Interviews

CEMETERY DANCE TALKS WITH MELANIE TEM

Interview Conducted by Stefan Dziemianowicz

In a very short span of time, Melanie Tem has managed to make a very big name for herself. Although visibly active in dark fantasy only since 1989 she has already produced three critically-acclaimed novels, including Prodigal, winner of the Bram Stoker Award in 1992 for outstanding achievement for a first novel. Alone, and in collaboration with her husband Steve Rasnic Tem, she has contributed short fiction to anthologies that include both Women of Darkness compilations, Women of the West, Skin of the Soul, Post Mortem, Cold Shocks, Chilled to the Bone, and most recently Snow White, Blood Red.

More impressive than her growing resume is the orientation of her fiction. Whether writing about a social worker who feeds on the suffering of his clients in Prodigal (Dell/Abyss, 1991), a young boy convinced he can cause events to happen simply by imaging them in Blood Moon (Women's Press, 1992), or a matriarchal extended family in which the women express emotions through shape-shifting in Wilding (Dell/Abyss, 1992), Tem reveals the psyches of her human characters to be more substantial grist for the macabre than horror's usual monsters. Her powerful character-driven stories have already garnered comparisons to the fiction of Shirley Jackson, and frustrated the attempts of critics to define her work within the horror genre.

Although the winning of the Stoker award might be cause for some writers to pause and reflect, Melanie Tem is already embarked on a series of future projects. Among them is a series of genre-subverting erotic horror novels written in collaboration with Nancy Holder, the first of which, Making Love, is due to appear in August 1993; a three-novel contract with Dell/Abyss that includes the Spring 1994 release Revenant, a vampire-variant tale currently entitled Desmodis, and possibly a prequel to Wilding. Her long-gestating project There Be Dragons, which will meld three different novels into a single mosaic relating the experience of grieving as a mythic hero's journey through the underworld, and the revision of three mainstream novels written several years ago. Such ambitious plans notwithstanding, Tem still holds down her day job as a professional social worker and lifetime career as a wife and mother of four.

CD: Although your mainstream publishing resume extends back about twenty years, the story that introduced most readers in the field to your work was "Aspen Graffiti," published in the first Women of Darkness anthology in 1988. When did you begin writing horror fiction?

Tem: I don't think I write horror--with the possible exception of Wilding--which I don't think I can claim is not horror when it's about werewolves. Other than that, though, I don't think for the most part that I write horror fiction. I prefer the term dark fantasy. I know that there's a lot of discussion about what that term means, and that some people think it's affected, sort of precious, but I like it better.

I think that most people who write horror would say that the primary emotion they go for in their readers is fear. I'm not trying to frighten people. If anything, I guess I would say I try to disturb people, to shake up how people look at the world. Mostly, though, I write out of an impulse in myself to understand something I don't understand in human nature. That may be something dark, or it may not be. It may be just something mysterious that I don't understand. My mainstream stories, the first stories that I published, were not fantasy. They were much more realistic and straightforward, but I think they were written out of that same impulse.

I came to be publishing fantasy, or dark fantasy, or horror, or whatever, because I married Steve. We met in a writer's workshop and when we began reading each other's work I realized that I had the same prejudice a lot people have about genre fiction in general: that you can't do anything serious with it, that it's all gimmicky. Steve taught me otherwise, and I began to see how much can be done by exploring important human themes through the genre.

CD: In a recently published interview, Steve said that one reason why he was attracted to the horror/dark fantasy mode was because it is a fiction that deals with transformation. Is this the same sort of interest it holds for you?

Tem: Yes, I'm very interested in transformation and transcendence. One of the things that interests me is how dark, disturbing experiences in our lives can transform us for the better, how we can come through those things. That's why I'm not really interested in horror stories where you go through everything with the character, only to reach a twist ending where the monster is still alive and going to come back. I always feel cheated reading that, I always feel "What was the point?" I like the idea of how we confront things, how we look at things. I think that the psychological truth of a lot of horror themes is that they're powerful when we don't confront them. They're powerful when they're hidden, or when they're secret. So I like the idea of the transformation and transcendence that happens when we face and deal with dark things.

