You’re well known for your short stories, with a couple of acclaimed collections, but we hear you’re working on novels, too. What can you tell us about them?
I have about one and a half books in a contemporary science fiction series that I’ve spent the past year on, and I am having a ball. I guess it’s a kind of a corporate paranoia tale. Is that a thing? I think it’s a thing. There should be more of this thing, I think.

I don’t know when I realized that the story I was telling was longer than one book, but at some point I realized I didn’t want to stop hanging out with this character I’d built. I love how she throws herself into things and then barely stumbles out the other side.

Yeah. Turns out, novel writing is a blast. Or maybe I just got lucky on this one, ’cos my previous attempt at writing novels wasn’t this much fun.

You write a lot about Sydney – what makes the city appealing as a setting?
Well, not to sound lazy, but it’s the city I live in. So that’s appealing. But Sydney fascinates me more the more I find out about it. It’s Australia’s oldest post-colonial city, but by world standards it’s still quite young. Sometimes it reminds me of ancient European cities, like Rome and Naples and Madrid, say. All traffic chaos and corners where detritus is busily building into its own shapes. Sometimes, instead, what you notice is its alcoves of villages, like Chippendale and Erskinville (Chippo and Erko, to those in the know). The village thing is a little like New York, where you can be in a perfectly large metropolis one minute and then suddenly find yourself strolling along a quiet street towards the most perfect local bar you’ve ever come across.

And then sometimes – perhaps more obviously – it’s reminiscent of coastal cities like Vancouver, San Francisco and Boston, where the water has as much of a presence as the land.

I think there’s something haphazard about Sydney; something tragically awkward about a city perched on the edge of a stolen land. Corporate buildings with shiny steel girders and deep blue windows clash with the pastels and beige of the eighties boom. Local pubs and cafes are dug into the red brick and peeling paint of the falling-down Art Deco buildings.

You contributed to the Ishtar anthology, which also had stories by Kaaron Warren and Cat Sparks. What can you tell us about the project?
Ishtar was one of those dream projects. Mark Deniz of Gilgamesh & Morrigan Presses came up with the idea of a three-novella anthology around the subject of Ishtar. He then approached us to write the historical, contemporary and futuristic stories. I was thrilled to get the contemporary story (I think I might’ve made a pitch for that one), although it was daunting to be in the potential position of the ‘‘sagging middle.’’ It was probably that worry that motivated me to write a thriller-style story told in present tense. And wow, writing in present tense is an incredibly energizing experience. I strongly recommend it.

Kaaron generously shared her research, and after a couple of initial discussions, we pretty much made our own ways through our stories. I think it’s part of the magic of the project that the resulting anthology hangs together so well; I mean, apart from the effort and teamwork, of course. The collection and stories were nominated for a few awards locally and my novella was shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award.

You’ve described yourself as a ‘‘tired idealist.’’ Care to elaborate?
Alfred Adler said it’s easier to fight for your principles than it is to live up to them. I think for a long time I took that as a personal challenge. I wanted to walk the walk. So I tried to live a life of justice and intelligence and grace. I guess you could say I was an angry youth for a long time, long after I could manage to call myself a youth at all.

But if you’re lucky enough to get older, you begin to realise that a lot of the ideals that drive you really are very hard to hold onto in the real world. In the space of one year a while ago, I had two people I worked with basically tell me to a) be less honest and b) care less about the quality of what I was doing. And not even in a very round-about way, but to actually say, ‘‘Your problem is, you’re too honest.’’ I hadn’t even realized I had a problem until then.

The worst bit was, I realized they were right, that the ideals fiction had fed me – of justice and equality, say, or the ‘‘rightness’’ of reward and loss – were a waste of time for the real world. I began to wonder why we weren’t teaching ‘‘real life’’ skills to kids in school. Like, ‘‘how to deal with bullies,’’ ‘‘how to suck up to your loser boss,’’ ‘‘why being a jerk gets you the desk with the view,’’ ‘‘how to not be bothered when the bad guys win.’’ I mean, it really obsessed me for a while.

