About a year and a half ago I was interviewed about my ebook Scratch by Stephen Foland for a website he was writing for at the time. Due to circumstances beyond his control the site closed down before the article was posted. It was a really good interview and I was sad that no one ever got to see it.
I saw Stephen last night and he said to just go ahead and post it myself, so here it is. Stephen asked some really good questions that went to the heart of my novel as well as some bigger picture aspects of my life and writing in general.
There may be Spoilers ahead.
Ten questions for
Wayne Wise, author of Scratch.
Where did you
get the inspiration for Scratch? What was the first mental
image you had that really crystallized the concept?
Scratch
began its life as a short story in a series of fanfics that a friend
and I were writing set in the Marvel Comics universe. Somewhere along
the line I realized that there was a core of a much bigger story in
it and that it would be easy to strip out all of the superpowers and
Marvel trappings and still have something. What survived is the basic
idea of a madman attempting to kidnap his biological daughter from
her mother and chasing them to this rural community with a secret. I
think the central image of a small, innocent-looking girl with angel
wings chained in the basement of a church is what led to everything
else. The prolog, though it has been rewritten and polished several
times over, appears much the same as it did in the original story.
The book seems
to be focused on the savagery that exists in the hearts of so-called
civilized men. Though there are supernatural elements in the story,
the real monsters are the humans. Like in C.S. Lewis’s The
Screwtape Letters there is the notion that all we need to be at
our worst is the slightest nudge. Do you subscribe to the notion of
“Original Sin,” if not in the theological sense, then in the
social philosophical sense?
In
most of my work that deals with the supernatural the real evil seems
to come from people and not from the “monsters.” We do horrible
things to each other without a supernatural agency being behind it.
Every day, the news is filled with far worse things than I can
invent. I think it is easy for people to blame an outside force for
what they do rather than take responsibility for their actions. In
the novel the residents of Canaan are eager to blame Scratch for the
evil in their town. He becomes a whipping boy for their guilt and by
projecting it onto him, metaphorically and physically through the
agency of Gabrielle, they are able to expiate it. Part of my goal is
to show the dark side of people. I don't think we are served by
hiding or ignoring darkness. It festers in the dark, if I may be so
obvious in explaining my primary metaphor in Scratch.
This tendency of mine probably originates with being a long time fan
of Alice Cooper (something I know we share). Alice always
showed us the dark underbelly of our culture. The other part of my
goal, hopefully, is to balance that by the good achieved by other
characters in my story. As far as “original sin” goes... I don't
really subscribe to the concept in a metaphysical sense. I think that
is also projecting our own evils onto supernatural precedents in an
attempt to remove ourselves from responsibility. If I'm born in sin
then I really don't have to take responsibility. It's Cain's fault. I
think we're all capable of evil acts, or at least we're tempted by
them. I think it's easy to make little decisions that seem like
nothing at the time that can lead to bigger evils. The benefit of
Horror, or Fantasy or SciFi is that it allows you the metaphor to
deal with this stuff.
In Scratch,
the small town of Canaan, West Virginia is brimming with emotional
intrigues and deception. Is this a case of “writing what you
know” in terms of your experiences with rural towns or upbringing?
Let
me say up front here, that though I was raised in a small, rural
church (that's a photo of the church I grew up going to on the cover
of the book, circa 1929), we never actually kept a young girl or an
angel chained in the basement. It doesn't even have a basement. I
haven't attended that church in years but still know people who do
and quite honestly, as much as I have moved away from it in my life I
have nothing but warm feelings toward it and the people who go there.
They are good people and I don't really trace my own feelings toward
religion to any antipathy toward this community. Quite the opposite
in fact. I may no longer follow their religious path, but the basic
lessons of compassion and kindness and mutual support inform my
earliest memories. My book is about secrets, and the lengths people
will go to to protect them. I think any community has secrets, the
classic “skeletons in the closet” thing. It doesn't have to be
rural. Any place with a long history has a history of secrets...
lies, addictions, violence, infidelities, deaths, murder in some
cases. It's part of human nature. Canaan is, in the tradition of
fiction, an exaggerated example. None of the residents of Canaan are
based on anyone that I know specifically. That said, in the big
metaphorical picture of my life, I've known every one of those
people.
