photo by Joe Wigdahl

You often write pieces that seem to take off on "pulp" genres. For example, The Boy Detective Fails is a take on the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books and How the Hula Girl Sings is a sort of "potboiler" crime novel. Where does that come from?

Those were the books that I read growing up. I wasn't reading James Joyce or Faulkner in high school... I was interested in storytelling: mystery novels, crime, noir, books like that. For each book, I want to try something different. One way of doing that is to borrow from a different genre. I think for a beginning writer, it's really attractive because there are certain rules... certain structures, conventions that you can kind of follow. There's rules to the game. With Hula Girl, I followed the formula pretty closely. With Boy Detective, I felt more comfortable and was able to kind of subvert those conventions and do some more interesting things instead of following that formula to the letter.

Some particularly interesting aspects of The Boy Detective Fails are the things outside the text: the "secret" story, the decoder ring, the buttons and stickers... How did these things come about? Did you plan on some things from the beginning, or did Akashic pitch some to you?
Well, as soon as I started working on it, I decided that there had to be a decoder ring. Not for the gimmicky, pop culture thing... To me the decoder ring is very different from the buttons and the stickers... To me that book is about mystery and how the older you get, the harder it is to appreciate [that mystery] and the more you see it as a sort of frustration. I wanted that decoder ring to be an experience. You have to take five minutes out of your day to set the book down and engage with it in this way that you probably haven't since you were a little kid. I can't tell you the last time I had to decode something for fun. I was trying to replicate the whole experience of the book in a small way. My editor, Dan—at Punk Planet—suggested putting in this hidden story at the bottom and I was like, "No, no one's ever going to do that." It seemed like too much. There's already the main code and the second code with the sister's diary. No one was going to do this. But we decided to try it, so I wrote this short, 150 word story and coded it. It had an e-mail address at the end, so that when you decoded it, you could get a prize. So far, we've had, like, 300 people. I thought we'd have, like, 10 or something. It's funny because it's written to the older brother, Derek, and people write to him and have this thing with Derek. "Hey! I solved your code!" It's just really wonderful. It's this great way to have a relationship with an audience that I don't usually get as an author: direct feedback.

Music is obviously a big element in your work. Hairstyles of the Damned with its mix tapes, Hula Girl has some Elvis in it...
And Johnny Cash.

Definitely Johnny Cash. How do you use music in relation to your work? Do you just listen while you're writing, and elements turn up in your work?
I think when I first started writing, I would listen to get a mood or tone. Now, I can't. Not that it has to be totally quiet, but music is such a huge part of my life—being a music journalist—so I feel that if it's on, it just always takes my attention. So, I don't write with it on, but the whole way I got into writing fiction was from playing in bands. I was in these awful metal bands when I was in high school. Somehow, we started writing our own songs, so I would write lyrics and then I would write poetry from that and then I started flirting around with writing these awful horror short stories.
Directly from that experience of playing music, I got into writing fiction. There's always this juxtaposition or sense of inspiration with each book. With Hula Girl, it was this kind of love letter to Johnny Cash, and I wanted that book to feel like a ballad—a country western ballad: kind of mournful, sparse at times, sad. It's about God and murder and prison. With Hairstyles, I wanted that book to be a mix tape of all my favorite music from that era. Even with the arrangement of that book, I wrote these really short chapters because I wanted to have this chaotic feel, like you popped in a mix tape and you have these short little moments. There's one chapter that's written backwards, and that was the idea of rewinding the cassette tape. There's a chapter where there's text side-by-side, and that was the idea of dubbing or how you can put a clip from a movie on top of a musical track. I tried to explore all the different ways of that punk aesthetic.
With Boy Detective... it was definitely those orchestral bands: the Beatles, Belle and Sebastian. They have this really great pop quality, but there's a sadness there, too. The short story book, Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir—a lot of that was based on the idea of jazz records and love songs. Sometimes it might be a title, like I'll steal a title and then end up changing it as I'm writing the story. I don't usually borrow someone else's story or character or anything like that. It's more that the feeling of a song will be really evocative and send me into this character or story. My goal is to get that feeling onto the page.

I wanted to ask you about some recurring images that are in your work. The first story in Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir is the one with the little animals...
All dressed up?

