This month - Gordon B. White
Interviewer: Aigner Loren Wilson (she/her) is a 2023 double Ignyte Finalist for best novelette and best critic. She is a senior fiction editor for Strange Horizons, and her writing has appeared in F&SF, Lightspeed Magazine, Monstrous Futures, and more. You can follow her on her website, newsletter, or on Facebook.
Horror Author: Gordon B. White is a Shirley Jackson Award- and Bram Stoker Award-nominated writer of horror and weird fiction. He is the author of the collections As Summer’s Mask Slips and Other Disruptions (2020) and Gordon B. White is creating Haunting Weird Horror(s) (2023), as well as novellas Rookfield (2021) and And In Her Smile, the World (with Rebecca J. Allred, 2022). A Clarion West alum, Gordon’s stories have appeared in dozens of venues and numerous “best of” lists. He also contributes reviews and interviews to various genre outlets. You can find him online at www.gordonbwhite.com or on Twitter @GordonBWhite.
This interview is a part of the HWA Seattle Member Blog Interview Series. HWA Seattle members who would like to be interviewed for the blog, reach out here.
Aigner Loren Wilson: You’ve been to Clarion West. What was your experience there and how has it shaped your career?
Gordon B. White: So, I went in 2017, and I’m really lucky because all the planets aligned perfectly in terms of my availability and where I was in my writing career at the time. I just moved to Seattle for my wife’s job. I was in between jobs, so I had free time and a little bit of savings, so I had the time to go. I was at that point where I was trying to decide how much of a role writing was going to take in my life, if it was going to be just a hobby or if it was going to be something more major. Clarion West, for me, was an interesting time and a way to live a very intense writing-focused experience for six weeks.
For me, it was a great experience. I understand that everybody has a different way they go through it. I’m very close with most of my cohort. We keep in touch even now, six years later. What I found most valuable about it was not necessarily learning how to write but learning how to think about other writing in a critical way. I know people think you go, and you write stories, and you write five or six stories.
You write a story a week, and you’ll get feedback on that. That’s helpful. But what’s more helpful is doing five or six critiques of the other 15 people’s stories. That’s 70 to 90 critiques that you do. Then hearing those 15 people critiquing everybody else’s story. By the end, you’ve got hundreds of critiques, and you’ve thought very deeply about how stories work, what is it that works for you? What might work for other people? All these different perspectives coming together.
It’s being able to hear those all and synthesize the ones that I found the most valuable. I think that there’s been a reassessment recently, too, about what role programs like Clarion West or the other intensive ones or even MFAs—what importance they have in terms of career and in terms of skill development. I think ultimately, they’re just a different way of going about the same thing. I don’t think that they’re essential.
I don’t even think that they provide an inroad to things that they might once have before the Internet and before there was a bigger push for community and accessibility.
I enjoyed my experience a lot. It was very helpful for me in terms of committing myself to how much of an emphasis I wanted to place on writing fiction in my life. I learned a lot of cool skills and met a lot of cool people.
I don’t think everybody has to do it. I certainly don’t think that if you don’t do it, it’s going to harm you. There’re certainly plenty other ways to get that same experience of critiquing and writing and thinking very deeply about it. If it sounds like something that would work for people, and they have that confluence of availability, time, and resources, I think it’s a great experience, but if they can’t, there are plenty of other ways to get to the same place.
ALW: Thank you for that. That was really eye-opening. I feel like a lot of people don’t think about that portion of being in a community of writers. They don’t think about the fact that it’s not just about what you get from the critiques of your stories, but from what you get from the critiquing of everyone’s stories, and just hearing how, like you said, other writers think about stories and craft. So, thank you for that. That was such a great answer.
GBW: I think, too, though, that that’s the important part is always to remember that no writer is an island. We are part of this group. And so, part of it is hearing other ideas and realizing where that works for you as well. But also, too, hearing that other people have perfectly valid interpretations of story and craft that is not at all what you’re interested in doing and not at all what you want to do, but that is still perfectly valid for them. Being able to embrace that different viewpoints can exist without being something that’s going to harm your writing or that you’re going to try to force other people into your mold as well.