You’re an
author of comics as well as novels, who would you say are your
primary influences in each form?
Too
many to name. I devour books and comics. It's easier to track my
comics influences. The Hernandez Brothers of Love and Rockets
fame, in terms of both storytelling and art. Matt Wagner, creator of
Mage: The Hero Discovered and Grendel. Scott McCloud on
Zot, before he did Understanding Comics. Elfquest.
Nexus. I've been going back and really looking at Dan DeCarlo
and Harry Lucie, famous Archie Comics artists and both big
influences on the Hernandez Brothers. Those are the ones that I can
trace specific influences to, but really, I learned to read from
comics. My entire sense of storytelling and heroic fiction can be
traced to Marvel and DC in the 60's and 70's, so all of those
creators. In writing... Everything. Stephen King, in terms of genre,
certainly. Charles DeLint. Jonathan Carroll. Hermann Hesse.
What was the
moment in your life where you knew that you were going to write?
I've
always known, on some level, that I wanted to be a storyteller. My
earliest form of play was pretend in the effort to tell stories. My
action figures were actors in stories of my own creation far more
often than they were the characters they were marketed as. My nephew
and I (he's the same age as me), used to spend hours playing in the
woods, and it was always about playing out an entire narrative. We
were “making movies.” It was improvisational theater. We would
create characters and play out an entire story in the course of a
Saturday afternoon. I always had a notebook full of drawings and
notes for stories. When I was fifteen I wrote a typed, single-spaced
90-plus page “Men's Adventure” novel, full of sex and violence
(neither of which I had any experience with at the time. No, you
can't read it). But it was a full story, with a plot and lots of
characters. I spent a lot of years trying to find my voice, more than
a lot of authors, it seems.
Scratch,
along with This Creature Fair, and Bedivere Book One:
The King’s Right Hand are all available as e-books. What do
you see as the future of print publishing, and what do you perceive
as the advantages of the e-book in terms of the current marketplace?
I
love books. Physical books. I love the way they feel, the way they
smell, the experience of reading them. I hope print books never go
away entirely, and I don't really see that happening. I have mixed
feelings about the ebook revolution. As a creator the terms for me
are very good. I have control over the product. It succeeds or fails
on its own merits. My royalty on a $2.99 ebook is better than my
royalty on the $21.95 trade paperback edition of the novel I had
published through a more traditional publisher several years ago.
Online booksellers have killed a lot of brick and mortar stores, and
as there are less and less of them traditional publishers are getting
more and more conservative with what they will publish. They aren't
taking as many chances with new authors. Thanks to Print-On-Demand
technologies there are more small publishers than ever, but they
don't really have much to offer in terms of royalties or advertising
or getting your book in the stores. Self-publishing has always been
looked down on in in the book industry, but I come from the world of
comic books where it is an ideal to aspire to. It's a completely
different mindset. Epublishing is DIY, utilizing digital
technology. I wrote it, designed the covers, found artists to realize
them for me, found editors, formatted it, promoted it... I am the
business. I own the rights. A far as the future goes, it's hard to
say. I hope books stay in print. Through a program affiliated with
Amazon I will soon be making my three novels available in print
editions, and while they will cost more than the ebooks, it's still a
good deal for me, and I still own the rights. Sales on ebooks are up
across the board while sales on regular books are down. I think the
cheaper price of ebooks can have the effect of people actually buying
and reading more. They say don't judge a book by it's cover. Don't
judge a book by it's format. The story and ideas are the same whether
it's on paper or on an ereader. Judge the content, not the method of
delivery. The technology is out there, it's not going away. Mp3's
changed the music industry but they didn't kill music.
One of the
major criticisms of the horror genre as a whole (as well as in DC’s
“New 52”) is the gender roles of women. How would you
characterize the sexualization/victim cycles present in the genre as
well as in Scratch?
