John Edward Lawson
D. Harlan Wilson

www.johnlawson.org

The first time I met John Lawson was at the 2001 Horrorfind conference in White Plains, Maryland. I was camped out at the bar of the Sheraton Hotel, hamming it up with B-movie star Robert Z’Dar, whose drunkenness put mine to shame. Robert kept going back and forth between the bar and the celebrity room where he was signing pictures of his mug. During one of his absences, John appeared and introduced himself. We didn’t talk for very long, but I liked him right away: he was tall like me, he sported my keynote outfit (jeans and a black T), he drank the scotch I bought him despite the fact that he had never drank a scotch before, and he was an emerging practitioner of Bizarro literature.

Since then John has gone on to father anthologies, story collections, poetry collections, novels, a small press — and a little boy named Ripley. He is also a Pushcart Prize nominee and recipient of the Fiction International Emerging Writers competition. Readers of The Dream People are of course familiar with John, the journal’s most recent emeritus editor along with wife Jennifer Barnes.

As the editor-in-chief of Raw Dog Screaming Press, John has garnered further acclaim, publishing some extraordinary authors, among them avant-pop guru Harold Jaffe, three-time Bram Stoker Award winner Mike Arnzen, Philip K. Dick Award nominee Steve Aylett, World Fantasy Award winner Forrest Aguirre, and Pushcart Prize winner Lance Olsen. Along with Eraserhead Press and Afterbirth Books, RDSP is a Bizarro powerhouse, and since its inception in 2002, the press has consistently grown in popularity and savoir-faire.

DHW: Juggling fatherhood and husbandhood with editing and writing doubtless keeps you on your toes. What does a day in the life of John Lawson look like?

JEL: There’s still a lot of bruising and swelling from all the recent surgery, but my days are looking better all the time. Being a father has worn me down, so I tend to sleep in until 6 in the morning, and go to sleep early — around 11 p.m. Jen usually watches Ripley until she leaves for work at 8, so I get a couple hours to catch up on e-mail, work on advertising, and handle other publishing-related stuff. Later, while my son runs around like crazy, I get some writing/editing done on my own work. Then, during his naps, I read and edit manuscripts from other authors; in addition to the RDSP manuscripts and submissions, I do a lot of freelance editing. When Jen comes home I cook dinner, take a cat nap, get the son to sleep, and spend the last couple hours doing work-related reading and stuff like this interview.

I know you started out in the music business before turning to writing. What was the name of your band? What kind of music did you make? Why did you break up?

We operated under the name Dead Letter Office. It was an industrial/goth/avant garde deal. There were some “side projects” as well, like POJO (Post Organic Jungle Outburst, improvisational dance weirdness) and Memory Without Pain (noise/death experimentation). That all lasted for about nine years, starting with five members but quickly decreasing to just Jen and I — we made a good team, and through technology we were able to create a massive, organic sound. I even had a recording studio for a while, Rack and Ruin Studios, but it all came to an end in July 1999. We had a small following of fans, mainly outside the USA, but music is way too expensive to finance yourself in the long term. By the second week of August, I had already decided to return to one of my former loves: screenplay writing. I had plenty of paper and pens, so it was a no-cost enterprise, unlike music and visual art. I still tinker with music every now and then, but neither of us regrets the decision to move away from it.

Why did you decide to go into the publishing business in addition to being a writer rather than just doing the latter?

It became apparent from the get-go that being a writer alone may not be enough these days. At least, not for somebody as impatient as I am. Nobody was publishing the kind of fiction I was interested in, you know, actually getting published. Plus it seemed to be a great networking opportunity; I had already started editing The Dream People, and some anthologies, both of which had provided me with buku connections. So it only seemed to be a natural evolution. Sometimes you actually can help yourself by helping others. Jen and I had been mulling over the move into publishing in early 2003, but then Carlton Mellick III came to us with the manuscript for 15 Serial Killers by Harold Jaffe, saying Eraserhead Press was a little backed up and would we like to take on this project? That was the catalyst. Three months later we were a full-fledged publishing company.

