This interview with Gary Mawyer follows the release of his book of epic short stories, Dark Trails, a re-release of a previous volume, Dark. It is also a continuation of “Supernatural Fiction Creates the Intruder,” an interview Lillian Howan did with Gary in which he memorably said,
I like the idea of familiar workaday worlds and nearly-indecipherable "other worlds" on adjacent tracks and sometimes crossing paths. This idea seems to me to correspond with experience and it's just a coincidence that it's also good for stories. Of course the very strange isn't confined to the deep woods. Cities and towns include corners or turnings that lead "off the map." Part of my hope for these stories is to convey the further idea that maplessness is OK. We need our maps. We perhaps cheat ourselves a little if we shy away from the map edges, though. The stories in Dark are meant to encourage and amuse, mainly. I don't mind an occasional chill. We need chills. But I see these tales as affirmations that the immense web of correspondences making up our worlds is deep, old, and strong, while our human maps of reality are cultural maps.
We caught up with Gary as he hovered between dusk and evening, gazing into the stream of nearly forgotten moments and past deeds. As always, his answers to our feeble questions displayed uncanny abilities of wise enrapture and profound enchantment.
Feelings emerge from the heart and thoughts from the mind. Does this seem true for you?
Edited in Photoshop, an old snapshot of Gary’s desk.
I struggle with that concept. Some of my favorite thoughts are feelings and some of my favorite feelings are thoughts. Maybe I’m quibbling, because I do feel some distinction between emotions and reasoning; a piece of music (for instance) might evoke what clearly seem to be feelings whereas a piece of historical writing may evoke narrative connections with other related histories. Thoughts quickly become narrative, and music seemingly does not. But music is mathematically constructed. Music’s emotive quality is a structure as orderly in some ways as language. Some of the apparent distinctions between feelings and thoughts may not hold up under closer examination.
Do you include friends, family and acquaintances in your work?
Yes and no. I don’t write about my family. I consider my family’s lives private. I consider friends and acquaintances fair game. Friends provided many of the elements for the stories in Dark Trails. Exemptions, likewise, was largely drawn from the experiences of friends as well as mine from 1969 to 1970. It’s always been the case that some friends recognize their own experiences being quoted and others do not. Experience is subjective and angular. Many people take their own experiences too lightly to recognize them later. We do not always believe the things that happen to us.
Has aging affected your writing?
I’m not yet shockingly old. I’m only in my seventies. Even so, that was enough to see three or four distinct American sub-civilizations come and go. It’s enough to change anybody’s writing. In youth what I was doing had no ulterior purpose. The older stories in Dark Trails reflect that. They are stories of amazement.
In mid-life I wrote more seriously, with purpose or need. Shad River for instance was intentional—a social or societal novel. Every Shad River version, including the two Rockfish predecessors, was meant to affect the thought and beliefs of readers by the medium of the historical novel, addressing grandiose topics like race, sex, religion, war, the ideals of the American Revolution. The different versions reflect my changing theories of what might best put it over in a thirty-year project, forty if you count a lost set of short stories, “Ten Rockfish Tales.” A failure as the world goes and yet needed more than ever as the American empire collapses around us. I knew my part. Sometimes you have to stand alone. That’s one of the lessons of aging.
As Karen, my wife, told me after recent travel disasters, I’m not an adult anymore. I’m an elder. I’m officially old and my former purposes seem quaint. The follies of youth are a cliché, and the follies of maturity ought to be. We sit by the river of time as all the elements of the world we once knew float past. Eventually we ourselves float past, and as you watch yourself disappearing downstream around a distant bend in the river, you can only ask where that supposedly leaves you in time and space. Attempts to answer that question, with the help of my co-author Edward Mawyer, led to the world of Macaque as described in The Adventures of Reese Macaque, Private Investigator. The future remains by far the most interesting thing, as it always was.
Personal and professional experiences: are there tinctures of irony and bitterness in your writing, or are these invented?
They’re invented. I’m incapable of irony.