That's
a really good question. When I sit down to write I don't really think
in terms of this sort of thing. Characters appear to me as part of
the creation process and they play roles in my story, many times
taking the narrative in directions I didn't intend. As a result,
there's not much of a conscious intent on my part to address these
issues. I'm a victim of the tropes of my genre and the conventions of
storytelling. That's not to dismiss or downplay the seriousness of
the issue you raise. In the genres I work in there is always going to
be the bad guys who are victimizing someone. The victimization of
women in fiction is a complex issue. Some say it perpetuates the
victim role. Others point out it is a reflection of reality and draws
attention to the issue. It probably does both, depending on the
context. In Scratch, an
incident of date rape is a part of Holly's past and serves as part of
her motivation and character. She was victimized by Billy in her
past, and he continues to victimize others in the course of the
story. He is, pretty overtly, the bad guy in my story. Hopefully, I
present this in a fashion that shows what a messed up person he is
and don't use these scenes gratuitously or pruriently (though I'm
sure that's debatable). Like the residents of Canaan who do horrible
things and blame it on Scratch, Billy is unable to take
responsibility for his own failures, projecting blame on everyone
else. This blame turns into violence as he becomes more deranged. I
would argue that Holly, in spite of her past victimization, is
healthier at the beginning of the story than her husband Adam is. She
is in touch with her creativity, is a successful mother, and her
career is on track. He's an emotional mess. I think Holly reclaims
her power from Billy by the end of the story as well. In Canaan we
see the incredibly dysfunctional relationship between Ed and Abigail,
where she is without a doubt an abused woman. I don't think Ed is
ever portrayed in a positive light. I think we have all known couples
who live like this, so this portrayal is representational of a
dynamic that actually exists in the world, healthy or not.
I think it is also fair to point out that there is a lot of
victimization of men in the novel as well. Without giving too much
away, a couple of men have a pretty harrowing experience in Canaan. I
don't have statistics to back this up, but my guess is that violence
against men happens in fiction as often, if not more so, than
violence against women. As a society we are more accepting of
violence against men. It's not as big of a social issue so it doesn't
get commented on as often. And once again, that's not said to
undermine the seriousness of the issue of violence against anyone.
The
eventual body count in Scratch
is pretty democratic in regards to the sexes.
I like to think that when writing I treat characters equally, at
least in terms of being honest in the presentation of who they are,
male or female. People are complex, and any fictional narrative, no
matter how detailed, is shallow compared to the depths of real
humans.
I don't know if I've really done justice to this topic. It's a big
issue and is pervasive in all storytelling.
There is a
great deal of esoteric symbolism present in the story: Animal
spirits, labyrinths, womb and birth imagery. Was this something
that evolved unintentionally and organically in the writing, or
something that you actively pursued?
These
are all topics that have fascinated me for years, so I've done a lot
of research and reading on them. I didn't really know they were going
to be featured as strongly as they were until I started writing. Some
of this comes from personal experience as well. In the early 90's I
had a series of significant dreams about bears. Now I come from a
Jungian perspective on psychology, and had immersed myself in the
whole Joesph Campbell craze of the time, so when this happened I
naturally started reading everything I could on bear symbolism.
There's a great book called The Sacred Paw
by Paul Shephard that sums up pretty much everything you might want
to know on the topic. Adam's dreams in the novel are based on my own,
though his are more specifically narrative than mine. The bear
knocking on his bedroom window and beckoning, as well as the image of
a bear in the worldtree, come straight from my dreams. Once I started
this symbolic path in the book it took on a life of its own and grew
well beyond my original plans. The juxtaposition of mythic, more
nature-based shamanic imagery against the admittedly twisted
Christian imagery of angels and devils was certainly intended.
You’re
forthcoming about your role as a practicing magician. Can you tell
us a bit about your own personal cosmologies? Chaos-based?
Thelema?
