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Hey, y'all. Jeff is out this week reading on a beach, as we all aspire to do sometimes. And through a perfect storm of scheduling and editorial issues, we don't have a new episode for you this week. Instead, we are really delighted to share Jeff's recent interview with Stephen Graham-Jones.
the author of many wonderful thrillers, most recently The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. This is a really terrific conversation about Stephen's reading life, his origins as a reader, and I think you'll find it really inspiring and moving. So hope you'll enjoy it. To find more like this, visit the First Edition podcast wherever you find your podcasts, and we'll be back in your ears on Wednesday with a new episode. So listen, this was going to be in two episodes.
One, a Reading Life episode with Stephen Graham Jones, and another one that's something else. But I'm going to split them into two episodes, one coming out today and one coming out tomorrow, just so that they're a little bit easier to listen to. So today's episode is...
I've done a bunch of these reading live segments. I really enjoy them. I've enjoyed every single one, but this one is really special. Stephen Graham Jones, the author of more than 35 books, novels, short story collections, novellas, done some comic books. His most recent book is The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. Also, he's written Of Late, I Was a Teenage Slasher, My Heart is a Chainsaw, Only Good Indians, A Horror Genre Mystery Master, and...
This is a really cool episode, so stick around, listen to it. He tells some of the best stories I've ever heard about growing up as a reader. And then tomorrow we're going to do something completely different. But for now, let's go! All right, we're here. I was just noticing the bookshelf is behind you, Stephen, so we have a lot to talk about here. We're going to talk about, as we said before, your life as a reader. So I guess this is where I generally start is...
What are your earliest memories of books in your life? Were there people, specific places, or titles that, you know, when you go back and search the time capsule that jump out, it's like, oh, this is the one, the first one that I can kind of remember. My very first book I read was fourth grade, so I must have been 10 years old. And our assignment project, I forget what it was, we had to check out one book from the library. Like, we had a library date. We all went and found the book we liked, and we had to read it and write it.
We didn't have to write anything on it. We just had to successfully read the book. And it took me three checkout periods to read it because I was easily distractible. And we had some sort of overflow classroom situation such that our classroom was in random desks throughout the library. And I distinctly remember getting finally to the end of Where the Red Fern Grows, my selected book. And I remember...
That final image of an axe stuck in a tree with a rusty lantern hanging on it, it's been there for 10, 20 years. And I distinctly remember sitting in my little desk and closing the book and holding it closed.
And thinking to myself, I can do that. I can stick an ax in a tree and hang a lantern on it and look away for 10 or 20 years. And I never had, like growing up, I never had any suspicions of doing anything with books because where I grew up, you either went into farming or you went to the oil field. Those are the two options. But so being a writer, being a reader was not even a little bit in my field of possibilities. But when I read Where the Red Fern Grows, I knew that
could end things you know and and that book it just kind of like it breaks your heart but it knits it back together and I think that's one of the most important things you can do as a writer that's a wonderful gift to give to the reader yeah I wonder how many read I mean I would guess you're fairly unique amongst readers of that book to remember the axe in the lantern what was it about that image like you
You just said that you could do that. Can you say more about that and what that meant? Yeah, it was... In high school, I came to call that instant nostalgia. I thought I was coming up with a new term. Like instant karma, instant nostalgia. But it's the idea that you can load things with meaning and then leave them for people to find. And that's what that lantern and that axe felt like to me. The whole book had been loading that image. And that...
then it finally releases when the reader passes their eyes across it and it goes right into their heart and it's the best thing ever. And that book, I think I've always been trying to write, well, that book and a couple other books together
are always what I'm trying to do, if I can. Well, maybe we'll try to... Now I'm intrigued by what those other couple of books are, but maybe we'll continue. We'll follow down the timeline and not try to DeLorean ourselves back and forth in time a little bit too much. I guess, so in that moment, do you remember why you picked out where the Red Ferdinand grows in that particular? Like, you're in the library, you're not really sure what to do. How did your hand and heart find that one? I'm pretty sure I selected that novel because...
It says something about hunting on the cover. Okay. And growing up, I mean, I was always hunting. My life was all guns and shooting things, you know. And so I thought this is something that can maybe help me be a better hunter, you know. Yeah.
I mean, I never really thought of it as an instructional manual, but I guess, you know, I didn't know much about hunting with dogs, so I guess I probably learned something when I read "Ridin' the Furred Grown" myself. Yeah. So that's your, it sounds like that's clearly your first strongest memory. So did that change your relationship to books right there at all? Or did you find yourself to be a more willing reader? Or did it take some time still?
No, I was – after that, I was hooked forever. And I burned through all the – like Gordon Corman has these series of – this series of books called McDonald Hall, I think. I don't know those at all. What are those? It's these two boys, Bruno and Boots, at a boarding school. And they're –
their roommates and one of them always wakes up with a sneeze and it's kind of like just hilarious hijinks. It's not like Hardy Boys level of seriousness. I was reading all the Hardy Boys as well and all the Nancy Drews as well and all the Black Stallions as well. But Burrito and Boots was what I really connected with because
it was such a fantasy world to me, this idea of boarding school. Yeah. And I mean, at the time, I had no idea of the history of indigenous people in boarding schools. I just thought boarding school was this wonderful place where you get to hang out with friends. Right. No parents, and you're done with school at six, and you could just move off, right? Yeah. Yeah, it seemed like the dream, man. But, you know, so I'm plowing through like Cardi Boys, Nancy Drew, Bruno and Boots, all that stuff. But then...
Totally randomly in fifth grade stumbled into Whitley Stryber's Wolfen and the werewolf novel. I mean, it's arguably a werewolf novel anyways. And there's chapters in Wolfen that are told from the grandfather wolf's point of view and his voice. And he's kind of the alpha wolf of this pack of Wolfen, which are these like side species. They're the ultimate predator. They're more than wolves. They're not quite human.
And I would spend the next few years rereading Wolfen, not the whole novel, I would reread the grandfather wolf chapters because that idea of being inside this amazing creature's head and hearing how it talked.
