Interview with Bruce McAllister for French Fries Magazine

Interview: Ally Ferraro & Guilherme Ferrari

Photography: Andreas Neumann

Bruce McAllister is an American author of fantasy, science fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. He is known primarily for his short fiction. Over the years his short stories have been published in the major fantasy and science fiction magazines, theme anthologies, college readers, and "year's best" anthologies, including Best American Short Stories 2007, guest-edited by Stephen King.

Did you finish your latest book Stealing God and Other Stories this year? 

Yes, in the sense of putting the already-published stories together to make a book. It's a collection of short stories—science fiction, fantasy and horror – because those are the genres along with “literary fiction,”I have written in from the beginning – with what readers often call a “literary” feel to the writing--and all have appeared in the new millennium. My first collection, THE GIRL WHO LOVED ANIMALS AND OTHER STORIES, appeared in 2007, but was focused on earlier decades of publishing. I'm a short story writer, have been for nearly sixty years now (I started publishing very young—at 16), and always will be, though I have written novels, too. I write my short stories because I love the form and send them to magazines, where they are published.  In this instance I talked to my publisher and editor, John Kenny at Aeon Books in Dublin (who published my last little novel in 2013), and we agreed that it was time for another short-story collection. John was very good with helping choose which stories should be in it, and the collection’s title story, “Stealing God,” appeared originally in his magazine, Aeon. He’s very good with book design as well, and critic Paul di Filippo was kind enough to write an introduction for the book, and the award-winning artist Dominic Harman provided cover art for it. Tonally the collection ranges from very light to very dark, and a number of the stories are set in Italy, where I attended middle school in a northern Italian fishing village during the Cold War—an experience, so to speak, that influenced my writing in ways I’m only now realizing. When I write, I am still that American kid in that fishing village, and people hear it somehow in my writing whether the story is set in Italy or not, and it’s a kind of lyricism, I think, and a romanticism that would never have entered me--and my writing--without that experience. It changed me, and at the same time it was who I entered this life to be--to become. How do I know this? Because a remarkable number of my short stories—even those not set in Italy--have been translated for Italian magazines over the decades and by editors who never knew I’d spent time in Italy when I was young. There are things within us and in our writing forever beyond explanation. Every fiction writer or poet will tell you this. We can only get glimpses of what those things are through events like these.

Is that because you had to move to new places and you had to adapt?

Yes. But I also believe, as I just said, that we come into this life the way we are and with issues that we are supposed to deal with. Do I mean “karma”? Yes, but not in the glib Sixties/hippie “good karma/bad karma” sense. We have our genetic make-up – once called “nature” – and the environments we live in – once called “nurture" – but this is beyond those. I grew up in a military family—my father was a career Navy executive officer and a Pearl Harbor veteran in WWII who worked for NATO decades later in the field of anti-submarine warfare--and we moved every two or three years. In my experience there are two kinds of military kids. Those who become more gregarious, more social, and those who become more withdrawn socially, as my younger brother and I were. But our entire family was also that way, so I’m oversimplifying the causes here, I’m afraid. I came into this world loving the natural world, nature and animals and science, art and literature that relates to them. As a kid I was very much a “19th Century naturalist,” people tell me. I had vast, neatly labeled seashell, insect, and fossil collections at age ten, but it was not only the science and beauty and wonder; the storyteller was in me, and I played with the seashells as many boys of that time played with toy soldiers. (There is a short story about this in the collection, “The Courtship of the Queen.”) I loved the specimens for their science, beauty, natural art, and natural-history “stories,” and the sense of wonder all of this provided. I believe, because I have lived it, that there's endless wonder and “magic” in our world—the natural world, but also the world of human beings (like those I knew, of all ages and socioeconomic brackets, in Lerici, that Ligurian fishing village, which was a truly magical place back then, in the “post-war” era—and, no, I’m not “exoticizing” the place and its people as tourists from America might—its magic was real)--if people will step away from the many faces and voices of fear and simply see it out of trust and in the many ways we are able to “love.”

Why “science fiction” in my life, starting at age twelve? American science fiction has always been a field for “outsiders,” the Other. It was created—American science fiction, that is (Hugo Gernsback et al)--by the sons of late 19th and early 20th Century immigrants to the US and was adventures full of thought, extrapolation and wonder (even if not elegant in style or good with characterization); so it was perfect for an outsider kid like me. Note: Now, science fiction and fantasy—as a field, a community, a sociology—is very committed to the “new outsider” (“people of color” and the LGB community).

