TIH 195: Nick Mamatas on Japanese Fiction, Self-Defining Politics, and Creative Writing MFAs

Michael David Wilson 0:10
Welcome to the this is horror podcast. I'm your host. Michael David Wilson, and today we are going to be reconvening with Nick mamatas For part two of our conversation. If you want to listen to part one and head back just one episode to episode 194 it's a wide ranging conversation. We talk about next time editing Clark's world. We talk about his strategy for writing a novel in eight weeks. We talk about some of his thoughts on the self publishing industry. We get into an awful lot, so if you haven't checked it out, it's definitely worth your time. But as with most of these conversations, you can listen to it in any order. So do feel free to listen to this one and then head back after and check that out before we get into the show as always, let's have a word from our sponsors.

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Michael David Wilson 2:09
All right, without further ado, here it is part two of our conversation with Nick mamatas And now for

Unknown Speaker 2:18
our horror interview. Yeah.

Michael David Wilson 2:26
Well, I'd like to talk about you working for viz medias, Hika soru line, which I believe was your first office job,

Nick Mamatas 2:39
correct? Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 2:41
I wonder how much were you interested in Japanese fiction prior to this job? So I know from a previous interview that you were not interested in manga in the slightest. But how about Japanese fiction and Japanese literature? Um,

Nick Mamatas 3:01
I'd only read, you know, the big ones, murder, Kami, kinsboro, OA and people like that. They hired me because I was involved with science fiction pretty closely. I just come off Clark's world. We could just be nominated for a Hugo Award. And I also did some other stuff in translation from the Korean with my friend, we did a book called The Kwan ju diary, which is a non fiction book about the Kwan ju uprising in 1980 in South Korea, when they attended massacre of their protesters after that. So I had experienced it with both science fiction and with translated work. So that's how I got the job. And I didn't have a lot of, you know, experience, because what we were doing, we were the first reading over science. Actually, people brought over horror. I had written a couple of those books, like, you know, you know, the vertical incorporated the vertical ink. Horror novels often based on or related to films or video games, not tie ins, but like the things that the had inspired the films and what, and ultimately, it isn't all that different. You know, most Japanese writers of science fiction grew up on Western science fiction, and certain things that were very popular here were never popular there, and certain things that have lost their popularity here are still popular there. Frederick Brown is still widely read in Japan, at least by the writers. Ae van z is still widely read in Japan, at least by the writers. So if you have experience with science fiction, especially science fiction of the post four hour, 50s, 60s, 70s, it's all in there. It's all just the Japanese version of that. So I don't know if I needed, you know, a pre existing interest in Japanese things. Of course, since the 10 years and just nine and a half years, I'll be 10 years in August without having this job, you know, I've certain, I've certainly gotten very interested in Japanese fiction, in Japanese. These culture just by being around the office. But no, I didn't. I didn't walk in there as a Japanese as a Nippon pile, still an old word of Japanese. Haven't picked up a single word in 10 years.

Michael David Wilson 5:13
Well, I guess the nature of your job doesn't really demand it. Yeah,

Nick Mamatas 5:22
although you wouldn't have thought I would have but I'm pretty well siloed in the company. Tourists here next, because it's already around doing manga and anime. And books are an important part of the list, but they aren't the central part of this. So it's already around manga and anime, meaning that they're sold differently in stores. How do you sell volume 43 of a manga while you go to the store and say, Did you did you sell any copies of volume 42 you did? Great. Here's volume 43 Yeah, yeah. While every book is an individual book, often by what is, by Western standards, a first time writer. So it's like a having an imprint for the first novels, which is a challenge. And so in the office, I'm working on slightly different pathways than a lot of the other people in the office are. So don't have a lot of interaction with them, necessarily.

Michael David Wilson 6:13
And so now that you are well versed within Japanese fiction, what do you think are some of the commonalities and differences you see between fiction from the east and the west.

Nick Mamatas 6:28
I would say that Japanese science fiction is still more focused on hard SF than American science fiction or Western science fiction in general is there's still more emphasis on getting near future technology right? Japanese horror is, I think, more playful, more more blackly comic, than than Western horror, which, which tends not to be very funny at all, which I think is a big mistake, I think hard and he were so closely aligned to physiologically, you know, you burst out screaming. You burst out laughing. And surprise that people should try, should endeavor to be funnier in their in their horror novel, instead of just dour and grim. And of course, they're just, you know, they're just practical differences, functional differences in Japan, both come out very quickly. And so even a relatively short book will come out in two volumes, Volume One and say, April, Volume Two in May, and you'll read it like a complete book, almost like a Victorian TRIPLE DECKER novel. So they're structured differently. I mean, there's still a lot more novels that are functionally three long novellas tied together like mosaic novels or fixed up novels, as we'd call them here. And so the demand for that kind of long story arc through line that may even go as a series or a series of adventures by the same characters is not as widely known. But then, of course, there are ones that you know are heavily influenced by western science fiction. We're doing a series now called Legend. They like the heroes, which is also a hugely popular anime, and it's a big manga. The anime is being remade. We've done the six novels coming out in April, and we've been doing two or three a year for the last couple of years. We're gonna go do all 10. And it is highly reminiscent of both the military SF of the 70s that often involved funding a European war and bringing it out of space. And also Star Wars, where in the first book there's a big Death Star, like fortress, then in the second book, they roll up another one right next to it from the enemies, and they just blast each other. And they become sort of big deals. And they're a lot of like, sort of dog fights in space, probably some of the Star Wars, but also with the political machinations of the big Prussian wars of the 18th and 17th centuries. So that's like a good Suez that is both very much attuned to Western ideas and Western notions of what space opera is, while also having the interest in intricate, uh, politics and kind of a chess master or Go master, uh, duel between two intellects. I would say that Japanese science fiction, fantasy and horror very frequently, involves one character trying to determine exactly what the other character his enemy is thinking in order to think a novel thought and use that to thwart the character. That seems to be a trope that is very common in Japan, that is not very common here in the United States or in the West generally. If I were a social scientist, I might think it has to do with something like Noah via the number of the history of Japanese architecture, with the very thin walls and the paper walls where Kaleidos indicate demands that you ignore, which are here on the

other side of the wall, right? So

there's often, at least historically, there seems to be more of a possibility of eavesdropping on conversations and using those to you. Your advantage than in the West.

Michael David Wilson 10:02
Yeah, that's

Nick Mamatas 10:03
probably not evidence, by the way, I have no evidence for that, or anything at all. It's just my 1142 in the evening. Random,

Michael David Wilson 10:12
yeah, but I didn't quite you're saying. I mean, it extends further than just the literal woes. I mean, there is very much a culture of harmony and of obedience. So you don't really want to disturb that peace, if at all possible. So even if you do hear something objectionable from the other side of the wall, or even if you see something objectionable happening opposite you on the subway, there's a culture where you don't really want to get involved in other people's business. And I mean, for me personally, this, I think this has its advantages, and, of course, deep, deep flaws. The advantage being, it does mean, on a day to day basis, that things appear to be more harmonious. The disadvantages are pretty obvious. It means that if no one says anything, then terrible miscarriages of justice and awful things can happen unchecked. So I think, I think it's about being harmonious when you can, but if something objectionable happens, then you have to take a stand, and you have to say, this is not okay. And I mean, as well as being based here, I teach a couple of times a week, so I talk to various Japanese people of different ages. And I do think the younger generation now are certainly more Western influenced and more aware that, look, if something shitty is going on, you stand up, you say, That's not okay. So I think that there could be a cultural shift coming. That's my inkling, and that's my hope. Let me get this conversation back on track, which I've completely derailed on my own,

Bob Pastorella 12:28
and I usually, I'm usually the one who derails them,

Nick Mamatas 12:31
right?

