"Alternate Presents": An Interview with Daryl Gregory

Abstract

"Alternate Presents":An Interview with Daryl Gregory Christina Connor (bio) and Daryl Gregory (bio) Daryl Gregory's publishing history includes a long list of awards and recognition that any writer of the fantastic would be thrilled to possess. Trained in the Clarion Writer's Workshop, Gregory has garnered acclaim since the publication of his debut novel, Pandemonium (2008), which won the Crawford award and was a finalist for the World Fantasy award. His bio is staggering: His novel Spoonbenders was a Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award finalist. His novella We Are All Completely Fine won the World Fantasy and the Shirley Jackson awards, and was a finalist for the Nebula, Sturgeon, and Locus awards. He's an executive producer and writer for several of his novels being adapted for TV. The SF novel Afterparty was an NPR and Kirkus Best Fiction book of 2014, and a finalist for the Campbell and the Lambda Literary awards. His other novels are YA horror novel Harrison Squared, The Devil's Alphabet (a Philip K. Dick award finalist), and Raising Stony Mayhall (a Library Journal best SF book of the year). His short stories have been nominated for the Hugo and other awards. Many of them are collected in Unpossible and Other Stories, which was named one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly. He has also written for video games and comics. We are grateful to him for sitting down to discuss craft in this special issue of Studies in the Fantastic devoted to fiction. During our interview, I discovered that the key to his success is a devotion to continued professional growth. In this interview, Gregory explains his thoughts on the "big ideas" of the fantastic genre and shares [End Page 95] advice for writers, both those seeking to start their careers and experienced writers hoping to sharpen their skills. He discusses his own path to getting published, muses upon how writers can train, and shares his views on what part of professionalism matters the most in a writing career. (Spoiler alert: It's not social media!) The following interview was edited for length and form. Christina Connor: Why did you become a writer? Daryl Gregory: Growing up, I would read books and desperately want to do the same thing. I didn't realize that you couldn't be a writer, so I began writing my own stories. In fourth grade, I wrote my first novel; it was eight pages—my magnum opus—and it was remarkably similar to a book I had just read. I guess everybody sort of plays around with the idea of being a writer, but I never outgrew it. And so, I just kept writing. CC: Who are your writing inspirations? DG: It's funny. I have a few heavy hitters, but every book I write gets to pick its own parents. Each one is in conversation with a different set of novels that came before. So, my inspirations are whatever books that led to this one. My favorite book of all time is John Crowley's Little, Big [1981]—that book's always in my head. But when I was starting out, there were the books of Sean Stewart. He's sort of stopped writing novels and has a very successful career making games and virtual worlds, but his novels in the '90s were a huge influence on me because he set them mostly in the real world where magic was infused with daily life. I thought, "that's my jam; that's what I want to write." But as I said, there's just a wide array of writers whom I steal from and get influenced by, and the roster changes with every book. CC: Why do you write in the fantastic genre? DG: The fantastic was the first stuff that sparked my interest as a young reader: science fiction, comic books, fantasy. It all just lit me [End Page 96] up in a way nothing else did. Even after I became an English major and studied the canon, I always wrote the fantastic. My sensibilities matured (slightly), but a story must have something weird in it or it bores me...