We're so happy to feature an interview with Jeff VanderMeer! His book, Annihilation, is included in our Essential List of the 25 Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books of the 21st Century (So Far).
Who are the authors you look to for inspiration?
Early on, writers like
Angela Carter,
Jorge Luis Borges,
Italo Calvino,
Katherine Dunn, and
Vladimir Nabokov topped the list. My dad loved
Vonnegut, so I had those novels to read, too, although I appreciated Vonnegut more than loved him. Then I discovered Deborah Levy’s
Beautiful Mutants, along with the Surrealists, including
Leonora Carrington and Decadent-era writers, followed by
Amos Tutuola,
Silvina Ocampo, Ben Okri’s
The Famished Road and a bunch more cool stuff, including
Alasdair Gray and
Samuel R. Delany. I was also always reading poets voraciously, including the amazing nature poet
Pattiann Rogers. I went through a phase of devouring everything from
Roberto Bolaño, and narrative technique in
2666 was useful for writing
Dead Astronauts.
Lately, I’ve been influenced by
Lidia Yuknavitch and
Charles Yu quite a bit, and I mention them together because they’re both very experimental, but in completely different ways. They’re also both fearless, and this is quality I admire in writers — a quality shared by another inspiration,
Olga Tokarczuk. But, then, so was
Daša Drndic — and I will never not be inspired by her utterly unique and brave novels. More people should know her work. Not to mention Richard House’s monumental and underappreciated
The Kills. Karen Lord’s
Redemption in Indigo, with such a playful and intricate structure has also been an inspiration.
Despentes has become a new favorite as well and I’m always interested in what
Rachel Cusk and
Colson Whitehead are doing.
Is there a young, upcoming author you’re really enthused about?
There are quite a few, several of whom now have three or four books out, so it feels like it might insult them to call them up-and-coming. So I’ll go with Gus Moreno and his debut
This Thing Between Us, which understands grief and compassion very well while also demonstrating a rather complete knowledge of the horror genre — all kinds of horror. Definitely a highly recommended debut.
When did you realize you were a writer?
I can’t really remember a time when I wasn’t a writer, to be honest, and started out as a poet, mostly. But I did kind of come to the realization in college that writing fiction was the main thing I wanted to do. A poem that made me understand this — written in my astronomy class. I got a D in the class at the University of Florida, in part because instead of studying for a key test I wrote a long poem based on some of what we’d been taught, titled “Four Theories of Earth-Moon System Formation.” The poem got published in
Amazing Stories and was a finalist for an award.
But, after that, I realized everything I was doing other than writing fiction was just fodder for the fiction, and I adjusted my college experience accordingly. I stopped pursuing a journalism degree, loaded up on history and English classes, and then dropped out after my junior year to get first a bookstore job and then a tech editing job, which allowed me to write on the side. I recall getting D A D as grades my last semester, as my goals were to use the information for writing, not pass the classes, and presented it to my dad, joking it was intentional to honor him. Not being impressed, he made me watch a snake eat a toad in the backyard that evening and not intervene. But, you know, ultimately, that was a sound decision. Snakes gotta eat, and that detail later went into a novel.
But, you know, ultimately, that was a sound decision. Snakes gotta eat, and that detail later went into a novel.
|
What does your writing workspace look like?
Like a slab of wood and a series of holes. I’m one of those writers who must spread out and see everything I’m working on, including research materials. So for the new house, I bought a bookcase that’s just holes so I could store stuff but still see it. Otherwise, the entire floor would be covered in papers and notecards. This is the least messy I’m capable of — photo from early in the interior design process. Similarly, I had a mural by my artist friend Scott Eagle put in to, again, stop me from putting a bookcase or something else up against the far wall. The mural is very calming to me and the whole office is very conducive to writing.
How much and what types of research do you do while writing?
I prefer to do research, for most novels, years before I write the novel. I’m obsessive about subjects I’m interested in, so I will do a very deep dive and I want all of that to steep in my subconscious, so that by the time it comes out, it’s very organic. I have a firm belief that if I don’t remember a bit of research, it’s not worth putting in a novel, so I don’t go back and review notes, for example. For my noir fantasy
Finch, I even purposefully got a job reviewing mysteries and noir for
Publishers Weekly a couple of years before I knew I’d have time to work on that novel, and that experience was invaluable — because you encounter and have to engage with a wide range of books you wouldn’t have picked up just browsing in a bookstore. And, frankly, sometimes it makes more sense to let an expert handle it. For example, for
Hummingbird Salamander, Dr. Meghan Brown created the imaginary hummingbird and salamander in the novel and everything about those to critters is better and has more depth because of it.
I’m obsessive about subjects I’m interested in, so I will do a very deep dive and I want all of that to steep in my subconscious, so that by the time it comes out, it’s very organic.
|
Share a sentence of your own that you're particularly proud of.
Authority, the middle novel of the Southern Reach, has had a polarizing effect on readers, but I still think it has some of my best sentences and scenes in it. “A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle” I’m proud of, for sure. Also coining the term “rhinocerocrutian” in
Authority, but also sentences like this one. Not showy or profound but really enlivening the texture of the novel:
“If you quacked like a scientist and waddled like a scientist, soon, to non-scientists, you became the subject under discussion and not a person at all.”
What do you want your readers to take away from your books?
Something of the beauty and horror of the world, and the messiness of humans in their relationships and in our institutions. Just all the teeming complexity of everything and the interconnected nature of everything.
÷ ÷ ÷
Jeff VanderMeer is either (a) a baby raccoon, (b) a noted curmudgeon, or (c) the award-winning, best-selling author of fourteen novels, including the Southern Reach Trilogy, the first of which,
Annihilation, won the Shirley Jackson Award and Nebula Award and was made into a movie by Paramount. Other novels include
Borne,
Dead Astronauts, and his most recent,
Hummingbird Salamander. He lives on the edge of a ravine where he has spent the past four year rewilding his yard. Recent nonfiction includes his long essay on the tragedy of Florida’s environmental woes, for
Current Affairs magazine.