When I decided to put forth a humor issue of Between the Cracks, my thoughts immediately strayed to my favorite James Morrow books — Only Begotten Daughter and Towing Jehovah. Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, to have an interview with Morrow, master of biting humor, that sort of dark, but inspiring humor that falls between the cracks? On a whim, I punched off an email to Mr. Morrow and was surprised and pleased when he so graciously answered “Yes.”

James Morrow seamlessly blends satire, history, fantasy and theology to create a genre wholly his own. From his home in Pennsylvania, Morrow continues to create novels and short stories to delight fans of Between the Cracks fiction.

Visit James Morrow’s website or his blog.

A Conversation Between

Kim McDougall and James Morrow

How did you become a writer?

There was never a time when I wasn’t making up stories in my head. When I was seven years old, I dictated a six-page, six-chapter novel — well, for me it was a novel — to my mother, who dutifully typed it up using a battered old portable typewriter she’d inherited from an obscure relative.

In the years that followed, my storytelling bone got me experimenting with various forms: comic books, 8mm movies, live theater, even board games. But eventually I settled on prose fiction as the medium that gave my imagination the freest rein — and reign.

I didn’t publish my first novel — my first piece of substantive prose fiction, really — until I was thirty-four.  One day the plot of The Wine of Violence, a dystopian satire about human aggression, arrived full-blown in my head, all three acts, climax included. This was clearly a gift from the gods, so I decided I’d better write it all down. 

It’s probably a good thing that I waited so long to try my hand at the novel form, because I was able to bring a lot of philosophical and thematic resonance to the story — most of it gleaned from my career as an educational theorist, curriculum developer, and instructional materials specialist. I believe it was Hemingway who said, “Writing is not a full time job.” You have to be out in the real world, ear to the ground, eyes wide open, looking for subjects, ideas, and characters worthy of dramatization.”

How do you research your books?

For most writers these days, I suspect that question has a single answer: Google. At least, that’s now the place where everybody begins. 

Amazing stuff, this blood-hound software, but Google and other such engines have taken some of the romance out of research.  It used to be that a writer could feel a certain pride in having ferreted out, through laborious descents into the bowels of his local library, the sorts of quirky historical, cultural, and technical material that give a scene the ring of truth. But now such gritty specifics are often available at the press of a Return key.

Of course, there’s much more to researching a novel than finding eccentric factoids. For my recent epic, The Last Witchfinder, I tried everything I could think of to immerse myself in the period. I read contemporaneous novels like Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. I studied Restoration plays by Wycherley, Congreve, and Vanbrugh, trying to develop an ear for period dialogue. I practically memorized Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography.  (Ben is a major character in the novel.) I even read other novelists who had tackled this same era — notably John Barth in The Sot-Weed Factor and Thomas Pynchon in Mason & Dixon — noting their take on the clothing, locutions, and mannerisms of the day.

I’m about to compose a Jack the Ripper story for a forthcoming steampunk anthology, and so I’ve been looking into what other writers have done with this inexhaustible subject. Among the masterpieces of the Ripper subgenre is Harlan Ellison’s “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World,” which first appeared in his landmark anthology, Dangerous Visions.  Ellison’s afterword to “Prowler” is very relevant to your question, Kim.  He informs us that, once he understood how thematically ambitious the story would be, he would have to immerse himself fully in the Ripper’s milieu.

“It was becoming heady stuff.  So I realized I could not write it just from the scant information on Jack I could recall from Bloch’s ‘Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper,’ or from an E. Haldeman-Julius ‘Little Blue Book’ I had read in junior high school, or even from the passing references, by Alan Hynd and by Mrs. Belloc Lowndes in The Lodger, I had encountered.  I suddenly had a project on my hands. The integrity of the story demanded that I do my homework.”       

How do you feel that genre classifications help or hinder writers and publishers?

I’m almost certainly one of those authors who’ve been hindered by classifications. For a writer unequivocally devoted to the fundamental aesthetic of the SF genre — the plausible depiction of possible futures — the “science fiction” label is eminently useful. I can’t imagine Gregory Benford, David Brin, or Greg Egan wishing that category labels would disappear one night.

But for those of us with other agendas — and I think Harlan Ellison, who I was just talking about, personifies this problem, as do Jonathan Carroll and Lucius Shepard — the various genre rubrics limit the size and composition of our audience. It’s ironic that people who wouldn’t think twice about renting a Hollywood spectacle abrim with SF or fantasy trappings will nevertheless filter their reading matter through the prim prism of mainstream respectability.

That said, I should hasten to add that the science fiction community, with its generally adventuresome tastes and appreciation of satire, has given me a congenial home — along with some awards, respectable sales figures, and occasionally a semblance of a living wage. But my current publisher, William Morrow, is keenly aware that, if my audience is to grow, this won’t happen by sharpening the pitch to the genre aficionados. We must reach out to readers with an affection for satire and postmodern weirdness, but who wouldn’t be caught dead browsing through the Del Rey paperbacks in a drugstore.

Under what genre would you classify your books?

I write in the genre known as Antitheistic Postmodern Social Satire Leavened with Secular-Humanist Affirmation and Unabashed Genre Tropes.  It’s one of the smaller sections in Barnes and Noble, but you’ll find it if you look hard.