Like I said, I've been trying to write two or three books my whole life. That's one of them? That's one of them, yeah. Wolf and it imprinted on me young. I was like Jacob in Twilight with Renesmee. I imprinted on it, you know? So you, I mean, is that sort of because you were into hunting and the idea of animals in the wild where you kind of cross-identified, right, with the predator or something like that at all? I think it has something to do with that, yeah. And like, so I would have been in
fifth grade. I would have been 11 years old when I read Wolfen. And I spent a lot of my 12th grade year looking up every way I could become a werewolf and trying all the ways. I was like rolling in the sand naked at midnight. I was doing everything I could to try to be a werewolf because I wanted to be a werewolf more than I wanted to be a kid. Yeah. Instead of how to lose a guy in 10 days, how to become a werewolf in 12 crackpot methodologies.
So it sounds like somewhere you're browsing and finding these things. This is a school library, public library. Like how are you actually encountering these books? It was, well, it was mostly the school library for fourth and fifth grade. And, um,
We didn't like town was really far away for us. We would go probably every two weeks, maybe every three weeks. And my grandmother started taking me with her on her like Saturday outings to town. And there was a little used bookstore in Midland, Texas called Mrs. B's Books. And just like, you know, mounds of random mass market paperbacks, towering little stacks of them everywhere. And
And I could usually get like six books because they were a quarter each or something like that. And I would do that. But to tell you the truth, my real book hoard was when I was in, I think it was the end of fifth grade. I was 11 years old. Yeah. I was at one of my uncle's houses. He lived out there with us in the country. And yeah,
And he was a reader himself. He couldn't drive. And so his wife drove him everywhere. And he always had his, he would sit in the passenger seat and read and read and read. Really? He always had a book. And so I'm over at his house one day and I'm sitting in the living room.
in some corner with some sort of book I was reading. And he said, hey, you like to read, don't you? And I said, yeah. And he said, come with me. And he led me down his hall and he pulled open what was supposed to be the linen closet, but it was his library. And it was front to back, side to side, top to top with mass market paperbacks. And just like a big block of books, you know, like a telephone booth of books. Like full, like you had to pull stuff out to get into it? Okay, not like a shelf with three walls, just like a...
Everything, he was using every inch to hold that stuff. Wow, wow. Yeah, it was. And he said, if you like books, you can take three of these. When you read those, bring them back, you can have three more. And I went through his whole closet like that. Wow. And his taste, he had three main authors, or three main types of books. He had Mac Bolan books, all the men's adventure kind of things. And he had every Louis L'Amour and every off-brand Louis L'Amour, Max Brand, all of those. Yeah.
And he had a lot of, all the Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Barbarian kind of wannabes. Interesting. Yeah. And so I really fell for Louis L'Amour and Conan the Barbarian. I never fell for Mac Bolin. I would read those because I had to, to get to the next book. To get to the next book. Yeah. Yeah. But I went through his whole closet and I always think, what if he had not done that? What if he had not showed me his linen closet? Where would I be? You know? I think a lot of us that books have become important to us have
It's not going to be your uncle's... It's going to be some version of that. Like for me, my uncle, when he was leaving college, had like all of his college books that he just gave me. And they were uncurated. They weren't picked for me. They were just my own little exploration chamber. And I read Philip Roth and some classics and some more modern stuff. And I just kind of opened my eyes up to it. I think also...
I don't want to put us necessarily in the same age group, but I'm guessing we're similarly aged. I think a lot of us had an uncle, a grandfather, a
Or someone who cared about Louis L'Amour? That there was a big... Like, my grandfather had a huge cabinet of Louis L'Amour. I don't think people get that. Can you talk about Louis... What were the pleasures of Louis L'Amour for you and others who fell in love with Louis L'Amour? You know, in looking back at my love affair with Louis L'Amour's novels, I think what I was finding in them was...
fathers or men who acted correctly you know and that that was something i so needed in my life was like an adult man who would act correctly you know who would who would stand up for people and just do all the good things like louis lamore's heroes they're they're all like they get shot and they always they always win and they always are upright and everything and i mean he stamped out the same book like 120 times right names that the names changed basically you know
Either he or his team did. I never was sure if it was him or... You know, I don't know that much about it. I should do some research into the Louis L'Amour industrial complex and how it got made and everything. Exactly. I think the shorthand for people who know Hollywood is sort of like... They're kind of like John Wayne stories, honestly. Yeah, they really are. It's very shorthand. It's...
Yeah, one of John Wayne's earliest films, wasn't it Hondo? Yeah. And that was a Louis L'Amour book. You know, that's one of Louis L'Amour's really early books. It's a pretty good novel and pretty all right film. Yeah. So you went through all of those. Did you ever talk with your uncle about what you were reading? It was just sort of a nod and go back to the closet and find what you're going to find? It was pretty much a nod. We never really talked about it at all. And I didn't exactly want to talk about it because some of those off-brand Westerns were like,
Horse operas that were an excuse for extended sex scenes. For dudes, right? Like for dudes to read, yes. Yeah, yeah. I haven't read those, but I know a little bit about those books. They're kind of lost to time. Yeah, they are. I can see that. It's like my daughter's friends or something asking me about Fourth Wing. That's not a good situation for anybody.
So it sounds like this period of like 11 to 12 to 13 was super important to you as a reader. It so was and you know, I'm just now realizing when I was 12, like I was saying we went to town, you know, twice a month. It was on a Wednesday afternoon when we go grocery shopping and it was such a long drive and our truck got such poor gas mileage that we would have to stop at this gas station halfway to town which was called Pecan Grove and
While my mom gassed up, she would give each of us kids three quarters. We could go in and buy a Coke or a Dr. Pepper or whatever, you know, because we never had those in the house. So it was a real treat. And one of those Wednesday afternoon drives to get groceries, I walk in with my three quarters. I've got the cooler in the back beelined, but
there was something new that had not been in the store before. It was a spinning rack by the counter and it was comic books. I had never seen a comic book. And, and I just turned that spinning rack in wonder looking at these gaudy, colorful images. And,
I finally picked one and I spent my 75 cents on Secret Wars number four instead of Dr. Pepper. And I was back every Wednesday trying to complete that 12 issue series. And I didn't get them. And I wasn't always the first to the rack, so I didn't always get them. But I still, I've read those inside out into tatters. And I really feel like Secret Wars kind of saved my life because in number 10, I
You know the story. I do, yeah. I'm a little bit younger, but I had a Spinner Rack Marvel conversion for like Extinction Agenda and Executioner's Song. Like, you know, I think about eight years later, I think those came. Yeah, yeah. But in number 10, Dr. Doom is coming at this cosmic entity to steal his power. He's Dr. Doom, he's power hungry. And this is like a god of another dimension. And Doom is coming at him. He's just immortal, but he's got this... He's built a suit that's supposed to be able to suck power. And anyways...