Seriously, irony seems to be part of the structure of reality. I’ve been extremely lucky, personally and professionally, but the people around me have always graciously provided a wild zoo of misadventure. Professional environments are particularly rich in brick-wall stupidity, goofiness, and surreal experiences. The bitterness of others is great material because people like schadenfreude; even very kind and compassionate people smile at the schadenfreude of others.
Other people’s mishaps added to the Dark Trails stories throughout. Dark Trails includes stories set in the 1970s or as recent as a few months ago. They all include unexpected happenings and uninvited meetings with questionable consequences. I’ve been fascinated with such things for fifty years.
The unanticipated outcome, or reversal of expectations, is also the mainspring of comic writing and even of the humble yet majestic language entity, the joke. As Dorothy Sayers observed in the foreword to her immortal 1929 short-story omnibus, the line is very faint between tales of crime and detection and tales of horror and the supernatural. The line is just as faint between horror/supernatural tales and comedies, both requiring unanticipated outcomes or reversals of expectations, one of the definitions of what constitutes a joke. I emphatically see myself as a comic writer, but the stories in Dark Trails are natural crossovers into tales of the uncanny.
My comic novels also describe unexpected meetings and questionable outcomes. I mentioned Exemptions, about the perils of hanging out with the very best of the wrong people, and The Adventures of Reese Macaque scarcely needs to be spelled out in this context. The Southern Skylark also has mishap as its practical subject, a topography of unfortunate outcomes across which the protagonists struggle from one spot of bad luck to the next, like an Irish novel. Suppose life was like that. It’s something to think about.
Among the things you have pursued—books, antiques, mosaics, painting—is there anything that leaves you unfulfilled?
In 1983, as a freshly minted MFA looking for a job, I had had three years’ experience as a proofreader at the old Michie Company Law Publishers, reading state and city codes and court reports, and a year as a Hoyns Fellow writing footnotes in the basement of the Alderman Library. I wound up at the Urology Department in the Medical School, redacting the Investigative Section of The Journal of Urology, the pre-eminent international journal in the field. Redacting is the term medical editors used in those days for what would now be called page editing. The MFA was still regarded in those early days as a potential teaching degree, so I had no reason to think I would stay long at Urology. Little did I know I would still be doing incidental copy for the Journal of Urology thirty-plus years later and ultimately retire from the department.
In between I worked for other journals, including stints as the Managing Editor of the tiny but prestigious World Journal of Urology, Editor of the Virginia Transportation Research Council, Executive Secretary of the Wound, Ostomy and Continence Nurses Society, and Managing Editor of JWOCN as my last gig before retirement. I also edited books, including the annual Year Book of Urology and the massive Adult and Pediatric Urology, faculty publications, and an incalculable number of grant applications. I developed a career on the side in freelance medical editing, primarily for Japanese, Chinese, and Taiwanese clients. My specialty ultimately became molecular biology, and I still have a couple of clients even now.
Dover, my father, was not a rich man and had a severe addiction to antiques and art objects. It manifested while I was still an infant. The only way he could handle the treasures he craved was to acquire them for resale. I was indoctrinated into the world of looking for antiques before I was old enough to know where I was. As a child I sold Cokes for a nickel apiece out of an ice bucket at country auctions where Dover clerked for the auctioneer. I grew up surrounded by art and antiques, though nearly all of it was destined to be sold promptly to provide Dover funds for more antiques. It was a good apprenticeship in art and artifacts.
Dover was also a painter, self-taught, who frequently drove to the National Gallery in D.C. to look at the brushwork of the old masters. I always went along. At home, while Dover painted, I would sit across the room at a tin TV tray and paint little childish landscapes of my own as Dad talked about his beliefs and his artistic prejudices. Dover had as many artistic prejudices as Ruskin. Strangely, though his painting was immaculate, he ceased to paint and began a career on the side restoring paintings. He expertly repaired many a battered old oil.
I kept painting for several years—my expectations were much lower. Married, Karen and I lived in small apartments, and when the kids began to arrive, the messiness and toxicity made painting impractical. I painted whimseys from time to time, including three of the four walls of a kid’s bedroom—one of my more concerted efforts. Decades passed and I continued to hoard paint and painting supplies. Now I’m back with a big pile of supplies. Weirdly, though, assemblages in glass, tile, shell, and crystal are what come out, not paintings. Maybe mosaics—I can’t say. I foresee ending where I began, in oils. My goal is fun and I’m enjoying this hugely.