Do you think that satire and humor are techniques that can be learned?

I don’t believe anyone is born with a sense of humor, but I think that, if your destiny is to write satire professionally, you will instinctively spend your youth cultivating an appreciation of its techniques. In my case, early influences included Mad magazine, Jonathan Swift, S. J. Perelman, Will Cuppy, and Robert Benchley. As an adult, I’ve spent many hours trying to figure out how Mark Twain, Joseph Heller, Walter Percy, T. Coraghessan Boyle, and Kurt Vonnegut achieve such puissant satiric effects. 

In Towing Jehovah, you deal with the death of God. Only Begotten Daughter is about the second coming of the Messiah. The Last Witchfinder is a dissection of moral values. Why do you tackle these difficult topics?

No cleric will tell you this, and most politicians, educators, and social commentators don’t want to let the cat out of the bag either, but it appears that human beings haven’t the foggiest idea why there’s intelligent life in our part of the galaxy, nor do we have a glove on why we’ve been hurled onto this planet, at this moment in cosmic time, in whatever existential circumstances we presently enjoy. But I figure that, given our thrown-ness (as Heidegger called it), we should work hard to become as bewildered as possible by this strange state of affairs, asking the most impertinent and audacious questions we can conceive.  To do otherwise — instead ceding the mystery of it all to dubious cults of expertise — is to waste one’s life, I feel.   

For me, the novel is the very best medium for playing with these grand questions. In recent years, in interviews very much like this one, I find myself noting what a privilege it is to work within this particular art form.  Novels give writers and readers unique ways to grapple with the mystery of it all, and thus continue the great post-Enlightenment conversation.

Who are the authors that inspire you and why?

I already mentioned my pentagrammatic pantheon of satirists: Twain, Heller, Percy, Boyle, and Vonnegut. 

Interestingly enough, for me the next tier of inspiration comes from not from prose fiction but from the theater. I’m an avid playgoer, and I think that an astute dramatist can wrestle effectively with the sorts of grand questions of which I’m so fond. If I wake up with the prospect of seeing an ambitious drama-of-ideas that night, whether a live performance or a cinematic adaptation, I’ll be humming all day.

A short list of my favorite such works would include George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, Peter Barnes’s The Bewitched, Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Jean Anouilh’s Becket, Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Doug Wright’s Quills, and Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia.  In recent years I’ve been lucky enough to see first-rate productions of both the Stoppard the Shaffer epics at the Royal National Theater in London.   

Which of your own books is your favorite and why?

I’m particularly proud of The Last Witchfinder. In that novel, I demonstrated to myself that I could write a straight — well, minimally crooked — piece of historical fiction, without depending on the automatic reader interest that accrues to SF and fantasy tropes.

A runner-up for personal favorite would be my new novel, The Philosopher’s Apprentice.  I sometimes describe it as a cross between Frankenstein and Lolita. The core idea proved even more fruitful than I’d hoped: what if Victor Frankenstein had created a “moral monster,” a creature whose conscience was developed far beyond the world’s capacity to absorb such a surfeit of virtue?  

Another runner-up is my sequel to Towing Jehovah, a loopy “odyssey through theodicy” called Blameless in Abaddon. No other Morrow novel is quite so jam-packed with grand, impertinent, and audacious questions — and yet I believe it also manages to be an entertaining and involving story.  Readers were divided on this one. Some of them found the theological speculation too dense.  Others found the ideas superficial. But Blameless also has its fierce partisans, me among them.

While I’m at it, let me put in a plug for project I did with my wife Kathy, The SFWA European Hall of Fame, which offers American and UK readers sixteen “contemporary classics” of Continental science fiction in carefully polished English translations. I’m pleased to note that Cory Doctorow, in a recent review on Boing Boing, called it “a ground-breaking anthology.”     

What are your future writing plans?

When I look at what’s on my plate, I see a series of Russian nested dolls: a short-short inside a short story inside a novella inside a novel.

The short-short is a piece that was requested by the Waterstones book chain in London, which they will use in promoting the UK edition of The Philosopher’s Apprentice. It will concern the further adventures of the Good Samaritan. The working title is “The Bad Samaritan.” 

The short story is the Jack the Ripper riff I mentioned earlier. I intend to produce the most feminist work of fiction ever written about the dastardly “Leather Apron.” It will appear in Nick Gevers’s forthcoming steampunk anthology, probably under the title “Penny Dreadful.” 

The novella is called Shambling Towards Hiroshima — all about the U.S. Navy’s attempt in the early 1940’s to create the ultimate biological weapon, a Godzilla-like mutant iguana, in tandem with the Manhattan Project. Tachyon Books will publish it early in 2009. 

The novel is a dream project tentatively titled Galápagos Regained. I see it as a follow-up to The Last Witchfinder, with Charles Darwin functioning as a major minor character, rather like Isaac Newton in the earlier epic. Once again my protagonist is a resourceful and slightly daft woman. Her name is presently Chlöe Davenport, and the plot concerns her attempt to recapitulate Darwin’s epochal voyage around the world — an adventure she undertakes for reasons I hope the reader will find plausible as the tale unfolds.

Thank you, and good luck with these interesting endeavors. I look forward to reading them!