CD: Does it bother you that at the same time you're resisting being labeled, which I would think any writer would want to do, you've had to take on the horror/dark fantasy label in order to get your work into print?

Tem: I don't so much mind the labeling itself, because I don't mind being called a dark fantasy writer. My difficulty is that at least outside the field, to the general reading public, if I say that I write horror fiction, most of them won't read it because they have preconceived Ideas. When they hear "horror," they think "Freddy Kruger." That's why I think the horror label is misleading.

I suppose that at some point I will dislike the idea of any labels at all. I find myself kind of chuckling over a phenomenon such as Toni Morrison's book Beloved, which is a ghost story. It's a wonderful story, and it's never categorized as a ghost story. Also Joyce Carol Oates' family saga Bellefleur, a gothic novel with only a couple of touches of what you might call magical realism. One of the ancestors in the story is a vampire, and Oates just talks about this character in the same tone of voice as she would talk about any of the other ancestors. But no one calls Bellefleur Joyce Carol Oates' vampire novel. It would be nice to be a writer whose work is looked at as outside of categories, so that like Beloved your work is not marketed as a ghost story when it absolutely is one.

CD: Is the difference between what you call your mainstream fiction and your dark fantasy just a matter of lighter shading? I ask because the use of the supernatural in your work is generally so subtle, so ambiguous, it's hard to say clearly that something fantastic is going on.

Tem: Except in Wilding. That steps further into the unarguable horror vein. In the stories that I consider my mainstream work I think anyone would be hard pressed to find a supernatural fantasy element at all. They're pretty much straightforward, character-driven stories. But when I've gone back in the last few years to my old stories to see whether any of them can be resurrected and reworked, in some cases it has seemed very natural, and not at all opportunistic, to turn them into dark fantasy stories, without any stretching, as though that element had been there in the first place. So I wonder if I might have been thinking that way all along, without acknowledging it or knowing it, because of prejudice or ignorance of what could be done in the field.

CD: That's not surprising to hear. It's clear in all of your dark fantasy that human emotion is the central concern, and that the supernatural motifs are simply a vehicle for expressing those emotions, rather than the object of the stories.

Tem: I'm delighted to hear you say that, because that's the whole point. I'm very interested in how traditional horror motifs can express psychological truths; for example, how the werewolf expresses anger in Wilding.

Nancy Holder and I are collaborating on what we hope will be a series of erotic horror novels which very deliberately use standard horror motifs to talk about romantic love relationships. We've just finished a retelling of the Frankenstein story, which is about a woman who has never been able to find a man good enough for her, so she creates her own. We have a story that we'll write some time, we hope, using the werewolf theme to talk about a woman in a physically abusive relationship. It just seems to me that the supernatural/fantasy/horror/whatever images and motifs have all kinds of things to say to us about human experience.

CD: Do you find that using these supernatural motifs allows you to deal more easily with human emotions in your stories?

Tem: I don't know if "easily" is the right word. I think that the symbolism, which is a word I use with great care, or the metaphorical quality of horror themes and motifs, maybe lets me go farther.

CD: Could you elaborate on that? Do you mean that using horror motifs creates a safer, imaginary context in which it's easier to grapple with these emotions?

Tem: Again, I don't think "easier" is the right word. As I said before, one of the reasons I write is because there are things that I don't understand or that I'm curious about. I don't tend to write for therapy, but because I'm curious about things. The novel I'm working on now, Revenant, is a ghost story. It's not easier for me to write about loss, and about the difficulty letting go of people we have lost, by using the idea of a ghost rather than writing about loss directly. But it's possible to talk about it differently and say more things.

I'm reminded always of the writer Jonathan Kellerman, a clinical child psychologist who also writes detective fiction. In his book When the Bough Breaks, which uses a child psychologist as the viewpoint character, he has that character muse that if we try to understand human nature solely on the basis of psychology, it's like trying to understand Shakespeare solely on the basis of how the lines scan. We miss something.

As a social worker, I'm trained to understand human nature fairly analytically, and with all kinds of theoretical background. And I'm not denying the theoretical usefulness of that, but I think there are some things that cannot be understood directly, and I think that writing in general allows me access to things about the human experience that I can't get at directly. Writing metaphorically one way or the other---and right now it tends to be in the dark fantasy or horror field---allows me even wider access.