What are your goals for RDSP?

The company was established for the sole purpose of providing authors, readers, and booksellers an alternative. We focus on fiction that can’t be pigeonholed, has cross-genre elements, with high literary standards. The litmus test: would another publisher take this book on? Could they get away with it? If the answers are “yes” then the book should be published elsewhere. We do a lot of stuff that falls under the Bizarro umbrella, but we also handle a lot of nonstandard horror, science fiction, and fantasy, or literary novels that contain a small speculative element, postmodernists, whatever is too much for the other publishers. Another goal is to avoid the “small press” syndrome. We think of ourselves as independent publishers with indie authors, not small in either case, and continually expand our purview to include bigger things. If nobody is reading the books, why bother? Many of the “small” presses that don’t fold still have such a tiny readership that the authors will never be heard from. So, not only do we attempt to publish the “unpublishable,” we also want to take underground fiction to the “mainstream.”

What new authors can we expect to see from RDSP in the next two years?

There are a lot of people we’re excited about working with. We’ll be publishing Steve Aylett’s follow-up to LINT in a few short months. Additionally we’ve just put out Meat Puppet Cabaret by fellow British weirdo Steve Beard, who isn’t as well known here in the USA as Aylett, but is equally as potent. Two authors already known in postmodernist circles who are having their first books with us, publishing in early ‘07, are Larry Fondation and Eckhard Gerdes, both of whom take unique and daring approaches to subject matter that would be simply mundane in less capable hands. Additionally, there are plenty of brilliant authors in the forthcoming anthology Text:UR — The New Book of Masks, edited by Forrest Aguirre, including all kinds of award winners (including an O’Henry even). One of those authors is somebody we’ve admired for a while, Brian Evenson; obviously, Forrest is a big time pimp in the fantasy scene. There is a lot of other stuff in the pipe, behind the scenes if you will, but as no contracts are signed, I’ll just say we might be working with some musicians and visual artists in the near future. In the meantime, we’ve signed a number of our previous authors to new deals (Ronald Damien Malfi, Jeffrey Thomas, your own bad self) — why fix what ain’t broke?

What direction do you see the publishing industry at large taking in the next decade?

A sucky one, unless somebody rises up to stop them. With the deregulation of monopolies back in the 1980s came an unending series of crazy mergers, and all the arts have been handed over to the unfeasible profit-driven model. So movies, music, and books get worse and worse as bigger companies — able to absorb larger losses than their smaller counterparts — take fewer and fewer risks. Careers are no longer cultivated as long term investments; if your first release doesn’t become a smash success within six months of hitting the shelves, you’re done. In fact, it’s gotten so bad that fiction is largely being abandoned outside the mass market paperback format. The big New York companies admitted earlier this year that their average literary fiction title only sells 1,000 copies. That’s it. In a land of 300 million people, with libraries out the wazoo. Why? Because there’s rarely a marketing tie-in, or something that people are instantly already familiar with. That’s why nonfic is the dominant genre — a book on sandwiches has an instant recognition factor built in, and the author can be a guest on numerous morning shows cooking for the audience. How many morning shows would a fiction author fit in on? So the fiction authors are increasingly finding themselves restricted to self-publishing and online publishing. Not bad things in and of themselves, but I feel traditional publishing needs to thrive, don’t you? To that end we’ll see more author-owned publishing companies establishing themselves — I hope — not as self-publishing endeavors, but as creative/creatively run businesses.

Your most recent publication, a collection of poetry called The Troublesome Amputee, deals with, as Mike Arnzen says in his introduction to it, “lopped limbs and phantom feet.” Tell us about your inspirations and objectives for this work.

