Richard Bowes 2009 Interview
Richard Bowes is nominated for his novelette “If Angels Fight”.
Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. When you were a kid, did you ever imagine that you’d be a writer?
Writing wasn’t that alien a career when I was growing up. My father was an editor and ended up writing high school textbooks. My mother wrote for TV in Boston in the 1950’s. A couple of her uncles were well known Irish authors. One of them was Liam O’Flaherty who wrote the Informer.
I’d had a lot of problems in school - dyslexia among other things. If something really interested me I’d read it compulsively. Otherwise it was slow torture. But I could always talk and always write - express myself in words.
When I was in my late teens I decided that I wanted to write and my parents were good with it. There was no immediate way they could see me getting killed writing - unlike some of my other interests. Unfortunately once I decided to write, I froze and couldn’t write at all.
I’d flunked out of the first college I’d gone to. At the next one I took a writing class and the teacher Mark Eisenstein was great at getting blocked kids started. Years later I wrote a novella called “My Life in Speculative Fiction” about that time and that experience. It’s in my collection Streetcar Dreams and Other Midnight Fancies and in an earlier out-of-print collection Transfigured Night and Other Stories.
What made you finally take that plunge into writing professionally?
When I think of someone writing professionally, I envision her/him making a living at it. When I got out of school and moved to Manhattan I was twenty-two and for a few years I worked as a fashion copywriter in the Garment District. Outside of that time, I’ve never made a major part of my income writing.
What’s the biggest hurdle you had to overcome before getting published?
My lifestyle: after college there was a long period where I wrote almost nothing. I was young I was gay in New York. I had major drug and alcohol problems. I was busy. After a while I got things together and a while after that I started to write Spec Fiction. The SF first novel I completed sold quite quickly and I thought it was all going to be a piece of cake.
What’s the appeal of speculative fiction?
It’s where I was lucky enough to find people willing to buy my work and to read it. Spec fiction has the last of the viable short fiction markets. Short form work gets reviewed, talked about, given awards, anthologized. About twenty years ago I started writing short stories. I’ve written forty-two of them in the last twenty years. All but the first one I wrote have been published and even that got cannibalized.
What’s the best piece of advice you received from Mark Eisenstein?
Write what turns you on. Nobody is going to be interested in what you write if you aren’t.
What was the inspiration for your Time Ranger stories?
History: it drove my father crazy that I learned all my history from historical novels and Time Travel/Alternate Reality Spec fiction. Some serious history books I find very readable but most of them are deadly. From the Files of the Time Rangers is kind of my historical novel.
It’s a mosaic novel - made up of short stories as is my earlier Minions of the Moon. A lot of the stories were my attempts at different forms. One that made the Nebula short list a few years ago, “The Ferryman’s Wife” was my version of a 1950’s John Cheever/New Yorker story set in the suburbs but with Time Rangers, Greek Gods and an 18th century English Noblewoman thrown into the mix.
In Jeffrey Ford’s interview with you, you mentioned that you used to write rules for board games. What was that experience like?
Well, a lot of it was good, clean fun and sometimes the money wasn’t at all bad. We did commercial games (sold in stores) and promotional games (ones companies used to push products, ideas etc). I learned a lot about plotting and multiple viewpoints. Board games from Monopoly to Dungeons and Dragons are closer to dramas than short stories or novels.
Did you encounter any difficulty writing your “If Angels Fight” story?
It was a struggle - they all are. The year I wrote that novelette I only finished one other story. The parts set in 1950’s Boston - the scene on the river ice, the moment when young senator Kennedy visits his aunt on her birthday and the rest - came from memory and were pretty easy. The present day material and the time lines were harder.
What’s the most difficult aspect of being a writer? The most rewarding?
I wrote about this in a piece published last year called, “I Like Writing but Hate Being a Writer”
The actual writing is maddening but also wonderfully satisfying. A lot of the rest of it I’m less fond of.
What projects are you currently working on?
I’m turning “If Angels Fight”, an earlier Nebula nominee “There’s a Hole in the City” and a lot of my other recent stories into a mosaic novel tentatively called, Dust Devil: A Life in Speculative Fiction.
Richard Bowes was born and raised in Boston and has lived in Manhattan for most of the last forty-three years. He has written five novels, the most recent of which is the Nebula nominated From the Files of the Time Rangers. His most recent short story collection is Streetcar Dreams and Other Midnight Fancies. He has won the World Fantasy, Lambda, International Horror Guild and Million Writers Awards.
Recent and upcoming stories appear in F&SF, Electric Velocipede, Clarkesworld and Fantasy magazines and in the Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Year’s Best Gay Stories 2008, Naked City, Beastly Bride, Haunted Legends and Lovecraft Unbound anthologies.
His story, “If Angels Fight” has been selected for all three of the annual best fantasy anthologies and for the Datlow, Year’s Best Horror. It and many of his other recent stories are chapters in his novel in progress Dust Devil: A Life in Speculative Fiction.
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.
2 comments so far.
Thanks for this interview! Bowes is one of the great unappreciated writers of our genre. His sense of history, and the specific historical moments that he writes about, is better than anyone’s except possibly Waldrop (who writes very different kinds of stories).
1. Jason Erik Lundberg on 09th July 2009 at 12:46 am
Great interview. And oh wow, I am *so* looking forward to Dust Devil.