Michael David Wilson 12:34
Well, you said about horror and comedy being closely connected, and I agree with you, and I think horror comedy and erotica, they're the only genres where they elicit a physical reaction. And yeah, I'm, I'm a big fan of the darkly comic, and I think that that's something that we see in a lot of your work, particularly in I am providence. I mean, there are some real laugh out loud moments in that novel. I mean, I think this is from this is from memory. So I'm probably going to completely butcher the line, but you're talking about the convention, the tentacular, and you're describing the people that are there, and you said it was a real who's that of horror? And I

Nick Mamatas 13:35
thought, who's that? Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 13:40
that really did tickle me, because it's so true. Well, thanks,

Nick Mamatas 13:46
glad you liked it. Yeah, I am. Providence is probably my most successful book. Like financially and that people actually bought it. I think other people bought it because they want to see if they were in it, which they are. So it all kind of worked out for everybody. They got pleased they were mentioned in the book, yeah, and I got 75 cents every time somebody found themselves in a

Michael David Wilson 14:05
book. Yeah, win, win. But I sense that the comedy, as with most, well as with I would argue, all of the best humor writing, it doesn't feel ever like it's something that's forced. It just feels like that's your way of observing the world, and it comes very naturally to you. I don't know, Oh, definitely true, but that's how it certainly feels reading it. Oh, definitely.

Nick Mamatas 14:37
I mean, I think anyone in any conversation is trying to make each other laugh. For the most part, any sort of casual conversation across people's days, you're not going to people on social media. They're not trying to make you cry or weep. For the most part, they're trying to make you giggle or have a good time for a moment. And this happens all the time, even in the middle of fights, when people are sarcastic, they're trying to elicit some kind of positive emotional. Action or some sort of recognition of cleverness. And so it's very strange to me to read horror novels where there are these shocking, weird things happening, and nobody is responding the way people respond to these events in real life, which is that they crack jokes, you know, in the middle of earthquake zones. And if you escape from somebody shooting at you. You generally don't just have a straightforward reportage of what happened or really earnest appeals to higher other emotions, like, you know, pity or empathy. You tend to say things that are very strange and weird. You know, it's true, if you were, you know, on the street, dealing with, you know, things, as a first responder, they're, you know, they're always cracking each other up, seeing terrible things. People just make these cracks all the time. And it's weird that doesn't appear in stories, and it's weird that author personas are often based around not doing this kind of thing. I can't count the number of times, you know, I've seen somehow our author on Facebook or Twitter share their new publicity photo, and it's almost inevitably, them in another jacket, folded their arms in a tombstone by a tombstone, or something like that, just trying to look earnest and trying to look mean. And let's face it, you're sitting at home writing books all day. You're not that earnest, you're not that mean, but this weird kind of bizarre, macho, style, grim and gritty stuff doesn't really fly with me at all. It just doesn't, because believable fiction. So when there's, you know, funny stuff, and Peter Straub is very funny, I think King can be very funny. Sometimes Michael Sisko is hilarious. He's, you know, a weird fiction writer does a lot of avant garde sort of things, but also, at least to me, extremely funny. And even Kafka, you know, who's considered sort of that father of horror fiction, of dark fiction in general. He was very surprised to hear that people like were distressed and disturbed by his stories. He thought they were funny. You know, it's in his letters to his friends. Did you think the hung arts was funny? The guy wasn't eating, get it, you know,

Bob Pastorella 17:04
I can see where he can't, where, where he thought that. Yeah, with, with a small experience with Kafka, which I love, I love the work, yeah, but I can see, I can see where it's coming from. It's like you've taken it's not gallows humor, but because that's how people react to things in real life, right? You know, they kind of do that, you know, like a funeral. You know, the funerals are, you know, they're, they're terrible events, and we deal with that by making jokes and stuff. You know, you got all the the pallbearers in the room, and, you know, there's, there's always that one old guy is going to tell some, you know, naughty joke and get everybody to kind of relax a little bit, you know. But it's, it's, it's taking it, it's moving it beyond that. So it's interesting to to hear that, because it would be a more realistic approach with characterization in a traumatic event. And, you know, as soon as you said that, it's like, you know what? Damn he's right? Because it's like, you read these horror stories, and it's like, nobody's cracking wise about shit, yeah, you know, and maybe they should be. So that's, that's a that's good thing to do. I don't me. Personally, I've tried to write comedy. I don't I think I'm more funnier when I talk than when I write, because most of the stuff that I've tried to do comedy wise writing, it's just it falls flat. I'd be like Kafka. You didn't think that was

Michael David Wilson 18:41
funny? Well, I tend to find, personally that if I try to write straight horror, then I end up cracking some jokes and adding some humor to it. But equally, when I've tried to write, I guess, more a comedy, I end up just adding something really dark in so I've just come to terms with the fact that in my work there will be dark stuff, there will be comedy. If that makes it harder to sell, then, you know, I'm I'm okay with that. I'm not trying to be Dan Brown.

Nick Mamatas 19:24
He's also extremely humorous, right?

Michael David Wilson 19:28
Well, we've got some more questions from our Patreon. All right. So this one is from rich bunting. He says, I've often heard people say when asked to define horror, that horror is everything that it's life lived. Others annoyed at the proposed exclusion of some things from horror, say something like, don't tell me that a Gillian Flynn. Novel isn't horror, or that Mad Men isn't televised horror. I confess that I'm confused by these kind of statements, for it seems to me that if everything is horror, nothing is horror. So I ask assuming that horror literature shares many of the same themes as other forms of fiction, including literary naturalism, what is it that makes a story a horror story, as opposed to some other kind of writing?