It goes back to my first poetry collection, The Scars Are Complimentary, really. It was a good collection but suffered from my artistic schizophrenia: people had an adverse reaction to horror, experimental, and straight literary poetry being mixed in together. In my second collection, The Horrible, I sought to reduce confusion by focusing only on the dark subject matter. The Plague Factory collection is my most experimental work. For my forth collection I wanted to do something that could fly as a full-length trade paperback, as opposed to being a chapbook like its predecessors, and housed all my styles in a single volume, but not in the chaotic fashion of The Scars. Therefore I tried a tactic developed as an editor of anthologies, and split it into thirds. Surgically divided by intent. Kind of like our country. The title poem is about the government’s handling of New Orleans during the Katrina disaster, and I felt it summed up the overall mindset of the book. We’re all missing something, and even if it doesn’t bother us it’s eventually troublesome to somebody, eh?

If you weren’t a writer or an editor or a publisher or a musician or an artist of any kind, what would you do for a living?

There would be few options open to me as I lack a college degree, respect for bullshit, and/or the backbiting laziness necessary to “make it.” I could run a booth insulting people at carnivals, or be a professional face-basher, or, more likely, do some minimum-wage manual labor type thing. In my heart of hearts I have lofty ideas about charity and politics, but here I am peddling filth that, no doubt, has corrupted many young peoples’ minds. I’d like to do something that could potentially “make a difference” and, although it hasn’t happened yet, art could make that happen. If not then perhaps you will see me entering low-level politics when I hit 40 (only eight years left to start “affecting” people with my writing, otherwise it’s stump speech time!).

Last year we drank absinthe out of a human skull together at the World Horror Conference. Was it everything you expected it to be?

The skull of that Tibetan monk wasn’t nearly as ... well, gruesome as one would expect. The absinthe, “black” absinthe I believe, was about ten times nastier than gasoline. I hadn’t been building up my expectations for a grand amount of time or anything, not like, say, maybe I started dreaming of absinthe-in-skull as a toddler, thinking, “One day, by the grace of the Almighty, I will achieve the impossible and drink it down in one swig!” I mean, I was a screwed up kid, to be sure, but let’s be real here. And please let me note, for the record, you have my complete and utter respect for drinking it twice — plus doing the white absinthe to boot! Both black and white in the same night! Martin Luther King, Jr. would be proud of you, man! We’re livin’ the dream, ebony and ivory ... (P.S. Next time let’s drink from a desiccated elephant trunk.)

Generally speaking, do you think authors nowadays are better writers than they used to be, say, 100 years ago?

Not necessarily better, just more free. The constraints that authors used to operate under are shattered, making us lazy. You know how hard those bastards worked back in the day? Doing everything by hand, having to stop and dip your quill in ink every other second? Living in fear that your work would be misconstrued as an attack on the establishment and you’d be sent to a prison (whoops — that still applies). For example, the sex scene in Notes from the Underground never happens. It’s barely even referred to, yet it is pivotal. If you’re not reading between the lines you won’t even know it happened. It took some wherewithal to persevere under such restrictions. That, and a heap of boring mundanity — those unimaginative dilettantes! But you know, in a hundred years, they’ll be talking the same smack about us. That’s why I sold my soul: not for some Dorian Grey vanity thing, but to stay alive and kick those whippersnappers between their tender sensibilities! Yes, even zombie intelligentsia can “keep it real in a roughneck Bizarro style, boy-eee.”

You write poetry, fiction, nonfiction and screenplays. What is your preferred venue?

To be honest, my fave modus operandi is sequential art (comic books). My first creative expression, long ago, was in the field of visual art. I still have the knack, but to be honest it just takes so long ... and the supplies cost so much ... versus what can be accomplished with a simple pen and pad of lined paper. Although, between you, me, and the Guantanamo Bay torturers, our printer just started doing full-color glossy interior printing. Soooo, I’ve been planning a series of graphic novels based on a story I’ve been developing over a decade (actually, two series both developed over the course of a decade, but one thing at a time). Screenplays are attractive because they only take a third as long to write as a novel, less sometimes, but it’s near impossible to get them made, even when you’re lucky enough to sell them. Nonfic I usually just do to get published, and poetry possesses me in short bursts, not long or steady enough to really sway me one way or the other. I guess, everything considered, fiction really does it for me, but these days I don’t have time to write anything longer than a short-short story.

