Caledonia Maples: Thanks for agreeing to see me.
Alyx J Shaw: No problem. The Jehovah’s Witnesses avoid me like the plague now, so it’s nice to have a new stranger to traumatize.
CM: Um… right. Okay then. Oh my god what IS that?
AJS: It’s Sparky. She’s a Chilean Rosehair tarantula.
CM: It’s the size of my HAND!
AJS: Yeah she’s a big girl.
CH: Uh… should it be out… running around?
AJS: Running? Sparky doesn’t run. Sparky doesn’t move. Wherever you put Sparky, that is where Sparky is. Unless she sees a mouse.
CM: It eats mice.
AJS: Yeah well if she catches them, I don’t feed them to her. But they climb into her tank after the corn I leave in there for the crickets, and who’s going to eat a cricket when they can have a nice mousie? She’s mental for birds too. She just molted so she’s all pink and pretty and fluffy.
CM: Ah… would you mind terribly putting it away?
(The tarantula is put away… much to the relief of the interviewer.)
CM: So, first question. What’s your favorite band?
AJS: Queen. Like you had to ask, I mean you did notice the albums, CDs, shoelaces, posters, photos, box sets, books and calendars by the door, didn’t you?
CM: Believe it or not I didn’t. So is that what you listen to when you write?
AJS: No, I can’t listen to them and write. I get too distracted and I end up on my back in the dark on the floor with ‘Father to Son’ blasting the neighbours. They are awesome for clearing writer’s block; the imagery is just incredible. But I can’t write to them. (laughs) I mean who can ignore Freddie?
CM: So what do you listen to?
AJS: Depends on what I’m writing. Music is very important for when I write. Sometimes I can only listen to one band, or one album, or one side of an album, and if it’s an intense scene, only one song on endless loop. I can’t write without music.
CM: So who is your favorite author? I mean who inspires you?
AJS: Well I would have to say I have three authors who inspire me. William S. Burroughs, Spike Milligan and J.R.R. Tolkien.
CM: Wow. That’s quite an eclectic collection.
AJS: Yeah I know, but they all taught me something that became critical to my style. I mean no one grabs you by the throat and shoves your face into reality like Burroughs. And Jack Kerouac, I really like him a lot too, can’t really have Burroughs without Kerouac so far as I’m concerned. Tolkien on the other hand creates reality. If you look at how incredibly detailed Lord of the Rings is, it’s like he was tapping into another universe and writing about people from there. And Spike is just hilarious, but brutal too. His war memoirs are… I have no word. Incredible for want of something better. He’ll be telling you about something a friend of his did, and you’re laughing so hard you think you’re going to have a fit, then he adds something like “He would be dead in three days.” I mean freaking hell. He makes you laugh and then when you’re not looking he punches you in the gut. He has an incredible style.
CM: Now that you mention it I think I have seen all those elements in your novel, ‘A Strange Place in Time’.
AJS: Yeah, well, I try. The hardest thing for me about learning to write was learning to write like me. I tried to be everyone else, and it just wasn’t working. I really didn’t think I was good enough, so I wanted to be someone else. Does not work. I see a lot of young authors with the same problem; they’re in love with an author’s style so they try to be that author, and it just ruins everything.
CM: You’ve actually written quite a lot.
AJS: Yeah I guess so. I used to work at ‘Angles’, which was a gay and lesbian newspaper. I think it’s gone now. Did a few articles there, some book and play reviews, and a cartoon, which stunk. I also wrote radio commercials when I worked at CKO News Radio. It’s gone too, now. And I contributed some work to a college writing manual. I currently write short stories for ‘Forbidden Fruit’, and I just sent some short stories to ‘Torquere Press’, and part two of my current novel, ‘A Strange Place in Time’ should be out next year.
CM: You frequently mention your time at ‘Angles’.
AJS: Well it was a blast; it was a great place to work. And I could bring my son, which was fantastic. Side note to all you anti-gay asshats out there; my son was exposed to gay men for the better part of the year, and the only thing he picked up from them was an ability to develop photos, how to change the toner in a copier, and a sharp fashion sense. Gay agenda my fat ass.