Nick Mamatas 20:35
Well, let's see. I know we're all communists here, so we'll start with the material and material speaking. You know what makes horror literature? Horror literature is a real physical condition of horror literature where someone has read some horror literature and says, I'm going to do that too, right? So it's a, it's a, it's a mode of practice created by previous books and stories. So sure, there are things that are horrific in all sorts of fiction, but horror literature is the literature that knows it's horror literature and writes setting out to have that physiological plasma reader as the primary cause based on a corpus of tropes already created in the past, which is why you can have a ghost story that's still a scary in the 21st century, when we know there are no ghosts, and that makes you know specific reference to prior ghost stories by Mr. James, or by anything else you might see, I might have seen on television, or any other elements of the ghost story. So Hamlet has a ghost in it, but it's not a horror story you story. And more, James's ghost stories are horror stories because he set out to write horror stories. And Peter Straub ghost stories are are horror stories because he started to write a ghost story. That's a horror story. And he's read amor James. So there's a tradition of horror that is horror. Having said that, horror is very capacious. It's like a spice. You can have spices anything. I used to work for this guy named Bill huffnagel. He is also a cook, a celebrity chef of storage called biker Billy. And his gimmick is that he cooks with hot peppers, and he's a vegetarian. So he would make, you know, we'd make. We did a cable show with him, and I was a camera operator, and he would just make different things every week, whether it was pasta sauce or brownies or Roos or all sorts of items from different cuisines, all with the idea that they were heated by chili peppers to be extremely hot, whether it was a dessert or an entree or an appetizer. And so horror is like that too. So yeah, Gillian Flint has horrific things in it. Sharp Objects is a shocking, great bestseller. I didn't read gone. Girl, I skim gone. Girl, I didn't like it as much as sharp objects, which I think is one of the best novels I ever read. But it's primarily crime novel, and it's based on the tradition of the amateur sleuth, who is a broken person on some level, and who deals with the crime by facing their own past. So it is very much in the crime amateur sleuth tradition, including being a crusading journalist and having sex hang ups. But does but does? It horrifically. So it is a crime novel with the spice of horror. It's a spicy crime novel. So both these, you know, ways of looking at horror are correct. Horror is a explicit tradition. It is what someone sits down to write. When they say, I'm writing, I'm a horror author. I'm writing a horror novel because I've read other horror novels and I like them, and it is a mode that anything can show up in. So there's, you can have horrific science fiction. You can have horrific romance, which much paranormal romance is, even things like Wuthering Heights is, you know, horrific and romantic at the same time. Star Wars is horrific and romantic and science fiction at the same time. You can have horrific realism, just quite about the really bad parts of reality and the psychology. So both those things are correct, just two different ways of looking at it. However, because we have this language, we can we can look at a book and point and say horror that is due to material conditions. One of my favorite novels is contra wife by Fritz leimber. And it has has over the years of its existence, and has been in print for a long time now, been a science fiction novel because he was not the writing science fiction and has some rational elements to it, where the for those who don't know, in this novel, pretty much every woman is a witch, and they use their powers to help their careers with their husbands, like a sexist novel it was, you know, pre 60s. And so the professor husband finds out about this and uses the scientific method to recreate the witches spells and uses like his Hi Fi radio, Hi Fi record player, rather and different items and. Some math to make his own spell. So it's science fiction. And then when gothic romance came along, became a popular genre, it became a gothic romance. And there's even, you know, a cover of it with the woman in a nightgown running down the flight of steps. And it has gothic romance elements too, because there are witches in it and women in danger. And that's just like Catholic romance, Gothic romance fell away. Mysteries were big. It was a mystery novel. There's been the mystery section Morocco does mystery. People thought it was a mystery. Mysteries faded away. It became a novel of campus politics and comedy, because typically some of campus it has satirical elements to it. You know, both about the battle of sexes and about how college towns work. So it read it as a mainstream comic novel with with a supernatural element. Then horror became big. It was, it was, became a horror novel because it has danger and supernatural stuff and magic and characters feel dread. And urban fantasy became big, and it became an urban fantasy novel. So one novel, the text did not change, but due to material forces, the way we produce books materially and sell them in stores. This book, conjure wife was basically every genre. Wow,

Michael David Wilson 26:10
that is a lesson in marketing labels. Yeah,

Nick Mamatas 26:14
exactly. And that happens all the time. You know, Jonathan Ethan's first three novels were put out by tour. They were in the science fiction section. Then it got huge with his fourth novel, which is a crime novel, motherless Brooklyn, was so huge it became a mainstream hit, and suddenly he was all mainstream, his new his oldest brought out back by Harcourt, and now you find them in fish in the literature section. They have not changed. They're just as wacky scientific as they were in the 90s. But now let them. Publishes the New Yorker, and he is famous, and he has written mainstream novels. So his novels from the old days are no longer science fiction. They are. They are mainstream fiction that happen to be full of science fiction inside the pages. It's not bad work, if you can get it right.

Bob Pastorella 26:55
So how do you feel about that repurposing

Nick Mamatas 26:59
I loved. I think it's been I think it's fascinating. I'm always thrilled as someone who goes to bookstores frequently, and I happen to live in a place where I have bookstores and walking distance to independent bookstores and noble so unlike most people in America these days, I have I am a spoiled choice when it comes to bookstores, and I'm always thrilled to see a book in the wrong place where it seems to be the wrong place. I love when I love watching them migrate from section to section over the course of years, as they get repackaged and refreshed and brought up by new editions and new editors. I just think it's amazing. And I And to me, even though I don't reread, I think the ultimate harbor of quality for a book is that you can reread it and get something else out of it. And so if you can reread a book and read it as a mystery, and we did as a fantasy and read it as a romance, and we did a science fiction, there's something really important there. So I'm all for these systems moving around. Plus this, the categories can be, you know, in the short term, they can be very damaging. They can be very hurtful somebody's career to be stuck in some section or or to be missing a section and to be lost in the book structure you have no particular section, so that there is still an opportunity to shift sections, is actually, I think, the benefit of the writer eventually, ultimately,

Bob Pastorella 28:15
yeah, in it's like the sections have gotten like now you can find horror fiction in general fiction and in science fiction, yeah, you can find it in mystery. So you're gonna, you're gonna find, you know, different titles in each one, you know. And I just remember the days like, you know, back in the you know, when Walden books, just like, hit every mile, you know, and you could go, and you'd start off on, you know, go in and on the right hand side, you know, there'd be, like, all these, you know, brand new books and everything like that. And then they have non fiction books, and then you'd have, you know, science fiction, and then you'd have romance, and you have, you know, general fiction, and down on the other end, and they have horror fiction. It was all separate, you know. And every and you knew you were in the horror section because every spine was black,

Nick Mamatas 29:09
you know, yep. And every five,

Bob Pastorella 29:12
you know, I was like, This is my home, you know. And, uh, where, you know. And, of course, if you're young, and this is back when I was younger, and you're naive, and every day you know, you know, you want to. It's all about what's on that, on that spine, you know, whereas I probably would have been just as satisfied in science fiction, going, Oh, look, this might actually be horror, you know. But we had this conversation with someone else recently that, you know how it's like, they it's like, sometimes horror is like a dirty word, and people repurpose things because they don't want to call it horror. Yeah, they want to call it, you know, like silences and horror. It's dark suspense. It's a thriller, yeah, you know. And when it's, it's actually, you know, it falls in line with horror. It's like, calling it horror was like, you know, or you know, like you're, you're making it lower than it is, right? And to me, that's like, an incredible disservice, you know, yeah. God forbid, you know, Thomas Harris probably never even thought for a second he was writing a horror novel. Yeah, you know. So there's this, it's like a fine it's a blurry line between intent of what you wanted to write, what you ended up writing, how you thought about it, and how other people think about it. So it's that, that stuff I find fascinating.

Nick Mamatas 30:46
Yeah, well, certainly, a lot of horror people lament the passing of the horror section of the bookstore. And when they have horror sections, they are, you know, heavily warped, because it's, there's a couple of A's, couple of B's, and Stephen King for three, three shells, and coons for two and a half shells, and then, then the alphabet sort of trails off. So there's nothing really there anyway, except for the three authors, you know, are always gonna be there, you know, King Coons and rice. And I think they're missing it, because back in the old days, there was a possibility of being able to be a very bad horror writer, and you write two novels a year on time, if you make your deadlines, and you write to the word limit you need, not too long, not too short, you could make an okay living. And that's no longer possible because too many people tried it and they spoiled the market. You know, some some genres last forever. They will almost always be a science fiction section in the store, a Roman section in the store, a romance section in the store, a mystery section in the store. Other genres come and go. Chiclet came and went. Horror came and went. Gothic romance came and went. The western listed for a very long time, then it went. And they often go when they're sort of have a fat element that makes it very popular for a short period of time. And people get burned out of it, because then the bad actors emerge, and it's easy to write horror badly. It's hard to write horror Well, easy to write it badly. That means you end up with more bad books than good books, and that hurts the genre, and hurts the genre as a marketing category, because all those black spines tell me nothing about the book. I don't know whether picking a bad book or a good book in the mystery section, I know what I'm getting if I have a lavender spine and I turn the page, I see the front cover. It is a cat sitting on a overstuffed living room chair, and there's a sort of a broken window and fire in a fireplace. I know I'm making a cozy if I pick up a spine and install red and there's a guy in the rain. It's like a photograph and has big block letters. I know I'm reading a noir, and I can decide, you know, whether I want to read a cozy or Noir. Same with science fiction. Is there a big spaceship on the cover or as an abstract chip kid style, pictographic cover? Or is there a kid with a sword or a dragon? I know what I'm getting with westerns and horror and with Chiclet too, the covers were all alike, even if the stories were radically different inside of them, because they were being mass produced as part of a fad. And that really hurt things materially. So the product, the process of producing books to order to fill the shelves, damaged those sections more or less permanently. So now, I think we're just in a position where, where, instead of waiting for her to come back, it's not going to the time is just right, just to find horror in the other sections and do what I can. And I think now, with the rise of Amazon, we're seeing how picking a little bit of a comeback, but not in a better way, what we're seeing is the self published and micro published stuff that is doing that same kind of thing we're talking about before, where it's the less esthetically successful version of stuff you read as a kid, and you can lower the price so much so all we could hope to do of people who are readers is just Try to find that best 3% and stick with that. And it may be stuff you find from best selling authors, or maybe find stuff you find from obscure authors on the right short stories occasionally, but we can only depend on the on the market signal of the bookstore shelf and the black spine, and whether that's a good thing or not. Well, I mean, it's not a good thing for if you were, if your goal was to write for the black spine. The black spine market, it is a good thing if you are more interested in finding good books. So it's up to you,

