Cliff Winnig: No one has traveled my path

I had the pleasure of meeting Cliff Winnig in 1997 at the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop. Cliff writes science fiction, fantasy, and steampunk. His short stories appear in a number of anthologies, including When the Hero Comes Home 2, Gears and Levers 3, Retro Spec, Footprints, and the forthcoming World Jumping. The twitterzines Outshine and Thaumatrope have published his very short stories.

Though he's made his home in the East, the South, and the Midwest, he's now a Californian. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife Debby and their two children. When not writing, Cliff sings, plays sitar, does social dance, and studies tai chi and aikido.

The Writers’ Lens is about "Bringing fiction into focus." What brings your writing into focus -- the characters, the stories, the love of words? All three, really.  A good story takes readers away from themselves and their world and moves them into fictional lives in a fictional world, using words to create the portal between the real and the imaginary.

Writing's an interesting art form in that you can see the code -- letters, words, punctuation -- that comprise the work, but when you get caught up in it, your focus changes to the thoughts and feelings the words bring forth in your mind. It's like looking at a pointillist painting close up, then stepping away and watching the picture emerge. You're aware of the components, but the illusion of form takes over.  If the story and characters seem real enough, the focus stays with them. But in reality, they're never more than the words that comprise them.

When I'm writing or editing a draft, I'm aware of all these elements. At some points in the process, I may focus on one of them, but in the end they all have to work together.

How do you find time to write and do a demanding job? It's tough. I work full-time in Silicon Valley, and my wife and I have small children. That's why I'm concentrating on short stories right now, rather than trying to tackle a novel. I write mostly after the kids are in bed, even on the weekends.  With shorter works, I can really polish the stories I want to tell, yet still have time to be the dad I want to be.

What's your favorite way to interact with fans/readers? I love readings:  both giving and attending them. There's something primal about storytelling, hearing stories told out loud.  It's one of the oldest human art forms, and it's a good part of how we build our views of the world, how we convey the ideas that really matter. I have theater experience, so I draw on that when I do readings. I really enjoy it if I can do Q&A and/or meet folks afterwards too.

What inspired your latest work? My newest story appears in When the Hero Comes Home 2 (Gabrielle Harbowy and Ed Greenwood, eds.), an anthology that takes as its theme the hero's return from the big battle/quest/whatever and the unexpected things that crop up with such homecomings. Many of my stories appear in themed anthologies, because the themes spark ideas that lead me to characters and worlds, and the desire to explore both.  In this case, the theme prompted me to ask:  what if the hero and the person the hero comes home to are one and the same?  In the resulting story -- "The Call of the Sky" -- the stay-at-home narrator and the returned-from-space hero are clones.  Furthermore, they're capable of synchronizing their memories, something they do whenever they happen to meet.  Only this time the injuries suffered by the hero clone prevent that, so our narrator has to try to understand her clone's experience -- and the importance of that experience for everyone back on Earth -- through mere words.  Even within the story, the important ideas come through storytelling.

I also have a flash-fiction piece coming out this December in the anthology World Jumping (Eric T. Reynolds, ed.).  Like several other stories in the book (though not all of them), it draws its inspiration from the digital painting reproduced on the cover, which shows a woman dancing or leaping in an empty landscape.  The crescent shapes of huge moons or sister planets dominate the sky above her.  I asked myself who she was and if what she was doing really was what it seemed.  I wondered what wasn't in the painting because it lay behind the viewer or took place a moment before or after the scene depicted.  That's what led to the story.  Unlike a painting, where the viewer sees the whole thing at once and might notice this or that detail with time, a story flows linearly and explores all the senses within that flow.  I could add movement, a sense of touch, sound, and so forth.  The painting drew me into an alien world.  My story explored it.

I'm happy to say the resulting tale bore little resemblance to those of the other authors, which leads me to...

What makes your book/characters unique? No one else could write my stories, because no one else has traveled my path. I bring my lifetime of experience, including a background in math, software, martial arts, music, and anthropology. In my science fiction, I draw as much as possible on actual science, and in my imaginary societies, I draw on what I learned from anthropology and ethnomusicology. My SF tends to include concepts from computer science and characters from a variety of ethnicities and cultural backgrounds.

In addition to being a writer, you're a musician. What's the relationship between writing and music? In early human cultures, storytelling around the fire combined words and music. Only much later did humanity distinguish among prose, poetry, and song, and even now the lines often blur. That said, the written word is quite different from music in that the former creates an object outside of time, experienced by a reader at the reader's own pace, whereas music is immediate, present, and (ideally) an event where the musician and listener are in the same time and place. Nonetheless, both are collaborative art forms: readers bring themselves to the book or story, using the words to create the imaginary universe, and listeners bring their movements and any sounds they make -- dancing, singing along, clapping, etc. -- to a concert experience. So while writing and music have different characteristics, they grew from a common set of roots, and their branches intertwine.