CM: I take it you are pro gay rights.
AJS: I’m pro human rights.
CM: Your son just had a baby, didn’t he?
AJS: Yeah, well, his wife did. It would have been a bigger deal if he did. But yeah he would come to the paper with me, and boom, he’d be gone. He’d be making coffee or fixing the copier or learning to use the computer… I mean he and I both had a great time, and everyone had a great time with him there. I can still see him and Jerome playing with Legos on the floor.
CM: Tell us about the rally you missed.
AJS: Oh man, the rally! My photographer, Nina, and I were sent to cover this rally; something like five hundred women demanding the right to go topless in summertime. We’re supposed to be at this park at a particular time, and we get stuck in traffic. But that’s fine, we’re thinking we should still be there for the rally. So we drive up, jump out of the car, look around, and there is NOBODY. We’re running up and down the sidewalk, driving around the block, we can’t see a soul. Finally we go back to the park, and there’s this one old guy sitting on a bench, feeding the pigeons. I said, “Hey did you see five hundred angry topless women go by?” He sits back, he THINKS about it for like, three minutes, and finally says; “Oh, yeah, I think I did. They went that way.” And I’m just staring at this guy; I said, “You had to THINK about that?” Too funny. So we missed the rally, we couldn’t find anyone, so she took pictures of me playing in the kid’s fountain in my CKO sweatshirt.
CM: So when are you going to update the series you have running here at ‘25%’? What’s it called, ‘Even Fall’?
AJS: (Rolls eyes.) Oy. Soon! I swear. I finally finished book three of ‘Strange Place’, so that frees up some time to work on it. I really want to see where that story goes.
CM: Where it goes? You don’t know?
AJS: Oh hell no, I never plan stories. I know all the books and creative writing courses say you should map stuff out to a ludicrous degree, but when I do that it takes all the fun out of writing. I think it works really well for some authors, but I can’t stand it. I mean after I get it mapped out, planned out, scoped out, know exactly who and what goes where, why bother? It’s written. I just write, and then I go back and weed what I have, and it’s fun because sometimes I find these throwaway phrases and say “Oh wow! Yeah I can take that and do this with it!” My creative writing teacher probably has nightmares about it. Anyway, back to your question, yeah, I’m going to be working on ‘Even Fall’ again, and ‘Gryphons’.
CM: ‘Gryphons’ is the one about rock stars, isn’t it?
AJS: Yeah, rock stars on another planet. Very goofy. It’s mostly a combination of rock mythos and teen fantasy, no brain cells required.
CM: But some parts are rather dark. For instance the way the invading forces tried to destroy the… I can’t say this.
AJS: Sferkkaans?
CM: Yes, thank you. I mean there is definitely a dark side to this tale.
AJS: Yeah there is. It’s a very odd tale, and I wrote it quite a long time ago with a friend.
CM: That would be Shane.
AJS: Yeah that would be Shane.
CM: She co-wrote quite a lot of stuff with you.
AJS: Not co-wrote, really, more like helped to hash out basic plotlines and characters. No, that’s not quite true, she definitely helped write ‘Gryphons’, and she did a few pages on ‘Yakalathi’, which is still in its infancy; there’s only about two or three chapters done on it. I haven’t really looked at it since she died in ’97, I mean there are pages in the folder in her handwriting… it has taken me a very long time to look at it again.
CM: You have some of her artwork in ‘Strange Place.’
AJS: Yeah, the black dragon she drew in pen and ink. That’s actually a calendar she made; I have the original drawing. I just felt she had to be included in some way. Her name will be listed on ‘Gryphons’ if it ever gets published, assuming I decide it’s worth publishing after I finish going over it. It’s actually just a chunk of a massive volume of work Shane and I churned out without any real intent of publishing or showing to anyone. ‘Gryphons’ is just a portion of that, and that’s why it’s rather eclectic. The original work was probably about three thousand pages in length, and Dahli and Draephus were really just walk-on characters in the midst of something much, much larger. But their story grew, and I liked it enough that I carved it out of the original work and turned it into a stand-alone piece. I’m re-writing it again in an attempt to make it more believable and readable, and putting in a lot of significant details I neglected to mention because they had already been discussed in other sections, but not in the part that made up ‘Gryphons’.