Bob Pastorella 34:29
right? Everybody's going to have an individual approach to it.

Michael David Wilson 34:33
Yeah. On that note, I'd like to take a question that we've had before on Patreon from Brian Asman, and I'd actually like to Yeah, same question every time. Well, he has had, he's had this question twice, and I think this would this is actually a really good question in light of what you have just said. So if you were to. Have a Mount Rushmore of horror fiction today. Who would be on your Mount Rushmore? Who would you like those writers to be, to represent the state of horror right now?

Nick Mamatas 35:16
Represent the state of horror right now, but Mount Rushmore is more historical figures, all right, so I guess we put Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson would go up there, Robert block would go up there, and Stephen King. And these aren't necessarily like all those authors, but it's not necessarily me saying these are the four best authors, but those are the four most influential authors, I'd say, because even if you look at the ubiquity of vampire fiction, contemporary vampire fiction, or even vampire fiction last 50 years, it's not like Bram Stoker's vampires. So I went for Bram Stoker up there. They're not like We're vampires either they are, they tend to be vampires, either in the king mode or in had Shirley Jackson written about vampires in that mode, whether they're a sort of a weird domestic struggle or some kind of ravening beast, they tend to read more like the way King and Jackson Wright than the way the actual progenitors of vampire genres wrote. So those would be my four. Well, I'm sure those are not unusual answers for this question, but amount Rushmore sort of means you want, who are the who are the big, important, influential people,

Michael David Wilson 36:39
yeah, and who are some newer writers that you've read in recent years that have impressed you specifically within horror?

Nick Mamatas 36:51
Yeah, Nadia Bolton is one. She has a collection out, yeah, and I've enjoyed her stories for years. I think I've blurred her collection. I forgot my blurb said, but it was a really good blurb. Definitely check out that book. She said, Destroy short fiction. I'm gonna name a lot of short story writers. Sorry about that, but nonetheless, who else is good. I co edited a book with Molly tanzer. She has a new book out called creatures of intemper, which is historical, dark fantasy Victorian novel with fencing and lesbians. So that was pretty good. Very enjoyable. The best novel I read in the last year and a half is I missed a world by vale la bois. It is unimaginable. It is amazing. It is extremely difficult to talk about without ruining elements of it. But I didn't have a chance to blurb it had I had a chance to play but I would have blurred with like this. I have a new favorite novel, McMaster, author volume, Providence. It is an amazing novel. Definitely check it out. It's by a micro press. 30 years ago, it would have been a major seller. It would have been like the thing everybody's talking about, people passing each other on the subway, you know, everybody would be very controversial. There would have been people being they would have denounced from the newspapers. They would have championed her in the newspapers. She would have been on college tours, being, you know, protested against. But in the year 2016 which was when it came out, last year, it pretty much just came out with a small press and was ignored wrongly. So definitely check out. I miss the world by violet la bois. I've named, I've named nothing. But women do I like any man at all? I probably do. Let me, let me give this one more second to think about. I mean, we all know people name Paul Trump. He's always a good writer. We like his books. Stephen Graham Jones, very good writer. Cisco, who I mentioned before? Michael Cisco, did I mention him? I meant to really good, yeah, especially his shorter novels. Let's put it that way. So definitely be the narrator and the tyrant. Those are two fantastic novels by him. Who else is good? Who else i very recently. I'm gonna leave it at that. I'll probably come up with one in the middle of your next question, and to interrupt you when you ask it,

Michael David Wilson 39:09
yeah, that's okay. Just jump right in. Well, along similar lines, what is a story that isn't classically considered horror that you would put into the genre?

Nick Mamatas 39:23
Hmm, good question, I guess, because I have a capacious definition, I don't want to just mention some science fiction story by Harlan Ellison or something that's that doesn't seem quite where they're going for I also want to say something like George carollos, who obviously does associate by horror sometimes. So probably. John Cheever is the swimmer, which is about a middle class suburban guy who took a swimming pool, the swimming pool trying to escape his life is horrific. He. And you know, it's horrific in the way that it's satirical and a dark satire of air conditioned nightmare suburbs. So I would say that

Bob Pastorella 40:11
that's a damn good choice too. Yeah, that's an excellent story.

Nick Mamatas 40:16
And it is horrific in the sense that it sticks with you, it is and it nerves you and unnerves you as a reader. Now, when you see that going, Oh my God, but later on, it's not, it's not something you forget. So it it leaves a scar. Let's put it that way. So that's what makes it perfect. Yeah,

Bob Pastorella 40:31
I remember exactly when I read it. I read it in college in 1986 and I've never forgotten it. That's right. I've never seen a movie because I, yeah, it's a good movie, Lancaster, right, right, but I've never seen it because I, I feared the movie will up what I remember overwhelm your

Nick Mamatas 40:52
imagination. So you imagine the film, right? When you think about the story, yeah?

Bob Pastorella 40:58
So, yeah, I need to reread that story. You won't reread it. Yeah,

Nick Mamatas 41:06
I'm not gonna read it, but the movies are not watching. Oh, hey, Joe Abercrombie, which I know is unfair, because he writes sort of heroic epic fantasy, dark fantasy, but he has, I would also put him as a very horrific writer. And I mean, it's kind of stupid to mention he's very popular, but I just got into him last him last this year I read, nobody told me his novels were funny, so he's a good example of somebody who's funny and dark and also writes the kind of, you know, heroic fantasy about swords and magic and shit. And I stayed away from that kind of thing for years. So people always scream darker than always people just raping each other and stupid shit and our assholes, but it's fucking hilarious. They're definitely the first lock. Trilogy was so funny, and the first book was so amazing. Second book was the usual second book type

of thing. Third book that's like the very self. And I'll let Yeah,

yeah, the blade itself is the first one. Second one is before they are hanging. Third one is last argument of Kings battle that goes on a little too long, because, like all fantasies got to wrap up the end thing, you can't leave it hanging. But still amazing, still dark and crazy, and, you know, the guy goes nuts and kills some kids and he kills his own friend. You know, it's really good dark stuff. So check that out. I mean, it's still like a million copies. Who am I telling to check it out? But if you were the one of four people has not checked it out like I was, because I was a prejudiced check it out?

