Storytellersunplugged

By Wayne Allen Sallee

In the spring of 1996, at my granddaddy Grover’s funeral, I turned to my cousin Denise and said “We are our parents now.” My grandmother had died in 1992, and my point was that the generations had shifted. In an abstract way, we were now older and more mature, within four short years. Denise recalled my words when we spoke a few days ago.

I’ve been selling my stories for over two decades now, I was selling to GRUE at the same time Beth and Brian were two of the “rising stars” on the cover of THE HORROR SHOW. I had yet to meet some of you on this list, to others I am still an enigma. But as far as I am concerned, I am no longer part of the current generation of horror, indeed probably have not been since the last century. Some of our grandfathers, such as Richard Matheson, are still around stirring trouble, while most–Karl Edward Wagner, Robert Bloch, Evan Hunter (Ed McBain), and Charles Grant–have passed on to that great spinning rack in Heaven-Eleven, where we all expect to be one day, sharing shelf space with Slim Jims and Johnny Paycheck cassettes.

Pretty damn scary, when I think about how many people I have come to know over the years, since my first convention in Providence in 1986, some who gave up on writing too soon, out of frustration or simply because of family concerns, others who kept punching and kicking through all the necessary doors. And here we all are, most of us hovering around either side of the half century mark.

I find myself being a parent. As often as I can, when I am not trying to struggle with my own writing (I didn’t say I was a great parent!), I will provide moral support to new writers who really do not know anything about the publishing field, never even having been hurt by receiving their first rejection slip via email. (For those who didn’t catch it, I replied on Janet’s entry that I once received a handwritten rejection note dated 1956, three years before my birth. Maybe they were trying to tell me something and it wasn’t a misprint at all).

I work with a guy named Barton Fanning, about ten years my junior, who has a fantastic grasp of Lovecraftian prose. We work at separate computers in the middle of a press room, looking like Emeril and The Iron Chef at our huge flat box-like work stations, talking about everything from Cthulhu to Chick Tracts. His wife, Deb, is a pretty decent poetry writer, too. Even though I am not in any way a literary role model, having chosen my own Sallee patois over actual sentence structure, I have encouraged Bart over the last few months to truly follow his desire to write. He has nearly completed a story that fits right in with any Innsmouth nightmare, “The Drudgery of Abner Bode.” Here in Chicago, the Red Lion Pub hosts the TwilightTales reading group every Monday night (I was the first reader, back in November of 1993; a pall was cast over my reading by the announcement that Bill Bixby had died of prostate cancer). The first Monday of every month is open mike night; writers are encouraged to read novels- or stories- in progress, flash fiction, any genre. Before summer arrives, this Fanning guy will be reading about Mr. Bode in front of a drunken and well-fed crowd on Lincoln Avenue, across the street from where John Dillinger was shot to death. (The Biograph Theater is changing to the Victory Gardens, whatever the crap that is, but the double feature on that November night thirteen years ago was emblazoned on the marquee A PERFECT WORLD WAYNE’S WORLD. I still have the photo). Hopefully, I’ll also have a photo of Bart Fanning reading that story damn soon. Reading it to aloud to people is the first step towards sending it out to strangers.

At my job, I have no access to email but I can access blogs and comment on them. Long story short, I have been talking with a woman in Johannesburg, Drizel Burger, who is a big fan of Roald Dahl, and has posted many short vignettes that, to me, resemble the kind of writing one would see in Ben Hecht’s 1001 AFTERNOON IN CHICAGO, in which he took the task of putting something down on paper in the Chicago Daily News from 1921 to 1923. A few of her blog entries, particularly “My Pet Heart,” shows the gallows humor that deserves a wider audience.

Last week, she wrote her first long fiction story, involving werewolves and past lives, and she submitted it to an online magazine. Drizel is ready to accept a possible rejection notice, and I have taught her what the old-fashioned–is it perhaps considered obsolete now?–phrase ‘slush pile’ means.

It is a joy for me to see people going through those first stages I went through back in the days of new wave music and Miami Vice sportswear. Writing fragments and setting them aside, finally getting the encouragement from others to put something into what is now called snail mail with about seventeen stamps plastered over the envelope. I myself have now written for an online magazine, JanuaryMagazine, and my story “Mitch” is a podcast through the TwilightTales website. I see nothing wrong with Drizel or Bart wanting to have their stories in print online instead of in a magazine or paperback, at least until their careers get rolling.

Does anybody else here in the realm of Storytellers Unplugged feel like a parent? Just curious. With every new fragment I might read at work or through gmail, I feel like a proud daddy seeing a passing grade on some piece of homework. I revel in recalling that same feeling I had back in the 80s, unlettered, finally helped along and eventually making what amounted to me as the big time.

—-Wayne