CM: Such as the inability of the few remaining Sferkkaan women to have children, and why there are so few women in the first place.
AJS: Right.
CM: I’ve noticed you have quite a few gay characters, why is that?
AJS: Why not? Gay people are people too.
CM: But you have a LOT of gay characters.
AJS: No I don’t, actually. I think people just focus more on them because they’re gay. The main character, John Arrowsmith in ‘Strange Place’ is gay, yeah, and obviously so is his boyfriend, but other than them and two other people everyone else is straight, although Dargothians consider sexual preference a non-issue. They don’t think in terms of straight or gay. And in ‘Even Fall’ everyone started out straight but I got so many requests to pair Aramais with Whitebird that I just caved and went with the flow. And in ‘Gryphons’… hmmmmmm…. Not sure that counts. I mean we are talking about a society so radically altered by an invading force that seeing a woman on the street is an event, and seeing one with a baby makes the five o’ clock news. These men are basically in prison; there is just no one else to form a relationship with.
CM: So what do gay men think of your characters?
AJS: Hopefully they like them. I’d hate to think there’s like a gay bar with my picture on the dartboard and the words “kill on sight” written on my forehead. I haven’t had any complaints about them, and I know I have quite a few guys reading my stuff. I think if the men found the characters offensive, somebody would have said something. At least I hope they would.
CM: Do you have lesbian characters?
AJS: Gay, straight, lesbian, black, white, plaid… nobody’s safe. People are people, and ya have to love them, because if you don’t you really are denying yourself something wonderful. You may as well just pull one of your eyes out.
CM: So let’s discuss genre. You primarily write fantasy, but you do science fiction as well. What’s your favorite?
AJS: Horror, actually, but I noticed every time I wrote it my friends would piss themselves laughing. Never a good thing. I mean it is if you are trying to be funny but… I wasn’t. (laughs.)
CM: But there are definite horror aspects in ‘Strange Place’.
AJS: Well like I said, I love horror.
CM: Your main character, John Arrowsmith, ends up in a fantasy world by accident.
AJS: Yeah. Well I had two reasons for doing that, one is it makes it easier for the reader, because she or he can learn about the place as he does, so there’s less of a struggle to explain the setting. I don’t have to hold up the novel with exposition. You know, the old 1950’s thing where one pipe-smoking scientist turns to the other pipe-smoking scientist and says; “Well as you know, Jim…” People don’t talk like that. They don’t sit and explain things to each other they already know. Arrowsmith gets to ask the questions for the reader, and I think it makes him more endearing as a character. He’s sort of a guide through the weirdness. Another reason is I think a lot of people wish they could just fall off the Earth and start over in a brand new place.
CM: You had actually given up on trying to publish this book, and had posted it on your website.
AJS: Yeah I had. Publishers were really uncomfortable I think with some of the characters and concepts. Someone even accused me of trying to warp children because there are Elves and dragons in the book and therefore it was clearly meant for children. The line of thought seemed to be you can have a dragon in a book, and you can have a gay man in a book, but if you have them both you must be a child molester. At any rate I couldn’t get anyone to look at it. And there are virtually no agents in Canada, and the few I talked to really had their heads up their own asses. Not to say they all do, I just seemed to find the ones that need to be beaten to death with their own attitude.
One even phoned me and literally screamed at me that she doesn’t take young adult. I screamed back “Well if you don’t, say you don’t in your write up, and furthermore I don’t f**king write young adult!” AUGH! Oh and another great remark I heard was “Well our readers are between eighteen and eighty five years of age and we don’t think they’d like this.” I said; “What the hell are you talking about, I wrote it and I’m between eighteen and eighty five!” And I had hacked and cut and spliced it to bits in an attempt to please these people, you know to make it a little more mainstream. I think I hacked out nearly three hundred pages, and it still wasn’t getting anywhere. So I finally thought; “Meh, just post it on the web.” And I did, and I put all the happy little offensive bits back in and I revamped the story line a bit and up it went. And it gathered, much to my surprise, a huge grass roots following.