Doom has lost a leg and an arm. He's like mortally wounded. He's functionally dead, but he still has one arm and he's still reaching ahead to the light to get that power. And all through my teenage years, I was in all kinds of situations where giving up would have been the thing to do. I shouldn't have pushed through, but I would always go back to that panel in Secret Wars number 10 and think, you know, Dr. Doom did it. I can do it too. He's got one arm left. Just keep, you've got something to reach with, reach with it. Exactly. And I really think if,
I didn't have that comic book, then I would have given up. That's amazing. So did you... I mean, you've written comics subsequently. And did you keep reading comics throughout your life? How did that... I don't often get to talk about comics with people. Yeah, I did. I kept reading them. I mean, I even got a Spider-Man subscription. Somehow I cobbled the money together for that or something. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, I was big on Spider-Man, big on Incredible Hulk. I was much more Marvel in my teen years. I was an X-Men guy.
I was, if X-Men and then if, you know, there's a crossover or something like that, I was always. Yeah, for sure. But, you know, I never gave up on comics either. In my 20s, of course, I was broke, had no money, but I figured out that libraries had trade issues of everything. So in my 20s was all about reading. I just spent so much time at the library reading so many comic books. I do think about that because I had, I mean, not a dissimilar experience of going into, we called them quick trips. I grew up in Kansas. Yeah.
You know, a gas station convenience store, you could get a Slurpee and a hot dog that's been there since, I don't know, the dawn of man. And one day I feel like they were coming. It must have been in the early 90s or late 80s where someone decided at Marvel or Diamond Distributors or whoever was doing this to put these spinner racks where teenage boys could find them. And I think you could draw a line between that and like,
billion dollar movie franchises. I'm not sure that if that didn't exist, we have all of this stuff that goes on today. Spinner racks and gas stations and grocery stores. I completely agree. I have so many friends who when I zoom with them, they've somehow found spinner racks and they put them, they have them back in the corner. Oh really? They put their single issues on there. That's awesome. I haven't really thought to do that. My kids would get a kick out of that. I always, I've always wanted one of those just for like the magazines and like what we're currently reading. So you can just find it. So we don't end up all over the table and floor and everything else like that.
you know i say i was i mean i was always reading novels and comic books when i'm 10 11 12 but the other thing i would i could not keep my nose out of was national inquire and weekly world news they were so like i feel like they were priming me to love x-files 10 years later right you know that boy real or myth yeah and so were you at the were you while grandma was checking out were you reading them that way were you buying them i was yeah no we never bought them but
No, never. I don't know who bought those. You just read them before you check out. You get behind someone who has a huge cart in front of you, and that gives you seven minutes to check out what's in the tabloids. Exactly. Well, my mom, on those Wednesday afternoons, she would go to the grocery store, and she had to get like two things of groceries because there were three boys and, you know, dad and
and they had the last two weeks. And so she would be in the grocery store for two or two and a half hours. And also it was like a social thing because she had friends and they would all talk and talk and talk. And, and all us kids would just get deposited at the magazine rack and we'd sit there on our knees and read magazines. Today's episode is brought to you by heirs and spears by jails for it's the messy year of 1569. Elizabeth, the first sits on the English throne. The reformation inflames the continent and whispers of war abound. Did,
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That's amazing. So you discovered comics. You have Uncle's trove, his arc of the paperback that you can read. What's next in your reading journey? In high school, college, what's another inflection point or a meaningful point you remember that was important to you? You know, probably around 14 or so at the Mrs. B's bookstore in Midland, Texas, used books.
stumbled into science thrillers like Michael Crichton stuff. I mean, he created a whole little subgenre. Absolutely. Everybody was trying to be Michael Crichton. And there was a lot of good stuff happening too. And every science thriller I could find inhaled
it over and over. I'd read those books over and over, just milking them, you know, because I thought there were ideas in there that I was going to need later, you know? For what? Yeah, I know. You're not thinking of yourself as a writer yet. I've read a little bit about you that your idea to become a writer comes later than this. It does. Yeah, no, I wasn't trying to get crafted. These are survival tips when the cyborgs come? Exactly. Okay, I got it. Exactly, yeah. Or, I mean, maybe, who knows, I was thinking, I knew I was different and weird, but
And I thought maybe, like one of the books I read was Einstein's Brain, where Einstein's brain is cut into six parts and put into six different people. And I thought, maybe I have a little bit of Einstein's brain in me or something. Or someone's brain. There's something going on with me, right? You'll find the skeleton key to explain the you-ness of you. Yeah, that's really interesting. And so that was at the Mrs. B's bookstore. So you would go and you would buy these or you'd read them there? No, I'd buy them. And they were so cheap. They're practically giving them away. And my grandma...
And she would support this. You know, I forgot, there was a fifth thing I was reading when I was actually, to go back a little. Yeah, sure. I lived with my grandparents a lot growing up, and they were way, they were way further out in the country than we were. And my grandfather had evidently fallen prey to a door-to-door salesman at some point in the past. Oh, encyclopedias? I'm just guessing here. No, it was every National Geographic and Reader's Digest from 1957 to 1984. Oh, wow.
And all that time out there with them with absolutely nothing to do, I read every issue of all those Reader Digest and Algeny Graphics from cover to cover and all the condensed books too. Those, you know, the four novels in one package kind of thing. And,
And that was amazing. I thought, I'm going to be a photographer for National Geographic. That's what I'm going to do. My grandparents also had a similar experience. They didn't live close by, but we'd go every year for a week or 10 days. And our Nintendo wasn't there. Our friends weren't there. We didn't have a place to go kick the ball around. So it's like, okay, what are we going to do? Busy ourselves. And they had...
A shelf of Louis L'Amour, as I said. And a bunch of old National Geographics. Those old... And they felt like...
