Report from Santa Fe; Stephen Graham Jones

The National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Tau's New Mexico. Hello, I'm Lorraine Mills, and welcome to Report from Santa Fe. Our guest today is an author, Stephen Graham Jones. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. It's an honor to be on your show. Well, you just had the premier launch party at the Jean-Cox Theatre in Santa Fe for your new book, Mongrels. So I've heard it's the thing for the spring that everyone's going to be reading this. You are an amazing writer. How many books have you written?

Written, I bet I've written close to 30, published, I've had 22, 23 published. And how many shirts, how many hundreds of stories? Probably about 260, 270. Wow, you're very prolific. Yeah. Oh, maybe I have low standards, I don't know. No, no, no. I read all the time. You are a good writer. Well, thank you. Thank you for being here. You were an NEA fellow. You got the Texas Writers League fellow in Texas Institute of Letters Award and the Independent Publishers Multicultural Award, a couple of others, this is horror. Yeah, this is horror and I've been nominated for the Shirley Jackson three or four times or a finalist for them. I've been a Stoker Award finalist. A couple of times. Stoker Award. Yeah. Good. Well, it's coming. Yeah. It's coming. You now are a professor at My Old Samping Grants University of Colorado and this is what's so wonderful. You get to teach courses like zombies and like werewolves and you said that it's your work on the werewolves that led you to Mongols.

But first before we get into Mongols, tell me a little about your background, your member of the Black Fleet Nation and you grew up in Texas. You are so Texas. Yeah. I grew up in West Texas. I grew up in a place called Greenwood which is 20 miles east of Midland. We didn't have a post office. We were just a bunch of trailers in the pasture when I was a kid. Now there's a lot of houses and other stuff. But we were the only Black Fleet for hundreds of miles around as far as we knew. And yeah, I grew up all, you know, I say I grew up in Greenwood. Greenwood was a place we would come back to over and over again. But we left to lots of the surrounding communities, surrounding towns. I made it down to Austin for a while. I made it up here or up to Colorado for a few months once when I was 16, 17, so just everywhere. I was going from school to school all the time. It was really fun. Well, one of my favorite of your books is called Growing Up Dead in Texas. And they say that if Quentin Tarantino and Kermek McCarty met in the bar, this is the book that we come out.

You also said that cut my fingers and I bleed Texas under the keyboard. I will tell you that when I read Growing Up Dead in Texas, I was glad that I did not grow up in Texas. So very fierce, you take a new flinching loose kind of a crush between memoir and fiction. Tell us a little about it. You know, every page of that book, I can open it up and there I am. It's a scene for my own life. But there is an event or two in there that I made up as a structure for all the events in my own life. So that's the reason I call it a novel, not a memoir. But yeah, the West Texas I grew up in was and probably still is. I haven't been back for a while, but a violent place. You know, just, I mean, so many other people I grew up with would have one side of their face all scarred up because they got pulled around by a dog when they were a kid or they stood too close to the burn pile so they got an aerosol came up in their face and everybody carry scars. You know, you're proud of them too, kind of, of course. But a whole lot of fighting, yeah, there was always fighting.

I'm not sure why that is. I don't think it was anything in the water. It must have been us. I don't know. It was, it's a tough environment to grow up as a sensitive teenage male, you know, who like to read and do things like that. But you have nailed the teenage maleness in this book, Mongols. Thank you. Let's talk about it now because it is in effect coming of age story, but who's coming of age? It's the narrator, the protagonist, he's trying to find his place in the world, he's trying to figure out what he's transforming into as he transitions from, you know, 10, 12 years old into the fringes of adulthood. He's trying to get a grasp on his own identity, I feel like. And it's funny, one of my friends, I was hanging out with him one night and he mentioned to me, he said, you know, Steven, you can, he said you can do that teenage angst thing better than anybody. And I thought, wow, that's really nice of him to say because this isn't a guy who was like really free with his compliments.

That night, I'm walking home and I realized, wait, he was probably insulting me, you know? But that is a pocket that I find I write really comfortably from. I'm not sure why that is really, I'm, I mean, of course, I was forming my own identity when I was at age as well, but I mean, there's other monumental times in all of our lives. I'm not sure why I write well from there from the time you're 15 till you're about 18 or 19, that's a pocket that I can live in. And how wonderful to cross reference the coming of age of a boy to a man and perhaps of the development coming out as a, as a werewolf, symbolic and literal too. What I love about your werewolf work and I'm so happy we get to do a show about this, is that you, you take, you blend in all the werewolf myths both from the European cultures and Native American cultures and you sort of trace how the story has changed through the ages.