I
guess if I'm going to toss out the word “Magician” in my author
bio I should be ready to address the issue. I've been meaning to blog
about my thoughts on this topic, but hadn't gotten around to it. Let
me say at the outset, I don't have any real answers for anyone else,
nor are my comments meant to be definitive. I'm all about everyone
finding their own path. This is what works for me.
This
will probably be long, so bear with me.
I
don't really follow any specific cosmology. I've read about most of
the more well-known systems, of course. I've spent time with the
Tarot, and read bits about the Kaballah, and alchemy and the medieval
magical systems. I'm aware of most of the ideas from Crowley and that
movement. I've also read the spiritual ideas from most of the world
religions. I've read Biblical writings and the Tao Te Ching
and parts of the Upanishads
and Wiccan/Pagan histories and lots of other stuff. None of
these work for me whole cloth, partially because they simply don't
reflect the world I live in. There are lots of great ideas and they
have made me think differently about the universe, but none of them
claim my allegiance. I'm a bit of a spiritual gypsy, picking and
choosing the bits that work for me (so I guess I'm a little chaotic,
in that sense). I'm a little skeptical about anything that resembles
a closed system. I don't cast spells in any way that would make sense
to anyone. I don't mystical rituals that I ascribe to.
I'm incredibly wary of any system that claims to have all of the
answers to anything, whether an organized religion, an organized
political party, or an organized magical system. My belief in regards
to this is that far too often the followers of these systems begin to
confuse the metaphors of their belief for the things these metaphors
point to. That leads to trouble.
I
think we are always removed from the ineffable. Short of neverending
enlightenment I don't think we can understand the true workings of
the universe, at least the metaphysical ones (and I say that while
being completely open to the idea that science may one day explain it
all). We talk about these things through myth and metaphor. And then
we go to war over who has the best metaphor, completely missing the
point of the whole thing. Everyone needs to find a system that works
for them, but always remember that the accoutrements of the system
are only symbols, not the truth itself. I think that's what the
admonishment about worshiping false idols really means.
For
myself the idea of the Magician is a metaphor to remind me to be
aware of the magic in the world, and that by being aware of it I can
bring it into my life. Other than through fictional characters like
Merlin and Dr. Strange my first real contact with this mode of
thought came through my reading of the Carlos Castaneda books in my
late teens. Now, I'm aware that a lot of his work has been
discredited, at least in terms of whether it ever actually took
place. Even then I didn't care whether it was “real” or not. I
read it as a parable. Something doesn't have to be real to be true. I
now know he took a lot of ideas from other metaphysical systems. My
point here is that this was my first contact with the idea of living
life as a “sorcerer.” I reread the entire series a couple of
years ago and was amazed at how many of these ideas still form a lot
of my core beliefs. Magic is perception. If you want to change the
world, change the way you see it. The only true power we have is
power over self (the only kind that interests me, anyway). Before we
can change anything else we must effect change on ourself. In
psychology it's called reframing. Change your belief system and you
change the world around you. Travel the path with heart, or “Follow
your bliss,” as Joseph Campbell would say.
Then
I started reading about quantum physics, and man, that stuff is pure
magic. Yes, I know that there are scientific formulas that prove
these theorems, but as a lay person, the math might as well be
esoteric magic symbolism. Ideas like David Bohm's Implicate Order
theory, or a holographic model of the universe resonate with my
perceptions. The idea of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, at least
in terms of a metaphor for me since I don't pretend to understand the
math involved, sounds a lot like the idea of changing your
perspective and changing the world. For me it is easy to see the
connections between the ideas of quantum theory and the classic
metaphysical systems. Physicist Dr. Fred Alan Wolf wrote on these
topics, and I believe coined the term Quantum Shaman
(I may be mistaken on that, but it's where I first encountered the
term). My friend Steve Segal, in his recent book Geek
Wisdom talks about how there are
Math Geeks and there are Myth Geeks, but at heart it's all the same
thing. I'm definitely more of a Myth Geek.
