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An interview with Michael Bishop
by Kilian Melloy
INTRODUCTION
Michael Bishop is principally known for his
speculative fiction, but to those familiar with his work it will come
as no shock that he is also a poet whose work has appeared in publications
as diverse as The Georgia Review and The Anthology of Speculative
Poetry (Volume Three). An early collection of his poetry, Windows
& Mirrors, epitomized the phrase 'slim volume,' being a chapbook
limited to a run of 100 copies; a more recent volume of Bishop's verse,
Time Pieces, had a somewhat larger printing. But there's a definite
flavor and touch of the poetic to Bishop's writing even when he's not
composing verse. Indeed, the virtues of poetry infuse his prose efforts:
his story-craft is disciplined, euphonous, with even his longer works
evincing a certain spareness and economy. Most mysterious is how Bishop
pulls a story from notional mist, seeming to create it before the reader's
eyes.
In the 2000 collection of four novellas, Blue
Kansas Sky, Bishop spins his long-form tales from a kind of magical
silk: a humming, unhurried, and gorgeously shapeful story is the end
result each time. The kinship between the novella Cri de Coeur and
the poetry that appears within the story in unmistakeable. In a kind
of haiku showdown, two characters, Gwiazda and Sharif, frame their observations
of the vast sky their ships move through, and sketch the universe, and
their place within it, in a scant few lines, but the effortless grace
of those stanzas echoes throughout the work as a whole. (Bishop recruited
another writer and poet, Geoffrey A. Landis, to supply Sharif's haiku.)
In the book's title novella -- nominated for the 2001 World Fantasy
Award -- no verse appears as such, but the imagery stuns. Bishop writes
of a boy entering adolescence, "Sleep he loved. He slept like a seed,
continually probing and reorienting throughout the night." Just that
simply, Bishop hits a multitude of nails on their heads: he nails the
character, the story's coming-of-age tone and theme, and especially
the very nature of adolescence. James Morrow, who wrote the collection's
Introduction, declares that the final line of Blue Kansas Sky
made him cry; one wonders how he got that far before shedding a tear
at the pure skill and intrinsic poetry evident on each page.
Bishop's new collection, Brighten to Incandescence,
repeats this astonishing trick over and over again in the course of
its seventeen selections.  "Thirteen
Lies About Hummingbirds" takes on an initially light-hearted courtship
and follows it through its first fresh, inventive throes of happy intimacy
and -- with a steadily darkening tone -- into a nightmare of visions
and supernatural menace. Turn by turn, the story's atmosphere chills
and suspense rises: how does Bishop do it?
"Chihuahua Flats" (available elsewhere in infinity
plus) accomplishes a similar feat, though this time leading the
reader not into ghostly horror, but rather through a tender love story
graced by devotion that survives to recur in a visitation from beyond
the grave. In the story, Bishop carefully creates a balance, and a creative
tension, between the mundane particulars -- he sells dog food, she runs
a Chihuahua farm; he falls in love with her green eyes and graceful
figure, she with his raw-boned earnest nature -- and the unlikely climax,
when a hovering shade (dressed up in a "haltertop, pedal pushers, and
a wavery cape") appears to the bereaved husband to offer him a source
of constant solace. Again, the exact method -- the specific locus from
which the story's conviction, and ability to convince, emanate -- is
somehow just out of sight, and yet present in each line.
There are a few stories in Brighten to Incandescence
that embrace familiar science fiction scenarios -- time travelers end
up as dinosaur food, leaving their children to fend for themselves in
"Herding With Hadrosaurs," while in "Murder on Lupozny Station," an
alien / human duo unravel a deep-space whodunit -- and there are a few
tales that flirt with the conventions of speculative fiction, to revealing
and self-satirising effect ("O Happy Day" is both a reversal of the
accepted order of things and a rueful rumination on the cornucopia of
life's frustrations and challenges that we like to call the rat race;
meantime, "Simply Indispensible" is probably the funniest Aliens-As-God
/ Aliens-Bring-Doomsday riff ever), but many of these selections defy
easy categorization. In "Sequel On Skorpiós," Bishop explores
the idea that Christ's death and resurrection were cleverly staged --
only to turn the plot on its head in miraculous fashion. "Tithes of
Mint and Rue" follows a former beauty as she flees the home town she's
grown oh-so-tired of living in and joins a carnival, with extraordinary
phenomena seeming to guide her way. And "The Tigers of Hysteria Feed
Only on Themselves" is a wonderful compound of plot and setting, combining
the uneasy psychology of horror with a sidelong look at American involvement
in Vietnam -- a ferocious combination in Bishop's charge.
Perhaps the most compelling of the seventeen
stories in Brighten to Incandescence is "Last Night Out," in
which Bishop ventures into perhaps the most alien of any alien realm:
the mind of one of the 9/11 terrorists, out for a final Earthly sojourn
(in a strip bar, of all places) on the eve of September 10. There are
many disquieting aspects and elements to this story -- the point of
view, the discord between the terrorist's 'holy' mission and the seedy
environment in which he finds himself, and -- most jarring, most fascinating
-- the seemingly cynical, almost paradoxical attitude of his fellow
terrorist, whose idea the visit to the strip bar is: "Good women are
obedient," the narrator's companion states, as women dance and titillate;
"Give them money and they'll do almost anything you ask." The so-called
clash of cultures has never resounded so mightily as in this short and,
in some ways, difficult work. It is a staggering accomplishment of imagination
-- and, strange to say, of compassion.
