Chatting with Josh Pearce

Josh Pearce has published more than two hundred stories, reviews, and poems in a wide variety of magazines including Analog, Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Bourbon Penn, Cast of Wonders, Clarkesworld, Diabolical Plots, Kaleidotrope, Locus, Nature, On Spec, Weird Horror, and elsewhere. Find more of his writing at fictionaljosh.com.

Josh is the author of “Lacus Odii (Lake of Hate)” and “Buttons and Soap” from Issue 9.

Q: “Buttons and Soap” uses form in an interesting way, effectively creating three poems in one. Can you talk about your creative process for this poem?

The initial version was written for a college poetry class and was only the first stanza. I remember the final stanza dropped fully formed, attached to nothing else, into my notes, and "I can only pray that my extinction fuels some future machine" was something that came out of a discussion about dinosaurs.

I saw someone post online that the Apollo program was the only example of ethically colonizing a new land because it hadn't involved genocide. But if you've ever read up on Operation Paperclip, that obviously isn't true. I still find it insane that von Braun had a second career designing Disneyland rides.

So, the poem expanded from its beginning stanza to its logical conclusion, and I tried to mimic the parenthetical format throughout.

Q: “Lacus Odii (Lake of Hate)” grapples with the way systemic power can undo individual action. What are your thoughts on the tension between personal responsibility and systemic power?

Funnily enough, I just finished reading Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World wherein author Naomi Klein articulates it better than I ever could:

"We should stop treating a great many human-made systems—like monarchies and supreme courts and borders and billionaires—as immutable and unchangeable. Because everything some humans created can be changed by other humans."

I was also recently inspired by the story of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, two queer French artists who lived on the island of Jersey during Nazi occupation. They started their own propaganda and disinformation campaign to demoralize enemy soldiers. Their surrealist pamphlets, poems, and posters were so effective that by the end of the war the Germans were convinced that the island had its own official resistance cell.

So. No one can solve everything on their own, but everybody can do something. Break a window, puncture a tire, plaster a fascist symbol with images of defiance and solidarity. Feed, clothe, and shelter the homeless. Punch a Nazi. I dunno, write a poem.

Q: “Buttons and Soap” and “Lacus Odii (Lake of Hate)” both address state violence and the weight of history. Do you see these poems as speaking to each other, or even as part of a larger conversation in your work as a whole?

If so, then not intentionally because they were written so far apart. But maybe subconsciously. I'd like to think that "Buttons and Soap" is merely a reflection on history, and "Lacus Odii" is a reaction to a recent rise in fascism. Unfortunately, it's not a resurgence. Under capitalism, fascism is always present. It's just that sometimes it puts on a happy face and fools us into thinking it's a friendly neighbor. A benevolent government. An altruistic corporation.

But it can't ever keep up the pretense for very long. The ugliness leaks through. And then I write something to counter it.

Q: You’ve written a fairly prolific body of film reviews. What is your relationship to film?

I took some introductory film classes in college, including one focused on science fiction movies, but nothing critical or analytical after that until I worked at Locus. Arley Sorg and I sat at the same desk and we'd spend all day talking about the movies we liked. Our editor-in-chief eventually agreed to pay us to basically record our conversations and so we started regularly reviewing science fiction, fantasy, and horror films.

Being writers ourselves—and writing for a SF/F publishing trade magazine—we tend to focus on the story, though I'm also interested in the technical work needed to bring a speculative idea to life in a visual medium, particularly creature makeup, practical special effects, set design, wardrobe. I'm generally bored by CGI sequences because I want to watch a film and wonder, "How did they do that?"

My favorites are '80s sci-fi horror films when they were really just kludging together monsters and spaceships out of whatever was on hand. It was also the heyday of body horror. It's been a long time coming, but I'm so excited to see something like The Substance even get nominated for an Oscar. Hoping it'll kick off a renaissance in the genre.

Q: You've published in a wide variety of magazines—from Analog and Asimov’s to Weird Horror and Nature. Do you adjust your writing style or themes to fit the different tones and audiences of each publication or create with abandon and submit where you think each would fit?

No, I've never written a story or poem with a specific market in mind. I actually have a hard time gauging what an editor is going to like—sometimes I'll send out a story fully confident that it'll sell, only to have it get kicked back from what I thought would be a good fit. Other times, the exact opposite will happen—I'll send in a story on a long shot, sometimes just because the submission window happens to be open, and it'll sell. So now I simply consider it a game of numbers. If I just keep writing and sending out, one or two eventually get picked up

The one thing I do adjust for is wordcount. Magazines keep cutting down their maximum story length, and I tend to write long, so I've had to train myself to finish a story in under 5,000 words or else it has a 

significantly worse chance of selling.

Q: Do you find yourself drawn to certain recurring themes or ideas across your work, or do you consistently try to explore new ground with each piece?

I do have recurring themes. I wrote a series of poems based on the features of the moon and got a half-dozen or so published, including "Lacus Odii." My most recent story in Bourbon Penn, "A Clockwork Gun," is set in the same post-apocalyptic Weird West as my Beneath Ceaseless Skies story, "Such Were the Faces of the Living Creatures." Both of those stories involve giant bug gods, and so does "Imago Dei," appearing in Flash Fiction Online.

I have two forthcoming stories in Kaleidotrope that feature the same shadowy organization as in "Unnamed Government Agency" (also in Bourbon Penn). And I've been trying to keep all of my spacefaring stories within the same technological level so that they could plausibly exist within the same universe.

Thematically, I try to write horror stories in which the heroes are not small-town sheriffs (or any type of law enforcement); space explorers who are not military or in a quasi-militaristic hierarchy; and alternate societies that do not default to capitalism.

Q: Have you found that being a reviewer impacts your poetry and fiction writing? If so, does it create obstacles, or do you think it sharpens your approach?

In my day job I'm a technical writer. I've found that kind of writing and review writing use a different part of my brain than poetry or fiction, fortunately, or else I'd be too burned out by the end of the day to do any more writing. A regular practice of writing reviews or articles to a deadline helps me push through to the end of a story instead of just dropping it if and when it starts giving me trouble.

Technical writing requires only including the absolute necessary information. Reviews require a very orderly, logical sequence of thought. And poetry is all about brevity. All this economy of language feeds back into my fiction writing and has been a useful tool in learning to write shorter, more focused stories.

Q: Are there any authors or works in particular that have shaped your approach to writing over the years?

Probably quite a few but I'll give one specific example: The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton is a Victorian-era novel that starts out as a police detective mystery, then shifts to a spy thriller, and then goes completely off the rails into surrealism at the end.

Philip K. Dick does something almost similar in Lies, Inc., except his surreal section comes in the middle of the book, and gets resolved before the end (it's an acid trip), whereas Chesterton uses his to create an ambiguous ending. (It's a religious allegory? The King Anarchist is god?)

I've tried the same in a few stories ("Play Devil" in Bourbon Penn, and "Freehold" in Dark Matter Magazine, for example): starting with a seemingly logical sequence of events that rapidly unravels into dream logic. I try it because sometimes the mystery is too large to be resolved in a short story and so I leave the answer to the reader's imagination.

Q: With more than 200 stories and poems now published, do you see yourself ever slowing down?

Nope! I have too many ideas to ever get them all out on paper, and now that I'm practicing writing shorter—writing faster—I hope I'll be able to iterate more rapidly. Of course, I can only control my own rate of production, I can't guarantee if or when they'll get published. Writing's the only thing that keeps my head from exploding.