In conversation with J. R. McConvey
We spoke with 2020 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize nominee J. R. McConvey and author of the short story collection Different Beasts on the books that have guided him as a writer of fantastical short stories.
What books were important to you as a child?
My Grade 1 teacher gave me a pop-up book called Goblins by Brian Froud. He’s an illustrator who did a lot of the character design for the Jim Henson films Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. It’s about a pair of characters who roam a forest, and where they only saw mushrooms, you’d manipulate the pop-up tab and up would pop a goblin. That was a book that interested me early on in the idea that things aren’t always what they seem. It pointed me in a direction as a child towards fantastical things.
I also loved The House With a Clock in its Walls by John Bellairs and all of his Lewis Barnavelt and Johnny Dixon mysteries. As well as The Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper, and A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.
But I also loved the mysteries of Eric Wilson, like The Ghost of Lunenberg Manor. Very Canadian stuff.
As I developed tastes for more complex literature, that led me to The Hobbit and Frankenstein.
Is there a book that sparked the idea that this is something you could do, too?
I don’t know if it was so much books showing me what I could do as much as it was books showing me a world I recognized.
There are books I read as a teenager that really shaped how I thought about writing. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles has such a strange narrative structure. And Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino too, the way he catalogues these fantastical places as Marco Polo describes them to Kubla Khan.
It sounds like you were set to write fantastical stories from the start.
I’ve always been excited by books that point to new possibilities for what can be done in literature, like an adult fairy-tale I love called In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell, and monumental books like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.
When I read Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, that gave me a sense of where I fit in the landscape of fiction. I felt like that book gave me permission to embrace my interest in writing about the fantastical, and to see myself as a genre writer. I felt like a door had been opened to a room where I belonged.
Are there books that you felt helped you write the stories in Different Beasts?
Some books are like spiritual guides, like Kafka’s The Castle or Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground, and they’re kind of always with me. But writing these stories I took on atmospheric influences through contemporary short story collections like Adam Johnson’s Fortune Smiles, The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt, and a novella called Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera. I couldn’t say how exactly, but their work has almost definitely seeped in.
I’m often consciously trying to emulate Brian Evenson; I’d be happy to be a pale imitation of him as a writer.
With the story “Pavillion,” there was a point in one of its many mutations where I decided to fit it into the “Cthulu mythos” of H. P. Lovecraft, which is less about influence than figuring out how to add to an existing universe, and grow it like a strange fungus.
Different Beasts: Stories
Winner of the 2020 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Speculative Fiction
The twelve stories in Different Beasts ask what it means to be both human and monster. Shape-shifting waifs, haunted stuffies, scavenging drones, insectoid demon-gods, and mutant angels all come to life in this wildly imagined debut. As do broken soldiers, disgraced politicians, tired parents, ogres and children, opportunists, and desperate survivors — human beasts each struggling with the animalian aspects of their nature.
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