I figured if I was going to survive, I either had to a) get rid of my juvenile ideals, or b) hold onto them & become sidelined. And you know what? I chose the latter even though I thought it was the dumb choice. I know I’m supposed to say that it made me a better person or a stronger person or there was some intrinsic pay-off for holding onto the ideals which defined me. But actually I don’t think it is the ideals that define me. It’s my dumb decision to stick to them that most shows what I am.

An idiot. Too old to learn to be somebody new.

You’re often described as a horror writer. Do you write to the horror audience, specifically?
I don’t. But I think if you write honestly, a lot of what you say will look like horror. That is to say, there is a dark and difficult side to life, and sometimes we write about it in order to exorcise it, and sometimes we write about it to embrace it, to remind ourselves about what it is to be human. Which is, messy and complicated and corrupted and aspirational and sometimes hopeful, sometimes hopeless.

I think it’s the acknowledgement of that darkness which makes people who write horror amongst the most welcoming and down-to-earth people to work with.

‘‘I’ve been fortunate to meet a number of my heroes over the years. I met the famous logician Kurt Gödel when I was in grad school. That was a big deal. He’s the smartest man I ever met, and just an amazing person. He knew what I was going to say before I said it. I only spent a couple of hours with him, but that was such an important event for me, like seeing the guru in his cave.

‘‘I also got to meet Allen Ginsberg around 1982. We were at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (at the Naropa Institute). The Beats were always there, Ginsberg and Burroughs and Corso. I was teaching a course on the philosophy of mathematics, but I always wanted to be a beatnik writer, or a beatnik science fiction writer, so I was thrilled to meet these guys. As soon as I met Allen, I told him I was a writer and I said, ‘Can I get your blessing?’ Like in a myth, where you meet the old writer, the old guru, and you say, ‘I need your blessing.’ He was into it, and right away he slapped his hand down on the top of my head and said, ‘Bless you.’ I got to give Burroughs a copy of White Light. He said it looked ‘far out.’ That made me happy.”

*

‘‘I’ve always had a theory that the British equivalent of the CIA, MI5, murdered Turing. This was the Cold War period. They were incredibly paranoid about homosexuals knowing state secrets, because homosexuals could be blackmailed. (Though again, Turing probably wouldn’t have cared. He would tell anybody that he was homosexual.) Turing had promised as part of his parole not to have sex with anyone in England, but he’d go on vacation to Greece, or to Scandinavia, and have boyfriends there. Sometimes the boyfriends would visit him in England, and he would debate to himself what the restriction meant, against having sex in England, if the person wasn’t English.

‘‘The setup in my book Turing and Burroughs is that Turing has a guy visiting him from Greece, and they’re about to have sex, but the vice squad is sneaking around watching Turing. He’s in a hotel with this boyfriend, and the cops send up a pot of tea with cyanide in it. Turing’s boyfriend drinks it and he dies. So then Turing says, ‘They’re out to kill me. I have to run. But what I’ll do is put this guy in my bed, in my house, and I’ll leave. But before I do that, we’ll switch faces.’ From there we’re getting into science fiction. The idea of growing faces wasn’t completely unlikely, given that Turing did those experiments in morphogenesis. So he gets a bit of skin from his nose and his boyfriend’s nose, and grows two faces in the oven, and puts his face on the guy’s, and the guy’s on his. Then he flees to Tangier. …

‘‘By the time I’d finished learning how to self-publish, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to sell Turing & Burroughs. It had been floating around out there, and nobody was making an offer. I thought, ‘Okay, I’ll do it myself.’ It’s a meager cash stream, but it’s steady, and it lasts for a while. And, as I mentioned, you can sell e-books direct by yourself. I have a site called Transreal Books. I’m a publisher. I’ve already made about as much off Turing & Burroughs as I would have gotten as an advance from Tor. I’m selling fewer copies, but I earn a lot more per book.”