Michael Bishop consented to an interview via
email recently, in which he chatted about his new collection and its
attendant concerns, among them religious faith, art, and a smattering
of rock and roll.
THE INTERVIEW
Kilian Melloy: Your new collection,
Brighten to Incandescence, gathers works that have never been
included in a book of your stories before. In your Notes, you mention
that you and editor Marty Halpern selected the stories according to
their quality, and, to a degree, according to the whim of the moment.
If you could change the table of contents for Brighten to Incandescence
now, what would you leave out -- and what would you put in that didn't
get included?
Michael Bishop: Actually, I pretty much like
the collection as it stands. Marty Halpern had clear reasons for excluding
certain pieces from this volume, and I tried to inhabit his point of
view. For example, we did not include a story structured as a short
drama -- "Spiritual Dysfunction and Counterangelic Longings; or, Sariela:
A Case Study in One Act" -- because its format too closely resembled
that of "Help Me, Rondo," a deliberate cross between a short story and
a Hollywood screenplay. I believed that in a collection of the size
of Brighten to Incandescence this slight similarity would not
compromise either piece, but I agreed with Marty that "Help Me, Rondo"
represented the more substantial effort, and I was not at all averse
to giving way to his judgment. Let me note, too, that Marty put a good
deal of thought into the order that the stories should fall in the text,
weighing such matters as length, theme, tone, subject matter, and so
on, and I think that the collection benefits tremendously from the play
of contrasts and kinships evident in Marty's careful deployment of the
various pieces.
KM: Some of the stories have
been rewritten -- at least one of them fairly extensively -- for the
new collection. Is it a common practice to revise short fiction when
anthologizing?
MB: "Of Crystalline Labyrinths and the New
Creation," my homage to and pastiche of R. A. Lafferty's short fiction,
incorporates the most drastic revisions, almost all of them cuts. The
story was grossly self-indulgent before, embarrassingly so, but now,
after a severe line-by-line edit, I'm proud to lay claim to it again
and happy to see the new version in print. Whether revising stories
for publication in a collection is a common practice, however, I can't
say. Clearly, gathering stories for a collection presents the author
with a perfect opportunity to correct minor mistakes and to rethink
and presumably eliminate elements that may have subtly, or conspicuously,
marred the original version. Most of the changes that I made involved
smoothing out obvious infelicities of style and tightening both my expository
prose and my dialogue where they seemed insupportably slack. Still,
a lot of the tweaking was minor.
KM: What role did your editor
play in the revision of the stories? What does an editor actually do
for a project like this, anyway?
MB: Marty, insofar as the revisions went, pretty
much gave me the reins and let me run. But he is extraordinarily meticulous,
always asking questions about word choices, spellings, my preferences
in rephrasing an awkward or ambiguous sentence, and so on. In short,
he worked with me in almost exactly the same way that the late Jim Turner,
who founded Golden Gryphon Press after working for years for Arkham
House, worked with me on my three books for Arkham, Blooded on Arachne,
One Winter in Eden, and Who Made Stevie Crye? And I can't
think of higher praise than that. I understand from other writers who
have worked with Jim's brother, Gary Turner, that Gary is just as meticulous.
The books that they have produced at Golden Gryphon reflect this close
attention to detail and virtually shine as library-worthy artifacts.
KM: Given your occasionally
minimalist punctuation and deft hand at naturalistic dialogue, Marty
must possess a rapport with your writerly intentions that borders on
telepathy. I think you even mention in your Notes something about other
editors wrangling with you over punctuation issues.
MB: Actually, that doesn't happen often. Ed
Ferman wanted me to place quotation marks around dialogue that I had
inserted into the text naked, so to speak, and I complied because I
was a young writer and didn't care to jeopardize a sale by insisting
on my own way. Marty doesn't make that many suggestions, if I'm remembering
this aright, about changes for my dialogue, and I don't think either
one of us feels particularly "telepathic." We just do a lot of careful
communicating, and he instigates the bulk of it because he is so careful
about scrutinizing both my manuscripts (or e-mailed documents) and the
proofs that we get back from Golden Gryphon's typesetter.
KM: How did you develop such
a down-to-earth style of dialogue while avoiding a forced or artificial
feel?
MB: Listening to people talk, and registering
the way they talk, is a key. Recently, Jeri and I visited the small
North Georgia town of Ellijay (which crops up in a poem by the late
James Dickey), and we entered a dress shop in its business district
because the shop is called Jeri's, and we seldom encounter the name
"Jeri" exactly as my wife spells it. The woman running the shop willingly
spoke to us about her business. She admitted that she was not the Jeri
for whom it had been named. The shop had previously belonged to a woman
named Geraldine, who had decided to call the place Jeri's (instead of
Geraldine's or Geri's) because the spelling struck her as unusual and
presumably more memorable. She then told us about how she had been working
for an automobile dealership in town, but wanted a new occupation because
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