In The Bizarro Starter Kit, a collection of stories and novellas from ten of the leading authors in the Bizarro genre, you define the type of writing you do as The Horrible. What does The Horrible entail?

The Horrible is ... a sexual congress between misanthropy and humanism. What else can I say? It is an honest portrait of human intent, dreams, action — in other words, the intangibles that make us what we are. This attempt to capture the feeling of reality, or what it’s like to exist I should say, can often only be completed through completely unreal means, resulting in surreal, antipodean landscapes and situations. Most people look at ugliness and see only ugliness. I look and see a way to beauty. We just need to dig through the ugliness. Naw mean? You can’t — while maintaining any measure of veracity — hide a dead body under your carpet and come back next week wondering what the smell is. The Horrible is a hook hand that snatches the carpet away, nothing more.

Rumor has it that your were recently contacted by the Weinstein brothers of Dimension Films about one of RDSP’s books. Care to comment?

Well, movie rights are on the table, with multiple companies, but since deals aren’t yet sealed I’d better keep my mouth shut. Until such time as we can make a public statement, go check out the uber cool Eyes Everywhere trailer at the RDSP site. Then buy and read the book. As you read, tell yourself it’s a movie. Soon enough your dreams may come true, and all good dogs do go to heaven, D. Harlan. They really do.

Tell us about your upcoming writing projects.

Well, I’ve got a collection of loosely related long fiction coming out soon, titled Discouraging at Best. It’s by far the most “real world” of my work, very humor-oriented and “literary,” with a brilliant intro by Kevin Dole 2. Also there’s the fourth anthology I’ve edited, The Wicked Will Laugh, featuring many great Bizarro, science fiction, horror, and dark fantasy authors. All the stories in that one are about the bad guy, the anti-hero, the monster. For 2007 you can expect to see Radiational Cooling (a Bizarro novella), Crimes Against Profanity (a freaky fiction collection), and Sin Conductor (my postmodern erotic horror novel) — all from RDSP and Two Backed Books. I’ve also got some mass market humor books that may or may not hit stores next year, and a Lovecraftian novel that may or may not be happening. Business deals are always uncertain for us writers, even after you’ve been paid, so we’ll wait and see what these other companies do with my work. Also, as I stated earlier, I’m working hard to develop multiple graphic novel series, with a goal of bringing them into print in late 2008/early 2009. One is a Twin Peaks-style dark action dramedy, and the other is a post-apocalyptic martial arts freakshow. Other long-term projects of mine include books two and three in my picaresque series, started with Last Burn in Hell, respectively titled Shame the Truth and First Burn in Heaven. Another novel, my absolute favorite project, has been simmering since early 2001, but is still only about 50,000 along (it’s a biggie, should be about 150-200,000 words when complete). The working title of that one is Static Skullcap and it’s basically two novels intercut with each other, making one complete book. I could go on, like about my insane collaborations with Perry McGee and Brutal Dreamer, among others, but let’s get on with things.

Lastly, who do you think was Jack the Ripper?

I was kinda hoping it was me, but then I read a great book called, I believe, The Diary of Jack the Ripper, which collected not only a recently-discovered diary from the time period, but also some pro/con essays regarding the authenticity/value of the diary in question. Fascinating and compelling stuff. This was actually this diary of a guy believed to have been a murder victim himself, in a case that took the Ripper out of the headlines — arsenic poisoning, for which his wife was hung. But as you can see in the diary the guy was actually addicted to arsenic, which was an over-the-counter drug back then, and the stuff was deteriorating his mind. Either he was batshit loony, or he really was the Ripper (contained details of another murder not credited to the Ripper). Or, it was that damned Rip Taylor, caught in the vice of degenerate confetti mongering.