You mentioned that you were going to do this course at the University of Colorado. So you saturated yourself in everything. And then you had got the course outlined in, it was done, but you were still full of all this werewolf stuff. So you said, this is one model for how to write a novel. Pack your mind way too full, then feel around, find the dream for me that dream is always the first line. So once you've gotten your course outlined and you sat down and you wrote Mongrels, tell me about that process. The process of writing Mongrels was, I didn't know what I was doing. Of course, I just thought I like werewolves and here's some characters and those characters are real to me. And so I'm going to chase the story down. And Mongrels took me, the first draft of Mongrels took me either 14 or 16 days. I had to get it done before the semester started because I knew once the semester started that we kind of clamped down on the novel, of course. So I wrote probably six or eight hours a day. I found that I write best in about an hour and a half sessions. If I can write for an hour and a half and then go shoot free throws or shoot pool or work

on the truck or wrestle with the dog or do I need any of 100 things to turn my mind off for 30 or 45 minutes and then I can come back and write. And that's how I wrote Mongrels. For all my novels, I always build a playlist so I can immediately plug back into the emotional space of that novel. For Mongrels, I got into it so quickly I didn't even have time to build a playlist. I had to reuse a playlist from another novel. You mentioned everybody's had their time to shine that the werewolves are more a blue-collar monster to compare the passion for zombies, the passion for vampires and now for werewolves. I hope that's what we're getting into because in 2002 we went from the vampire to the zombie. Max Brooks and 28 days later and all that, they brought us into the zombie renaissance and we're still at the very end of that and the reason we went there was because vampires were getting too sparkly. They were getting too tragic and too much of a victim kind of and this way we went to the zombie because we as humans need teeth in the darkness that are going to bite us.

We need to feel that danger, that uncertainty I think. And so we're always going to have a creature that it is at the current top of pop culture or something. And the zombie, because we've had so many good zombie stories, both from Max Brooks with World War Z, from Kirkman with Walking Dead, we've had really fortunate zombie times. I think that's kind of extended to zombie renaissance longer than it was originally meant to. Usually they go about six or eight years. This one's gone 13, 14 years. And I think we're long overdue to reset and go to the next monster. Because we just came from vampires, it makes sense to me that we're also be next. And I think the world is a vital story. We need to be telling ourselves now in a world that's becoming increasingly sterile and well lit. We need to remind ourselves that we have an animal inside us, that we want to run. One of the things is unusual is that you really do present them as animals. This is not so much the wearer, man, the heart, but the wolf part. Things I'd never thought of before, the issue of the transformation when they transform

conservation of mass, how does a 150 pound woman turn into a 350 pound sterling, ravening beast? It doesn't make sense. No, it doesn't. And that's one thing I really wanted to push in this. I wanted to create a believable werewolf, a werewolf I could believe in. And I can believe in a woman that's 150 pounds turning into 150 pound werewolf. Really, she had probably turned into 146 pound werewolf because she'd had to burn a lot of her calories to transform, you know. But yeah, that's what I really wanted. I wanted to construct a monster that I could believe in. And then I could put it in dramatic situation and make other people believe in it, you know. Another aspect of this that I love is that you allow us to internalize the monster within that we ourselves are animal and spirit combined. And that you want us to connect the human and the wolf side within us and allow ourselves the space to, you know, have the beast and to tame the beast and to take that beast energy and do something else within.

Yeah, it's very rare. This is not the usual platform for where wolves are. I think that a lot, I mean, I'm no like social diagnostician, but I think that a lot of difficulties that I see happening on the six o'clock news are because people try to tamp down their inner animal too much. They don't give it any expression. They don't let it out to run anytime at all. And that's what the world's about for one for two or three nights a month. You run through the pastures, you chase the sheep and the rabbits and the pigs and everything. And you acknowledge that you're not only mind or spirit, you're also these animal urges. And you're all wrapped up into a single package. And I think we need to acknowledge that as people as a society. Now, you do go through a lot of the traditional werewolf lore, moonlight. What is your sin? Moonlight and, of course, silver. Yeah. I believe in silver. I think silver could hurt a werewolf. I think really that's more or less the definition of a good monster is that it has an Achilles heel, you know, like for vampires, it's sunlight, you know, and for zombies,