CD: This leads inevitably to the question of whether you feel your work as a social worker has had an impact on your writing, and if so, how?

Tem: Well, the obvious answer, which I think is true, is that any part of one's life has an impact on every other part of one's life. So of course, yes. More specifically, I think, there are a couple of particular interactions between the two careers that make sense to me. One is that I went into social work probably for one of the same reasons why I write. And that is, again, to try to understand somebody whose life experience I don't have. Another is that social work brings one into contact with all kinds of stories that can be told. I have never written whole cloth about a particular client, but very often I will come into contact with someone, and something in my mind will say, "There's a story in that."

CD: Would that explain why so much of your fiction is based in very intimate human relationships: mother/daughter relationships, father/daughter relationships, sibling relationships. Essentially, all of your fiction uses the family as the context from which the story emerges. Is this a reflection of your professional experience?

Tem: I think it's more personal. I tend to live in the world on a microcosmic level. I'm a child of the '6Os. I went through that era's large-scale changing-the-world kind of perspective and have done my share of social action. In fact, my specific concentration in social work school was not clinical, but community services, the broader kind of scope. But in my personal life, and in both professions--social work and writing--I don't think like that anymore. There are lots of social questions I'm glad I don't have to make a decision about anymore. It used to be I thought I could make decisions, and that I wanted to make a difference on a social policy kind of level about things that mattered to me. But the older I get the more complex everything seems to me, and the less I am even willing to have an opinion about some of the more important social issues of our time, because I see things more and more and more microcosmically, how they affect people individually, day by day. So I think probably that intimacy in my writing comes from how I see the world, and how I live in it.

CD: Could you describe the genesis of each of the three novels you've published so far--Prodigal, Blood Moon, and Wilding. How each came to you, why you decided to write what you did, and also how each expands upon a standard genre motif. Prodigal, for example, has been described as a vampire novel--

Tem: I never thought of that until it was finished, by the way.

CD: That answers a question I had about whether you consciously choose motifs before you started writing, or simply find that as the story you're writing picks up impetus it begins to clarify itself in terms of a particular motif.

Tem: What would you say is the motif in Blood Moon?

CD: Telekinesis, or wild talents.

Tem: I never thought about that. You see, I don't read a lot of horror, so I actually hadn't thought about that, but you're right, the wild talent motif is what it uses.

CD: This is interesting, because it seems that in contrast to the work you're doing with Nancy Holder, in which you're going to try to expand or explore the possibilities of these motifs, it sounds as though for each of your three novels you weren't deliberately trying to do that.

Tem: Prodigal was written many years ago, so I can't remember exactly how it came about. Actually, Blood Moon was written before that, and it had a hard time selling, probably because it has the least "horror" of all my books, and people had a hard time categorizing it. In fact, Jeanne Cavelos at Abyss said she didn't want it because it's not horror. And Women's Press doesn't consider it horror because they don't think they publish horror at all. It still hasn't sold in the states.

Both of those books grew, like most of my work, out of characters. In Blood Moon the character of Greg is what drives the novel, absolutely. In Prodigal, at least some of the genesis came, I think, from wanting to talk about someone who was supposed to be a helping person, but who in fact fed off of troubles and created problems when he was supposed to be helping. So mainly that book came from my social work experience, because there are a lot of social workers who do exactly that, although hardly as literally as the villain in Prodigal. In fact, there was a particular social worker who had been involved with our family, against whom this novel is my revenge, who did a lot of what Jerry did.

SD: Is there a conscious connection between Prodigal and "Lightning Rod," your story in Lisa Tuttle's Skin of the Soul anthology, which is about a mother who takes on the suffering of her children and thereby deprives them of the capacity to grieve and realize their full humanity?

Tem: Well, there's a connection. Our son died five years ago this March, and much of my writing about loss has to do with the grieving process because it's such a life changing event, and it can be absolutely transcendent and transforming. It has been for me. And "Lightning Rod" is the only story I can think of at the moment that was directly therapeutic for me to write, because at the time I was getting trapped into that exact position, feeling as though I didn't dare let Steve or the other children feel the pain, that it was my responsibility to protect them. And realizing not only how dangerous it was for me but how dangerous it was for them, yet not being able to stop it because that's what mothers do. This is an example of how making the psychological/metaphorical truth of the story literal became therapeutic for me, because it did help me to get a handle on it.