I'm very pleased to be part of this series.  I've enjoyed the opportunity to focus on aspects of reading and writing that are often subconscious.

You can find out more about Cliff and his work at:

Cliff's website -- http://cliffwinnig.com -- has info on his published stories, a list of his readings and concerts, and a resource page for writers.  You can find him easily on Twitter (@winnig), Facebook and on Goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5124021.Cliff_Winnig).  The audio of his recent SF in SF reading can be found at http://www.sfinsf.org/?p=1930

When the Hero Comes Home 2 is currently on sale in both Kindle (https://www.getonic.com/Store/71888/1574) and ePub (https://www.getonic.com/Store/71887/3435) formats.  It's also available in paperback (http://www.amazon.com/When-Hero-Comes-Gabrielle-Harbowy/dp/1897492715).

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This is T.W. Fendley. You can find out more about me and my books at www.twfendley.com. Thanks for reading and commenting on The Writers' Lens.

Fantasy/horror author James Dorr: "True" stories resonate with readers

Welcome to James Dorr, whom I met through my publisher L&L Dreamspell. He joins us to talk about his latest book, The Tears of Isis, released on May 15 by Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing. James is a short story writer and poet working mainly in dark fantasy and horror with forays into science fiction and mystery, and  has previously worked as a technical writer for an academic computing center, associate editor on a city magazine, a nonfiction freelance writer, and a semi-professional Renaissance musician. Dorr’s earlier books include two collections from Dark Regions Press, Strange Mistresses: Tales of Wonder and Romance and Darker Loves: Tales of Mystery and Regret, and a poetry collection Vamps (A Retrospective) from Sam’s Dot Publishing (now part of White Cat Publications), joining nearly four hundred individual appearances from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine to Yellow Bat Review.  An active member of SFWA and HWA, Dorr recently wrote the introduction to Telling Tales of Terror: Essays on Writing Horror & Dark Fiction (Damnation Books, Dec. 2012). You can find more about James and his books at: Goodreads  Website  Facebook  http://perpetualpublishing.com/the-tears-of-isis/ The Writers' Lens is about "Bringing fiction into focus." What brings your writing into focus--the characters, the stories, the love of words? For me character is usually the most important part of a story since (as I see it) fiction is about the testing of a character or characters under stress (in the case of dark fantasy/horror, extreme stress). So the character is in a situation and it's how the character copes with it (or not) that defines the plot.  Characters, in turn, are defined in part by their beliefs and by their environments (my life has been relatively peaceable, for instance, which will give me a different perspective than someone who grew up, say, in Iraq).  The game, then, is to put oneself into the head of that character, look out through his or her eyes, hear with his or her ears, feel with his or her skin and emotions, etc., to translate that character into terms the reader (most likely having had a relatively peaceable life as well) will be able to understand.  It is then that a love of words comes in, choosing those words most apt for the task -- because words can induce mood too, which cycles back into that character’s feelings -- but ultimately it is still the character, the person or other being that the story is about.   What inspired your latest book? Artistically, hopefully some of the answers that follow will give an idea. Because inspiration is a tricky thing, it can come in dribs and drabs from various places and not even be seen as inspiration until something happens to pull it all together. So on one level, the answer might be “I really don’t know.” But there’s a pragmatic side to art too, Michelangelo, for instance, received a commission from Pope Julius II that resulted in the painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, so the Pope was somewhat responsible too. In my far more mundane case, Editor/Publisher Max Booth III had just started up Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing and, having recently edited an anthology for Dark Moon Books, Zombie Jesus and Other True Stories, that included a story by me, he asked me if I would like to do a collection. As it happened, I’d had some dribs and drabs of ideas, running in several different directions, so I started putting some of them together and ran with the one that looked the most interesting, one having to do with the idea of art and creation. (Thus the Michelangelo name-dropping, although, of course, it’s after the fact -- itself inspired by Teresa’s question.) And so the result, taking its title from the last story in the volume: The Tears of Isis.          What do you think readers will like about your book? The Tears of Isis is actually a collection of seventeen stories and an opening poem, but, rather than just being a grouping of what I might think are the best of my works at the moment, it also attempts to have a unifying theme, that of creation but coupled with destruction as well as a balancing factor.  