ALW: You’ve been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award for your hilarious, creepy, and inventive meta-story, Gordon B. White is Creating Haunting Weird Horror. It’s such a great story. Could you get into a bit of how it came to be, and your process for editing it or prepping it to send out to publications? And the reason I ask that is because writers sending stories out, don’t know how they should edit it or prep it for that submission process. They know how to edit it for other people’s consumption, but there’s a difference in prepping a story for sending it out to a publication. So, if you could get into that, I think that’d be really helpful.
GBW: So that story is the little story that could. It keeps going and going. It got nominated, as you mentioned, for Shirley Jackson. It’s been translated into Chinese and published twice. It was translated into Spanish, and the anthology it was in won the Ignotus Award for Best Anthology.
It keeps going and going. It’s a weird one, too. It’s one of the most annoying things about writing, as I’m sure most people know, is that there’s no direct relationship between how much effort you put into a story and how well it’s received. Because I think this story, Gordon B. White is creating Haunting Weird Horror it’s about a sorta haunted Patreon with postcards that come in with lesser-known haunted houses that come with ghosts. I originally wrote that because I totally misunderstood what an anthology was looking for. There was an anthology with the theme spook houses, and I totally misunderstood that as haunted houses.
I was like, I’ll put a bunch of haunted houses in, and the way I’ll do it is I’ll have all these little postcards of haunted houses because I was really inspired by Nicole Cushing.
I’m a member of her Patreon, and she sends out postcards with little weird drawings on the back of them. I took that as an inspiration. I really like meta-fiction stuff. I’ve been reading a lot of Jeffrey Ford, who puts characters called Jeffrey Ford into his stories, who are not necessarily him, but they’re just other characters named Jeffrey Ford. I was really inspired by that, and I put together this story.
When I go about putting together a story, I really have to have something, an idea that interests me, but I also have to have a challenge for myself because I don’t want to just make good versions of stories people have read before. The challenge for me with this one was using the second person because a lot of people don’t like that. Then the other one was seeing how many times I could put my name into something so that I could see how many times it would pop up. When it went up on Nightmare Magazine on their website, it’s got a whole bunch. Now, it just ruined the SEO search for my name, which was my goal.
That one, part of the thing is I came up with this structure of haunted postcards and a frame story. But the original call was for flash fiction or flash-ish fiction, so I really focused on that. Part of what I did was I wrote out the story, and then I went through and just mercilessely cut it down. Having that, I think, need to meet a certain word count definitely kept me very economical. I think it helped highlight things like the horror in the humor, like the different parts of it, because there isn’t enough space for me to get in my way. As you can tell, I like to talk a lot. Having those constraints is very helpful. It didn’t get accepted at the first place, and that’s totally cool because it didn’t fit what they were looking for. But I did send it to Nightmare Magazine because Wendy Wagner there was looking for flash fiction. She liked it a lot, but she also, too, thought that there were places where it could be flushed out. I worked with her, actually, to get into the final version, just a couple of hundred words above flash fiction length.
But she gave me the space to do that and also some helpful places where she thought maybe it could breathe a little bit more. That’s how I did it with that one. We worked together. Wendy’s a great editor in terms of helping. She’s never telling you what to do, but always what she thinks the story is trying to do and how it could do it better.
In terms of getting it ready to send out to the different publications, other than making sure the word count was there, that’s all I really did. But part of the thing, too, with submissions, for me, is one thing somebody told me once, I found very helpful, is that when you submit places and get rejected one of the things you’re doing is training those editors on how to read your work. If you write in a very idiosyncratic way or a way that isn’t necessarily what you see the predominant mode of other genre of fiction be, it doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong. Rejections don’t mean you’re doing anything wrong. But sometimes you can just see that people aren’t quite sure how to approach your story yet. I think eventually, your voice comes through, and editors will remember that. I don’t think you should, sand your edges off to meet somebody else’s expectations.
It’s always these weird ones that end up going much further than you expect because they’re the ones that for some reason, once they find the people they hook into them.
ALW: Any odd writing habits that you like to use or have used in the past?
GBW: I try to switch things because I tend to fall into a rut, so I like to switch things up and break out of whatever rut I find myself in. So, it changes from time to time. But I either do a lot of handwriting and then retyping, or I do a lot of typing and then a lot of hand-editing. I do typing and handwriting, but I do them in different phases.
Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of handwriting for first draft because it forced me to go slower, but also to it forces me to keep going. There’s no real easy way to go back and insert things or make changes. I just have to keep pressing forward, which is good because lately, I’ve been stuck a lot and spinning my knees. But when I do that, I end up with this very bare first draft, and then I go back, and I type it up and flush it out. Other times, depending on how energy is running, I’ll type the first draft. But when I do that, I can type super-fast, so I type way too much. I’ll do a description of things and I’ll use 12 details, and then at the end, I’ll go back, and I’ll cut it down to two.
But it’s all a process of tapping into that ability to visualize and imagine. And either I have to do it and pick descriptions, then handwrite down just a couple of details. Or I just do everything I can see and then have to go back and later cut them down for the most vivid ones.
That’s not really too weird, though. I think that’s pretty standard. I think the weirdest thing I have is for times when I get too distracted, I have a like, dungeon in my basement. We moved in and there was a former owner had put in a big wall of wine rack holders. We have a couple of bottles of wine in there, but not much because we’re not wine collectors or anything. But I have a little chair in that storage area and a little light and a little I’ll take my laptop down there where I don’t get reception or WiFi, and I’ll type there if I’m on a deadline or something. It’s really creepy because there’s a big red curtain that’s covering the shelves. We have our Cask of Amontillado wine bottles behind me.
The weirdest part of all that is that there’s a Kermit the Frog in there. My wife’s dad, he drove his motorcycle across the country and did a big road trip. For some reason, he had a Kermit the Frog with him. He left it here with us when he got to Seattle. So, there’s just a Kermit the Frog sitting in there who’s watching me.
ALW: I really liked your author website when I went to it. Any tips for authors setting one up? How can they make a site that’s appealing to people and will help them get their work out there?
GBW: I mean mine’s a little bit behind the times, I have to say, at this point, but nobody noticed. I think the real big thing author websites need to have at a minimum is the work you’ve done and how to contact you. Because ideally, people are going to hear your name, look you up, and then see what other stories or books you’ve written, and also, hopefully, contact you to say, “Hey, I really like this stuff.”or “Here’s a job opportunity.”
One time I was at a convention and somebody asked me, “What have you written?”
I was telling him about my stories. Then he was like, “No, are any of them in podcast?”
At that point the answer was no.
And he was like, “Well, if that happens, let me know because I’m just too busy to do things. I only listen to stories on podcast.”
That’s very weird. But I understand that. But what it highlighted to me is that if you’re trying to reach out to people, you’ve got to make the barrier to entry as low as possible.
I try to arrange my website so that people have a minimum of three clicks before they’re reading something new, buying something, or emailing me. Whatever they came here to do, I wanted them to be able to do it as soon as possible. In addition to that, there’s a clear bio and contact page. I’ve got a bibliography of all my stories and links to those where they’re available. But the other thing, too, I do for that is I make it clear. Is it free online? Is it a podcast? Because people will look for that.
I want people to be able to find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. So, I have a short story tab that lists them chronologically, and also has colors that say online or podcast so that people can look and just scroll through and find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. Because I think we all know that attention spans are quite short these days, especially online. But my goal is for somebody to hear about me, look me up, and then find whatever they’re looking for as soon as possible. I think it also helps to I have a lot of pictures of myself and/or my dog on the thing. I think it helps to have a human face or a dog face that people can associate with it.
ALW: If a reader was unfamiliar with your work, what’s the story you’d suggest they start with?
GBW: The first one would be the Gordon B. White is creating Haunting Weird Horror, because that one, I think, is a fun one. It’s got a mix of horror and humor and a little bit of stylistic flourish, which I like to try to add.
The other one, though, would be called Birds of Passage. It came out a couple of years ago. It was in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year. It’s available on PseudoPod to either read for free or to listen to a lovely podcast version. That one’s much more earnest, but it’s a weird fiction, father and son, strange family, the ecstatic strangeness of the universe type thing. Those are both pretty much the opposite end of the spectrum for this I do. So, if you like either of those or if you like both of those, you definitely like the other stuff I do.
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Thanks for reading. I hope you’ve found a new author or a deeper love for an author you already know.
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