SD: How about Wilding?

Tem: Wi1ding came to me in a conversation one evening with Richard Curtis, my agent, discussing my "next project." I am not a writer who has problems with someone giving me advice about what I should write next because Richard never tries to say "I think you should write this story," when it's not something that occurred to me. He doesn't plan my career for me in that sense. And I said to him "I have this and this and this and this as ideas----which one should I do next in terms of career development?" And one of the ideas was a clan of werewolves, or vampires, or zombies, or something like that living in a city, and it would be a story focused on women. The idea in my mind was the interplay between the traditional kind of old-fashioned ideas of what one of those horror motifs would be, and daily life in a city. That was the genesis, and as we talked I got interested in the idea of werewolves and anger, womens' anger, womens' sexuality, and the violence inherent in the werewolf idea. So that story was, I suppose, still-character driven in a sense, but not as specifically driven by an individual character.

It's also the book or story that has most surprised me by what's there. After I finished the book, I thought, "This has no redeeming social value. I don't know why I wrote this book. I don't know what my point is here, and it's going to be embarrassing if anybody likes this book." So I sent it away, and Jeanne loved it, and Richard loved it. I read it in galleys and thought, "Well isn't this interesting, I didn't see that before." And that usually doesn't happen to me. So it was kind of a surprise.

CD: One of the more interesting aspects of your writing career is your work with Steve. You're one of the few couples who have successful careers as writers in your own right, and as collaborators. It must be difficult for two writers, each of whom has developed a unique approach to writing, to work together.

Tem: No, It's not difficult at all. We have no difficulty collaborating. I think part of the reason may be that, just from the perspective of process, nothing by one of us leaves the house without the other having read it. Both of us edit each other's work, so in a sense we're always collaborating. The other thing is that while I think we have some important differences in our work--this is going to sound terribly hokey, but it's true--I think that the reason why our collaborations work is the same reason why our marriage works, and that is that we have the same way of living in the world, the same approach to life, and the same things that are important to us. Both of us tend to write character-driven work, both of us tend to think that human experience is the point of fiction. I think Steve's work tends to be darker than mine, on the whole, less upbeat. I like happy endings, or at least hopeful endings, and he doesn't, so we sometimes argue about that.

We've collaborated on a lot of different projects in addition to what everyone has already seen, including a high-fantasy novel called Daughters which so far hasn't found a publisher, and about half of a non-fiction book we would finish if anyone were interested.

CD: Steve has written quite eloquently in his essays about the therapeutic function of horror fiction. He says that horror fiction allows receptive readers to ponder the darkness inside all of us, and learn how to deal with it; not necessarily to be better persons but to be fuller persons, because it necessitates confronting a part of ourselves we are usually instructed to repress or not think about. Do you agree with this, or do you have a different sort of philosophy about the function your fiction serves for readers?

Tem: Again, I tend not to think that broadly. What comes to mind, though, when I think about that question, is a recent experience in which something I read touched me. I've just just finished reading Robert McCammon's Gone South and Boy's Life. I thought the first half of Boy's Life was alright, but I was not overwhelmingly impressed. Then I read the scene where Cory's dog is dying and the boy prays death away. That experience has now become particularly important to me because yesterday our dog of 14 years died, and our children have been telling us "I didn't want her to die," and asking "Can't we keep her alive?" So we've had to discuss death, why it's important, and why it happens to all of us. That story within the story of Boy's Life helped me to get a handle on death again, or have some kind of better understanding about death and about the responsibility of the survivor, even before our dog died. I can't say directly what it has done, and if I could, that wouldn't be the function of literature, it would be the function of therapy. But I hope my work can have that kind of effect on people--not in the sense that you read it and say, "Oh, now I understand 'X' about this." But in the sense that it resonates the same way that story in McCammon's book resonates for me, and keeps coming back to me, and makes me learn something new every time it does. Because I think that's what literature is all about.

© copyright 1993 Stefan Dziemianowicz