You Don’t Know What You’re Doing: Stephen Graham Jones on Experimentation & Innovation
Interview w/ Stephen Graham Jones
Stephen Graham Jones is the author of sixteen and a half novels, six story collections, a couple of standalone novellas, and a couple of one-shot comic books. Stephen’s been an NEA recipient, has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, a Bram Stoker Award, four This is Horror Awards, and he’s been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the World Fantasy Award. He’s also made Bloody Disgusting’s Top Ten Horror Novels, and is the guy who wrote Mongrels. Next up are The Only Good Indians (Saga) and Night of the Mannequins (Tor.com). Stephen lives in Boulder, Colorado where he is the Ivena Baldwin Professor of English, as well as a Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado Boulder.
HR: What are your thoughts on the label “experimental” with respect to literature, in a general sense? What does the phrase “experimental literature” even mean to you? Can it be adequately defined?
SGJ: It’s a term that’s always bugged me. Never knew really why until I heard Brian Evenson say once somewhere that ‘experimental’ suggests that you don’t know what you’re doing. Some stuff that gets called ‘experimental,’ you can definitely feel that, too, that this writer really has no idea what she or he was doing. Not that they don’t stumble into good stuff every once and again. But it’s kind of just like you’re in the basement mixing random stuff together. ‘Innovation,’ though, that’s a term I can go for. Innovation has a purpose. You’re mixing chemicals to achieve X or Y effect. You can see where you want to go, you’re just having to make stuff up to get you there. Innovation is so economical, it can save so much time.
HR: Do you find “experimental” useful as a category? If useful, is it more useful for writers, publishers, teachers, or readers (or equally useful across the board)?
SGJ: In a lot of magazine and journal’s submission guidelines I still see ‘experimental,’ yes. And I think that tells a lot of writers that, hey, this crazy thing I wrote, they might actually look at it. So it’s useful that way. Not sure how it’s useful to publishers or teachers or readers, though. Well, except to those who use it as a Do Not Enter sign.
HR: Whatever “experimental” might mean, in the very least it’s probably safe to say that it attempts to describe a particular subset of writers who try to distinguish themselves from “popular” literature. But: is there also a mainstream sense of experimentalism with respect to literature, distinct from other forms of experimental literature? What does it mean to be a “trendy experimental” writer/artist?
SGJ: There’s Egan doing Powerpoint stuff, there’s MZD jacking with typography (as a way to jack with narrative), there’s Vonnegut drawing in his books, there’s Coupland playing in the margins . . . I don’t know. I can’t figure if there’s a difference in mainstream experimentalism and garage experimentalism or not, aside from level of success. I mean, didn’t people call Everything is Illuminated ‘experimental?’ Not necessarily because it was breaking new ground, but because it didn’t look like everything else on the shelf that season.
HR: It seems to us that, when it is deployed, the term “experimental” changes depending on who is doing the experiment. Would you agree with that? If you disagree, is there a better way to understand the function of experimental literature? Or, if you do agree, in what ways does the “experiment” change based on the subject position of its author?
SGJ: Well, if you’ve got the seal of approval from a commercial press, and they’ve got serious marketing money behind you, then your ‘experiment’ kind of automatically gets considered amazing by most of the readers. Not because they’re into what you’re doing so much as if they say they’re not, then they’re no longer hip or smart. Whereas if you’re hotwiring words in your garage for you and thirty friends, truly and really inventing new ways to tell a story, you’re kind of automatically a crackpot, because you’re not reaching for that brass ring every time around. Neither’s better than the other, don’t get me wrong—well, the second, it has the chance to sneak new DNA into fiction, while the first, the commercial, it can get replicated in MFA programs across the country until it’s hollow of meaning. So, no real answer, I don’t think . . .
Héctor Ramírez is a Xicano writer, educator, and a child of immigrants. Originally from Covina, CA, Héctor received his BA in Literary Arts from Brown University in 2012, and his MFA in Fiction from CU Boulder in 2018. His professional background is in college access and institutional equity for underrepresented and historically oppressed communities, specifically indigenous youth. His literary work has appeared in Apogee, Muzzle Magazine, LIT, GASHER, and elsewhere
Issue 5