They felt like transcriptions of a different universe, like something from 1937 and it's about Africa or Asia. And like some of them are photos and some of them are like hand-drawn. They were so strange and compelling. I remember that experience myself. It's so wonderful. And what's neat to me, not neat to my wife, is that I've inherited all those National Geographic. And so I've got them all in the other room. It is so many books. Yeah.
And you can, and I do find myself, even when we're like an antique place or at a flea market, you'll see a stack of them. And I'm always sort of tempted to acquire them for reasons unknown. Like they're important for me to have. Yeah. Well, I had a similar experience at a flea market about three weekends ago. I was talking to this guy about some little weird, like welded together nuts and bolts he had on his table or something and like $3. And,
And he kind of looked around and he said, hey, man, I'm not telling everybody this, but under the table here, I've got, you know, the way the more it came out in those hardbound leather back, the golden lettering and all. He said, I've got all of those under this table. I'll sell them to you for like $25. And I wanted them so badly, but I'm under strict orders to not bring stacks of books into the house. Okay, well, we need to get to the, what are the customs official at your homes declaring as needing to be restricted goods?
So in high school, a lot of people who read young can have a fallow period in their high school into 20s. Was that true for you, or where did your reading path take you after that? I was reading compulsively the whole way through high school, and it did not socially help me to always be the guy with a Mac. Who was I reading at the time? Yeah.
Like the Mickey Spillane stuff. Oh, yeah. Hard-boiled. You're doing hard-boiled stuff. Yeah. I was doing a lot of that hard-boiled stuff. And I always had one of those little bitty... They're like thin paperbacks. The books had to be like 45,000 words long, if that. And I always had one of those stuffed into my back pocket or a comic book rolled up in my back pocket. And...
And any time all my friends were – if we'd be at a cotton field or a lake or something, I'd sneak away and be reading a book. It didn't help me. But when I was reading Thor comics, it didn't help me when I tried to talk like Thor on the playground either. Yeah.
No, by the power of Asgard doesn't help with the ladies when you're 14. No, it doesn't. What the hell are you doing? That doesn't work at all. You know, it is interesting to think about because most of the books we've talked about so far, I guess outside of where the word for ingrowns are, mostly commercial enterprises, right? They're mostly meant to, and again, there's nothing wrong with this, sell books to people who...
I guess don't have an independent bookstore around them or a New Yorker subscription or some sense of prize winners and everything else like that. And yet it matters, right? It matters to have availability books. And I think that's one thing when, this is one of my hobby horses now, making books more difficult for kids to access only hurts everyone down the road. And it's so hard to understand how this happens where
At some point in most people's lives for whom books become important, they have access to some ability to choose books for themselves. It doesn't have to be a huge selection, just like a closet or a used bookstore or a school library where they can kind of explore and discover.
It really makes me sad when I see stories about libraries closing or kids not having access to books in that way. Oh, man, I know. Where would so many of us be if we hadn't had that access? So how were you as a reader of stuff you were assigned in school? Did you enjoy that? Were there things that helped you? Were there teachers that stand out as being even sort of passively interested in you as a reader? There were. I remember in...
Let's see, in sixth grade, this is just more about a teacher than a book. Sure, yeah, absolutely. My history teacher was taking us through like, you know, the old style slideshow where you, you know, the wheel and everything. Yeah, the carousel. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and she was putting stuff on screen and taking us through like Greek or Roman stuff. And I noticed that these BC numbers were going backwards. Yeah.
And I raised my hand and I said, I said, her name was Mrs. Easton. I said, Mrs. Easton, I think this is messed up because the numbers are going backwards. And she says, you're the first student to ever notice that, but that's how it works. You know, BC goes backwards up to zero and it starts over. And,
And that was like a really important inflection moment for me because I was like, oh, I can be right about something. That just blew me away, you know? And a teacher can be impressed with me too. That was important, you know? I've been in, I mean, I've been in so much trouble by that point. Like I remember my mom had to come talk to the principal because I couldn't go back to English class because, and when she asked, well, what did I do? The teacher said I was smiling. And yeah, I got sent to the principal's office for smiling and,
And I was acting all innocent, but to tell you the truth, I figured out how to push that teacher's buttons. Oh, okay, right, yeah. I knew that if I smiled, she would flip out. Like a joker smile, like one of those kinds of situations. Not all smiles are the same, I guess. No, they're not. And I had another teacher where, a science teacher, I aced all of her quizzes, not because I remotely knew the material, but because I figured out when she gave us four choices, which that's how all her quizzes were structured,
She would always shape her lips like the right answer, like just very slightly. And so I figured out how to game a lot of stuff like that. You're reading pitches sort of that way. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it helped. But let me think. You know, in high school also, I was reading a lot of the hard-boiled stuff and science thrillers. I hadn't discovered horror yet, but I was like,
I was also reading a whole lot of physics. I never understood the math, but I remember lots of times when I'd get busted for truancy, people would find me. I'd build like a little cardboard fort somewhere, and I'd be reading like chaos, like James Gleick's chaos and stuff like that because I really thought I could figure the world out if I could just find the right key, you know? Well, it's kind of like trying to figure out if you have part of Einstein's brain in your brain. Like what explains all this crap that's going on out here? Exactly, man. I want to make some sense of this.
I guess even for people who don't turn into horror writers or fans, but they're readers, there's a Stephen King moment. Did you have a Stephen King moment? I did. Yeah, I was, must've been 16 or 17. I think this is 1988. And somehow, some random way, I got a hardcover of Tommyknockers. Okay. And I stayed up all night reading it. Yeah, you did. It was, I mean, coming out of a science thriller, Tommyknockers is absolutely perfect, you know? Because it's got all these like,
Egg cartons with D batteries making amazing alien inventions and everything. And Tommyknockers completely hooked me. And yeah, I fell into King after that. And I read everything I could get my hands on. I probably didn't read the big ones, you know, The Stand and It until probably 1980. Just because they were big or any particular reason? Yeah, I think because they were big. Yeah. And kind of big to carry around. Right. And I was always carrying stuff around. Yeah.
