Mike Allen 2009 Interview
Mike Allen is nominated for his short story “The Button Bin.”
Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. Let’s talk about your nominated story, “The Button Bin.” What was the inspiration behind the piece?
Years ago my wife and I were visiting a charming fabric shop at the center of an equally charming little mountain town. While she shopped I took a seat beside an immense bin – an RC Cola machine, I believe, lying on its back with its front and all the mechanical parts removed – filled to the top with every kind of button you could imagine. Like any decent primate attracted to shinies, I started to run my hand through it, discovered I could submerge my arm in buttons at least past the elbow.
Then, I wondered: what if I pulled my arm out and the buttons had attached themselves to my skin? What if I could then unbutton my flesh, see what my soul looks like?
It may say a lot about how dark my view of the world can be that the entire plot of “The Button Bin” exploded into existence inside my head right then and there.
Using a second-person perspective is a tricky technique. What made you utilize this method?
The final line of the story wouldn’t work if I told it any other way. So I firmly believe.
At risk of tainting how others experience the story: I see “Button Bin” as an interior monologue. The narrator is addressing himself in a manner that borders on stream-of-consciousness. That’s why I did all these wacky things I’d be afraid to try in a more conventional story: second-person, present tense, no quotation marks, etc. Writing it that way made the story move when it hadn’t before.
What was the most difficult part in writing the story?
Without a doubt, figuring out how to tell it. From the moment of that download from the Muse in the fabric shop I was certain I had a terrific idea, at least in my head, but every time I attempted to set it down on paper it quickly grew bogged down and boring. I hung up on issues of style and plot. As I originally conceived it, at first the narrator didn’t know who the owner of the button bin was, and I couldn’t quite piece together how he figured it out — years went by before it occurred to me to just have someone tell him. Eureka!
Yet that was just part of the problem. The hallucinatory images and furious emotions that fueled the story as it existed in my brain didn’t appear on the page until I approached it in second-person present tense, the way I’ve sometimes written poems. I have to give some oblique credit to Joe Hill (specifically, Heart-Shaped Box and “The Black Phone”) and Cormac McCarthy (specifically Blood Meridian). Somehow exposure to those writings gave me tools I needed, in terms of plotting and voice, to get this single story done the way it needed to be done.
I think it’s true, too, that at the time I had the idea I didn’t yet have the life knowledge or writing skill to bring it to life as a full-blown story. I couldn’t pull it off without the experiences I gained in those intervening years as both a crime reporter and a poet.
How has your poetry background aided you in your fiction writing?
I’m not sure it has, in a larger sense, though I think it helped me in this instance. First, the second-person perspective, rare in fiction, is not that uncommon in poetry, so I had a fair amount of practice with it. Second, poetry plays an active role in this story: the sharing of favorite poems is essential to the friendship between the narrator and his niece.
More generally, writing poetry makes you sensitive to the sounds and rhythms of language, always a handy thing in any kind of writing. The subjective viewpoint of “The Button Bin” allowed me some flourishes along those lines that I hope add to its intensity.
Maybe, though, there is a pragmatic side to this poetry thing. In my day job, I work as a reporter, and over the past ten years I’ve written well over two thousand news stories. That can tap directly into the same well of energy and creativity that my poetry and fiction comes out of. Because of this it can take me a long time to finish a short story when I don’t have a hard deadline. The poetry has been a way to keep my creative baubles out there where they can be seen while I plod along on larger works.
How about your experiences editing anthologies like Clockwork Phoenix?
I have to say, in terms of experience, the next best thing to writing short stories is editing them. You can learn from others’ mistakes and others’ triumphs, and when unsolicited submissions pour in you’ll get direct exposure with a number of both in short order.
I’m a hands-on editor, as several of my contributors could tell you, but I’ll confess, it’s still much easier for me to deduce how to fix problems in someone else’s story than in one of my own. I think that has to do with distance. I can look at a story I’m editing for one of the Clockwork Phoenix books and say, here’s what the story does, here’s what I think it should be doing, here’s how to get there. With one of my own stories, of course, I know exactly what I intended — but is it really there on the page? I can’t always see whether it is or not. That’s why reliable and patient beta readers are just so damn essential. In the case of “The Button Bin,” those readers were Cathy Reniere, Jessica Wick and Sonya Taaffe. To them, my heartfelt thanks!
Can you tell us more about speculative poetry?
I can tell you a lot more than we have room to discuss.
The speculative poetry community is a lively, thriving entity inside the larger universe of speculative literature. Most of the major short fiction outlets publish poetry, and nearly all of the smaller ones do.
