The Company We Keep

Today is the day after the midterm elections here in the United States, so things are perhaps marginally better than they were yesterday. At least in Kansas we managed to replace Kevin Yoder with Sharice Davids and we got Laura Kelly for governor instead of Chris Kobach, so we could certainly have done worse.

I don’t talk a lot about politics on here, and that isn’t about to change now, but I did talk a little bit about politics on the latest episode of the Missouri Loves Company podcast with Brock Wilbur and Viv Kane (if that is her real name…). Of course, we also talked about fun horror, that video game of The Thing that they made years ago, what Jordan Peele is up to these days, Clive Barker’s Facebook tendencies, Venom greeting cards, why Brock hates art, and lots of other stuff.

One thing I want to mention, in that podcast I say that I try not to think about what’s going on in the world politically when I’m writing. To some extent that’s true, insofar as the day-to-day politics of the United States don’t specifically factor into most of my stories, but what I guess would be considered “my politics” definitely do make their way in, just in broader terms that I would think of more as ethics. The specter of racism hangs over several of my stories, classism plays a big role in tales like “Shadders,” anti-imperialism and anti-war sentiment shows up in “The Blue Light,” etc.

More than any of that, though, I try to write about characters who feel at least a little bit like real people, who deserve dignity from one-another, even when they don’t get it from an indifferent universe. Certainly, as someone who grew up feeling different, I have sympathy for the outsider, the Other, the monster. But I also just try to casually inject diversity into my stories, in a way that lays a groundwork for simple acceptance. I don’t know if I always succeed, but I do try.

There’s no such thing as a story that isn’t political, and I don’t want to get caught in the trap of saying that my stories aren’t. They are, often in ways that even I don’t realize, and I hope that they sometimes reflect what I think is important in the world, even when I’m usually not specifically thinking about what’s going on in the latest headlines as I write.

In other news, another glowing and thoughtful review of Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales recently showed up, this time on Heavy Feather Review: “At the heart of Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales is a monster, and it might just be us. The real question is, are you willing to pay the price to find out?”