A Bowl of Questions

Chatting with Brian Francis Slatterty

On Bookburners, collaborating, and everything in between.

We have Bookburners author and Master of The Weird Brian Francis Slattery with us today on The Back of the Box to let us pick his brain for a bit. Take a gander below and learn what inspired him for his latest demon-hunting collaboration!Magic is real, and hungry—trapped in ancient texts and artifacts, only a few who discover it survive to fight back. Detective Sal Brooks is a survivor. Freshly awake to just what dangers are lurking, she joins a Vatican-backed black-ops anti-magic squad: Team Three of the Societas Librorum Occultorum. Together they stand between humanity and magical apocalypse. Some call them the Bookburners. They don’t like the label.Bookburners is a 16-part Serial, presented by Serial Box. From a team of writers headed by Max Gladstone and including Mur Lafferty, Brian Francis Slattery, and Margaret Dunlap, this collaborative effort unfolds an epic urban fantasy narrative across an entire season in weekly installments. Read it or learn more at SerialBox.com!

BB ep 2
BB ep 6
BB ep 12
BB ep 14
headshot_slattery

Are there there things as a writer you get to do when writing for a series that you can’t do when you’re on your own?Absolutely. The biggest one is just the collaboration itself. In one sense I’ve never really written “on my own” in that I’ve always seen making a piece of writing—whether it’s a book or newspaper article—as a collaboration between the writer and the editor. (This may be my day job as an editor talking.) But over time, I’ve gotten more and more interested in collaborating with other people more intensely. Working on Bookburners with Margaret, Max, and Mur has confirmed my suspicions that some really great things can come from working closely with other people, from building the story together to putting the final touches on the moments that make up the tale’s twists and turns. It has been a lot of fun working on this project, and getting to know the other writers. I’ve learned a lot from them, and thanks to them, I’ve stretched and written in ways I may not have ever thought to write otherwise. I’ve discovered, for example, that I really enjoy inventing monsters. And what’s not to like in that?You have experience writing both fiction and nonfiction works. Do those veins of writing inform one another when you sit down to write?Definitely. There’s a really long and boring answer to this question that I can make a lot shorter by saying that I find that doing journalism helps ground my fiction, and writing fiction helps me think more broadly about the journalism. Editing a lot of nonfiction, meanwhile, is a constant source of inspiration to me; the most interesting things I work on as an editor seem to find ways into the fiction I write, often in surprising ways.Is it easier or harder to work in a world that is not entirely your own creation, as opposed to working on your own solo project?I’m not sure I think of it as easier or harder. Both are great. I will say that working with other people means there are more surprises, and I like surprises. A lot.What defines a great story?That’s a heck of a question. Maybe the best way to answer it is by telling you how I ultimately pick the fiction submissions I want to publish as a fiction editor for the New Haven Review. There isn’t a specific writing style that gets me, or plot, or characters. The ones I publish are the ones that I wake up the next morning still thinking about, the ones that pop into my head while I’m making coffee; the ones that change me in some subtle way.Do you have a favorite Bookburners episode or character? If so, why?So far my favorite Bookburners episode is one Max wrote that has Grace’s backstory in it. I guess I should just stop there since I don’t want to give anything away. But the bigger truth is that I think every episode Mur, Max, and Margaret have written have a bunch of wonderful moments in them that I would never have thought to write, and the sense that we’ve managed to create something that lets all of us still roam pretty free in our individual episodes is thrilling to me.Who are some of the influences you’re pulling from in writing Bookburners?Oh, man. That’s a long list. There’s some Fritz Lieber thrown in there for me, and some Michael Moorcock (particularly the Elric books), and there’s Buffy and Repo Man and, for the magic, just the general vibe of Spanish and Latin American cinema, from The Spirit of the Beehive to Pan’s Labyrinth, which I made some fairly explicit nods to early on, though I think we’ve managed to run in our own sort of direction with it by now.Finally: what are you reading right now?Right now I am making my way through a big fan Argentinian novel called Adam Buenosayres, which is wonderfully weird and just getting weirder. Before that I read Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, which I loved. I also read this excellent nonfiction book by Lee Sandlin called Storm Kings, about tornadoes in the United States, the devastation they’ve wrought, and our growing ability to track them. That was partly because I love Lee Sandlin and partly research for a Bookburners episode, but now I feel like I’ve said too much.

Brian Francis Slattery is the author of Spaceman Blues, Liberation, Lost Everything, and The Family Hightower. Lost Everything won the Philip K. Dick Award in 2012. He’s the arts and culture editor for the New Haven Independent, an editor for the New Haven Review, and a freelance editor for a few not-so-secret public policy think tanks. He also plays music constantly with a few different groups in a bunch of different genres. He has settled with his family just outside of New Haven and admits that elevation above sea level was one of the factors he took into account. For one week out of every year, he enjoys living completely without electricity.

Recent posts