JACK
KETCHUM

		Interview by Monica O'Rourke
SHOULD YOU? TIP JAR "The reason we're able to read the books we're able to read today is because Henry Miller broke the bank with Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn." - Jack Ketchum

Monica J. O'Rourke interviews
JACK KETCHUM
Page 5

Continued from pg. 4

Photo by Monica J. O'Rourke

JK: Erratic. When I’m working on a novel or long story, I’m quite disciplined. I usually start working at around 10:00 or 11:00am and work to about 3:00 or 4:00. After that I get sort of brain dead and start to lose the track. Short stories can go on all day long. Revisions can go on all day long. I can do revisions for eight hours. I take a lot of hand notes.

And I write best when I’m in love. Take She Wakes, for example. The book is good, but that last chapter . . . that last chapter is great because I was in love when I wrote it. That’s the difference.

MO: Why aren’t you on MySpace?

JK: What is MySpace? Kidding. I know what MySpace is. Why would I want to spend time on MySpace?

MO: Promotion? You have a website, which is very well done and well maintained, but people who don’t know your website won’t find you. MySpace has taken off, it’s huge, and everybody is on MySpace. It’s a great publicity tool.

JK: But that’s for people who are promoting me. It’s not for me. I’m supposed to write. My job is to write. My job is not supposed to be promoting my stuff. For example, this is the first time I’ve ever had a film, so I’m bending over backwards to accommodate that fact. And enjoying it, having a good time, but I wouldn’t want that to be another job. My job is to write.

MO: Even The Lost has a MySpace account.

JK: Really? I’ll have to look that up.

MO: You’ve been writing professionally for thirty years now. How have things changed for you over the years?

JK: The major change is, and I’m knocking on wood here, is that I can expect a reasonable income every year as a result of my writing. Whether it’s from foreign or domestic or film. For the first I’d say ten years that I was writing, I lived very hand to mouth. I was lucky if I had ten grand in the bank. And my income has stabilized nicely. It’s stabilized according to my work habits and expenses. So if that goes on, as it has gone on, I’ll be perfectly happy. I don’t need to get rich and don’t need to get famous. I don’t want to get famous. Infamous is good.

MO: But infamous is very different. It’s famous with a negative connotation.

JK: Well, no, it’s got a kind of sexiness to it. Infamous means that not everyone knows what the hell you look like. Steve King once said that the worst thing he ever did, the stupidest thing, was to go on that American Express commercial. Everybody knows what he looks like now. And I think he was correct. If he had downplayed that, he might be able to go to NECon, and we could see him and hang out with him. I don’t ever want to have that happen to me. That’s why I quit acting. I realized that stardom is not what I really want. I want respectability and want people to buy my books and have fun with them.

JACK (w/favorite shirt) AND BOB BOOTH WITH A PEEKING RICK HAUTALA

MO: Were you looking for fame when you first started?

JK: Oh yeah. I wanted to be Elvis. When I was boy, I thought I either wanted to be Elvis or Henry Miller. They’re more linked than you would imagine, if you think about it. Both were iconoclasts, both liked breaking barriers, both were rebels, both sexual.

MO: These are things I never thought about Henry Miller. Rebel? A sexual rebel?

JK: The reason we’re able to read the books we’re able to read today is because Henry Miller broke the bank with Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. A couple of writers had paved the way for him, but if you want a really good primer on how the censorship laws were broken, pick up Erica Jong’s The Devil at Large, which is a book about her experiences with Henry. But she elucidates wonderfully how the American sex laws were busted by Henry, basically. Proust helped a little, Joyce helped a little, D. H. Lawrence helped a little, but Henry busted the bank. So anyway, I wanted to be either him or wanted to be Elvis but I got a lot of stage fright with the Elvis thing, so it seemed that the “behind the typewriter thing” worked better. But then I realized I didn’t want to be Henry Miller because I didn’t want to write memoir, I wanted to write fiction.

MO: Who do you relate to more at this point?

JK: Oh, they’re both my men. I couldn’t have survived my teens without Elvis. I really don’t think I could’ve. And I know that one of the reasons that I got the courage to write was because I was privileged enough to be Henry Miller’s agent for two to three years before he died. And met him, and saw what he had become. And that’s a story you should read: “Henry Miller and the Push.”

MO: I've read it more than once.

JK: I’m going to try to get that reprinted this year. I think it needs to be in a mass market situation.

They’re both still with me. When Elvis died in ’77, I was in Greece, on the island of Crete, and I just lost it.

MO: In 2003, Stephen King won the Distinguished Contribution to American Letters award. During his speech, in part, he said, “There's another writer here tonight who writes under the name of Jack Ketchum and he has also written what may be the best book of his career, a long novella called The Crossings. Jack Ketchum's first novel, Off Season published in 1980, set off a furor in my supposed field, that of horror, that was unequaled until the advent of Clive Barker. It is not too much to say that these two gentlemen remade the face of American popular fiction.”