I
have an MA in Clinical Psychology and read tons of Jungian work,
applying his thoughts to all of the esoteric systems and what they
represent in psychological terms. As I said, the works of Joseph
Campbell provided the basic framework I still use to look at the
contact point between all of these topics. In the 90's I read a
series of psychology books that talked about Masculine Psychology by
breaking it down into four basic archetypes. The first book was
called King, Warrior, Magician, Lover.
Truly healthy men, according to the book, are able to tap into the
positive qualities of each of these (and each has negative
connotations to beware of). The author's take on it is that anyone
who engages in any type of specialty knowledge, be it a brain surgeon
or a car mechanic, is accessing the Magician. He is the technician of
knowledge in one guise, and the technician of the sacred in another.
Sorcerer and Shaman. Math geek and myth geek.
Around that same time is when the bear dreams started showing up, so
my interests turned to Shamanism. I tend to prefer this as a more
naturalistic approach than all of the formulas and symbolism. But I
recognize that this tends to have a religious connotation to it. Real
world religions still have shaman who engage in a lifetime of
dedication. I am not that. Many years ago I was “ordained” as a
minister by an online service that professed no specific religious
belief other than that of everyone having the right to get legally
married outside of the strictures of organized religion. I did it as
a whim, but discovered that it was legal in all states. My primary
social group has always been a hodgepodge of beliefs and non-belief,
yet when things like marriages and funerals come up they all seem to
recognize the need for some sort of ritual. Because of my beliefs and
demeanor I have fallen pretty naturally into a role that we all refer
to, tongue in cheek, as “Shaman of my tribe.” I have performed a
dozen weddings and one funeral.
As
a creative person, in my case a writer and an artist, I believe that
all Art is an act of magic. It is an effort to take my perceptions of
the universe and make them visible. I am creating myself more than I
am any work of art. Comics creator Alan Moore (of Watchmen
fame), claims to be a magician, and in his case it is with all the
trappings and esoteric history one expects from that word. He has
said that writing is an act of magic. When we write, we spell.
Grammar serves as our grimoire. We are giving life to an idea and
casting it out into the world. Positive or negative (and I try for
the positive), this effects change in the world. Ideas are memes that
change people, so we need to be careful about the ideas we put out
there. Grant Morrison, another comics writer who claims to be a
magician (I'm sensing a theme here) talks about Pop Magick (google it
to read his thoughts). He is not caught up in the magical traditions
of the past, but believes that it is here around us all the time,
taking new forms that reflect our current culture, which I happen to
agree with. He talks a lot about the idea of Sigil Magick, which
basically is giving an idea a symbolic form and putting it into the
world. In his view the McDonald's golden arches logo, all corporate
logos, are sigils that have tremendous power in the world. Anyone who
sees the logo associates a whole complex of ideas with it and it
changes their behavior, in this case for the purpose of making money
for the owners of the logo. His series, Batman Inc.
deals with this idea.
I believe that everything is connected. I believe this because it
feels right to me and science tells me it is true. If it is true,
then everything we do has connections to every other thing. Being
conscious of these connections is what is magic to me. We all
experience synchronicity, which is defined as “Meaningful
Coincidence.” The key here is finding the meaning. It's always
there if we look for it, because by looking for the meaning we create
it (Heisenberg, anyone?). All it takes to see it is a change in our
perception. Seeing the connections allows us to align ourselves with
the universe. It's living life in balance. It's the Tao. It's
recognizing that what we put into the world is what we get out of it.
“And
in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”
What other
projects do you have in the pipeline right now?
I'm
working on the second novel in the Bedivere
series. Right now it's a trilogy in my head. It's a more complex
story, so the writing of it can be a little slower. I have ideas for
more stories set in the world of both Scratch
and This Creature Fair.
There are several characters from my print novel, King of
Summer (which will be available
as an ebook eventually), who will appear in further stories. I'm in
the really early phases on a non-fiction project about comics and my
personal experiences with it. I'm not exactly sure what kind of form
the final product will take, but it's shaping up.
Thanks for the interview and review. These were wonderful questions
that forced me to think... always a little dangerous.