You are a fan of Japanese Art.
Yes, I am an outright anime fan. I’m also a big fan of Japanese woodblock prints, a tradition that led me straight to anime. Japanese art traditions treat light, shadow, and color somewhat differently from western traditions. Western artists were startled by the boldness and freedom of Japanese coloration when the first Japanese woodblocks reached the west. The same happy freedom with color is vividly alive in anime.
A question in all painting is “where is the light coming from?” Old art in the West often has the same shadowless background field that much Japanese art retained into modern times. Later, as Western art developed an obsession with naturalistic perspective, light and shade became things the painter needed to define. Traditional western painting includes a point where illumination originates, and the shading in the painting follows naturalistically. By comparison the woodblock and sumi-e traditions preserved “the light of eternity,” which does not cast shadows. If a shadow appears, it too is objective, rather than an absence or diminution of light. Indeed, in woodblock prints, buildings may be shown from a high angle as roofless interiors, so the inside and outside can be viewed simultaneously.
When twentieth-century western painting, particularly in the abstract schools, returned to shadowless light or the treatment of shadows as things, this was in some measure the result of contact with Japanese art, but it wasn’t new. Giotto, for instance, painted shadowless light. In Japan, experiments with luminous suffusion, where the subject platonically provides its own light, continue very freely in the cultural mainstream, for instance Takashi Murakami’s Superflat school, Kaikai Kiki, and anime. Superflat also hints at another potential light source inside paintings: the viewer. If the viewer is the source of the light, the shadows are hidden. I think I’ll just risk saying that the esthetic of shadows and negative space in Japanese art is a thing unto itself.
Please say something about the effect of your professional work on your writing.
Another tough question. My feelings about this are complex. I spent over thirty years in medical editing, and I still have private clients though I retired ten years ago. In 1983, as a freshly minted MFA looking for a job, I joined the Urology Department in the UVA Medical School, redacting the Investigative Section of The Journal of Urology. Soon I was producing a column on scientific writing, “Investigative Grammar” (recently scooped up along with the rest of my work by Anthropologie without compensation as part of the training of their AI language model). I saw an era of medical revolution, from lithotripsy and Viagra to evidence-based medicine, laparoscopy, and robotic surgery, tremendous advances in the study of hormonally controlled cancers, and the birth of molecular biology. I could never walk away. Journal work included stints as Managing Editor of the tiny but prestigious World Journal of Urology, an interlude in engineering as Editor of the Virginia Transportation Research Council, and a return to Investigative Urology. My last long gig before retirement was Managing Editor of the Journal of Wound, Ostomy and Continence Nursing. Aside from journal work, a textbook avalanche included the annual Year Book of Urology, the massive Adult and Pediatric Urology, and numerous other titles along with my own growing side career of freelance papers and grants. I never intended for any of this to happen. Hope I’m not quoting Jack the Ripper when I say that.
What affected my literary writing: international exposure to many editors and science writers, some good, some bad, and some terrible. I worked with authentically great editors. I may have learned just as much from the absolute worst. My job provided continuous intellectual stimulation—at least a few new things every day—and the gratification of seeing clinical and research changes take root and grow, affecting the lives of whole categories of patients. It was fun to watch young researchers begin as postdocs and wind up as professors and lab heads. There wasn’t nearly enough time to fit everything in. Only Plutarchan levels of discipline made all this possible. Come to think of it, I had a wonderful career.
The effect on my writing: you know my books, and you also know I write by redrafting, so each book fronts for much more than its weight in backstory. On the career side, everything I touched bloomed. I had nothing I needed to ask for. A bee is a hairy stinging insect whose food and shelter inadvertently produce what Jonathan Swift called sweetness and light. The effect of medical editing on my writing—my final answer—food and shelter, but not without sweetness and light. Then I retired and was finally able to stop being a bee and become what I always wanted to be—a solitary wasp.
Photograph by Alan Mawyer. More of Alan’s photography can be found at Vice-Versa.