it's a headshot for werewolves at silver. I think until a creature gains that Achilles heel, that gives humans, us weak little humans, the ability to take that monster down is not a real monster. My take on moonlight, I don't use moonlight as a cause or a trigger with transformation in, in Mongrel's. The reason for that is I was never able to conceptualize how if a full moon can trigger its transformation, why can't a half moon trigger half a transformation, why can't a quarter moon make your hand go hairy or something? I watch you in Al Jazeera, interview about the Native American traditions and reconfiguring them. And you were so articulate, it was an issue about Jackie Rowlands in this monster beast, you know, fantastic beast book. And she got a lot of the wolf stuff wrong.

And you very clearly said that there's a lot of cultural appropriation going on and they've got to let each tradition speak for itself. So in your own tradition, the black nation, there's not a wolf tradition, is there? If there is, I mean, there's not a man and a wolf tradition that I know of anyway. There could be one buried somewhere that I don't know about because I don't claim to know everything, of course, but I've never come across anything, no, which is why I don't wrap any of that in here, you know? Well, you also mentioned that there are all these Native stereotypes, you've got to keep fighting against. Here you are, a Native American writer. And yet your topic is horror and these delightful, wonderful things. And so how do people, do you have people having a hard time putting that together? They do, because people conceptualize or conceptualize is probably too nice, they stereotype all American Indians as like 19th century versions of ourselves with loincloths and living out in lodges on the plains and stuff, which I mean, I'm not disparaging that at all,

but that's not the way it is anymore, you know, we wear Levi's, you know, we live in houses. And so when they see us writing fiction or engaging stories that can't necessarily be used as a lens onto our culture for them, then that disturbs them a little bit. I feel like that disturbs people, the audience a little bit. And I think that's good, because you have to always be prodding the audience and waking them up, because if you don't, they fall asleep and their tastes, their sleeping tastes kind of inform the whole genre and shape it. And I think that's really dangerous, because we ourselves tend to be shaped by the narrative perceptions of ourselves, you know, I think. But we're speaking today with Stephen Graham Jones celebrating his new book, Mongols. And so one of the things that so charming, I'd never thought of this, it's just a very refreshing writer, you have in here the ways where wolves are dying these days and it's

not silver bullets and it's not, can you just mention a couple of them because I hadn't ever, it was a revelation to me. One of the big ways I think werewolves would die in our world today is if they start transforming behind the wheel of a moving vehicle, because steering wheels, gear shifts, brake pedals, they're not made for claws and paws and everything. And you're kind of fused, your fused is a lot shorter when you are werewolf too, so you make rash decisions and you wreck and there's all kinds of ways to die in a car for werewolves in another way that I propose that I think make sense. There's probably no way to prove it, but is if a werewolf is wearing pantyhose and that werewolf shifts into, and that human shifts into a werewolf, the pantyhose of course are going to stretch with the werewolf, which makes sense and it's going to be a funny kind of sleek looking werewolf on a floor half, but it doesn't matter because that werewolf can kill anybody who laughs at it, you know, but the problem comes when that werewolf shifts

from wolf back to human because the hair draws back into the skin for us and it's going to pull that nylon stocking back into the skin and that's going to effectively suffocate the werewolf and it's going to meld the skin and the nylon together such that they can't be extricated and that's a wound that you can't recover from and so you die a slow, long painful death, I propose. He would say one way to know that the werewolves are in town is there no more jeans at the goodwill? Exactly. That's the garment of choice. It is, it is because jeans rip away, they have seams, they go, and the jeans you get at goodwill are generally 80% through their life cycle so they're going to split a lot easier when you transform, you know. You've had all these awards, you're really a big name in the field of horror. This is not a field that I have ever entered into because I get scared, but they've asked you, you know, how do you measure your success and you've had people come up to tell you