*

‘‘What I’m working on nowadays is a novel called The Big Aha. It’s set in Louisville KY, where I grew up, and I’m enjoying that. If you stay in Louisville, then all the people around you are people you’ve known your whole life, and you can pretty much say anything to them. Nobody cares. I’ve been visiting Louisville lately, and it’s strange. I’m pretty close to done with the novel now, maybe 85 percent of the way. I enjoy writing books about genomics and the biotech revolution. I think that’s going to be one of the really big technologies of the 21st century. We’re still just barely wading into that. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suppose that in a century or so, lots of our devices won’t be manufactured machines anymore. They could be plants and animals that have been designed to behave in ways that we consider useful. Even things like a knife or a glass, it’s easy enough to imagine plants growing such things for us. Primitive peoples drink out of coconut shells, but we could tweak it so it’s more what we like. And for communication devices, there’s all this interest in squid skin – that would be a great visual display. Electric eels send out electromagnetic pulses, so that could be the basis of wireless communication. …

‘‘The gimmick in The Big Aha is that people get quantum wetware. Wetware’s already an intriguing word – it’s what’s going on in your body, your DNA, your chemicals. Then you make it quantum, so you can consciously control how rapidly you do the oscillations between the cosmic mode and robotic mode. So my characters are party people – they just wedge their minds open to the cosmic, and they’re cosmic all the time. …

‘‘I’m not sure who’s going to publish this novel. I’m putting a little more sex in it than I used to do for my Tor books. David Hartwell once said to me, ‘If you’re talking about the 13-year-old audience, there are some 13-year-olds who are very interested in sex, and some who aren’t. And you can guess which group is the one that reads science fiction.’ But the book isn’t really about sex. I’m having a lot of fun with it. I do like the classic tropes of SF – I call them the ‘power chords.’ That’s how I thought of cyberpunk, as a way of taking the classic SF things, like alien invasions, telepathy, giant ants, and making them rock a little harder. That’s what I’m doing in The Big Aha. If I don’t find a publisher, I’m confident I can self publish it. We’ll see how it goes.’’

‘‘My husband Keith Miller and I taught high school there for three years and then moved to Egypt. We actually wanted to go to Egypt first. Keith is American but grew up in Kenya, so we had East Africa in common: for him it was growing up there, for me it was my ethnic background. We’re both also very bookish. We like languages that have a lot of literature in them. Arabic was the obvious language to get interested in, and we wanted to go somewhere where people spoke Arabic, so Egypt was the obvious choice.

‘‘We wanted to go to Egypt, but when we were looking for jobs, this opportunity in Sudan came up. Keith had worked in northern Sudan before we got married, and he pointed out that because of the war, southern Sudan was a part of the world you couldn’t get to unless you had a reason to go there (like a job). We could go to Egypt on vacation, but we couldn’t see southern Sudan. He had worked in the north and really loved it, and he had a lot of southern Sudanese friends, and he’d always wanted to go to the south. To travel from north to south you had to go through Kenya, and we had different passports – it was like being spies because northern and southern Sudan were at war, and it was really complicated. After that we lived in Egypt for nine years. I taught English as a second language all those years, then decided, okay, now I’m ready to do the academic thing, and returned to Madison to get my PhD. I’ve loved it.

‘‘I’ve always been a writer. I’m not trained, so I taught myself to write by writing A Stranger in Olondria. It was a hot mess when I wrote the first draft. That took me two years. I was writing longhand. It was 200,000 words, which is about twice as long as it is now. It didn’t need to be that long – it wasn’t like beautiful things were lost! I spent the next 10 years revising it, on and off. I wrote a sequel, which is also a mess, that I’m trying to revise now. I didn’t imagine the books as a long series, but I did imagine two Olondria books.

‘‘When I came back to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I went to the convention WisCon for the first time. I’d never been to a convention before. I knew that I loved Small Beer Press – loved their books, I love everything they do, everything Kelly Link does ever. But I had published nothing, no short stories, nothing. I went to the Small Beer table and I met Gavin Grant and said, ‘I wrote this book.’ He said, ‘What’s it about?’ And I said, ‘Well, you know, it’s about somebody who leaves home and then he’s haunted by a ghost.’ He didn’t seem enthusiastic about my description at all! But he said, ‘Send me three chapters.’ So I did, and he said, ‘Can you send us the whole thing?’ Then he said, ‘We love it and we want to publish it.’ Best e-mail ever.