Also in high school, the same exact time when I discovered Tommyknockers, when I discovered King, I was living in a house where there was just always all kinds of violence and all kinds of officials and law enforcement people. It was just a wild place to live and guns and knives all the time. And
And I went back to Louis L'Amour. I would find Louis L'Amour is like for comfort, you know, because they brought me back to being 12 years old and believing in that kind of stuff. And I would read those, but I couldn't read them in the house because it was too wild of a place to be. So I would, we were living at the edge of the Air Force Academy based in Colorado Springs. And I would take my book and either a lighter or a match and
and go far out into the trees and just lean against somewhere and read. And then when dark came, I would, when dark came, I would start tearing pages out and lighting them. And I would burn that page and read the next page. And I would go through the whole book like that, such that by the, such that by the end, I just had ash everywhere and the book could evaporate. It was, it was a really cool way to read. Somewhere there's a tree being fertilized by those burnt pages of
Louis L'Amour, that's an evocative image if there ever was one. And those old, cheap, thin Louis L'Amours, they burn really well. Yeah, that paper probably had chemicals we don't even want to know about. There's probably hardly any actual paper in there. It's probably mostly plastic or rayon or something that's going in that way. So you go to college, right? And like you said, you didn't ever think a...
Life in books was a possibility at what point did that change for you that maybe there's something here for you as a career as a professional for a life and
Yeah, well, yeah, you're right. I never planned to go to college. It was completely random and arbitrary that I wound up there. But my mom said I needed to be somewhere where book people were, you know? She said that. So she had been seeing you doing all this reading all your life. It's now a thing. Stephen's the reading kid and like, let's do something with that. Yeah, well, what she did was I didn't graduate high school the traditional way. I had to go around the side because I got kicked out of so many schools. Well, there's all the smiling. I mean, so much smiling. Yeah.
Exactly. But she took me out to eat and she said, she gave me a suitcase. She said, you got to get out of this town. It's going to kill you. And she was right. And she also said, you've always been reading. You need to be among people who read. And she had saved up enough money for me to go to one semester of college. And I figured I can go to one semester of college. And
And so I went up there to Texas Tech two hours away. And for the first time in my whole entire life, I sat in a classroom where a book had been assigned and everyone in class had read that book. I hadn't asked you about that, about your peers. Because you kind of mentioned that you felt like an oddball for reading at all. So that must have been an extremely powerful experience. That was amazing. Usually, I mean, like in high school when...
we were talking about Beowulf or Canterbury Tales, the teacher would always call on me to read it because I can, I've always had a really, a knack for getting the meter down and reading stuff as it, as it maybe was meant to be read. And, and that never helped me. You know, people would like, not, that would catch a lot of stuff for that. But, but,
This college, which I had never imagined, was completely different. It was a place where you were rewarded for doing that. So I was hooked, man. I was off to the races. It was the best thing ever. Did that change your relationship? Did that change how you understand yourself or books? How was that transformative to you?
I felt like less of a weirdo. I think then that was good, you know? I mean, you always, I mean, you kind of always want to be unique, I guess. Right. Unique but not weird. Exactly. It's a very fine needle to thread most of us are trying to do. It definitely is. But this, I had found a place where my ability to read books and understand books was something that was advantageous, you know? And
And I was a philosophy major. I was not an English major. I wasn't an English major until my very last semester. But I loved reading. The harder, like the more Heidegger something could be, the more I liked it. Okay, yeah, all right. You weren't shying away. Well, you were probably prepped for that by trying to understand the math of chaos theory. It's like, you know, it's easier than, Heidegger is hard, but it's easier than just equation after equation of chaos.
It is. But looking back, I think the reason I excelled in philosophy, it wasn't actually that I could conceptualize this stuff any better than anyone else, but I could regurgitate it and write it in a way that people could understand. And so my real talent wasn't necessarily philosophy. It was writing, I think.
I was also a philosophy major to begin that switched to English. So I can sympathize with that. What was the moment where you decided English was the way rather than philosophy? Was there a moment that happened? Well, I guess what happened was this was probably my second semester at school. I'm sitting in the back of a monster classroom, which my advisor had said, "Do you want to take a monster class?" And before he even finished asking, I was like, "Yes." Is that a rhetorical question?
But when I showed up, I was so disappointed because I thought it was like werewolves and zombies and vampires. Monster at Texas Tech means like a 400-person class. It's the size. So it's a giant like a chemistry lecture or something like that? It was like a world lit two or something. And so I'm in the very back row of that one like Wednesday or something. And
I'll have a tank top and some gym shorts and a spiral notebook and a pen. I'm taking notes on Canterbury Tales or something or, you know, and Fairy Queen from the professor talking. He's like an ant two miles away, you know, and
It's all dark, and a couple of police officers come in, and they lower their sunglasses, and they're looking around, and I'm going lower and lower in my seat because every time in my life the officers have been in the room, they're always there for me. They're looking for you. And sure enough, they're looking for me, and they pulled me out, and I slouched out after them. And I know this is going to be another ordeal, but it turns out they weren't –
Getting me for something I had done the previous weekend, that uncle who had given me all the books when I was 11 had been burned terribly over his whole body. And they had airlifted him to my town because we had the best burn unit in the region. And I was the only family member they could find. And so they brought me to the ICU. And for three days and three nights, I sat in the ICU waiting for him to live or die. And all I had was that pen and notebook. And I got bored enough that I read a story. I read all the magazines. And so I wrote my first story when I was 19. Wow.
And I came back on Monday after my uncle did end up surviving. It was a long ordeal, but he's still kicking. But I came back Monday to my composition class, and I had missed Wednesday and Friday because I was in the hospital. And I was supposed to have a personal essay written for that day.
I did not have that personalized thing. But I do have this. Yeah. And so we had to turn all our stuff in on the left corner of the desk, and everyone lined up to turn it in, and they all had typed out stuff. And I didn't have a word processor. Mine was just handwritten, and I pulled it out of the spiral, and I crimped it at the edges and left it there, and I figured maybe I'll get partial credit. But that instructor, she liked it enough that she passed it on to the creative writing faculty who typed it up and entered it into a –
English department contest, which I won, and I got $50. Oh, now we're cooking. Exactly. And that was, for me, that's the moment where like a light went off. And I was like, you mean people care about these lies? And that blew me away, you know? And so I just kept on doing that all through undergrad, just writing stories and getting little publications and winning little awards and taking workshops. And coming into my last semester, my advisor said, you know, if you take one more creative writing class, you've got a double major. And I said, sure, let's do it. Yeah.