that some of your stories have guided them through very dark times and their life really given them hope. Then you just say you flat out like to scare people. I do, yeah, I do. I think what draws me to horror is that with horror you can elicit a visceral response from a reader that that reader is not necessarily intending to give, you know, it's like jumping from behind a door and clapping and scaring, it's that kind of thing, you know. Because if I jump out from behind a door and scare you, you didn't walk into the room thinking, oh, I'm about to be scared, I'm ready to be scared, I'm willing to be scared, you know, it just happens. And that's the way it is with horror. I mean, when people read a horror story, they often will throw up their own defenses like, oh, you know, swamp monsters don't exist and there's no aliens and, you know, and I saw the boom mic there and that kind of stuff. But then the real test comes at three in the morning when they get up to get a glass of water from the kitchen and then they realize that that story has got under their skin. You know, and that's a, that's a response they didn't necessarily want to give. Well, you do in a way feed the paranoiac in all of this, you know, you hear that wrestling

at three in the morning and you wonder, that that's a paranoia that I think has served us well through our evolution. Yeah. Yeah. If the, the humans who survived from the Savannah were the ones who looked into that tall cops of grass and saw a lion face, even when their, what lion face wasn't there, if they saw it and moved camp or put up their defenses and they had a higher chance of surviving, you know. So I think that horror does serve our own survival in that way. It makes us more aware of our surroundings and of our neighbors, definitely. And it just makes us more careful like I used to be part of a zombie defense team, which trained people how to fight off zombies, of course. And I'm, is this just a literal team? It was a literal team. Yeah. We had martial arts people. It was a pretty fun affair. But when we go to places, we would explain to them that we know zombies don't exist. We're not trying to pretend zombies exist, exist. However, these tactics that we're teaching you to defend yourself against zombies are just as useful for in the morning and in a parking garage when somebody's stalking you,

you know. And that's what we want to get across. We want to, we want to, we want to be safe, you know, and that, that's the way we could make it fun for them to learn it, you know. Yes. So the wolf has gotten a lot of bad PR, and I'm just wondering, the plight of wolves today is so serious. A lot of farmers and ranches, and they just want to kill them all, not even the fact that they're endangered and their numbers are going to die out and they're going to become extinct. They're illified. They're hunting that we've got a wonderful wolf sanctuary here in New Mexico. But who's going to speak for the wolves? Who's going to give them good PR to say, this is an apex predator? The whole thing, there's a balance here and we're missing that. Yeah, I think who could speak for the wolf would be the yearling elk, you know, who can say he keeps the whole ecosystem healthier, you know, and in that healthy ecosystem, I can find food. You know, I'm not competing against six clones of myself for the same bite of grass, you know.

But yes, wolves are terribly maligned, definitely wolves. You know that the wolf that America likes is the wolf that's on a t-shirt that's on a blanket. You know, that's the same way it is with American Indians. They like us on t-shirts at truck stops. They don't like us at Kentucky Fried Chicken, you know. Yeah. But it's such a caricature. Yeah, that's what that kind of cultural appropriation you've fought against in your whole life. Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, American Indians, of course, were extremely sensitive to any issue of appropriation because we kind of had a whole continent appropriated away from us and language and dress patterns and governance, all kinds of things appropriated away. Things we probably would have shared. A lot of it we would have shared anyways, you know. But yes, so we are definitely very aware when we take note of our images being used in ways that we didn't, I don't know if the proof is the right word, but in ways that are kind of damaging when they come back to us, you know.

Well, there was a recent case where a fashion house was using Navajo designs and they were made to cease and desist. And in our state, our state symbol is a beautiful Native American symbol, a Zia symbol, the sun with the floor. And so we're now paying, you know, a nominal fee for the use of that symbol and it's been voted the most beautiful flag in the United States. It's such a powerful symbol. But some people appropriate without even noticing it and with a huge amount of disrespect. I agree. I agree. Yeah, it happens over and over and over. And the, I mean, we can resist it by making noise and saying, you know, give that back, don't do that like that. But really, I always think that the most authentic or effective form of resistance is to go out in the world and just be a person, you know, to be a writer who writes books and proves to the audience to the American readership or American, just American at large or the world that we're just, we're people.

We exist in the world. We don't exist. As you see us, we exist in our own right. You know, we have a voice. We say things that are stupid and smart and funny and terrible and everything, you know. I'm too often America, when they do get on the side of the American Indian, they tend to glamorize us and make us all noble and stoic and that's just as damaging, you know, just let us be people. That's what I'm always wishing for. And that's really what I've been doing with my werewolves and mongrels. I just, I want them to be, I want people who engage these werewolves to understand they're just people. They have this, yeah, they transform into wolves sometimes, but they're just people, you know. And the other aspect of that is for ourselves to make peace with the beast inside of us, the anoints out of us that's ravening to get out. Definitely. It wants to run, you know, with them. And I wonder if I didn't, you know, I've been meander at a big werewolf novel forever. I wonder if I didn't wait until now, until I'm 44 years old, because by now, after a lifetime I'm playing basketball, I've got so many knee and ankle and back surgeries and everything that I can't go at the pasture and run for three miles anymore, you know.