*

‘‘I read constantly. I discovered Proust while I was in Sudan. That was incredible, and possibly not the best thing for a young writer – it may be the reason the first draft was so overwritten! I was reading the poetry of Rilke, too. The whole idea of the angel as ghostliness and terror and beauty and pursuit, something that’s in pursuit of you, which is so important in A Stranger in Olondria, actually comes from Stephen Mitchell’s critical introduction to his translations of Rilke’s poetry. I wasn’t reading much genre fiction at all, though I’ve always loved Mervyn Peake, and Tolkien is an influence definitely in terms of maps and language and those epic fantasy things, and Ursula Le Guin, especially The Tombs of Atuan – I’ve loved it since I was a kid. Those were all there. But I read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time twice when I was in Sudan. The first volume, I don’t know how many times I read it. I also read the Brontë sisters, and I read Dracula for the first time when I was in Sudan. There’s Carole Maso, I adore her and her book AVA, it’s almost like a narrative poem. She’s a big influence. Cormac McCarthy. Michael Ondaatje. These are the people I was reading over and over while writing the book. I was also influenced by my favorites from high school: Woolf, Hemingway, Joyce, Faulkner, all of those.”

*

‘‘I’m starting a job in the fall at California State University Channel Islands, which is in Camarillo, north of LA. They want somebody who can do world lit, and I can do African Lit, and teach Arabic for them as well, and Arabic literature in translation. It’s interesting because when I went on the job market, I asked people, does the novel go on the CV? They said, ‘No, no, no, don’t let anybody know you write. Hide, hide, hide. Strange Horizons, who are you kidding? These are research universities, they don’t want to hear that!’ But with this particular school, they’re really into the interdisciplinary thing, and I thought they wouldn’t mind some crossover between academic and creative work. So I mentioned the creative writing stuff when I applied, and obviously it didn’t put them off, because they hired me. I’m happy I’m not starting a job and having to hide a huge part of my life. I was really excited to take this job – this is the one I want.”

Teresa Nielsen Hayden: ‘‘The first time we met, it was in 8.5’’ x 11’’ twiltone mimeograph paper. I noticed that Patrick did really good colophons. He liked my adjectives.’’
Patrick Nielsen Hayden: ‘‘We met in person about a year later. We were both quite young. A couple of years later we got involved. When we married, she was 23 and I was 20. I got into fandom when I was 16 in 1975 in Arizona, when I was still living at home with my family, doing a classic teenage throwing-myself-into-organized-science fiction-fandom-at-a-great-rate thing. I went to one meeting and by the end of it had gotten conned into taking over the editorship of the Phoenix club fanzine. I went to my first convention a month later, and my second convention was the first convention ever held in Phoenix, and I was one of the gophers, the general staff people. This is all against the backdrop of my family preparing to move to Toronto, so I very industriously got in contact with Toronto fans. We moved that summer. But I stayed in touch with the Phoenix crowd, and a year later Teresa got into that social group, so we sort of knew each other in print.’’

*

TNH: ‘‘For a long time we’d wanted to do something more serious about science fiction, because the old sercon fanzines, lumbering dinosaurs of things, had mostly gone away. What we had left was light reviewing in fanzines, and academic scholarship which could be pretty stodgy. We wanted a venue for the half-baked theories and informal critics – like, ‘I have this interesting idea, but there’s no way I’m doing the footnotes on it.’’’
PNH: ‘‘There’s a place for informed commentary about science fiction from the better-informed end of fandom that overlaps with the publishing scene in New York. One of the things that occurred to us was that we were almost certainly going to be traduced as a bunch of New York literary elitists. That’s why I named it The New York Review of Science Fiction: ‘‘because that’s the most in-your-face, take-us-on, we-are-the-thing-you-fear name possible.’’
TNH: ‘‘’We are snotty elitists, neener neener.’ We were partly inspired by The Pretentious Science Fiction Quarterly. So that was fun.

