The one and only Joel Derfner stops by The Back of the Box to answer some burning questions we have. In addition to writing several memoirs and a book of poetry, Joel has joined Serial Box to add his voice to Tremontaine! Scroll down to find out why we should call him Stud, but he probably won’t answer to it.In a city that never was, sex, scandal, and swordplay combine in a melodrama of manners that returns readers to the beloved world of Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint! A Duchess whose beauty is matched only by her cunning; a passionate young Scholar with dreams beyond his reach; a Foreign spy in a playground of swordplay and secrets; and a Genius on the brink of scientific revolution—when long-buried lies threaten to come to light, the stakes are high, and more than lives may be lost. Mind your manners and enjoy the chocolate in a dance of sparkling wit and political intrigue.Released in weekly episodes, Tremontaine began October 28th and is written by Ellen Kushner, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Malinda Lo, Joel Derfner, Racheline Maltese, and Patty Bryant.Read it or learn more at Serial Box.com!
What comes to mind when you hear, “Serial Box”?Honestly? Cocoa Krispies. And now I’m hungry. Even though I’ve just eaten half a pound of M&Ms.Can you describe your most recent project in one sentence?A murder mystery set in ancient Greece in which the detective is a prostitute and Socrates is her bumbling idiot sidekick.Where are you a local?Manhattan. It’s been almost a decade since I lived there, but I think I’m the one person in the world who moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn and regrets it. Brooklyn is too full of neighbors and authenticity and trees.If you could live in one fictional world, which would it be?One in which everybody realizes I’m right about everything and just does what I want them to.Who would be the 5 people (alive, dead, or fictional) at your dream dinner party?Bayard Rustin, Dolly Parton, a calorie-negative eternally regenerating chocolate-chip cookie, Natural Selection, and Chris Meloni.The first three because, duh.Natural Selection because then I could ask it why it’s satisfied with ensuring we can pass on our genes without bothering to make us happy.Chris Meloni so that he could stay after Bayard Rustin, Dolly Parton, and Natural Selection had gone home and fuck me silly. (In the meantime the cookie could go to the other room and look at my books.)Who is the author or book you will always recommend?Three candidates:Jane Austen. Once somebody wrote me a fan email about one of my books and mentioned that he’d never read Pride and Prejudice and I told him I couldn’t answer his email until he had.Shirley Jackson, who said she loved eighteenth-century novels for “the preservation of and insistence on a pattern superimposed precariously on the chaos of human development.” She went on, “I think it is the combination of these two that forms the background of everything I write—the sense which I feel of a human and not very rational order struggling inadequately to keep in check forces of great destruction, which may be the devil and may be intellectual enlightenment.” She also said that she found in “magic and the supernatural … a shorthand statement of the possibilities of human adjustment to what seems to be at best an inhuman world.”The Count of Monte Cristo, because it’s an 1,100-page novel about revenge.Favorite quote or line?Again, three candidates:1. “Rident stolidi verba Latina.” It’s from Ovid’s Lamentations, written during his exile from Rome, and it means, more or less, “Fools laugh at the Latin language.”2. Mr. Bennett’s line to Mrs. Bennett from Pride and Prejudice, “I have not the pleasure of understanding you. Of what are you talking?”3. So there used to be a competition every other week in New York Magazinerun by this woman named Mary Ann Madden. Every week she’d solicit things like “near misses,” and people would send in things like, “Get down, Moses” or “The Agony and the Fun.” Or it would be “drop a letter,” and she’d get “Moby Ick.” And whoever sent in the one she liked best would win a subscription to New York or something. (I think they’ve started it up again online, run by somebody else, but I haven’t seen it.) Well, occasionally she’d solicit “change a letter,” which produced terrific stuff like “We have nothing to wear but fear itself.” That was the competition for the July 7, 1969, issue, and somebody sent this in:
Out of the night that covers me,Black as the Pit from Pole to Pole,I thank whatever gods may beFor my unconquerable soup.
I don’t understand how the woman who sent that in didn’t win, because I think it may be the most brilliant piece of work ever to issue from human hands.If you had a nickname for your writing persona, what would it be?I would call my writing persona Stud, because I’m a raging narcissist, but my writing persona wouldn’t answer to it, because I also have an inferiority complex the size of Pakistan.If you could have one magic spell up your sleeve, what would it be?For a long time, I wanted a telekinesis spell so that, when people were mean to me, I could carry them in the air behind me as I walked along and repeatedly drop them head-first onto concrete and other hard surfaces. Then I got better medication and I wanted the power to give people who were mean to me splitting headaches that only went away when they started being nice to me. Now that I’ve lived in New York for almost two decades I’d rather have the ability to teleport just so I never had to take the subway again. I’m really worried about my priorities, but I don’t think there’s anything to be done at this point.Joel Derfner is the author of Gay Haiku, Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and What Ended Up Happening Instead, and Lawfully Wedded Husband: How My Gay Marriage Will Save the American Family. (Are you sensing a theme?) Musicals to which he has composed the score have played in New York, London, and various cities in between (going counterclockwise). He lives, alas, in Brooklyn, along with his husband and their small, fluffy dog.joelderfner.com. @JoelDerfner.