As a military kid in a family with no interest in sports, and as a kind who liked animals, wild and domestic, more than people, I had no idea who I was really, who I was in human terms; and it still feels often as if I’m “passing” as human, having spent a lifetime trying to understand what it means to be “normal,” whatever that might mean and whatever its downside. I lived with my peripatetic family, saw the US from a global perspective because of the Navy, was not exposed to two-party politics or politics of any kind really (our father was a patriot, but gently, compassionately so, not jingoistic at all—more inventor than Cold War warrior—and our mother was an underdog-championing cultural anthropologist who most probably had some Cherokee or Chickasaw in her, knew it, and specialized in Native American studies and Early man archeology), lived in nature, loved living things other than people and felt I understood them better than I understood human beings (today, were I a child, I’d probably be diagnosed with ADD, but one of the natural cures for that is always passion and pursuit of passion, the focusing of life’s energy through passion), and one day when I was twelve began to write fiction—which, ironically enough, is about human beings even while it may be about so much more than the surfaces of human lives. Fiction became a place where I could explore what it meant to be human while also making for the reader, if I was lucky, the kind of wonder, magic, miracle and mystic’s questioning which the world made me feel.

You wanted to shape your own universe.

Definitely. I found that by writing I could shape the universe—which often made no sense to me in all of its complexity--and make meaning from it. Rather than the chaos—from all the unanswered questions (I was no mature mystic—i.e., one who accepts that the questions cannot be answered—and am still not, I’m afraid). “Story” is wired into us, right? We are story-driven creatures. I could connect with other human beings through stories. Was this a conscious decision? Of course not. I was twelve, and I simply kept writing. If I didn’t, I felt crazy and early on didn’t know why—something (that is, the craziness from not doing it) you’ll hear from many writers and many artists of all kinds.

I saw that it took you 15 years to write Dream Baby.

Yes, it did. My first novel had been published twenty years earlier and was a science-fiction-reading/naive 20-something young man’s novel with a lurid cover (far future, distant water world, a culture of merpeople, reptile aliens invading—it’s hard not to laugh now, but I keep it compassionate laughter). DREAM BABY was another matter entirely and would ask that its author live, in order to write it, experiences he had never lived before as an outsider and lover of nature, but one who wanted to understand human beings and his father’s military world. Those experiences—and the actual writing of the novel (seven drafts, 120k words) at the end of that journey—did take fifteen years, and that’s because the journey was more than the writing of the book. DREAM BABY may in fact be one of those novels where the story behind the novel might be more interesting than the novel, even if the novel is about the paranormal experiences of soldiers in combat. But I'll let you decide. I didn't serve in the military, in the American conflict in Vietnam, and those I knew in college managed not to also. Even my father, one day in the 60’s, said to me, “In WWII, we all went. I don’t know what I would do today were I your age. I just don’t know. It’s not the same kind of war….” As the 70’s arrived, I began to meet more and more people from my generation who had indeed served, and I began to feel two things: a “survivor’s guilt” (they had gone in my stead) and a desire to understand, really understand, the American war in Vietnam—which, during it, both “hawks” and “doves” in the US had reported on in their own best interests, and with slants that were obviously not the Truth. And as a fiction writer I could attend to these things through a novel—one in which “combat ESP” was both literal and metaphoric. 

The first veteran I spoke to who told me of his paranormal experiences in combat didn’t care whether I believed him, and that was convincing. He became a good friend, and I traveled in his world and saw what a remarkable life he lived even then. I sought out other US veterans, men and women both—not just of Vietnam, but of other US wars—who had had similar experiences, and over those fifteen years, taking many risks in my naivete and trust of passion that could have ended very badly, interviewed 200 of them. Thirty of them became totally committed “consultants” on the novel, and I came to feel that I was, in DREAM BABY, speaking on their behalf—because no one else would. Because I hadn’t served, I had to rely on them; I had to feel as best I could what they felt and try to imagine what the wars had been like. Many of those veterans, none of which I‘d have known or been able to call friends during the divisive 60’s, became friends; and through one of them I gained access to contingency plans (which I used in the novel) to end the war in Vietnam that have still not been made public, though Richard Nixon alludes to them in his memoirs. Another consultant/friend stood on the Red Dikes outside of Hanoi and got North Vietnamese officers to fill in dialogue and information blanks in my novel manuscript that even under Freedom of Information and the help of intelligence-agency consultants I couldn’t fill in. If I needed a character for the novel, the character called me on the phone. The more I researched and wrote, the more “synchronicities” occurred and the novel took on its own paranormal behavior. I don’t know how else to put it, but I’m not surprised. This kind of thing happens when one is writing the “right” thing. 