Bob Pastorella 42:25
Well, I've been meaning to I've had a lot of people recommend it to me. No,

Nick Mamatas 42:30
definitely, worthwhile, definitely and very, very funny. You'll crack you'll crack your shit

Bob Pastorella 42:34
up. Maybe my next one. I'm reading arat right now by Oh yeah, surprisingly, it's very good. Uh,

Nick Mamatas 42:44
why is that surprising? I'm sure Christopher,

Bob Pastorella 42:50
he is, he, he's he's awesome. He's awesome. But the subject matter, I didn't think I was gonna like it. And then I don't know I read the description in a because I'd never really read it. I'd heard about it, and I was like, okay, and I read it, and I'm like, Oh, wait, this is something that actually does interest me. What is it? Uh, just growing up, I remember going watching the movie about Noah's Ark, you know, and it was all debunked and everything. And I'm like, Okay, so he's getting so I was like, Oh, so this is, like, Noah's Ark, but it's actually a horror story. And then something about, you know, they found something, and it's older than the ark. And I was just like,

PMMP 43:35
oh,

Michael David Wilson 43:36
that's what I like that. So,

Bob Pastorella 43:38
yeah, it was like, that description, I, like, clicked on it on Kindles, like, bam, and I started reading it, and I'm like, Okay, I'm really digging the shit out of this. It's

Nick Mamatas 43:50
got, like, good books. I like the the boys were back in town many years ago. It was great. And the fairy Man, these are the older books of his. I really enjoyed those,

Bob Pastorella 43:58
yeah, my, my most recent stuff was of his I was reading. Was Baltimore so, oh yeah, yeah. And just love that stuff. Love that stuff. Lobster Johnson, I think he had think he wrote that as well.

Nick Mamatas 44:19
Yeah, definitely did. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 44:23
right. Well, we've got a couple of questions from Rick cm. Now the first one you might have, in fact, kind of covered in the last few questions, but I'm going to ask it anyway. So you wrote the introduction to a book of stories by Gerald Kirsch, noting that he had sunk into obscurity. Are there other such authors that deserve to be back on the bookshelves?

Nick Mamatas 44:56
No, he's the only one. Of course. Are there authors?

Unknown Speaker 44:58
Yes. Curious.

Nick Mamatas 45:02
Yeah, Kirsch, everyone has got to help. I'm not actually an expert on what should come back or not, but luckily, valencourt books, who put out on and on note by jellicrish and reissuing a lot of jellicrup stuff is and I spent a lot of time on villcourt's website, bravely trying not to buy everything I've seen. So I would just go there. And whatever they're publishing is fantastic. So they were publishing Charles Jackson, again, who was this kind of he wrote The Lost weekend, which is a great novel and became a great film noir with Billy Wilder as the director, memory Milan. And other than that, he's out of print, although I guess now melinch Bring them back. So those his other two books, which I've I'm blanking on the names because it's midnight, but I've read them. I've got one of these books where I got one vincourt edition are fantastic, and he had a great this will be the great biography, which usually don't get a biography of failed writers, to have very ambitious and then to sort of fall apart, which Charles Jackson did. So he deserves to come back. And I read another violin court book by Philip callow, who's not a horror writer. He's, I guess, a mainstream British realist. I don't know. Maybe he's still popular in England. Have you heard of him?

Michael David Wilson 46:18
I have Philip callow. I have not no so, I mean, even that means he's not popular in England, all right. Well, he is popular, and I'm just ignorant maybe, because maybe he's really fucking popular right now in England, but I'm in Japan. Well, he

Nick Mamatas 46:36
kind of writes those books I like about all these sort of after the world's second world war books about these poor guys who live in like, the Northwest or mining country, and they like, Fuck this. I'm going to London be an artist. And they can't be an artist if they crawl home like, that's the kind of thing he writes like, that's the kind of thing I love people sort of about failed proletarian Bohemians. You know, I don't know why that attracts me, other than my entire life, but that's the kind of thing I really enjoy. And you know, Colin Wilson, of course, is widely reprinted, but he deserves to come back again as well. He's another guy in that kind of mode.

Michael David Wilson 47:10
Yeah, what did you say? The name of that author was that I haven't heard of Philip

Nick Mamatas 47:17
callow, which is sort of a terrible surname for somebody, yeah, c, a, l, l, W, I read a short novel by him just a few months ago called common people, which is very short and very good and really nothing to do with horror at all, just a realistic novel about a young guy. But it definitely was a something I want to read a lot more of. So I hope they bring you back more stuff. But anyways, go to Alan court books. They do amazing work. They did a great edition of eggmans, the late breakfasters, which was sort of an obscure, maybe it was like a lost novel of his, which I thought was fantastic. And they put a bunch of short stories at the end. And anything they do is great.

Bob Pastorella 47:56
They did the Michael McDowell. They're like, yeah, they're doing some cold moon over Babylon and, and I'm just now, I read some of his work when I was younger. You know, toppling for the win. But, uh, that's just like surreal, Naked Lunch. David Lynch, just wow. And but you know, now I've got, you know, his Blackwater, I got end up getting with the with the book dealer, and got the original paperbacks and so which now, because I have them wrapped up in plastic. I won't read them. I'm just going to get the book on Kindle, you know. But I have, you know, it's like, so many people's like, you actually have those? I'm like, Yeah, I had them before, and I never read them, so now, but, uh, yeah, I mean, I read the Elementals. I mean, he's, you know, very, very good writer, and it's good to see a publisher willing to, you know, step up to the plate and bring some of these writers back. Yeah, they

Nick Mamatas 49:11
do fantastically. They got a bunch of lines. They have, like, a gay line, I don't know if it's LGBT line, but it's something like gay men line of, like, sort of lost gay fiction. And they've got a gothic horror line, and they've got a more contemporary horror line, and they've got kind of that post war British lost classics line. So if you like any of those types of things, definitely check them out. They also do a couple of original anthologies, like Christmas, go between ghost stories and also wonderful things like that. I've got nothing to do with them, by the way. I don't like, I don't make, like, a dime. Would you buy

Bob Pastorella 49:45
it's always good to plug. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 49:48
yeah. I'll put a link to them in the show notes. Well, the second question that Rick CM has is, how did you get the idea for Exit Through The. Gift Shop.

Nick Mamatas 50:02
So just to sum it up, exited the gift shop is a story that I wrote for st joshi's structures after horror anthology back when St Joshi liked me, I guess before I read any of my stuff, apparently. But he asked me for a story, so I wrote him one, and the idea of the anthology was you'd go looking for horror. I used to live in Somerville, Massachusetts, and there are a lot of donkey little towns in that area, one of which is Rehoboth, which has its own version of the Haunted hitchhiker, the Phantom hitchhiker myth. Usually the Phantom hitchhiker is a young woman who needs a ride home. In the home's the cemetery. Oh, she's dead. This guy, this is different hitchhiker. He is an angry redhead who sort of appears in your car and kind of fucked with you, like, yells at you and tries to drag your thorough that kind of thing. She's a malevolent fan. I'm a very unusual for an urban legend. So the idea of the story is, what if this was monetized? What if you can go, you know, into a certain strip of road in Rehoboth and pay 2000 bucks to be the ghost, and it's from his point of view, the ghost point of view. And I just came up with the idea, of course, because my friend Michael Marrano lives out there. He's an author too. He's written several good novels against collection. You know, he's a film reviewer for cemetery dance and on the radio, he told me the story once, and he said, Well, he told me he saw the guy once, or like his friend did. I guess it's always like somebody's friend who sees him, like all these, you know, ghost stories. And it stuck in my mind, is having, oh, it's very unusual to have a malevolent urban legend, as opposed to a kind of a passive or just spooky one. And when I was tossing over ideas in my head, it just came to mind. And at the time, Google Glass was big. They don't really make them anymore, but Google Glass was really the bane of the Bay Area existence, where I live now, because all these Googlers were just walking around, recording everybody, and it's freaking people out, and people getting to fight. People were dragging off people's faces, punching them in the nose. You know, it was a big news deal for a while here out in the bay, so I just figured to combine the two. And so it is from the point of view, starting off the driver, proving the ghost exists via Google Glass, and then it becoming a ride you can take. And the rest of the story is from Why would somebody want to take this ride? And the hitchhiker tries to find out by pulling out his nervous system, which always seemed like a very frightening thing to have your nervous system pulled out like the long strand of spaghetti. And I guess it was pretty good story that we printed in us go. Affliction Yoshi liked it, he said, was brilliant. So if you read his review of all my other work, where he says, I am terrible and I'm a failed mimic and I'm a pretentious hipster asshole. He actually bought two stories of mine and thought they were brilliant and enjoyed publishing them before we had a disagreement. Now he hates me, so it's weird when you disagree with somebody that you know your work gets worse. Yeah, funny how that happened. Sounds