My publisher, Laura Thomson, started out as a reader, and she liked the book so much she decided to take a chance on publishing it. So ‘Strange Place’ was the first book of a brand new publishing house, and I think that is just fantastic. I really feel vindicated on a lot of levels, not to mention the fact that it’s great to be dealing with non-linear people who don’t want things to all fit into one orderly cubbyhole and have a fit when something is not formulaic. And ‘Strange Place’ is currently being translated into German by another reader, Naurring, and she took this on herself, she’s not asking for a nickel from me, though of course if I publish it in Germany, which I really hope I do, she will be compensated for her work.
I also had an offer from a fabulous artist, Eve Le Dez, to do some illustrations for it, and I would love to have her work in my book, she’s just amazing. I would be really thrilled if it was picked up in Germany. There’s a lot of grass roots support for this book, and that is just the greatest feeling in the world that people believe in something I did enough that they are willing to dive in and lend their support like that. I wish I could have published it here in Canada, but, oh well, can’t have a dragon and a gay biker in the same book apparently. So I’ll go where I’m wanted.
CM: Well I’m just about out of time here, couple more questions…
AJS: Yeah?
CM: Rabbit.
AJS: Oh pfft, okay what do you want to know about him?
CM: What prompted you to create what is basically a hermaphroditic Neanderthal cave-Elf?
AJS: Well you can kind of blame him on Tolkien and Peter Jackson. I was watching ‘Fellowship of the Ring’ and they were talking about how Orcs were once Elves. So I’m looking at this three hundred pound… thing… with fangs and bulging with muscles and this thick wiry black hair, and… these freaky yellow/green eyes, and if you think about it, there are no female Orcs anywhere in sight. So Saruman’s breeding an army, well bully for him, but who are these Orcs breeding with? And if you look at the Elves, they’re all tall and slender and willowy, and they have boy and girl Elves, so my brain, being the fetid sick playground it is, thought “There is no way that Orc was created from that race of Elves.” So out of the mists of my deranged mind came this massive carnivorous Elf with yellow eyes, capable of both bearing and fathering a child. And the funny thing was, the part that astonished me, is people went absolutely mad for him! He has his own fan club. I get drawings, photo manipulations, short stories… it’s really amazing.
CM: So what about the rumours he is to star in his own full length novel?
AJS: Yeah they’re true. I’m writing a Rabbit novel. Actually he’s going to take up residence in ‘Yakalathi’, which is the novel I started with Shane. It takes place on Earth in the future, after all the gods decided humanity was a really bad idea. So most of the humans are eradicated, and the good people, who tried to respect the land and their fellow people are merged with an animal spirit and become a new race.
CM: But Rabbit’s a human.
AJS: No Rabbit’s an Elf.
CM: But there are no Elves on Earth.
AJS: I’m… not so sure about that but that’s just my feeling. As I said I’m Wiccan, and I think there is far more sharing this world with us than we know. I try to incorporate my beliefs into my writing.
CM: Such as the wolf-warriors in ‘Strange Place’.
AJS: Yeah, though I’m not so sure if they are a manifestation of my beliefs or my rampaging feminism. Bit of both I guess. The wolf-warriors are meant to represent the different aspect of womanhood. I wanted a woman completely removed from the Hollywood movie silicon queens. I mean if you look at these actresses, they’ve been sterilized. They are cut and shaped into a perfect form, they are underweight, just cut and primped and… they’re not real. They are females for squeamish men. They don’t think, they don’t menstruate, their bodies don’t change with the phases of the moon, they’ve had allll the icky scary bits taken away, and even if a woman in a movie does kick ass and take names, she has to do it as sexily as possible, and she can’t be in charge, a man has to be aiming her like a gun.
