James Warner writes, organizes the reading series InsideStorytime, and helps organize our very own Lit Crawl. He is also the author of the novel All Her Father’s Guns.
See him live October 9 at Dangerous Dolls, Bad Men & Smoking Guns: A Night of Noir & Burlesque.
1. What is your favorite book?- I’ll go with Labyrinths, an anthology of Borges stories that blew my mind when I was a teenager. That book proves the short story is capable of anything.
- 2. Who is your favorite writer?
- Samuel R. Delany.
- 3. If the answers to 1 & 2 are different, why?
- Sheer contrariness and cantankerousness on my part.
- 4. How old were you when you were first published?
- When I was about eight, a poem of mine appeared in Cricket, a kids’ magazine that has cartoons of insects in the margins. I don’t subscribe to it anymore, but I still think more magazines should have cartoons of insects in the margins.
- 5. What writing style do you most abhor?
- I don’t think any style is abhorrent in itself – what matters is what a style accomplishes in a particular context.
- 6. What is your favorite writing cliché?
- It was a dark and stormy night. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Winter is coming.
- 7. What is your favorite word?
- I like the sound of “velutinous,” but there’s probably no excuse ever to use it – I don’t think even Tennyson ever went there. If a leaf is velutinous, that just means it feels velvety—I saw the word on the menu at a tea shop. You can charge a lot for a tea if you describe it as “velutinous,” so I guess that’s one excuse.
- 8. When and how do you write?
- Interminably, obsessively. I don’t have any weird routines like needing to face northwest over a Blickendorfer no. 5 typewriter etc.
- 9. What is your greatest fear when you first turn in a manuscript?
- That I’ve accidentally submitted an early draft.
- 10. In what era do you wish you’d been born?
- Heian Japan sounds relaxing—lots of tea-drinking and blossom-watching—although it might not be easy for me to blend in there.
- 11. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
- “Strangely” is one word I strangely often type, then have to delete.
- 12. Which talent would you most like to have?
- Self-marketing would be a handy superpower.
- 13. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
- Being a father. That’s unless my daughter also turns out to be a writer, in which case I clearly messed up.
- 14. Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
- Maybe Maqroll, a character invented by Álvaro Mutis.
- 15. How would you like to die?
- I hope to keel over from excessive joie de vivre.