Michael David Wilson 52:55
like revisionist history to me. Well, we've got a couple more Patreon questions and All right, I've saved the political questions for less. So read into that what you will. So Alan Scott says, in the horror writing field, there are plenty of political liberals and even some conservatives, but fewer socialists or Marxists or anarchists. Number one, how do you self define your politics? Two, do you see politics as inseparable from cultural production or as dividable? Number three, in what ways does your politics inform your writing? Genre, style, content?

Nick Mamatas 53:48
Did this guy pay for three questions?

Michael David Wilson 53:50
He did he

Nick Mamatas 53:52
pay for three different

Michael David Wilson 53:54
he's delivered free. He wrote them all as one, as one question. Just line them up. Boom,

Nick Mamatas 54:04
peachy. So what was the first question again? I forgot it. Just read it one at a time. It's either that way. Okay,

Michael David Wilson 54:10
how do you self define your politics? Okay,

Nick Mamatas 54:14
that's the tricky one. I guess I would call myself an autonomous Marxist, so a non state commune, so fundamentally, an anarchist, but an anarchist who believes in transforming society, as opposed to saying, Hey, I'm going to eat out of a dumpster, and, you know, not get a job, which is the kind of anarchism, but I like eating not out of a dumpster, and eating out of them, for, you Know, involves having dumpsters and having so you're not really, you know, not really leaving the system if you're just going to eat out of the dumpster from Whole Foods. Because, no, that necessarily implies, because it's of whole foods as a private concern, who dumps out food. So I would call myself an autonomous Marxist, non state communist. Okay. Second question,

Michael David Wilson 54:58
do you see politics? As inseparable from cultural production, or as dividable?

Nick Mamatas 55:06
The first, I don't see it as separable, right? Because, you know, if you're a materialist, then so the cultural production is, you know, what's in the term is cultural something that gets produced. It doesn't come from nowhere, right? You don't have cultural ideas from coming from coming from space and landing in our heads. It comes from the conditions under which we live. So when Internet came out, and everyone we had, they became their own little press release. Factory. Things changed politically. You know, when the industrial revolution happened, then, then slavery became immoral, because part of that, it seemed necessary for economic growth, the extent among the powers that be, among basically white supremacist society, that there was no room for it to be immoral. When it became no longer strictly necessary economically, it became immoral, right? Even religion changed to make it immoral. That is, the Christianity itself changed its collective mind about what Christianity what Christianity about where slavery was in order to allow capitalism to evolve and emerge, and even that was very bloody experience in the US to make that happen. So no, I can't think, I don't think you can split cultural production from politics. They're entwined, which is not the same as saying that. Well, every every movie you see, every picture you see on a hotel room wall is, you know, limed with capitalist oppression, but in the broadest stroke, cultural production as a as as a thing where you where there's something as a hotel that you go to, if you go into and because it's a nice hotel that needs to test, and then covering the wall is part of Is it a political statement? Again? What third question,

Michael David Wilson 56:46
okay, in what way does your politics inform your writing? So, genre, style, content? Hmm, well,

Nick Mamatas 56:57
I read about politics a lot because I'm interested in them. So it just comes up a lot. But if I was interested in cars, I wrote about cars a lot too. So like, I'm trying to convert people to politics via or to my politics via my books. Very inefficient way of doing so I just like thinking about it. So it ends up being the plot of a lot of my books, the political stuff. It's not so much my politics necessarily to my genre, but is my class position that does right? Because if you want to write, say, avant card, experimental literature or even mainstream realism, you need to be of a you need to be born to a certain class which I was not born into. So I wrote a book called The Last weekend, for example, which we talked about the last weekend before the last weekend. It's kind of a zombie novel parody the last weekend of the last weekend. That's also a parody of all these novels about bohemian young men who go to the a big city become a writer like that. We talked about Philip Kyla as common people before he becomes a painter, but the same kind of thing, and it had to be a zombie novel because it wouldn't get published otherwise, because I'm not the right class to write that kind of book. I went to the wrong schools. I've got my father had the wrong job. He's a longshoreman. He came from the wrong country, Greece. I grew up in the wrong part of Brooklyn. I went to bad public schools, State College. I'm not allowed to write. I'm not allowed to sit down and write and write and get published by a mainstream publisher, a novel about a young man who goes to the big city and gets drunk and has sex and tries to write a book unless there's zombies in it. Because of my class background, I can only write genre fiction. There are there are literal gatekeepers that keep these things out. People talk about sexism and racism. There are absolutely sexism and racism, huge amounts of it to publishing. There's also class and outbreak in publishing. So if you didn't go to the right school and you don't have the right paratrooper about the last name or right skin color or the right gender or the right chromosomes, you there are certain things you can't do, or at least it's so incredibly complex and difficult to do them, that the only way to do it while you're, you know, in your 30s or 40s, as opposed to in your 60s, is to do it the genre way. No, I also often like genre fiction when you are a smart ass little kid in the 70s living in Brooklyn, and, you know, your father works with his hands as a as a mechanic on the docks, and you're the smarty pants. You're given science fiction because that's what smart kids read. But if you are an upper class person and your father's a lawyer or a banker, you're given different set of books to read, and they're not genre fiction books, they're the classics. And you grew up reading those classics and developing that voice and those themes, and you're allowed to reproduce those classics as an adult writer, when you're downtown in pensioners Brooklyn, you get other books, and you get to produce those things. And so my public realized this, as opposed to my public saying, I don't want to say, this is working class literature. I'm in the working class. I'm gonna write the working class literature for the working class. I just happen I've been from the working class. Yes, and genre fiction has worked in class fiction, it has been since the days of the Industrial Revolution, right when pulp magazines were nickel and slick magazines were 25 cents. I go over to my class my first, you know, class, when I teach, I say it the Industrial Revolution had a number of changes. One, people were brought to the cities and the cities were bad, and they were gross and they were crime ridden. And then the police were professionalized and brought into, you know, patrol the cities. And in the factories, you were controlled by machines, right? It wasn't even your Foreman telling me to do the machine. The assembly line told you how to do, when to act. Romantic love became prominent because you had no land to trade, no livestock to trade, and so you married someone for the sake of you know your emotions and you're still so that love is more important than money. You're also told that God was more important than money and that there'd be a better life in the future after, after you die like an afterlife. And these are the genres. What genre is about the city and crime and the police? Crime fiction, detective fiction, what's what genre is about technology controlling your life? Science fiction, what genre is about love being the answer and not money? Romance, what genre is about a golden place or a better life that can be had for the virtuous? Well, fantasy, what genre is about people being squeezed out of the big, gigantic cities and going to a new frontier, the Western or in the UK idiom, the colonial adventure, going to Africa, going to Hong Kong, going to the mysterious east. So these are all fictions that were created for Pulp Fiction production to be sold back to the working class because they were that was with their experiences refracted through the world of fiction. And middle class people had slick fiction, which is primarily about psychology, which merger and industrial revolution as its own kind of theory of being. We thought about ourselves not as, you know, spiritual beings, but as mental beings. And to this day, psychological realism is more prominent in schools, in colleges, in the publishing industry, because it is based on the fiction published by more expensive magazines in the 19th century. So it's inescapable. So that's both the second and third question together. That's why? Because I'm trapped, as we are all trapped when I get to work from home, so it's okay, yeah, how about wearing pants now, you know, it's great, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 1:02:27
well, I mean, there's no requirement to wear pants on this is horror podcast. It's okay. Well, Andrew M Reiche has asked a question which is very much related to politics, and I think your answer will probably be yes, but the question is, are you as relieved as I am that the fad of god damn Nazis coming to our town appears to have tapered off? Yeah. The only problem with the question Is he hasn't said how relieved he is, so I don't know how he I've met this guy. I

