criminals and so-called outsiders, by the desire to protect itself against them and provide a safe haven for the really nasty criminals, the bankers and politicians.

I feel the view from below and outside is relatively unfettered by the blinders that afflict those who inhabit the straight and narrow. Who better to talk about justice than someone justice has just landed on?

I write about the people I know, and though I guess I know a better class of people now these new people…they’re interesting, they’re friends, and on occasion I notice some peculiarity, some excess that I incorporate into a story, but there’s a kind of gloss over them, as if they’re members of the same club, whereas the people I used to know (and still know, in some instances) seem less homogenous. 

I don’t know. I like good wine, but I’ve drunk my share of Night Train. Go figure.

SF: Describe your routine. How does writing integrate with living, for you?

LS: Up early, make coffee and at the computer immediately. I’ve found it pays to get a quick start, to get at the writing before I wake up fully, or else I begin thinking of ways to piss away the day. Usually I’ll work until noon or 1 PM, but I have stretches when I’ll work straight through until 8 or 9 o’clock at night. Sometimes I break for lunch and then come back and do a second stretch at the computer, often focusing on a side project. I usually have a number of stories to work on in various stages of completion. 

Since I’ve become a writer, I’ve been obsessive about it and I’ve managed, with the gracious acquiescence of various partners, to keep my morning people-free…and sometimes my afternoons. Basically, we learn to work around my writing jones.

SF: What was the original inspiration for Viator?

LS: friend and I were to be on a panel on Edgar Allen Poe (it was his birthday) at a writer’s conference moderated by someone we didn’t particularly respect, so we came up with a fake writer, a Scandanavian fantasist named Jochanan Lunde, and developed some of his plots so we could discuss them authoritatively. The idea was that the moderator would, when confronted by our reverence for Lunde, begin to agree with us and heap praise upon Lunde, and this would fill us with childish glee. It wasn’t as mean-spirited as it sounds—we didn’t plan to expose the joke and humiliate the moderator. We were just trying to make the panel entertaining for us.

At any rate, the panel started and the moderator began to talk about Poe in a less than admiring way, saying that his work did not impress upon re-reading. I met my friend’s eyes and we silently agreed to forgo the plan, since the panel was already a joke.

Viator was one of the plots I made up for our fake writer. I kept thinking about it and one morning I wrote the first paragraph, thereby initiating a process that served to prove the joke was on me.

SF: What happened to you when you were writing the first version of Viator?

LS: I can’t totally blame Viator for what happened, because I’d been overworking myself for a good while before it came along, and I was caught up in an unhappy love affair, which took something of a toll—but it certainly was the thing that pushed me over the edge. 

In the book, Viator is the name of a cargo vessel that was headed for shipbreaking grounds in Latin America, coming from Siberia, when its captain ran it aground on the Alaskan coast. Five men, all of Scandanavian heritage, are hired to do salvage work while living on board the ship. As the job progresses they begin to go mad, to believe that the voyage is continuing and they’re headed somewhere incredible. The claustrophobic confines of the ship seem to accentuate and encourage their madness. 

I wanted to write something stylistically extreme, to do it in page-long sentences, and as I worked on the book, the concentrated effort of working in this style, getting the balances right, wore on me. I began to feel like my protagonist, muzzy-headed, feverish, obsessed, trapped in the confine of my study, increasingly enfeebled in mind and spirit. I lost my way. I became humorless, dull, listless…I couldn’t hold a thought in my head. My editor wouldn’t hear any excuses. He demanded the book and somehow I managed to wrap up the story and handed it in, but I knew the ending wasn’t right and the whole last quarter of the book was truncated.

I discovered that I’d worked myself into a state of clinical depression. I sought help, recovered, and asked my editor if they planned to do a paperback. No. So I took it on faith that someone would publish it and went about setting things to rights.

SF: What led you to write Prayer?

LS: I had one of those swirly white ceilings in my apartment, a roughly textured ceiling. I used to lie on the couch and stare at it and think about the story I was working on, and one day I discovered what every acidhead knows, that if I let my eyes go out of focus I saw images in the white paint. In this case, images of a medieval town. They became more and more detailed each time I lay down on the couch, as if the images were imprinting themselves on the ceiling, and after the detail reached a certain point I began thinking about a novella connected to it. I’m still working on that story, called The Lace Ceiling, and may finish it later this year. A few months afterward I was lying on the couch and I saw images of a little desert town with mesas around it and over the next few weeks I fleshed it out until it was populated with beat-up cars and Native Americans and tanned white people—it took the place of the medieval town. Soon a name popped into my head. Wardlin. I messed around with the character, writing a few lines here and there. Not notes, really. Just things in his voice. I started writing the story before I knew what it was about and it just grew into the book.

Not much of a method, but it’s all I’ve got.

SF: Do you see Prayer as a particularly resonant book in 2011?

LS: People have been looking for easy answers, the kind Wardlin Stuart provides, in every human period, but I suppose this decade and the last are particularly suited to his glib delivery, his DIY style of prayer, his entire act. He’s our type of con man in that he seems to be conning himself in order to con others—there’s something innocent about him, even though he’s a murderer. 

When I was a little kid I was sick a lot and this gave me a pale, ethereal look. A local preachers (not our church) noticed this and asked my parents if he could borrow me to help with his fundraising. It seems appalling that parents would lend their five-year-old out to someone they barely knew just because he was a man of God, but they said, Hey, take him, and I spent a good many afternoons accompanying Reverend Nichols while he went door to door, asking his parishioners for money to build a new church. About six months later he vanished with 250K of the church’s building fund. He would stand there, holding my hand, giving his spiel, and I think that image stuck with me in some crucial way. It became a way I saw myself in adolescence, a decent kid but someone who had to get over on people or else they wouldn’t notice him. And eventually it became the image at the heart of Wardlin’s character.

I think the Wardlin, a man with two or three personalities washed together, is a character that suits the schizophrenic tenor of our times, the fragmented way we see ourselves.

SF: Why did you choose to publish Prayer with the Concord Free Press?

LS: I thought it was a good way to bring some new attention to the book, but I also liked the tie-in with a diffuse charitable enterprise. The idea of people sending money to a charity of their choice because of this book—a book that concerns the very antithesis of charity—I find that very appealing. In addition, I’m drawn to any press that’s attempting to radicalize the publishing industry. 

SF: What are you working on now?

LS: A novel about a small group of people who believe that a nuclear apocalypse has occurred, though clearly it has not. Also, the usual assortment of novellas and short novels. I’m particularly enthusiastic about one that’s very obliquely connected to Prayer, about a career criminal who emigrates to Central America and goes all Robin Hood for a while…but then reverts to type.