*

TNH: ‘‘Readers would ask us anything. It came to me that Tor needed to have a real website. There’s a running conversation in science fiction that’s been going on since the 1930s, and it never ends, it just instantiates in different places. GEnie gave it a really good place to instantiate. People in science fiction go to have conversations wherever the other people are. We’re a gregarious species. So I said look, there’s this mindspace, this conversation, and we can catch it if we make a place for it. Eventually we got the attention of Fritz Foy, who’s a high-level person at Macmillan. Have you seen Pulp Fiction? You know the Wolf, the guy who comes in and fixes things? Fritz does that at a corporate level, only he tidies up infrastructure, not murder scenes.’’
PNH: ‘‘Officially he’s the senior vice president of digital development. He’s also a giant geek. He’s a huge comics fan, huge science fiction fan, loves working with Tor. Tor.com was actually born five or six years ago at a Christmas party in the back room of a bar. This was the point at which, after years of the rudimentary 1995-style Tor website persisting into the era of modern websites, Tor had ponied up the money and paid professionals to put up a corporate calling-card website that looks like everybody else’s boring website. We’d been having a lot of desultory conversation about how basically nobody goes to corporate websites like that. At the party, Fritz Foy walked up to us and Irene Gallo and said, ‘I just realized how little the science fiction magazines pay for fiction! We could pay lots more than that and we’d still be throwing away less money than we routinely throw away on newspaper ads!’ We said ‘True fact.’’’

*

PNH: ‘‘Tor.com is a giant cost center. No one expects it to make any money. It’s set up as a separate company under the Macmillan umbrella. It’s a big sandbox and testbed. This is my interpretation, it’s not official policy, but in a very real sense it’s a way of getting more Macmillan people used to the idea that the future of book publishing is going to have a lot more to do with us dealing directly with individual readers.’’
TNH: ‘‘Frankly, it’s also a way of handing love back to science fiction readers and community, because Tor’s always been like that. Nobody ever knows what’s going to be happening in five years. For example, it’s a lot easier to do hardcovers and trade paperbacks than mass markets at this point.’’
PNH: ‘‘There’ll be lots more e-only publishing. There’ll be e-only stuff at the top publishing level, or e-first stuff. We’re doing this experiment with Scalzi’s next Old Man’s War book, The Human Division, releasing it as a digital serial first, early next year. He wrote it so that each episode is short story length. They’re for sale weekly, for 13 weeks, 99 cents each. It’s a good idea but it might totally flop. Even if it totally flops, we’ll be smarter for it.’’

*

PNH: ‘‘Our competition at Tor isn’t Ace or Del Rey or Simon & Schuster. They’re part of it, but the real competition is all the other things you can do with your time these days instead of reading books, many of which are really high-quality and terrific things to do. The task is staying interesting in the face of all that. Anybody who’s our age – I’m 53 and she’s 56 – we were kids and teenagers in the ’60s and ’70s, so we’re the last or second to last generation who can remember being bored kids with nothing to do.’’
TNH: ‘‘We remember running out of things to read. We remember conversations with the earlier generations that remembered a time when there wasn’t science fiction. I remember Gordy Dickson saying it would be a different world when the last of those died. We remember a universe where there was a paucity of entertainment. This is not that universe any more.’’

*

PNH: These days I’m actually less interested in finding the next Book of the New Sun, and more on the lookout for books like Old Man’s War or Little Brother, what John Scalzi calls entry-level science fiction. It’s comprehensible even if you haven’t been pickled in SF for the last 25 years. The Book of the New Sun is a great piece of work, it’s a masterpiece for people who have spent decades inhaling vast quantities of science fiction and fantasy. I’m at least as interested in books like Spin by Robert Charles Wilson, because it tore through a pile of readers inside Tor who almost never read SF. They all latched onto Spin and went, ‘Wow! This is science fiction that I actually like!’’’
TNH: ‘‘We need both kinds.
PNH: ‘‘Right.’’