Thus it begins and ends with the iconic figures of Medusa and Isis, the former a sculptress who “spoke to her hair” and may literally turn her subjects to stone, and the latter one who, seeking inspiration, discovers Isis and in her herself, one who both creates art, but also takes from those she deals with some piece of their vitality, their souls. Then in between come perhaps some of the tales Medusa’s snakes spoke to her in return, not all of art but some touching on it, and most in one way or another touching on destruction or its possibility. To quote from the editor’s Introduction, “Each story in this book has a purpose. It would not feel complete if even one were omitted...” As author, I hope readers will agree.         Would you share a bit about your next project? An ongoing project of mine has been a series of stories set on a far future, dying Earth centered around a vast necropolis called “The Tombs.” About fifteen of these have been published thus far including two reprints, “Mara’s Room” and “River Red,” and one for the first time, “The Ice Maiden,” in The Tears of Isis, with two others this year in separate anthologies, “Ghost Ship” that came out at the end of April in Techno-Goth Cthulhu from Red Skies Press and “Raising the Dead” to be out in fall in Airships and Automatons by White Cat Publications.  At one time I had been in discussion with a mid-size publisher about a possible novel made up of Tombs stories somewhat along the lines of the late Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, though problems with the economy at large seem to have put that on hold for now. However, the project could be revived. Also, having published a book of poetry on vampires in 2011 with Sam’s Dot Publishing, Vamps (A Retrospective), I’ve been toying with the possibility of a follow-up volume, perhaps to be titled Vamps (And Friends), opening up to allow zombies, werewolves, demons, etc., into the mix too.   How much fact is in your fiction? Stories have to be “true,” and not just in a factual sense, if they’re to resonate with readers, and so if there are facts they’d better be accurate. Or, if they’re made up facts, as perhaps in science fiction, they’d better still be at least plausible. Why? Because facts are what the reader holds on to first, they’re a sort of anchor from which to reach out to the wonder beyond, the myth and the fantastic. So as to how much in a story is fact, it will depend on the story itself -- some need more, some less -- but even in something like “Bones, Bones, the Musical Fruit” in The Tears of Isis, a wholly fictional, even absurd, account of a man who carves musical instruments from human bones, details about his dealings with the local police, for instance, must be true to how real police and how local politics would operate given the situation.  In this case, I’ve been involved in local politics, not in anything having to do with human bones, but enough that I can extrapolate from my own experience as well as things I might read in the paper or see in the news on TV. Or in the story “The Tears of Isis” scenes taking place in San Francisco, in terms of neighborhoods and streets, are based on library research, while those in Boston where the story ends are again from my own experience living five years across the river in Cambridge (and notice how I threw in the river as well as a city on its other side, to flesh the area out just a little, to give an idea, however slight, about what it would be like to be there yourself).         What makes your book/characters unique? The stories in The Tears of Isis rely in many cases on myth, even fairy tales (although, to be sure, often disguised). And yet I hope a streak of reality runs through them as well, that the people, even in fantastic lands or situations, ring true as actual people, with actual motives and reactions readers can believe in. The fantastic rooted in the actual -- myth rooted in truth. To go up to the previous question again, I research a lot -- in the story “The Bala Worm” I used maps of England and Wales with places with local myths about dragons marked, just as do characters in the story. I followed the same procedure as they did to find where the dragon’s lair might be, then also put in background details of rock bands passing through the area with one-night stands in the neighboring village, just as they do in the town I live in now. I hope that throughout The Tears of Isis readers will see a thematic unity (some stories closer than others, of course, but even here there are musicians, for instance), yet see variety in the stories so each one will be unique in its own way.     What's the highest compliment someone could make about your writing? That it made someone think.  That it made them wonder, and then to reflect beyond the page.   THE TEARS OF ISIS: What do Medusa and the goddess Isis have in common?  Are both creatresses through destruction?  And why was Isis oftentimes depicted as weeping?  Herewith are some answers as parts of a journey through art and creation, of sculpture and blood-drinking, crafting musical instruments from bone, revisiting legends of Cinderella and the Golden Fleece, of Sleeping Beauty and Dragons and Snow White -- some of these, of course, well disguised.  For is not art both the recasting of what is, as well as the invention of what is not?       The Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney spoke of art as “making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature,” so here there be vampires, and ghouls, and insects perhaps from outer space as well as from this Earth, and visions of Saturn and life in the sea, and other wonders “such as never were in nature,” but, above all, Isis.  The Weeping Isis.  Isis with vulture wings, breasts bare and smeared with blood as in the earliest forms of her myth.    And of course, as well, Medusa.   The Tears of Isis is available at: http://perpetualpublishing.com/the-tears-of-isis/