Yes. What is with you and the little animals in little outfits and the dying? I mean, it's in that that first story in Bluebirds and on the cover of Hula Girl...
Well, there's a couple of things there. The first is that animals appear a lot in my stories. Part of that is that I grew up in the Midwest... I grew up in Chicago, on the South side of the city, but I spent my summers in this little town in Indiana called Angola. It was all rural and there were woods and I would always hang out with these country kids. I borrowed a lot from that experience for that first book, Tender as Hellfire, and also for Hula Girl. Even though I grew up in the city, magical moments—these really transformative moments—happened more when I was alone. My grandpa would give me a compass and a knife and send me out. I'd run around in the woods all day. An 11-year-old kid from the city running around in the woods all day when there was no one around... I'd catch a glimpse of, like, a fox... and one time I stumbled across a badger... There was just this feeling of connection to animals. There's something really dramatic about it. I've always loved Jack London and those kind of stories about how animals connect with humans.
But what it really goes back to is fairy tales. So many fairy tales have animals as characters or as a part of the plot. There's something kind of mythical about the whole thing that I try to bring into my work. The thing about dressing up the animals... there's this great French artist named Annette Messinger. About 15 years ago, she had this show at the Art Institute where she had these installations that were... stuffed animal's heads on, like, real birds. Some of them had clothes on. For some reason, there was something about the creepiness and the beauty of it at the same time... Part of my aesthetic, I think, is looking for beauty and sadness and prettiness mixed together with something that might be a little terrifying or gritty.
Nelson Algren, one of my favorite writers from Chicago, had this idea that it is your job to celebrate the ugly things. There's something about that, looking for the beauty in these unexpected places. Also, a lot of those stories I wrote before Hairstyles and some of them were practice. I would write a story, like some of the ideas or characters, and later try them out for a play or novel. There's that story, "Midway," which I kind of culled for Hairstyles. That's just kind of the way that I work: I'll start something as a short story and if it's interesting, I might use it as a play or as a novel. If you put it all together, there is definitely this kind of cross current... in my mind, it's this one big art project, one big novel.

You talked a little bit about how your childhood affects what you've written, and you often have child protagonists. What's the reason behind that?
For whatever reason, a lot of my favorite books have child protagonists, whether it's Huck Finn or Catcher in the Rye. Again, it goes back to the folk tale or fairy tale thing where there's young protagonists and there's something really dramatic because of their age... The story, in a really distilled way, is about a moment that changes a character. It's really easy to observe that change in the life of a kid or an adolescent: It's a little more obvious than it would be in the life of an adult. Kids are also incredibly vulnerable, so the stakes are a lot higher. In my mind, it always goes back to the books that I like and the ones that have always inspired me have been the ones with younger characters. Even in The Boy Detective, which is about this 30-year-old guy, a lot of it hinges on the events from his past: It's a book about him being 30, but it's also about him being a kid, too.

Would you ever consider writing something specifically for a YA or children's audience?
I actually got to write this puppet show for this really great theater company in Chicago called Red Moon. They approached me and commissioned me to write this show and it was an all-ages show—you know, kids six and up. When they asked me to write it, I was like, "Have you ever read anything I've written? Have you seen anything of mine?" I'd never written for a kid before, and it's not that I feel like I'm above it or anything; I just felt it was a real challenge because I'd never taken anything like that on before. It was really exciting. It opened last January and it ran for three months in Chicago. It was called Once Upon A Time; Or The Secret Language of Birds. It's set in the 1920s in Chicago and it's about this little girl who can talk to birds and then all the birds in the city get stolen, all with this really amazing music. It was a cool experience. Right after, though, I was like, "I need to write something really gritty... with sex scenes in it"—just to change the pace. I feel like the best thing I can do as a writer now is to keep trying different things; that's how I feel that I'm growing.

Something we've talked about in the LJ community is "What makes something YA fiction?" Oftentimes, people say that if there's a teenage character in it, it must be for young adults...
Yeah! Like with Hairstyles... When the reviews came out, it was always labeled as "Young Adult." I was totally [surprised]... it can't be. There's all this... this dry humping and all these drugs...

Stuff like that happens a lot in Young Adult nowadays...
I guess I had no idea how savvy or worldly the audience for Young Adult is. When I wrote the book, I was thinking people that grew up in the '80s and knew those bands [and] who are now in their thirties were really going to get that book. What I've found the last couple of years is that these 14-year-old kids—who weren't even born [in the '80s]—are the ones who are really connecting to it. I think there's always this affinity, especially when you're a teenager, for this era that has occurred right before you. When I was in junior high and high school, there were all these kids who were into Black Sabbath and The Doors... because those bands weren't really around anymore. Or these kids who were really into the Grateful Dead, 20 years after the Grateful Dead broke up. It always seems so much cooler in the past and it's done, it's completed, so you can really get your arms around it. It's the same thing now with kids who are really into punk and these bands that were around thirty years ago. I had no idea about that.
A couple of schools have written me and they let me know that some high school teachers have taught it in their classrooms. I'm totally flabbergasted, but I'm excited. I'm like, "My God... there's like...masturbation and all this stuff in there. You're reading this in your class and you're not going to get fired?" It's been really rewarding... those little surprises like that when you think this one group of people, this small audience, is going to connect to it and then you find it's really this much larger thing. It's really gratifying.

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