If you want to get a sense of what goes on in speculative poetry, I’d recommend starting in two places. First, the archives at Strange Horizons hold strong examples from just about every major voice in speculative poetry going back over the past 30 years. (Not to mention there’s a pretty wide sampling there of my own best work.) The editors who do the picking, Harold Bowes, Mardel James, Roger Dutcher and Mark Rudolph, are all accomplished veterans who publish or have published poetry journals of their own. Quite a few of the print mags that use poetry, Asimov’s especially, slant toward short humorous verse — which I think has inadvertently created a grossly wrong impression of what speculative poetry is about — while Strange Horizons has room and inclination for much more serious and ambitious work. I think it’s fair to say they represent the field’s “mainstream.”
Now, once you visit there, slide on over and have a look at the new kid on the block, Goblin Fruit, edited by two talented young women in their twenties, Amal El-Mohtar and Jessica Wick, with an emphasis on fantasy and folktale. These folks just broke the record for number of poems from a single publication nominated for the Rhysling Award. Explore the archives there, and you’ll see some overlap with Strange Horizons, but you’ll also see an almost completely different set of poets. What you’re looking at here is a new direction in speculative poetry (though technically, it’s been simmering for several years) that is going to become even more dominant in the years ahead.
I publish my own poetry journal, Mythic Delirium, that I feel falls somewhere between these two poles in its content. My newest issue features Neil Gaiman, so, you know, it’s not just career poets that play in these sands.
What motivated you to champion this medium?
Enlightened self-interest, of course. I write it, so I want people to read it.
When first I started volunteering with the Science Fiction Poetry Association, I quickly developed a sense the ship had lost its rudder, and wound up running for president in what was the organization’s first (and so far only) contested election. Becoming a spokesperson of sorts for speculative poetry essentially came with the job, and I set about (with many others’ help!) trying to raise my field’s profile at least a tad. Though my successor as president, Debbie Kolodji, is doing a fine job of steering, some of that advocacy role seems to have followed me off the boat. I don’t guess I mind.
As a writer, what challenges are you currently facing?
The usual: getting things finished. Then getting them published. Then getting them noticed. It’s funny, you know. Learning how to write isn’t enough. Learning how to promote your work is at least as important.
What projects are you currently working on?
Dare I say it? A novel. But who isn’t?
The first two episodes of my book in progress, stories called “The Hiker’s Tale” and “Follow the Wounded One,” have been quietly published in out of the way places, though reviewers who’ve noticed them, like Rich Horton, have said nice things about them. I’m now into what might be the fifth or sixth episode, and still going. I hope to finish the complete draft this year, we’ll see.
What I know will be out soon is the second anthology in the Clockwork Phoenix series, coming this July. Hopefully we’ll once again be able to debut the book at ReaderCon. It features a new novelette in Tanith Lee’s “Flat Earth” series, and new stories from Mary Robinette Kowal, Catherynne M. Valente, Marie Brennan, Steve Rasnic Tem, Gemma Files, Claude Lalumière and a host of others. I think the second volume is even stranger than the first; we’ll see what folks make of that.
Mike Allen wears many hats, and occasionally they’re purple. He edits a poetry zine, Mythic Delirium, now celebrating its 10th anniversary, and the anthology series Clockwork Phoenix, fhe first volume of which made the 2008 Locus Recommended Reading List. Obviously, he also writes fiction; stories have appeared in Interzone and Weird Tales, with new ones scheduled this year in Tales of the Talisman, Cabinet des Fées, and the Norilana Books anthology Sky Whales and Other Wonders. He lives in Roanoke, Va. with his wife Anita, a demonic cat, and a comical dog. You can view his website at www.descentintolight.com and read his LiveJournal at http://time-shark.livejournal.com. He also for no apparent reason has accounts with MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.
Charles A. Tan is the co-editor of the Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler and his fiction has appeared in publications such as The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories and Philippine Speculative Fiction. He has conducted interviews for The Nebula Awards and The Shirley Jackson Awards, as well as for online magazines such as SF Crowsnest and SFScope. He is a regular contributor to sites like SFF Audio and Game Cryer. You can visit his blog, Bibliophile Stalker, where he posts book reviews, interviews, and essays.
3 comments so far.
Coise you, Laiwd Bawwon!
I know, I know.
1. Laird on 16th July 2009 at 7:31 am
Mike Allen’s Button Bin demonstrates only filthy, dengenerate sons of biscuit eaters use second person. I would burn that story if possible. Too bad it’s electronic!