‘‘With Hide Me Among the Graves, I didn’t deliberately set out to write a sequel to The Stress of Her Regard, which had been published more than 20 years earlier. I was snagged by reading somewhere that when Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s wife committed suicide, and he blamed himself and was all torn up about it, he took his notebook of poetry and laid it into her coffin, and she was buried with all his poetry. Everybody admired this gesture of extreme grief. Several years later, though, a publisher said, ‘You know, if you had a collection of poetry we could publish a book.’ And Rossetti said, ‘Ah, give me a couple of days,’ and he dug her up and retrieved the manuscript. My first thought on reading that was, ‘Oh yeah? Why did he really dig her up?’ Plainly he either needed to get something else out of the coffin, or he needed to put something else into it. That was an obvious event to use as the kernel of a fantasy novel, and so I began reading very obsessively about him and his sister Christina Rossetti and their siblings and all their various associates. I discovered that John Polidori was their maternal uncle, and Polidori had been a character in The Stress of Her Regard. Then I discovered that Edward John Trelawny, a sort of piratical figure who knew Byron and Shelley and who arranged Shelley’s funeral pyre – and who also had been a character in my older book – knew the Rossetti siblings. He was in his eighties by that time, but still a very important character. For instance, William Rossetti’s children always died in infancy, and Trelawny gave him a piece of Shelley’s charred jaw bone which he had saved as a souvenir from the funeral pyre 50 years earlier, and immediately William was able to have children that lived. This was all true!”

*

‘‘My approach is to assume that nothing in history is a coincidence – if any two things happen at the same time, then there is a connection – and to ask myself, ‘What were they up to really?’ If history says a person was in a particular place to meet somebody, or attend a funeral, or get married, you look for little details and you’ll find he threw a cigar into someone’s drink, maybe, and so you find out whose drink it was, what he was drinking, did either of them have any false limbs or a glass eye, what phase the moon was in, everything. And if you’re obsessively looking for evidence of some supernatural context, you’ll generally find something. I let the pieces of the plot suggest themselves – I connect the dots, but the dots present themselves. My system of writing is really designed for someone with no intrinsic imagination (though I suppose it does take imagination to know what is a suggestive dot and what is useless trivia).”

*

‘‘Luckily I don’t keep up with current SF and fantasy. Up until 1975 I read virtually everything, but now I don’t really know what’s being written about – case in point – vampires. I get the idea that current vampires are metrosexual guys who are kind of perversely charming. I certainly prefer the kind of vampires like Dracula – they’re more fun because the metrosexual with nice hair is going to be too much like a human character, one who probably reads the same blogs and magazines as everybody else, and probably goes to Starbucks. I want an inhuman species that will be alarmingly and disorientingly alien. I want them to only peripherally overlap with humans, so that humans can’t comprehend their emotions or their thoughts. The vampires can’t really understand very much about us, either, but to our misfortune there is an overlap. That’s more interesting to write about. Vampires shouldn’t tweet.”

*

‘‘The next novel looks likely to involve Los Angeles and Hollywood, and it will be pretty much contemporary. It involves consequences from things that happened in the ’20s and ’30s – how can you not have consequences from the ’20s and ’30s? One nice thing about the history of Hollywood and LA is, you can comprehend it. The city itself only goes so far back. If you go back to 1890, you have pretty much encompassed all the history of LA, unlike London or Rome where you have to go back thousands of years before you’ve seen everything. I find Hollywood totally fascinating. LA is my favorite city. Some people are baffled by that – they’ll say, San Francisco, New Orleans. But it only takes ten minutes to fall in love with San Francisco. You have to hang around LA and take some wrong turns and funny off-ramps and get to know it for a while before its charms become evident. The Hollywood area especially is so full of mythology and extravagance and doubtful stories, apocryphal stories that may be hugely important or might be smoke, and lots of them involve physical places that are still there – you can go stand there and look around. You can see the secret black Madonna embedded in a wall, which is only visible if you stand in a particular place across the street. What’s the story on that, really? There are stairways that let you skip long roundabout roads and climb right over a hill into an adjoining valley, and I swear you can’t get to some of those valleys except via those stairways. Weird temples in the hills, forgotten tunnels, abandoned Nike missile bases! I find Hollywood endlessly full of implications, and stories, and colorful history, all lending themselves to fantasy. We live only an hour away and research is a great excuse to go there and climb up and down the hills and spend an hour in a bar where Orson Welles threw up, or see where F. Scott Fitzgerald fell down dead. The place is full of the suggestive details that I use in lieu of imagination. The details of Hollywood are likely to be florid and sensational and full of exaggerated drama, as opposed to the history of Akron OH, which I’m sure is not less important but probably has less flamboyance and is less obsessively documented, photographed, and filmed.”