The wolf warriors, and notice I said wolf not cat not panther not jaguar, I mean come on we’ve done the pussy references to death, let it lie, are essentially berserkers. They dress in wolf skins, they eat raw meat, they hold ritualistic orgies to celebrate the changes of the season, they stink, they have bugs, they’re not pleasant. They’re not meant to be pleasant. They are meant to scare the life out of an enemy. Little cuties mincing around armed with fruit knives dressed in half a thong are not scary. They are a porn movie. The wolf warriors will literally eat you alive, haul your guts out and start chewing on your heart while you’re still using it.
CM: And what aspect of womanhood involves cannibalism?
AJS: It’s not about cannibalism. It’s about strength. I’m not explaining it right. The goddess they worship is called the Moon Goddess, and she has warriors, and priestesses. The priestesses are her nurturing side; they’re healers, gardeners, keepers of the hearth fires. The warriors represent her more earthy side, the parts that guys don’t want to hear about, blood, and birth and cramps, and they manifest that in their hunts, the rending of flesh, the spilling of blood. They bring life in the form of providing meat for the table, which is another aspect of life we have lost touch with. We live in a world of fast food and supermarkets with packaged meat all nicely cleaned and removed of the scary icky bits, and we’ve forgotten that something had to die so you could have kabobs for dinner.
Cows don’t naturally come in little cubes for stewing. Someone had to drive a pneumatic hammer in that animal’s skull for you to have that burger. We’ve forgotten that, and that’s a shame. An animal gave its life for us; we should be thanking it instead of having eating contests. I mean how bloody wrong is that? Stuffing yourself until you vomit, using up life and barfing it out. Anyway I suppose they represent my own personal feelings about how we have come to view the world. We want babies and we want steak for dinner, but we don’t want to think about the biology that made that baby, and we don’t want to think about that cow crammed into a barn, chained in place until the skull is smashed in and its hauled up by its heels and the guts ripped out.
CM: And yet you have a stuffed duck mounted and displayed on your desk.
AJS: He’s not stuffed he’s asleep.
CM: He’s what?
AJS: Asleep. That’s my duck, Erestor, named after a character in Lord of the Rings.
CM: That thing’s alive?
AJS: Yeah he’s alive. Look, see the eyeball blinking at you?
CM: Oh… my god. You have a live duck on your desk.
AJS: Well I’m not gonna put him in the snow. He’s an urban duck. Nap on the desk, and watches CSI Miami with me at night. Oh and he has a serious thing for the female judge on ‘People’s Court’. He’s been to conventions with me, sleeps in bed with me sometimes, loves to get in the bath with me, but he’s only allowed in the tub with me before breakfast, not after, because I’m just not into bathing in duck doo-doo.
CM: That’s… too funny. He’s happy in the house?
AJS: He should be, he was born in the house. His mama was chased off the nest by a raccoon, and I knew the eggs were only days from hatching, so I brought him in and hatched him.
CM: Are they smart?
AJS: Yeah, I would say they are, about like a parrot. I tell him something once, he remembers, and even if it’s been months, he still knows what I taught him.
CM: You must be the only person in the Lower Mainland with a live duck on your desk. Okay, very last question. Why do you portray many of your male characters as small and delicate?
AJS: Hey, my book my rules. I don’t like big men. I don’t like these huge muscle beach bruisers. I like small men. I think they are incredibly sexy.
CM: So no great symbolism behind all these slim little men with long hair.
AJS: Nope. Just my own pervy obsession. Like I said, my book, my rules, I get to populate it with all the little hotties I want. (laughs.)
CM: Well I’d like to thank you for your time, and it was great meeting your duck, less great about the massive hairy bug.
AJS: Hey, love me, love my massive hairy bug. (laughs.)
***---***
Recommended links:
EX LIBRIS - The Official Alyx J. Shaw Website
DOPPELGANGER PRESS - watch and order Fine Print copies of 'Strange Place In Time'
TORQUERE PRESS - watch and order regular copies of 'Strange Place In Time' |