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It is amazing too. And you mentioned that story of, you know, a teacher saying, you know, never, no one's ever noticed that about the numbers in BC. You have this teacher that sort of sees something in you to cultivate. It is amazing how powerful that is for a student of any kind to have, you know, someone who doesn't have to, like you, see something in you and do something about it. Oh, I know. I'm so thankful to that instructor in my college composition two class because if she had not
accepted that off-assignment assignment, you know, then I'd probably just go home and farm, I suspect. Wow. What a sliding doors moment that is. I know, it totally is. And what I hate is that I can't remember her name. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. She was a graduate student teacher, and I just...
She slipped away, man. I never can find her. I had a second grade teacher that noticed I liked to read and sort of cultivated and fed me stuff. And I wish I knew her name. I don't know what I do with that name. Who knows? But I wish I knew it. I do wish I knew it. I can feel that. But I mean, I had the other kind of teachers too. Oh, sure. My very last day I ever went to high school was the first day of my senior year where I was at a new school. I was always at a new school. And I was sitting in the back. It was a packed government class. And
The teacher walks in and she kind of cases the joint, like trying to get her bluff in. And she picks me to get her bluff in. And she says, you in the back, get your greasy head off my chalkboard. And so I just walked out of high school and I was done with that. Yeah. I mean, the less said about those teachers, the better, I guess. But it works the other way, too. Once you started writing stories yourself,
How did that... Did that change the way you read things? Were you starting to look for how things are put together at all? Or did it... I did. I did. And I was really nervous, too, because I realized I was becoming a different type of reader. I was becoming like what I consider like a robber, like someone who goes in looking... I go in looking for stuff to steal, you know? And I'm...
And I was afraid that I was going to lose the magic of reading, that I was going to see it as a mechanical process or that I was going to see the joints and the seams and everything. But I think I'm lucky in that I still fall completely under the spell of everything I read and I believe it. And I do read like a writer because I'm looking at technique. I'm looking at it. How do they do that? Yeah, exactly. But I can do that and I can also just be so under the spell of this. That's cool. Yeah.
That's really cool. As an adult, I don't want to take... We're already... I'm good. We're running out of the time here. I want to be careful of your time, but this is amazing. So let's move to like your current state, you know, because we can fast forward a little bit as your life as a reader now. You have a long writing career. You've been writing for, you know, multiple decades. Mm-hmm.
How do you organize your reading life now? How do you decide what to read? Do you still read just for fun? Are you reading all over or are you reading horror, sci-fi genre? Describe your reading life as it exists right now. You know, it maybe sums up with a text I sent to a friend of mine last night, Paul Tremblay. Okay. One of his books had like a shelf talker at a bookstore I was at last night. I was on my way home from work and there was a bookstore and I'm like, you know, I better stop. Yeah.
You can sneak one into your coat or something. That's not a whole chest of Louis L'Amour leather. It's just one book you can get through customs. Yeah. So I stopped and I saw that and I sent him a snapshot of that shelf talker, whoever was saying something nice on an index card about his book. And he said, what are you doing? Are you there signing books? And I said, no. I do this about once or twice a week. I go and just like
the magazine racks and the new releases. And what I told him was, I miss random readings so badly. I miss just the wonder of falling into something completely unknown because that's something I don't really have anymore unless I make it happen because most
Most of my reading is planned out for me by people who lean on me for a blurb for this or that. It's wonderful. I read amazing, great stuff. I mean, I remember I read Daniel Krauss' Whale Fall before anybody else. Oh, my son just read this. He's been talking about it for the last week. It's such an amazing novel. And his next one, Angel Down, is amazing too. He's a great writer. So I'm not at all sad about what I read.
but I miss random reading. I miss picking up something based on, well, why would an elf be on a spaceship? I better investigate this, you know? Yeah, and it's, I mean, it is, I think about this, and I've talked to other people about this, when you're in a library or bookstore, especially as a kid, it's one of the few places a kid is given freedom to choose
right? You know, I'm going to do that and not that. And the stakes are, adults think the stakes are low and they kind of are, but they're also totally not like it could, that something could change or the Redfern grows or something else can change your life. And I think, because I'm like this too, I read professionally and it's, it's not the same, but it's similar where I could have all my reading mapped out for me, just sort of
practically, but I do try to go out of my way and go to the bookstore and just sort of wander around and just sort of see some stuff. Because you work in books and I do too. We know a lot, but there's even stuff we haven't heard of, right? There's stuff that's confusing. Where the hell did that thing come from?
I know. And I'll listen to podcasts and people will talk about like a Booker Prize winner from 2011. And I think, I've got to read that book first thing. So you'll go back and do backlist? Like, you know, are there any patterns to what catches your eye or is the stranger the better? Or what do you notice about your own taste left to its own devices? No, it's not. I don't think it's patterns. I do gravitate. If my first two choices are generally science fiction and horror, those are kind of my happy places. And I think the reason they're my happy places is because...
If I read a story about an accountant going through a divorce and it turns out to be a
poorly written novel i get to the end of it there's nothing left in my hands but if i read a story about a cybernetic werewolf then at the end of it if it's written poorly then that's a disappointment that it's written poorly but still i saw a cybernetic world cool right i gotcha yeah whereas a boring accountant book like accountants are still boring at the end of that yeah yeah i really didn't take you on a bad roller coaster ride is still a roller coaster ride exactly but so i
So I think I'm kind of like a, as far as a reader goes, I'm kind of like a raccoon. I like shiny things, you know? Yeah. Do you recommend books to people? Do people look to you for recommendations? Do you have some go-tos that you recommend to people? You know, for a few years there, it was Fup by Jim Dodge. I would recommend that to a lot of people. That's like a weird book that changes people. You don't come out of the book the same as you were, you know? No, that's true. That's a good one.
I'm always proselytizing for Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine. That novel is just magic to me. She's one that, as great as she is and as many awards as she won, still under-known and underrated in American life. I agree. I totally agree. I don't understand it. But what I really love is a book that makes my heart pound. Like how Scared or just any of the ways a heart can be pounding, you'll take whatever? Okay.
It's probably any of the ways you're right. And like one of my most pure reading experiences I can remember is what's his name? Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon. Oh, that was the TV show, but I never read the underlying thing. I didn't. The first novel I think is really good. It's a little it's a trilogy. But the first one I've read that book a lot of times. I've got some dogs barking. That's all right. Adds to the color. People like it. It makes it feel real.
