WHAT IS THE AIRSPEED VELOCITY OF AN UNLADEN AUTHOR? AN INTERVIEW WITH HORROR LEGEND KATHE KOJA

Your new collection of short stories Velocities is coming out with Meerkat Press in April. Would you be able to tell us a little bit about it?

Yes, we’re very excited. This is the first time that I’ve worked with Tricia, and it’s been a lot of fun so far. When I read a short story collection, I don’t read all of them at once and sometimes I don’t read them all in order and sometimes I read some and not others. So when I chose the stories I tried to group these thematically. So if people wanted to go in a particular direction or feel a particular mood the stories are grouped to offer that to the reader. There are a couple of stories in the collection that are original to the collection and haven’t been published before, and some are from anthologies and places that people might know and some are from more surprising places. So I hope I gave people a good cross section of my voice and what my stories can do.

As with your novels, your short stories cover a wide range of ground and genre. How do you feel about genre and where your work sits in it?

I never really think of it to be honest. Everything that I work on starts from whatever the idea is, the character that sparks the story or the novel. Then afterwards I try to think of or try to see where that might fit in the larger world of publishing or where it might find its most sympatico readers. So I never set out to specifically create something in the genre, I don’t work very well that way.

This is your second collection of short material after Extremities (1997). How do you feel you’ve changed as a writer since then?

I hope I’m better! I’m always trying to get better, that’s kind of the point. These stories though themselves cover a fairly wide chronological range. My collected stories would be a fairly hefty book. there are lots of stories out there that don’t appear in either of these collections. Maybe someday we’ll do a nice omnibus of all of them. It was fun to be reminded of some of the circumstances and the place where these stories came out originally. But hopefully anyone who enjoyed Extremities will enjoy Velocities. And for people who are completely new to my fiction, Velocities I think makes a good taster menu. And if you like what you read there then you’ll probably like the rest of the things I do. And if you don’t, no harm, no foul, it wasn’t for you and we’ll part as friends.

Your work frequently features obsessive artists with a really intense connection to your work. What keeps bringing you back to these characters?

I think because that’s a large part of my own worldview. My work is very central to my life. My husband is an artist, I’m an artist, a lot of my friends are creative workers in one way or another, although I hate that term! Anyone can be a creative worker. You can be an extremely creative nurse, or an extremely creative bus driver. But people who work in, lets say in the creative industries. And I find that the people whose work that I enjoy the most seem to have an intense focus on what they produce and what they do as an artist. So I would imagine that’s why I go there, cause that’s where I already am.

You have written many novels as well as short stories. When you start a story do you always know if it’s going to be a novel or a short story?

I would have to say I always know. Sometimes when I start something, you kind of have a feel for the shape of it. It’s like how much room does this idea need, how much room does this character need, how far are you going to go with it, or how far can I go. And it does have a particular feel. Like, this is going to be a very short story, or this has to be a novel. A couple times I have misjudged the length of a novel. My Victorian puppet trilogy Under The Poppy (2010) started out as one book, and I had no idea it was going to be much larger until I got to the end of the first book and said oh, wow there’s tons more stuff that I have to tell about these people. And it ended up turning into a trilogy. Which is kind of good, because if I’d known in the beginning it was a trilogy, it might have scared me off. At that time it was the most difficult thing I that had ever ventured, and it was an education.

Under The Poppy is more historical fiction compared with your horror novels. Was it very different writing it, and did it require a lot more research?

Yes and no, but that’s like anything, that’s like any of my books. When I was writing Bad Brains (1992) I had really no idea how close head injuries worked, or how treatment was. Or what did people experience, what drugs were they on, what was likely to happen, what was likely to go wrong. So I had to do a lot of research to be able to have the correct facts to add to my story to make sure that the things that happened in the story were things that would actually happen, or could actually happen. Under The Poppy, because it takes place at the end of the Victorian era, and the beginning of modernity, we have a kind of colourful idea of what those time periods might have been like. But to get a better idea of what was available, how did people travel, what did they do, what were societal expectations of you, if you were a performer what did people think about you in polite society – all that stuff. Because you’re trying to create this world that partakes of the reality of the larger world as closely as possible. So you kind of lay reality over what you’re doing like a template and see where are the rough edges, where is the stuff that doesn’t fit, or isn’t correct. In one of my YA novels Straydog (2002), I had thought I knew some of the animal control laws and regulations. I got to a certain point in that novel and said, you know I had better check, just to be sure. And I found out I was completely wrong. And everything I had planned for the last third of the novel would have to be thrown away, because it’s not what would happen. So I was punished for my ignorance! But the answer is always, as much research as the project itself will need.

Straydog was your first YA novel. How did you find that after having written your adult horror novels?

It was great. It was a lot of fun. Again I don’t plan things out ahead of time, I don’t say well now I think I’m going to try to do this. I’d written a short story in fact for a young adult magazine called Cicada that was the basis of Straydog, and my agent really liked it and suggested I see if I would like to try writing a YA novel. That book was the result and then I went on to write a bunch more for FSG and I loved the experience. I think the bridge or the connection between the horror novels and the YA novels is probably intensity. There isn’t a time in your life generally when you’re more intense than in your teenage and growing up years. So I felt very much at home there. I loved writing YA.

Another thing that comes through in your writing is the intensity of the voice. A lot of your characters have very specific ways of speaking and looking at the world. Do you find when you’re writing does the character’s voice have to come first or does it take a lot of writing and rewriting to find it?

No, they always come first, and that’s how everything starts. If there is no voice for me then there is no way in, and there isn’t anywhere to go. It’s always the voice, it’s always the person, the particular point of view, and that’s what makes the story for me, the novel or whatever. When I start working, I’m always following that voice. And the project that I’m working on now, Dark Factory, there are two very different voices in that book, and that took a minute to navigate. Because they’re two very different people, and nobody has more weight than the other. There isn’t a viewpoint character, it’s both of these guys, so that took a second.