And so I have to do it on the page, you know. So if we could have the next best monster, the renaissance of werewolves, hopefully too, it would help the species themselves. That's really good. I'd not consider that. That would be a wonderful boon if werewolves get popular. Yeah. Yeah, there would change people's conceptions of the wolf, because what the reason ranchers don't like wolves is because they're really afraid they're going to commit, come eat all the first year calves, you know, of course. And, yeah, a few calves do go down, definitely. But if I understand correctly, there's funds in place that actually pays for the loss. Reverse them for the loss. No. And so what does it matter at that point? You know, I mean, the wolf's got a meal and the rancher got money. So. Well, you know, in the true sense of conservation, there's a conservative element that is not conserving that all these species have a place and the delicate balance is really, really fine.

It really is, yeah. So we're hoping for the renaissance of werewolves, but what is your next, and you teach this class? I do, yeah. And will you tell us your website, because the syllabus for your class is actually online? Yeah. My website is just stevengramjones.com. You can find me there. And yeah, I have all kinds of ramblings on there, of course, and links to a lot of stories. But the werewolf, of course, is so fun to teach. I've learned so much doing that. I think I've taught it three, possibly four times now. And every time I teach it, some student who's 20 years old out there will come to class like one out of six days and raise their hand and say, what about this? And I'll, I mean, I never thought of that, you know, I'm like a lot of the werewolf stories and associate administration with first werewolf change in that kind of makes sense. However, one of my students in my most recent werewolf course, he said, what about menopause? How does that affect werewolves? I have no idea. That's interesting. Now it's such cool stuff, and the stuff that I would not have considered myself. So it's wonderful to have a hive mind of 60 people in there, all on one subject.

It helps tremendously. Well, what's next for you? What's next for me is going to a lot of bookstores for mongrels, but as far as what I'm putting on the shelf next, I've got a new novel I just wrote, a big crime novel set in West Texas. You know, actually when I, when I moved to Colorado, the committee was interviewing me and they said, how is moving to Colorado going to change your fiction? When I said, I'll probably finally start writing about Texas and sure enough, since 2008, almost everyone in my novels have been in Texas. I needed that distance to be able to see back to Texas, I think. And so this next novel, Texas is burning, is set there in West Texas and the place I grew up. Yeah, growing up dead in Texas. Yeah. Well, I'm delighted. I look forward to that next book. Thank you. You are so prolific. What can you tell young writers out there are people who are struggling with the next chapter. You just sit down doing everything that happens. I mean, my biggest advice, I mean, the big advice is that same advice Stephen King gives

is just read all the time, you know, intake as much as you can from it. When I was a kid, living on my grandmother on and off, I would read through all her readers digest, all her national graphics, and I would be so desperate to read. I would go to the lazy Susan in the kitchen and spin it and wait till it stopped and get a soup can out and read the soup can label, put it back, spin it, read a bean can label. That's how I had to read so, so badly. But as far as writing and output, it's just about choices, I think. If you choose to write instead of watching TV or going to the bar or doing any of the 8,000 other distractions the world has to offer, then you can get a lot of words down, you know. It's all about hours spent in the seat with your hands on the keyboard. That's what it's about for me. I like to write the same way I like to read. We were talking about Harry Potter. When the goblet of fire came out, I was reading that in line at the bank. I was reading at the stoplight. I was reading everywhere. That's how I like to write throughout the day just all the time. Well I'm grateful for your writing and thank you for being with us today.

Thank you. It was such a great time talking to you. Yes. Our guest is Stephen Graham Jones and we're celebrating his new book, Mongrel's A Delicious Read. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. And I'm Lorraine Mills. With the audience for being with us today on Report From Santa Fe. We'll see you next week. Past archival programs of Report From Santa Fe are available at the website reportfromsatife.com. If you have questions or comments, please email info at ReportFromSatife.com. Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by grants from the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healy Foundation, Tau's New Mexico.