Nick Mamatas 1:03:09
think I know this guy a little bit. Okay, yeah, I think he's got, I think he's kind of a skinny guy with curly hair, and he does a Wing Chun, okay, I think that's, I think that's him. So yeah, and I think I think he follows me on Twitter or something. He's got like a wolf head Avi, so I think I know this guy a little bit. So yeah, I'm pretty relieved. I thought it was pretty funny. The last time they tried to come here, they had, they must not have gotten a permit to the Martin Luther King Park, because they usually were manifesting in where they chose because right by the police station. So the course of police come and protect them from the people they were protesting. And they said, try to get a permanent People's Park, which, if you don't know what People's Park here in Berkeley is, is that it is a park dominated by the homeless, drug addicts of the town, that sort of squat there. So it's no place to have a rally, whether you're a Nazi or just a Radical Republican, you know, radical right winger, or a Trumpian, because you're going to step on a lot of shit and hero needles, and you're going to find a lot of very heavily agitated, ready to be violent homeless people being very annoyed at you because you're on their sleeping bag. I'm going to throw a rock at you, and they're going to be the fuck out of you. So I think that that last attempt to have that at People's Park really finished away right away, and they decided not to bother Berkeley anymore, which is great. Seriously, I'm thrilled the fat is over for now, but I am always on alert to make sure they're not sneaking back into town as you should be. Andrew, they give you $1 for that question. Geez, he could just pm me, I guess.

Michael David Wilson 1:04:42
Well, don't, don't tell him that we want to keep turn people away.

Bob Pastorella 1:04:51
I'm going to go refresh the screen and make sure we didn't lose anybody.

Michael David Wilson 1:04:57
All right. Well, I. Yeah, there's so much more that I could ask you, but I guess for the sake of your evening and eat and night, which is now evaporated, we better wrap up. And of course, that means that we just have an excuse to get you back on the show at some time. Sure,

Nick Mamatas 1:05:20
anytime. Oh yeah, every week I'm available. Every week I don't have to do your Patreon, but I'm always available. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 1:05:30
well, if we did that, then the podcast might have to be rebranded to this is Nick mamma test. In fact, you know what there is? There is something I want to ask you before I wrap up. And so we were talking about the different classes and genre, and I wanted to talk about your experience studying the MFA. So I wonder, did did you come up against any of that prejudice there? What? What was the experience like for you? What were some of the best and worst things about studying the MFA program? Because I know yours was probably quite a unique situation, because you were a published writer at that point, I think had been for 10 years. And yeah, if, if I have researched correctly, your main, or perhaps even your sole motivation was to get that MFA to enable you to be able to teach in universities correct,

Nick Mamatas 1:06:38
which was a mistake on my part. I, or at least for that I chose the wrong MFA program because I'm from the working classes and did not grow up with people who went to college. I had no idea how to actually work. In fact, not until I was in the MFA program, when I read a book by one of the faculty members called telling tales at a school, when she described her experience, not realizing that to teach at a university, you need to be have your degree from the University being one level up. So if you have your PhD from Yale, you can teach at, say, UC Berkeley. If you have your PhD from UC Berkeley, you can teach at some liberal arts college. You've got your PhD from liberal arts college, you can teach at some state university in the middle of country. If you have your MFA from the from some new program from a state university. You can't teach anywhere. It doesn't really count as at a university level. So I actually teach at the program where I where I taught, where I went to school. I teach at westcon and Connecticut. No, it's a low SMC program. I chose it because it was close to me at the time. I was living in Vermont. So it's close to go to Connecticut twice a year. David Hartwell, the famous tour editor, was on the board. So I figured, oh, they won't have a genre of panic if I show they're writing science fiction, which was mostly true, but not all true. And because there's no residency, I could just sort of do the work I was already doing, writing articles and essays and fiction, and give that as my assignment, which I did so on, some of it kind of worked out, and it didn't work out because Japanese companies tend to really appreciate formal education, so I think I got a better salary than I would have had I not had the MFA. But the idea of teaching at the University on a full time basis was not possible because the MFA program was too new and from a state university with proletarian students, essentially, and with not a great reputation, that's just the truth of it. Inside the school, which was a very is a very good program, westcon, because it's professional writing. So you have to take one creative genre and professional genre, and they wonder, you can't teach. You know you need to be a real writer. So you might be a poet and a speechwriter or a grant writer and a novelist or no, you pick those two things. So when I went there, it was me and a bunch of people from Connecticut who are mostly being paid to be there by their workplaces as continuing education, because they were all working for insurance companies or accounting firms, that kind of thing, they'd be learning how to be a better, you know, writing better copy for ads or writing better memos or that kind of thing. And it'd be poets on the side. And so the faculty, like science fiction and fantasy, they were done with it, whatever. The students were like, food freaked out. I remember having to give a talk about a book I like. I talked about Joanna Justina Robson's natural history, which is a wonderful, hard SF for our future novel. And it could have wrapped their heads around it. It is, it is a novel basically about ships that are persons, spaceships that are persons thanks to evolution and, you know, computer emulation and post humanity kind of thing. How could a spaceship be a person? What the spaceships just talk to each other. This could not get it, even though this is a classic idea and scientific at this point anyway, just because what? Why we wishing on top of the stupid shit later, one of the five. Faculty members who taught the online portion of the course, we always worked together as a workshop, made everyone read Salem's Lot by Stephen King, and they hated it, and they freaked the fuck out, like I'm not going to school, and paying this many $1,000 to read Stephen King. My professor told me today was trash. I don't like Stephen King, and they also reading it. As you know, Salem's Lot, nothing happens in the first 100 pages. I it's just about a little town. Then, like, they turned in three the dog gets killed on the fence, and they're like, Oh, this is so great. It's so literary. It's just about people having a good time and being nice to each other. And, know, this kind of weird author shows up, and he's taped in the librarian, and it's a sweet little town. Then, then when the bear and pressure. They all freaked the fuck out again, as it and they were really upset and really angry that they had to read these books. They also had to read lost spoilers. Girl by Peter strautz is a brilliant, amazing book, and they just had almost generalized revolt, like we, you're making us. We do horror novels. It's not fair. We don't understand. And so there was a lot of genre animosity there, but in general, I will say I didn't even wrote an article about this for the writers Chronicle, which is the awps social writing programs major magazine. If you want to write genre for Jenkins MFA, go to a low residency program like westcon, where I teach now, or stone coast in Maine, where they have you know, Dora Goss, most of the low residency programs will are more open to genre fiction than the full time programs because it's people who are no not leaving their lives to write. So they are more commercially minded. Of course, these programs have to be competitive, and one way to compete is to offer that is not being offered by the mainstream programs. So then we're all open to genre fiction, and genre fiction faculty run cheap because it's all part time, and so they can afford us, but I can't afford the prestigious writers who teach at full time MFA programs. So having MFA was a good experience. I made a few extra bucks, I think from my day job, from it, I do teach a little bit here and there. I have a couple word stories, and I go back there occasionally. They're close to my folks, who live on Long Island. So it's happy, and it's easy to take the ferry against a visit. But if I had to do it all again, if my goal was really niche at the university. One, I should have gone for a more prestigious program full time. And two, I should have not tried to win by saying I'll be the genre guy who does this. I should have had to. I should have worked on trying to change my stuff to be more mainstream that is more amenable to literary journals, as opposed to science fiction magazines and horror magazine. So word of warning to everybody, once in a

Michael David Wilson 1:12:46
minute, yeah, well, you've certainly given some good advice. Good advice in terms of where to take an MFA. What about for people who on the fence, they're considering taking an MFA. I mean, who should and who shouldn't take an MFA?