Frequently your characters tend to have a doomed aspect to them. Do you feel that in order to really find out how a character works you have to grind them down?

I don’t think I’m grinding them down, I think that’s what they’re doing. I don’t have a particular plan for any character when I’m writing, again I’m following the voice and seeing what would naturally happen to that person in that situation. I don’t do any of that consciously at all. And that would not be fun at all to do!

Meerkat Press is also reissuing your legendary debut novel The Cipher (1991) and bringing it back in print for the first time in ages. Would you be able to tell us a bit about that?

Sure. I’m really excited to have The Cipher coming back into print again in English. It’s been quite a while, and for years and years people have asked, when will it be back, will it be reprinted? And I really wanted to do it in the best possible way. I found a really good home at Meerkat, and I’m really happy with the way the book’s been handled there, and the relaunch of it’s gonna be a lot of fun. I’m excited to see how people respond to it. Many people have read it through the years, and especially since the ebook edition was made available, but there are lots of people who haven’t. I’m very excited to see how they resonate with the Funhole.

It’s such an iconic book but it’s been so hard to track down for ages, it’s really nice that it’s going to be back in print.

Yeah I’m really glad and I think now is a good time.

Where did the Funhole come from?

I think people really respond to that feeling of this kind of emptiness that asks something of you but you don’t know what it wants and you don’t know why you’re attracted to it. That’s clearly something that we as a species are kind of pulled to the inexplicable, even though we deduce probably correctly that it’s not safe or even desirable. But there’s something in that mystery that draws us forward. And you know obviously I’m not the first person or will be the last to think of this void or this emptiness and why are we drawn to emptiness. And answering the question was really interesting. And again it began in fact as a piece of short fiction. And the Nicholas character was not central to that piece of fiction, but it became clear that something else was happening. So I moved him out of the other piece and gave him his own place to play and the book just took off on its own. Nicholas also is a character that people resonate to or with in different ways. His adversary in a way, his girlfriend, Nakota, a lot of people are very harsh on her. I’m particularly fond of her because I think she’s probably the most honest character in that book. She knows exactly what she wants, and she’s not afraid to go after it. Actually very much like Bibi in Skin (1993). Bibi was also another very definite, very strong and concentrated character. She knew exactly what she wanted and was not afraid to go after it. I’m always very interested to see or to learn from readers what are they getting out of a particular novel, and The Cipher’s been great for that. People have shared their ideas and theories and questions throughout the years, so I’m really excited to see what will happen now.

That relationship between Nicholas and Nakota is very dysfunctional, which could be said of a lot of your characters. Is that something you feel particularly drawn to explore?

No, not really. Again it’s a function of the characters. The character relationship at the heart of Under The Poppy is a quite functional one. They manage to stay together through every kind of separation and torment that the world can throw at them, so they’re magnificently functional. It’s going to come out of whatever the stresses and the particular shape of whatever those characters are going through. There’s a character in The Cipher, Vanese, who gets up and leaves – spoiler alert! – at a certain part of the book, because that’s how she would react. That’s how she would respond to the things that are going on. Which has always bothered me about fiction in general but maybe horror fiction in particular, I want to see the people who get up and leave. I want to see the people who say, “You know what? I don’t think I’m going to go into this hellmouth, so bye! Let me know how it turns out if you can!” But that’s a natural human response as well. Smart people generally flee pain.

You mentioned earlier the project you’re working on at the moment, Dark Factory, would you be able to tell us a bit about it?

Yes, I’m really excited about this, and this has been a total learning experience for me, and an education. Dark Factory started out as a novel. It’s about these two guys who both come to work at this club called Dark Factory that’s like an augmented choose your own reality type of club. You can dance, you can drink, you can see all kinds of things. There’s a huge menu of different experiences you can have. And once these two get together, their synergy causes the club to change and causes the reality of the club to change. And writing this book has brought me into collaborative contact with artists and musicians and designers and the world of Dark Factory itself is going to be something unique in my creative method. It is a book it is also a lot of other things. I don’t want to say too much about it. I do have a Patreon if people are interested. There’s a video they can watch that tells more about the project, and of course I would love it if people would support it. But it’s going to be something I haven’t attempted before, it’s very ambitious for me. I really believe that we are so sophisticated now in the way that we take in narrative. We’re used to watching and binge-watching and taking in long stories with multiple branching narratives, and do that easily and well. I’m excited to see how that will translate to something that’s immersive fiction, that’s a narrative and there’s a lot more than what is going on on the page. it’s been a lot of fun. It’s been very nerve wracking, cause you’re kind of building the airplane while you’re flying it! But I hope that people will have as much fun with it as I and my collaborators had.

Meanwhile, with Meerkat Press bringing back The Cipher, are there any plans to bring Bad Brains or any of your other works that are out of print back?

At the moment no, but I would never say never. They’re all available in e editions so people can have ebooks. And so the fiction’s there. Right now no, no plans yet.

What’s next for Kathe Koja?

Dark Factory is my life pretty much for the foreseeable. In fact I just locked down a performance space for November of this year – assuming we’re still all alive and viable – for a Dark Factory performance event. So that’s my life going forward.
​
Thank you Kathe Koja for speaking with us!
​

Velocities Paperback by kathe koja

From the award-winning author of The Cipher and Buddha Boy, comes VELOCITIES, Kathe Koja's second electrifying collection of short fiction. Thirteen stories, two never before published, all flying at the speed of strange. Dark, disturbing, heartfelt and utterly addictive.

---