Spotlight On…

Matt Bell needs no introduction. He is respected, loved, and insanely talented. There are rumors he is superhuman. Certainly, he is a rare breed of wonderful.

Here he is, under the spotlight, bright-bright.

– Ethel Rohan

You’re writing a novel right now, and How They Were Found will be out this fall, also an as-yet unannounced book coming next year. What informs your creative process? How do you keep inspired?

Inspiration comes from every direction, thankfully: In books and lit mags, plus my editing at The Collagist and Best of the Web, I’m constantly reading new and challenging fiction, all of which certainly spurs on my own. I’m also a very curious person, and I try to indulge that curiosity whenever I can by at least scratching the surface of whatever catches my eye. Even if it’s just reading a Wikipedia page, a little bit of information can lay the seed for something fictional to grow later. I listen to a lot of non-fiction audiobooks in the car, and try to squeeze in the occasional bit of history or science reading at home. That’s just the textual inputs, of course: I devour new music, and watch a fair amount of movies, although not as many as I used to when I had more free time. I’m also lucky enough to have a wide and interesting group of friends and family, both in the writing world and outside it, all of whom constantly inspire me to try new things, to think and feel in new (and hopefully better) ways.

Beyond all these inputs, the best way for me to stay inspired as a writer is to be sure I’m in the chair every day, doing the work. The writing itself is capable of inspiring more writing, when I’m doing it right: Through my daily practices, I should be digging deeper, finding new things to think and feel myself, new ways to translate those onto the page for the reader. If I’m doing this work honestly, there should always be more of it to do. Writing’s a lot of fun, of course, and that helps keep me going too. I genuinely enjoy even most of the difficult or discouraging parts of the process, so it’s not too hard to get me to do it again and again.

You sport many fancy hats in addition to your beard. Do you worry about spreading yourself too thin, burning out? Worry about diluting the quality of your writing, editing, teaching, and living?

I think this is part of my above answer about inspiration, actually: I’ve actually tried to quit editing a number of times over the past few years. The last time I quit, I was editing the book reviews at NewPages until the fall of 2008, when I decided I wanted to spend that time on writing instead. A month later, I was a web editor at Hobart, and I went directly from that job to The Collagist. Same with writing book reviews. I keep saying I’m going to stop, because they take up so much of my time, but I also really enjoy doing them, and understand they provide a necessary service. I just turned one in a couple days ago, and I’m really glad I did it, because otherwise I wouldn’t have thought about the book in question at such an in-depth level.

All these extra tasks — the reviewing, the editing, the teaching, etc., — they’re only extra if you look at them as burdens instead of opportunities. As I’ve gotten the chance to do these various tasks at higher levels, I’ve learned that they’re all part of my literary life, as essential as my writing to my conception of myself and my happiness with my efforts. For now I’m happy and grateful to have so many roles, and to get to enjoy the different challenges and rewards each brings. That said, I may not want to do all of these things forever. Maybe I’d be just as happy only editing or only writing or only teaching, or whatever, because really they’re all part of the same whole.

Of course, it helps that I’ve got a wonderful and supportive wife who puts up with the fact that I do irritating things like sneak out of bed on Christmas to write. She works pretty hard herself, putting in long hours at work and at school, so I’m really just trying to keep up with her impressive example.

How has the Internet impacted your reading and writing? What is the future of print publication?

There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that I wouldn’t be the reader or writer I am without the internet. I dropped out of undergrad a few times before I finally finished, and I didn’t live in an area with a strong literary culture. Most of the writers that were early influences on me or that informed my reading tastes came to me through the internet, and I bought most of their books from Amazon or other online booksellers because there just weren’t good bookstores where I grew up. So I certainly needed it then, and still do.

I’m a pretty technologically-inclined person. My dad worked with computers, and I grew up around them. Now I’ve got a laptop, an iPhone, a Kindle, all of which are capable of delivering huge amounts of text anywhere and at any second, and which often do just that for me. That said, I’ve also got thousands of books in my tiny home, and I’m always reading from several of them at a time with more coming in the door every day. Print isn’t going anywhere, probably ever, and certainly not anytime soon. Print and online aren’t in opposition to each other, no matter how often people try to pretend that they are.

Tell us something that most people don’t know about you?

Are there still things we don’t know about each other in the internet age? I suppose there are. Maybe we should preserve a mystery or two yet.

If you didn’t write, what would your life look like?