I hadn’t served, but I wanted to know what they felt then and felt now; and that seemed to be a kind of magic. I wanted to listen, and they wanted to be heard; and I was a novelist, not a journalist—which mattered. Somehow, in the end, DREAM BABY ended up being called by a major review publication “one of the most memorable chronicles of the Vietnam War”—which astonished me, but shouldn’t have. No veteran who reads it finds it unauthentic or inaccurate, and it is somehow viewed as an important Vietnam War novel now—all because that bookish, nature-loving young man wanted to understand a war and get over his survivor’s guilt, and to hear the stories of those who’d gone in his stead into darkness. 

I’m also told it is probably the most collaborative, in one sense, war novel ever written. DREAM BABY has been reviewed as literary fiction, science fiction, fantasy, thriller, horror and war literature, and I suppose that, yes, it is all of these.

You grew up in a very science family, and you already had that base.

I did, yes. My father’s field in the Navy was marine sciences and engineering, and our mother was an anthropologist who taught psychology and sociology, too, in her college-professor career. But even from an early age I was drawn to the mystical, to the elegance of a universe whose elegance can’t really be explained, to the transcendental—to an essay like Einstein’s ”Cosmic Religious Feeling,” in which he does not mean organized religion or fear-based faith, but something else, something pointing to something beyond what empirical science can give us at the moment. At age ten I remember saying to my parents: “I don’t understand why people argue about God and evolution. Why aren’t both possible?” Decades ago, the great psychologist Carl Jung attended a “God gene” conference. The conference aimed to look at the idea that we have genetically in us the need to believe in a God—which idea, if accepted, of course would mean, reductionistically and exclusively, that there was no God, nothing beyond us. At the conference a man walked up to Jung and said: “You do believe that there’s a God gene, don’t you, Dr. Jung.” There was a long pause and finally, with a smile, Jung said, “Yes, I do, and were I the divine, I would design it that way.” Either/or thinking—Cartesian duality--is one of the great curses on human beings.

There was something very, very interesting about the symbolism in writing.

The year in high school that I published my first national-magazine science fiction story (one that, miracle of miracles, would be reprinted in that year’s “best science fiction” anthology and years later called by Isaac Asimov’s, “one of the great science fiction stories''—when asked about this, I always tell people, “I don’t know what happened, the why--I just wrote”—which is what any writer says about acclaim and writerly fortune)--I’d written it the year before, at 16—was a remarkable year. I try to remember how that kid felt, how ingenuously and innocently but also boldly he did what he did, only to have the universe respond to him not because was manipulative or calculating but because of his passion and trust; and remembering him helps cut through the sometimes immobilizing white noise of the world we live in increasingly, I think. 

That same high school year, because I was frustrated with the “literary symbol hunting” we were doing in our literature classes, I sent a very rough, very young-man’s questionnaire about symbolism (basically: “Do you use symbolism consciously in your fiction)—to l50 of the world’s most famous English-language writers. Golding, Updike, Buck, Rand, Asimov, Bradury, Kerouac, on and on and on. And, lo and behold, 75 of them were kind enough to answer—partly because I was young and earnest and interested, partly because they’d never been asked. I had my comeuppance, of course: I wanted them all to say, “No, I don’t use conscious symbolism!” but there was no one answer. Golding and Updike both used symbolism consciously; Bradbury, who’d often been charged with being a “conscious symbologist,” was not, trusting his unconscious above all else. Some believed in the will of the subconscious; a couple didn’t even believe in the subconscious. I shared the responses with my teacher, and she didn’t know what to do with them either. I didn’t know how to summarize what couldn’t be summarized, and I didn’t for decades, because the digital world didn’t yet exist. To make a very long story short, fifty years later that project went viral on the internet, along with scans of many of the famous-writer responses, thanks to a writer for THE PARIS REVIEW Online, and it has apparently changed how symbolism-hunting is taught in the US in many schools.

That same high school year, a friend and I conducted a sleep deprivation experiment for our high school science fair (we tossed a coin, Randy “won” and stayed awake for eleven days—which drew the attention of Stanford University and Navy scientists as well as world media--that became the third most written-about story in English in the world, and that changed how sleep deprivation was seen in some scientific circles, but that’s another, much less literary story. Suffice to say that because of that year I believe that young people often have incredibly good, intuitive, unencumbered ideas if they will only act on them and not listen to the hesitancies and social cautions that many acquire when they reach adulthood. Passion, wonder, curiosity, ingenuous courage, and compassion and support from adults, of course—these things can make miracles.