King closed by saying, “I accept this award on behalf of such disparate writers as Elmore Leonard, Peter Straub, Nora Lofts, Jack Ketchum, whose real name is Dallas Mayr, Jodi Picoult, Greg Iles, John Grisham, Dennis Lehane, Michael Connolly, Pete Hamill and a dozen more.”

Were you surprised by this, or did you know what he was going to say?

JK: (laughs) Paula (Ketchum’s longtime companion), who was sitting next to me, said, “Dallas, close your goddamned mouth.” My jaw dropped wide open. I remember the moment vividly. I turned to Peter Straub, who was on my left, and we looked at one another and we just grinned. Ear to ear grins. Because Steve also mentioned Peter as another person who had written arguably the best novel of his career with lost boy lost girl. And we had no idea, it was totally out of the blue. We’re sitting with Evan Hunter and his lady, and Susan Straub and Paula, and we were totally blown away. Steve is the most generous man I don’t know. I know Steve enough to call him Steve, and we’ve met on a couple of occasions, but on almost all of those occasions it’s not a social occasion, it’s an occasion where he’s somehow praising me. I went to a bookstore signing of his just to sort of sit there because it was close by, and he sees me there and he goes, “Ah, this guy over there? You gotta know Jack Ketchum. He’s one of the best writers in the country.” And I thought “what??” So I start signing books. Barnes and Noble are pulling my books because Stephen said, “Get his books out.” Steve’s amazing.

MO: Has King’s nod helped your career in any way?

JACK WITH FRIEND AND FELLOW WRITER, GERARD HOUARNER Photo by Monica J. O'Rourke

MO: More recently - in November 2004 - King said in his Entertainment Weekly article, “Who's the scariest guy in America? Probably Jack Ketchum, the outlaw horror writer whose terrifying first novel is finally available uncut from Overlook Connection Press. That would be Off Season: The Unexpurgated Edition. If you read it on Thanksgiving, you probably won't sleep until Christmas. Don't say your Uncle Stevie didn't warn you.”

JK: (laughs) I love his hyperbole.

MO: What have you done to take advantage of King’s acknowledgements?

JK: I haven’t done a damned thing, my agent has. I just sat back and grinned. I couldn’t believe it. Monica, I could never have believed, when I started writing at what, sixteen or something? that my name would be in a magazine like Entertainment Weekly, which is a very big magazine. And that Stephen, who I had read and admired way before I wrote my first novel, would be the guy to kick my butt into a different level of notoriety.

MO: Are you still writing poetry? Any future plans to publish any?

JK: I am still writing poetry every now and then, when the spirit moves me. I’m thinking about doing another short story collection soon, and I think maybe as a bell and whistle, and I’ll throw in some poetry.

MO: Your last original published novel was in 2001, with The Lost. What have you been working on since?

JK: I did Weed Species, and I’ve done a couple of short stories, and I’m about three quarters of the way through a book that I’m tentatively calling Old Flames, which is about unrequited love. It hasn’t occurred to me yet whether it’s a novel or novella. Its length hasn’t quite announced itself yet.

MO: Who gave you the best piece of advice you've received as a writer?

JACK, LUCY, AND GEORGE Photo by Monica J. O'Rourke

JK: That would be two people. The first advice was Robert Block, saying, “If you don’t need to do this, don’t.” And the second would be Billy Altman at Cream magazine, when I asked him, “What do you want from me?” and he said, “Write lively.”

MO: What parting advice would you give to aspiring writers?

JK: Robert Bloch’s to me: “If you don’t have to, don’t.” (laughs) My advice? It’s all about people. You’re writing for you and me. You’re not writing pyrotechnics. You’re not writing genre. You’re trying to break our hearts.

(I thought the interview was over, but Ketchum heads over to his desk to retrieve an interesting item. He explains:)

If I have one superstition as a writer, is that I do believe I have a muse. And my muse is a twenty year old woman who probably died in the 1920s, and who was used as a medical subject. It was given to me many years ago, found in a Boston antique store. She's my memento mori. She reminds me about life and death.

(He's holding a human skull)

(Ketchum disappears into the kitchen and returns with a bottle of Old English furniture polish and a paper towel. He lovingly cleans and polishes his skull . . .  which he has named "Lucy." He holds her gently in his hands, careful of her fragile cheekbones. It's almost surreal watching him holding her by the eye sockets.)

JK: If I have any superstitions, it's that I think that she has guided me a lot.

MO: Really?

JK: (laughs) Yes. Oh yes.

END

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