It’d be hard to imagine it without writing, but if I stopped writing today, I’d still have my reading and my editing and my reviewing and so on, all of which have similar joys. Harder would be to stop all these things at once, to give up the literary life completely. That’s what I couldn’t imagine, and probably couldn’t bear. A ridiculously high proportion of my life — eighty percent? ninety? — gets lived in my head or on the page, my own or someone else’s, and I don’t know what I would do without that. I wouldn’t be me, at least for a little while. Sooner or later, I’d find some other way to fill my life that provided similar joys though, I’m sure. My writing emerged, I think, from my curiosity, and that would be hard to suppress. Eventually it’d find another outlet.

Please tell us your favorite, and why:

a. Musical

You know, I kind of hate musicals — I’m not against artifice in art, but when people burst into song in the middle of something, it tends to take me out of things. This isn’t really what you’re asking for, since it’s a bio-pic and not a musical, but when I was a teenager I used to watch Oliver Stone’s The Doors over and over and over. Several times a week, probably. If I could have been anyone when I was nineteen, it would have been Jim Morrison. Of course, I’ve already out-lived him by a couple of years, and if things go well, I’ll write more books than he wrote albums. I’m almost halfway there already. To be fair though, my readings don’t quite inspire the same level of screaming women throwing bras. (Although I did have a waitress at AWP offer to throw her cardigan at me while I was reading, which is probably the indie-lit equivalent. Sadly, she didn’t follow through.)

b. Fable/Fairy Tale

Little Red Riding Hood is obviously close to my heart, considering Wolf Parts, but Rumpelstiltskin comes to mind as well. I can still see the cover of a children’s version of that fairy tale that I had as a child, and I remember how freaked out it used to make me. I definitely had Rumpelstiltskin nightmares. Neil Gaiman has a line about how it’s the things that scare us as children that we remember forever, and I’m still afraid of Rumpelstiltskin, I think. I’d like to go back and read the originals of that fairy tale as well — I’m not sure I ever have, to be honest.

c. Movie

I don’t know if I have a favorite movie anymore, just like I probably couldn’t tell you my favorite book or album. I know too many of them, and have too many that I love a lot. When I was a kid, it would have been The Empire Strikes Back, then Fight Club in my late teens. Now I’m not so sure. Requiem for a Dream was up there for a while, but I’ll probably never watch that again. Children of Men was one of my favorites from the last few years, and one that I’ve thought about a lot since first watching it. Same with Pan’s Labryinth. That’s not quite the same as “favorite” though, is it?

If we were talking television shows, the answer would be clearer: Deadwood is the best television show I’ve ever seen, by such a huge margin that I’m not sure it can be knocked off. If only it hadn’t been prematurely canceled before it’s final season finished the story arc. Or maybe it’s better because of it, since there’s no opportunity to be disappointed by the end. The third season is the finest example of how to raise tension continuously for twenty hours without ever releasing any of it, and because the final season doesn’t exist, it’s actually kind of excruciating (in a great way) to sit through again, knowing you’re never going to get any resolution.

d. Painting

For a long time, my favorite painting was Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, but I have to say I remember being really disappointed when I first saw it in person: I hadn’t realized how small it would be. I’d seen so little physical art up to that point that I’d assumed it was bigger, that all the paintings I knew were bigger. That dissonance has remained with me as part of the experience of the painting, in what seems an interesting way.

e. Place

I like a lot of places, but I’m particularly partial to home. This is where all my stuff is, where I get my writing done, and where my wife knows how to find me when she wants to. That’s good enough for most days.

Please do a five minute free-write with the words “purple apples,” and share.

He punched them right in their purple apples. Their apples weren’t purple the first time he punched them. He had to wait a whole day for them to get purple, which was how he wanted them to be when he punched them. It was harder to punch them in their purple apples than it had been to punch them in their non-purple apples. Because of the first punching, they were afraid of getting the second, but he was determined. He chased them after school on the day their apples were purple. He had to chase them one at a time. It took all afternoon, so he was late getting home. When his father asked him where he’d been, he said that he’d had to punch a person, several persons really, and that he had found them and punched them in their purple apples. His own body was purple all over, not just there. His father was mad that he was late. His father showed him what other colors a person could be made to turn, if you just kept punching.

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Matt Bell is the author of How They Were Found, forthcoming from Keyhole Press in October 2010, as well as three chapbooks, Wolf Parts (Keyhole Press), The Collectors (Caketrain Press), and How the Broken Lead the Blind (Willows Wept Press). His fiction has appeared in over seventy literary magazines, including Conjunctions, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Willow Springs, Unsaid, and American Short Fiction, and has been selected for inclusion in leading anthologies such as Best American Mystery Stories 2010 and Best American Fantasy 2. His book reviews and critical essays have appeared in publications like The Los Angeles Times, American Book Review, and The Quarterly Conversation. He is also the editor of The Collagist and of Dzanc’s Best of the Web series. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with his wife, Jessica.