Nick Mamatas 1:13:08
If you have a lot of self esteem problems, you shouldn't take one. If you only have a moderate self esteem problem, you should take one, because you'll have a lot of people who are friends with you, who will, you know, be on your side, who will take you seriously for two years, which is two years more than you like to be taken seriously across the course of your life. Anyway, if you are married to a professor and you need an investigative because you're going to be a spousal hire someplace, get an MFA. It's easy to get when my friend Ben bergus got his MFA while pursuing his PhD in philosophy, and usually, you know, your PhD program really consumes all your time, but he was able to do MFA on the side, because it's kind of easy to do, if you can just keep your deadlines and keep your head straight. So if you live in state, and the State University says inexpensive, go for it. If you are ready to move to Iowa or to Providence, or to Austin, Texas, or to wherever these big programs are, Irvine, California, and they will pay you to go. Definitely go and take it. Don't go to Columbia. It's a bazillion dollars. They have almost no financial aid. You have to live in the city, even though agents come and present you. So if your goal is required, MFA, if you want to be sort of a big name, semi fancy writer who also writes essays for the New York Magazine or Harper's that kind of thing. Get your MFA at a good place if you just want to have some sort of stupid degree for some reason, go to some level and keep your head down and squeeze your candy out of it and try not to spend too

much money.

Michael David Wilson 1:14:42
All right. Well, thank you so much for spending the majority your evenings My pleasure. Where can our listeners connect with you?

Nick Mamatas 1:14:55
Just Twitter these days and Mamata Assa, Twitter. My Facebook is friendslock My. My blog is defunct, but Twitter is where it's at and my class

Michael David Wilson 1:15:07
All right. Do you have any final thoughts that you'd like to leave our listeners with? I just

Nick Mamatas 1:15:13
want to plug my next book because I'm an asshole. So coming this summer, is my new short story collection by attack on publications. It'll probably be called, speaking of communism, the People's Republic of everywhere, and it will include my second novel under my roof in its entirety, with author preferred text. It came out in 2007 with soft skill press, two days before soft press went bankrupt. So it kind of had sort of a, kind of a messed up history, yeah. But now it's been fixed, and it's back in there with along with 13 of the stories, I think, including a new one, and some hard to find ones, and some of my offer printed better ones. So that's the People's Republic. Everything should be on your Amazon pre order thing relatively soon, maybe next two weeks. Check that out. And I still have mixed up, which is short stories by Jeff VanderMeer, karma, Maria Machado, Benjamin Percy, Liz Han, Carol Hoffman, Robert swartwood and more, with cocktail recipes by Molly tanzer, and it's a great book. It's in hardcover. It's got a ribbon in it for your bookmark if you want to get drunk, which you do, because using this podcast, buy this book. You want a couple of short stories on John. What you do because you've got an ass. Buy this book.

Michael David Wilson 1:16:37
Yeah, I think is eminently reasonable to plug your book after almost three hours. And I think in fact, for people who have listened this far, they are in fact, obligated to go out and buy the book. That is the condition. Yeah, all right.

Nick Mamatas 1:16:56
Thanks very much, guys. You

Michael David Wilson 1:17:02
thank you so much for listening to this is horror podcast with Nick mamatas. Next episode, we've got a bit of a different episode for you, and quite a special one, because Dan Howarth is going to be back with me. You know, I love chatting with Dan alongside John Costello and myself. He was one of the original This is horror podcast co hosts. It's been a long time since I've spoken with him, which games messages almost every day. But with me being in Japan and him being in the UK, we don't always get many opportunities to actually speak with each other. So I'm I'm personally very excited about that one, and it's certainly going to be worth your time, because much like the collaborative episode I did with J David Osborne, Dan is going to be interviewing me at the same time that I'm interviewing him, and we're also going to talk about some upcoming news, some, well, some potential news, really, some avenues and directions that we could take to this is horror podcast in things that we might be able to do in the UK, events that you might be able to attend. There are things going on, you know, that we're talking about possibilities, so do tune in for that. And those that have been fans of this is horror long term. Now, might remember that we used to do events all over the UK. We did events at Warwick University. We did some events in Coventry. We did events in Manchester, London. We even had an event up in Edinburgh. So keep an ear out, because it could be, but you're gonna get some more live, just as horror events. But yeah, listen to the episode, and you know, what else you should do? You should become a patron, if you have $1 if you like what we're doing, if you want to help us reach 1000 patrons by 2020 and I'm sure you do, because it's a pretty ambitious goal, and we need all the help that we can get. So please do head on over to www.patreon.com forward slash, this is horror. 1000 patrons by 2020 please help us make that happen. Before I wrap up, let's have a quick word from our sponsors. Do

PMMP 1:19:55
you like Stephen King? Do you like podcasts of Stephen King? Do you like spook? See magazines, good news now you can have a Stephen King podcast, Castle Rock radio, and you can have a spooky magazine, Dark Moon digest. All you have to do go to www patreon.com/pmm, publishing. Have a scary day.

Jon Padgett 1:20:26
Vestarian, a literary journal, Nightmare made normal, in depth, essays, interviews, weird fiction, original artwork, poetry and fascinating hybrid pieces by authors including Thomas ligatti, visit our Kickstarter campaign page, receive remarkable rewards and join us where Stars Dance forever like bright puppets in the silent staring void, as

Michael David Wilson 1:20:56
said before, how much it means to have that support from our patrons. And thank you so much to Jennifer Grindstaff and Joe Benjamin mankaruso who signed up earlier this week. And thank you to all of those who joined us in February. It was great to welcome so many of you, people like Iago, Faustus, Adrian Lee wo Scott Kemper, Lisa Quigley, Dan Hill, Israel. Finn, Daryl Foster, Christopher Parker, truly. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. You know, recently, both offline and online, I've read and heard from people who are suffering from depression and mental health issues at the moment, I know that there will be people listening who are going through that pain at the moment. I think for me personally, when I was going through some of the darker times in my life, just having an awareness that it's okay to not be okay was comforting for me, And there's a quote from Juliet Lewis that you may find comforting. So here it is, the bravest thing I have ever done was continuing to live when I wanted to die. That's Juliet Lewis, and if you're suffering, if you're in pain right now, please talk to someone. Talk about it, because I found that that really helped as well. I've blogged a little bit about that kind of thing on Michael David wilson.co.uk, you may also find that journaling or recording an Audio Diary is very helpful. I may even be cathartic, but just don't keep it locked up, even if you're just sharing the pain with the page that still counts, that can still be very valuable, but look, admittedly, I am no expert. I am just talking from my own experience. I just know how devastating depression can be and I don't want you to be alone. I know that's a pretty real note to end the podcast on, but it's an important topic. It's something we need to talk about more. Do not suffer alone. I'll see you in the next episode, until then, look after yourself, be good to one another, read horror and have a great, great day.