Interview Update: July 1999
Q: So, Shirley, you've won some awards now -- most notably the Bram Stoker -- does this make any real difference in your life as a writer?
Q: How about an update on the screen/TV work?
A: I'm finally finished with Strontium Dogs for Showtime (and foreign theatrical distribution), an adaptation of the comic book about a rebellion of oppressed mutants. I've always identified with oppressed mutants. I'm supposed to write a script called Weapon Zero, another cable movie, about good and bad aliens, also based on a comic book. I've been hired, but the producers have to secure the rights before I can really plunge into it. Maybe most significantly I'm redrafting the script for the pilot of Redstone, a TV series I've created for the FX Channel (Fox on cable). It's about a guy who discovers a vast secret organization -- one that's sort of absorbed his fiancee. The show'll feature new goth bands, performance artists, and be directed by the newest (but still professional quality) directors I can get. If I have my way, it will be a very street-level, underground flavored show. But -- although FX commissioned the script -- it's a ways from getting greenlighted for a season. These things take time. If the show goes I'll not only be creator and head writer, I'll be executive producer...Numerous versions of the good ol' Washington Irving tale, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," will be appearing soon. There's a Hallmark TV show and Tim Burton's movie, of course, is the "big" one, but I wrote a humbler computer-animated version. The story has been changed somewhat, but not disagreeably. My version will be on Fox, Halloween 1999. The story is in the public domain (so no one has to buy the rights) and has "name recognition value" --hence these things get made. I'm planning a spec adaptation of a Poe story -- also in the public domain!
Q: How about the music?
A: I've written new songs for the Blue Öyster Cult -- whose most recent album, Heaven Forbid, has eight of ten songs with lyrics by yours truly. And I wrote some new stuff for the punk band DC Moon, down in Alabammy. I'm planning to start a bay area band that covers ONLY tunes by Iggy and the Stooges with myself as lead singer (skeptics check out my Red Star CD) and then will eventually ease into original material. I also have about another CD's-worth of original material recorded to release, much of it recorded with Tony DeStefano. The music with DeStefano is electronica with a lot of guitars, but it doesn't sound much like a lot of the electronica/mix/dance stuff that's out there -- though I respect all that stuff. (I like Moby, for example, but what I'm doing ain't much like Moby.) I guess what I tend to do is counter-intuitive to what would be commercial-cutting-edge, but I don't care, I do it by feel. For me, as soon as my intellect -- which I use heavily in writing fiction, along with the subconscious and my artistic capacities, such as they are -- as soon as conscious thinking enters into music, for me, that's when I screw it up. I sing by feel, I find the groove by feel. Lyrics are the most intellectual part of the process but they're just as much about the expression of the unconscious. John Hammond, Sr. believed there was a real songwriter in me, and though I blew that chance, I can't give up songwriting. On my gravestone I want it to say John Shirley, Storyteller and Songwriter. That's what feels right.
Q: I never asked this, but if people visiting this site could go away with one thing, what would it be (other than an obsessive desire to buy Shirley books, etc.)?
A: Other than, perhaps, encouraging curiosity about my fiction and music, I guess I'd hope they leave with another, helpful perspective. With luck they'd get closer to finding out "what condition their condition is in"--and I'd hope they'd find that in nonfiction pieces like The Selling Of Dehumanization, Political and Corporate Censorship in the Land of the Free, and The Shadows of Ideas: A Distant Glimpse of Gurdjieff.
©1999 Paula Guran
Original Interview: January 1996
Interview Update: December 1996
Interview Update: January 1998
Interview Update: January 1999
©1999 Paula Guran
A: It's too early to say for certain -- but probably not. My stuff is still too outré in most quarters. But any writer likes encouragement and recognition. It lets him know he's on the right track with at least some people some of the time. I would like to be really cool and disavow awards, but, of course, they please me. I'm too cool to be cool. Or is it uncool to be too cool to be cool? Anyway, you can't write "toward" awards. Ultimately I just try to write what seems meaningful and true -- that is, I try to write short stories and novels that, along with entertaining, express metaphorically or directly something true and new about the human condition, or that reveal something happening in some dark corner of the world that, like it or not, we need to shine light into. People who bitch about writers who tell stories about the dark side forget that in order to tell a story about darkness, one has to bright light into that darkness. I think of it as bringing what is hidden into the light; not bringing darkness into the readers' world. So if in that process I excite readers and colleagues enough that they want to chuck an award at me, that's extra, that's a bonus... as long as they're not throwing it at me while my back is turned.