It's those dogs from Red Fern. I've got them there. Yeah. Wait long enough and then you can manifest them.
Yeah, but I've got a list somewhere of books that make my heart pound, and I do go back to them over and over and read them. So you are a rereader? I am. Oh, I'm a compulsive rereader. I've read like Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door 13 times. I've read The Shining probably 9 or 10 times. Yeah, I've read Valis, I don't know how many times. And The Crying Allot 49, I used to read that book with such regularity. Wow.
So do you keep track? So you say 13 times. So do you know that in your head or are you keeping track? Do you have a spreadsheet somewhere where you keep track of this? I don't have any kind of spreadsheet. The only reason I remember Jack Ketchum's Girl Next Door 13 times is because when I got to that 13th time, that felt like an unlucky number. And that was kind of scary because that's a book that when you read it, it's easy to feel like it's reprogramming you and making you like your worst self or something. It's like it's opening a door in your head you can't close. Right.
But that's also where the fun is, I think. You know, the fun, it's like Bruce Springsteen says in Blinded by the Light, Mama always told me not to look into the eyes of the sun, but Mama, that's where the fun is. That's where the fun is, yeah. Well, you've now come full circle because you teach writing.
Right? That's part of what you do. I don't need to put any students on blast or anything like that, but when you're reading student writing, what do you see? I mean, what excites you in a new writer? I mean, what are the kinds of things you're looking for? What opens your eyes and say, there's something here or something, or even just a story to pursue?
I guess it's two things that opened my eyes. The first is innovation with form. I love, like, just yesterday I got to workshop a story that a student had written as a quiz in a Cosmopolitan magazine, you know? And I love, I love, forever love those kind of tricks.
But my students don't love this about me that what I also look for is correctness. Like I think that the first part of writing is communication and communication has to be clear. There can't be static. There can't be noise in there unless it's intentional, like for different reasons, of course. And so you've got to get your like direct address commas right. You've got to punctuate your dialogue correctly. All those things, if you don't do them right, then no one's going to care about your story. That's a really, I mean, I used to, I'd never taught creative writing, but I used to teach freshman comp. And that was always,
A light bulb moment for students when they realize that grammar and clear writing wasn't just manners. It was actually like a service to the reader. Like you're trying to be understood. And if you screw something up or you don't know how to coordinate independent clauses, the reader won't understand what you're saying. Like that's just the part of the game. And if you're going to flout those things, you have to do it knowing what the effect of that flouting is going to be.
Exactly. It's like the poets say, you can't write free verse until you can write form. You know, the book I've read that has helped me so much in that regard, as far as clarity goes, is that Steven Pinker book on style. Oh, I haven't read that one. I don't know that one. I've read that book a few times and I read it like every two or three years and it just reminds me, oh, there's still so much to learn. I've got to get better, you know? Right. Yeah, I was reading a book for Katie Kamara's audition, which is coming out next week. And one thing she does is,
With dialogue, there's no parentheses. It's just embedded in the paragraphs, which I don't like.
like as taste, but then you thought, what is she doing with that? Like, why is she flouting our conventions of how we'd normally understand dialogue? And then you can, that's the other thing as a reader you can do. If you're conversant in the standards, then you can notice a divergence and sort of think about why they're doing that or what the net effect of those kinds of things are. You can, although I always try to tell my students that they always argue back with, they say, but Cormac McCarthy does it, you know, and I'm like,
And I'm always sure to – I always call him Cormac McFancy pants. Yeah, it's like saying, well, Steph shoots threes from half court. Well, you're not Steph Curry. Exactly. That's how that goes. Anything – go ahead. Oh, Steph Curry. Since his like meteoric rise a few years ago, every place I go where they have put my name on a cup, I'm never Stephen anymore. I'm always Stephan. Steph.
That's so interesting. All the Stevens are like, oh no, what have you done to me? That's really, yeah. I had some Christophers in my life and there's that actor Topher Grace. Yeah, yeah. And they were all getting called Topher for a while. And they're like, what's happening here? What's going on here? No one ever called me Topher before that 70 show or something. It's amazing the power of mass culture at this point. Well, you mentioned you mess with form and I, you know,
You have the new book coming out, and it's doing something with form. You want to describe what the setup and how you're messing with form a little bit with the Buffalo Hunt? Yeah. I mean, number one, it's epistolary. I've done epistolary before, but I've never done epistolary in this embedded narrative way. Like the Philip K. Dick nested narrative thing, or maybe Joseph Conrad, but with another layer on it. Right, right.
It's this guy, Goodstab, Blackfeet dude, born in 1833, telling his life story to a Lutheran pastor in 1912 as transcribed up from a journal in 2012 by that pastor's great-great-great-granddaughter. And there's vampires and there's revenge and there's blood. It was really fun. It was kind of like a wish fulfillment novel because it really just continually insults me and enrages me how all these people just
shot whole herds of buffalo and that just breaks my heart and so getting to stick a vampire on them felt really really good so a vampire book written epistolary forms i mean that's an i mean dracula has to be a specter over that how much do you think about diverging or homage or how do you do something like that well i i i wrote this novel coming right out of teaching a graduate seminar on the vampire and what we kind of came away with from that class was it two of the most um
I don't know, influential texts are, of course, Dracula and Interview with a Vampire. And so, therefore, my Buffalo Hunter Hunter is epistolary, but it's also kind of an interview with a vampire. So did your students read Interview with a Vampire? Did you read all that together? Yes, we did. How do modern students find that book? Do they like it? They do like it. They really identify with Louis' like, I don't know, guilty vampire life. You know, he doesn't want to kill. That's what Anne Rice gave us that I think was really, really good. This like...
almost humanistic vampire. Yeah, who sort of has to but doesn't want to. The conflict there is pretty amazing. In terms of the text within a text and the metatextualness of it, what do you think that lends to? I mean, I'm sure that's fun to do as a writer, but what do you think it actually does to a reader's experience of this story? Do you have some sense of the net effect of that? I do, because what it does is it kind of makes the...
