Kelly Link and Gavin Grant in North Carolina

Early last week I received an invitation from my friend Dale Bailey, a professor at Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, NC (and an excellent writer), to attend last Thursday night's public reading of "Monster" by Kelly Link, this semester's writer-in-residence. I'd met Kelly and her husband Gavin very briefly at the World Fantasy Convention in D.C. a couple of years ago, and I was eager to get a chance to make a more durable connection. More than that, though, I wanted to see Dale again; I'd last seen him at that very same convention, and although we'd emailed sporadically in the meantime, I looked forward to a chance to sit down and talk face to face again.

Dale and I were roommates at Clarion (1992, I think), and hit it off pretty well; although we see each other rarely, it always seems as though very little time has elapsed. We seem not to have to expend any effort reacquainting ourselves with one another, falling into the old comfortable patterns pretty easily. Now that I'm living in North Carolina again, I hope to maintain much more frequent contact with him.

Kelly and Gavin are wonderful people, as you might imagine. If you've read their writing (and if not: who are you? what are you doing here?), you know that it's intelligent, layered, and suffused with good humor. They are much the same way in person. For a writer who has been called "the future of American fiction," Kelly is refreshingly down to earth. Gavin is both affable and witty, though I got the impression his humor can be extremely cutting when he wants it to be. Despite being virtually buried by obligations (from what I could gather, one or both are immediately engaged in: teaching two classes at the college; working on the fantasy overview essay for the nineteenth volume of The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror; editing a manuscript for a Small Beer Press collection of Alan DeNiro's short fiction; and keeping up with the regular chores inherent in running both the Small Beer Press and their 'zine, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet), they spent the afternoon with Dale and me, and hosted the two of us -- along with a few of Dale's students -- for some beer and shoptalk in their apartment after Kelly's reading.

I took two things away from this meeting, both of which I'm going to have to mull over for a bit before I write much about them here. One came from a brief exchange with Kelly. I was orating tediously about my decision to abandon the genre in the mid-nineties, shortly after making my first professional sale ("She Found Heaven" to F&SF). I mentioned that the writing I had done for a while afterward had been mainstream. Kelly asked me if I'd felt that I had to consciously keep the fantasy out of the stories, and without hesitation I said, "Yes." It occurred to me almost immediately afterward that that wasn't true. I had conditioned myself to accept it as truth, which is why the answer came so readily; but it didn't feel right. My hang-ups with genre are long past; but I realized then that I'm kidding myself if I believe that the overtly fantastic is a natural part of my idea process. I have some thoughts on this, which bear directly on the pieces I'm working on now ... but give me another couple of days before I try to write them down.

The other thing came from an exchange with Gavin about horror fiction. Gavin makes no secret his general distaste for horror. When I questioned him about this, he challenged me to come up with examples of good horror writers who do not conform to genre norms (I don't think he doubted their existence; I think he just wanted me to give some solid basis to my viewpoint). I was stunned to find myself at a loss for ready names. I came up with Conrad Williams and Peter Straub then, but I found myself utterly incapable of mounting a credible challenge to his apathy. Now that I've had time to think about it, I could come up with a few more names for him -- Laird Barron is an obvious one, as well as Glen Hirshberg and Michael Marshall Smith -- but precious few. Damnably few, actually. And that recalled to me a long-standing, rather amorphous discomfort I've had with the idea of horror as a genre. One could come up with excellent reasons to exclude most of those names from a straight-up "horror" tag. I've blathered on vaguely about this in the past, to little practical effect, so that's another one to think about for a few days.

So: more to come.