*

I never have any points to make in a book or story beyond the events of the story itself. I never feel that I am making a statement about anything. If a writer consciously has some external point to make, the characters and events are too likely to become metaphors for something, and the story generally collapses entirely. Because suddenly they’re not real starships, they’re actually American imperialism or something. I want them to be real starships. There are exceptions to this, of course. 1984 is exactly what I’m saying I don’t approve of, but it’s a great book because Orwell made it so aggressively tangible, smellable, and palpable. The whole point of our stuff – our starships and time machines and ghosts – is disorientation and vertigo. You want the reader to be suddenly tilted into an unexpected direction, to have an experience they can’t possibly have in real life. When I read this stuff, I want to be walking through an Escher print or a Bosch landscape. I want that experience to be totally presented as real. I don’t want any hint that the writer is actually talking about the Catholic Church, or George Bush, or the size of soft-drink cups in New York.

How did you get your start as an illustrator? What artists most influenced you?
My approach to illustration was not the normal path that most artists take. I graduated with my MFA in painting in 1995. I thought I would show my art in New York, but what I found was it was really commercialized and contrived on many levels. They were giving the public what they thought they wanted in modern art, and realists had to take a backseat.

So I decided to forge my own path. I immediately started doing gallery shows around the United States and approached it like an independent band on a tour. I felt the only way people were going to get to know my art was to see it. I really took my time and sought out the galleries that were willing to show fantasy, surrealism, and art that dealt with the human condition. I started showing in Santa Barbara at a gallery called Darks Art Parlour, in L.A. at La Luz De Jesus with Billy Shire, and in Minneapolis at Gallery 360. Omaha had Visions Darkroom and Chicago Echo Gal­lery, etc. Every city around the United States had underground gal­leries that were selling my kind of art and doing really well at it. There had been this belief that realism was dead, but that was not the case.

I also decided to create a website around 1994, and took HTML and Javascript classes. It was in the early days of the web, but it was a good way to get my art and ideas to the public. In 2000, after a long night of painting, I sat down at the computer to check my comment/blog page and found a note from author Doug­las Clegg, asking if he could buy rights to use one of my paintings on his latest book cover. I wrote him back and the rest is history, as they say. Publishers and movie companies contacted me, and I really enjoyed working on the projects that they had.

I feel fortunate in that almost every movie com­pany, publisher, and art director I have worked with has given me the freedom to create without compromising my art, personal vision, and inter­pretation. As I start my 13th year in the field, I now realize how lucky I have been that they trust my creative vision.

I have a lot of artists who have influenced me, but by far the five that really blow me away are Cara­vaggio, Kathe Kollwitz, Thomas Eakins, Howard Pyle, and NC Wyeth. These artists all possess the drama, horror, fantasy, and redemption that I love in painting.

What’s more important – inspiration or perspiration? Is being an artist a higher calling, or a craft like any other?
My art has always been about inspiration and perseverance. I have always painted subject matter and worlds that inspire me emotionally on differ­ent levels. Sometimes those elements were found in the books that I read, experiences that I witnessed firsthand, or in my family.

The way that I fell into the arts or that the arts fell into me was a higher calling. Certain things led me to this path, and as I look back over 20 years of painting, I know it was a road that I was meant to forge. When I am in my studio I feel inspired to bring worlds to life. My work rises on the thick brushstrokes of wind­swept earth tone palettes that show humanity’s hardships and strengths.