the floor, the ground beneath their feet unstable. And like nesting narratives and making each narrative have bubbled up through the previous narrative lends the story itself indeterminacy. And then the reader has to elect to believe in this or to believe in that. And they become participants in the creation of the story and they invest in it in a different way. And I really think that's why I like Law & Order. The television series has lasted all these decades is because it's,
It's always about what somebody, the story someone tells in an interrogation room or from the witness stand. And it can be bolstered or undercut by the evidence and all that. But nevertheless, the audience has to say, oh, I believe them and I don't believe them. And we don't ever get those ridiculous flashbacks in black and white of somebody stabbing somebody. You know, those don't help at all. We don't need certainty. We like determinacy. We liked having to...
having to choose. And when we choose this or that, that tells us something about ourselves. And I think it's wonderful that stories can do that. Thank you so much for joining me, Stephen. Best of luck with the book. This was a delight and a pleasure. This was a wonderful time. Thank you for having me. Thanks so much to Stephen Graham Jones for joining me and indulging us with those stories. What a treat. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is out now. If you feel up to it and you want to rate, review, comment,
the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify. It really does help the show. I think we've got 81 ratings slash reviews on Apple. I'd love to get up to 100 by summertime. Let's make it happen, folks. And with that, we've got something else coming out tomorrow. So I guess until next time, overnight, read something great.
Thanks so much for listening today. We hope you'll enjoy this audiobook excerpt from Lethal Prey by John Sanford, provided by our sponsors at Penguin Random House Audio. The auburn-haired woman talking to Henderson took a final sip of cranberry juice and tapped the empty glass with a spoon to make it ring. Everybody, we're all here. Time to work. She introduced herself and the blonde.
I'm Tricia Boone of Mason, Tano, Whitehead & Boone, and Michelle Cornell is an associate with our firm. We represent Lara Grandfelt. She reached out and touched the diamond-studded woman. We're here to help Lara launch a long, delayed quest. I will let Lara tell you about it and say only that our firm is firmly behind her whenever our legal services may be needed. Grandfelt smiled, turned to look at everyone in the group, and said-
What we're going to do is we're going to find the monster who killed my twin sister. That was more than 20 years ago now, and that's long enough to know he's roaming free. Lucas scratched his forehead, an unconscious gesture of skepticism, and Grandfelt caught it. Marshal Davenport doesn't think we'll get anywhere, but he doesn't know what we're going to do, she said. Boone jumped back in. Why don't we all sit down? I believe there are enough chairs.
They all did, and Grandfelt said to Boone, You were going to fill in some background? Boone nodded. Yes. She opened a file folder on her lap, cleared her throat, and said, Lara Grandfelt and her sister, Doris, both graduated from Minnesota colleges. Actually, Lara was at the university just before the turn of the century. Lara studied finance and economics, and Doris studied accounting at Manifold College in Northfield.
After graduation, she said, the sisters found jobs in the Twin Cities, Lara with U.S. Bank in their wealth management department and Doris with a local accounting firm. Three years after graduation, Doris was brutally murdered, a murder that was never solved. In the years between the murder and the present, Boone said, Lara left the bank to begin her own wealth management firm. She has done very well with it. Lara's not ridiculously rich, but she's done very, very well.
"'Is that correct, Lara?' Grandfelt nodded and said, "'Yes.' Boone said, "'I'm reviewing all of this so that we're all on the same page, and so we know that the money involved in this project—I'm coming to that—was legitimately sourced. So, Lara has asked Mason, Tano, Whitehead, and Boone to set up a project designed to investigate and find the perpetrator of the rape and murder of her sister, Doris.'
Neither Virgil nor I worked that case, Lucas began. We know. We've done the research. You were starting your own company, Davenport Simulations, and Virgil was in the Army. The State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension handled the investigation, Boone said. When you, Lucas, later went to the BCA, Lara told me she spoke to you once about the lack of progress in the investigation. She got you to review the files with no result.
Yes, I remember it now. Lucas shrugged. The BCA ran a good investigation, but there was nothing to go on. They never got to first base. Boone said, I understand. Lara, however, has been unable to escape the gravity of the murder. She can't escape the injustice of it. That's true, Grandfelt said, looking around at the crowd again.
So she wants Virgil and me to reinvestigate, and Elmer and Edie and John are here to strong-arm us into it if we need strong-arming, Lucas said. I wouldn't have chosen that precise phrase, but that captures the substance of it, Boone agreed. What are you going to do? Virgil asked Grandfelt. Before she could answer, Boone stepped in again.
Lara has directed our firm to post a $5 million reward for information leading to the identification of the killer. The reward is to be made as a gift of gratitude to the person or persons who provide the information. If that passes muster with our tax people, and I'm told that it should, the gift will be tax-free. If somebody wins it, they'll get to keep the whole amount.
Later today, and we've already prepared this, the reward will be posted on all the major true crime sites on the Internet. Virgil said Boone laid out the details. She expected a lot of people would be digging into the case, and Michelle Cornell would be in charge of reviewing submissions by what Boone called the true crime researchers. Anything that seemed even slightly relevant would be forwarded to Lucas and Virgil.
Lucas, as a deputy federal marshal, and Virgil, as a BCA agent, would have the legal authority together to get almost anything that needed to be gotten, to kick down any doors that needed to be kicked. We have the complete investigative files from the BCA and Woodbury, every piece of paper they have already in-house. We didn't steal them. That's absolutely legal under Minnesota law.
If we find that they've held anything back, we will sue them, Boone told Lucas. Lucas, and you'll post them? The files? Yes, including the crime scene photos. Lara has seen them and wants them on the sites. Grandfelt said, I can't tell you how painful that was, seeing those photographs. Her lip trembled, but she kept her chin up. I'm set on this.
"'If you need anything from me, anything, day or night, you call. "'If for some reason I can't answer, my personal assistant will.' "'She reached out and touched the woman in the gray suit. "'Marsha Wise. "'She'll find me wherever I am. "'You will have personal numbers for both of us. "'Virgil. "'You will be stirring up a storm, "'and you will have no control over it. "'We will be complying with Lara's wishes, "'which are perfectly legal.'
Boone said, her voice gone sharp. Frankly, we tried to talk her out of this, but she insisted. She is the client. The client does not have to accept our recommendations. So it's a done deal, Lucas said. Grandfelt nodded, and Boone said, yes, it is.