Why did you choose to focus on horror/fantasy?
People always ask me why a majority of my art centers around horror/fantasy, birth, and death. It helps me understand the impermanence of life on this planet.

My work has always been about the human condition, and the hardships and triumphs that life gives us. I grew up in a real blue collar family. My grandfather had immigrated to America from Sic­ily to try to give us a better life. My father was a carpenter who was often out of work in the winter. I watched my parents struggle to take care of us in the most impossible conditions, always sacrificing the little they had for us to survive. Those were tough times, and really felt like I lived in a surreal Dickens world. When I first started painting I wanted to bring some of the things I witnessed to life.

Another reason was the influence of my cousin Angelo Rossitto (1908-1991). Angelo’s mother Carmela Caniglia left Sicily when my grandfather did and came to Omaha, Nebraska. Angelo decided when he was in his twenties to make a living in Hol­lywood. He met John Barrymore, who brought him into the business, and made films with Lon Chaney and Bela Lugosi. He also starred in the famous 1932 Tod Browning film Freaks. He would come back to Omaha and tell us about his career and working with great writers like Ray Bradbury in the film Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Is there one work you’d particularly like our readers to see, either because it’s most representative, or because you’re especially proud of it?
At the moment I am very proud of the last three projects that I have worked on.

The first is William Peter Blatty’s 40th Anniversary edition of The Exorcist. I read the book when I was in high school. My uncle, Father Joseph Haller S.J. had been a Jesuit priest at the time in St. Louis MO in 1949. I remember him talking about the incident. So I felt very honored when Blatty and Cemetery Dance chose my artwork for his 40th anniversary for the limited edition hardcover.

The second project that I was honored to work on was Max Brooks’s World War Z (soon to be a major motion picture). Max created a brilliant surreal story of the ‘‘Zompocalypse’’ at its finest. When I was brainstorming his cover for the new limited edition, I wanted it to be a painting that was gripping and visceral. My idea was to have a single powerful image on the cover of an animated screaming zombie corpse that has come back from the dead. I wanted the image to feel aggressive, harsh, and full of terror. In my oil painting, I tried to make my corpse a truly living dead soul that has the qualities of heaven and hell, hence the halo (gold leaf) above the creature’s head.

The last and latest project that I am currently working on is Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol 170th anniversary edition from Easton Press. Working with Easton Press has been an amazing experience. Their company really gets into the art­ist’s vision and lets you take the books and stories as far as your imagination allows you to go. So far I have created over 25 drawings and 10 paintings that will be featured in this rare edition. Dickens was one of my literary heroes, and to have the chance to tell the story through my art has been a dream come true for me. I have already started working with some museums and galleries to create a show to coincide with the release of the book. I will show the entire process of the project from preliminary sketches to drawings and the final artwork.

Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about you or your work?
I feel very blessed to have made a living at something that I love to do. Painting is my life and blood. For years people would tell me that my art was sick and demented without purpose. So many times I was left behind on the downside of up. Instead of giving into their insults and views of my art, I dug deeper and persevered. I channeled that energy into my art, and I stayed in the realm of what made me whole and who I am. I knew that it would come around someday and even if it didn’t that would be okay, because I was so happy living the worlds that I created.

As artists, it is up to us to create our own sense of reality. In an age of social and political upheaval, the artist is an anomaly. My art searches for the new spirit in modern figurative painting. Like the old masters, I have found vitality and life hidden amongst the layers of the human condition and have started breathing new life into the human form with visceral brushstrokes that are intimate, piercing, mesmerizing, and at times distressing.

Do you have any art shows, lectures coming up?
Yes, I will be giving a lecture and art demo at Creighton University in Omaha Nebraska on April 12. Then I travel to Iowa State University (April-17-21) for a lecture and solo art show. July 18-22 I will be heading out to NECON (Camp Necon). I am the artist guest of honor at this year’s event. I will also be at the Allentown Art Museum for this years IlluXcon (September 11-15). That is going to be one amazing show.