INTERVIEW WITH LEIGH BLACKMORE by Benjamin Szumskyj for

Studies in Australian Weird Fiction No 1

1) Mr. Blackmore. You are considered by many, to be a principal figure in

relation to the rise of weirdfiction in Australia, primarily due to
youranthologies and magazines. After a hiatus, you have returned to the
field. What lured you away and has initiated your return?

Thanks for saying that, although I think the current crop of horror
writers in Australia would not see me as playing a particularly significant
part in the genre’s development here. For a start, the Terror Australis
anthology, which came after Terror Australis magazine, was published in 1993
– that’s nearly fifteen years ago. Long enough for the genre to have moved on,
for new magazines to arise both in print and on the net, and for Terror
Australis to be something that the younger generation of horror writers
probably aren’t even aware of. That said, Terror Australis was important at the
time. In the late 1980’s, there was not even one paying market in Australia
devoted to weird fiction (TA’s predecessor The Australian Horror and Fantasy
Magazine didn’t pay). I’m proud that we started the first semi-pro horror
magazine in this country (by we, I mean myself and my colleagues Bryce J.
Stevens and Chris G.C. Sequeira) and that the magazine led to an important
early anthology of all-weird fiction.

As far as going away from the field, that’s not true – I’ve never left it.
From 1995-2004 I was running specialist science fiction bookstores in Sydney,
at Dymocks and at Collins Superstore. I was able to bring many writers to
events at these stores – local writers like Richard Harland, Robert Hood,
Simon Brown, Jack Dann, Janeen Webb, and Terry Dowling, and overseas
writers like Douglas Adams, Storm Constantine, Harlan Ellison, Raymond
Feist and others. I like to think this work was a continuation of my
encouragement of the local genre writing scene. Chris Sequeira and I have
discussed resurrecting Terror Australis in various forms over the years, but
most things have their time and place, and Terror Australis was, it seems, of its
time and place. It has been encouraging to see the professionalisation of the
Australian Horror Writers Association under Marty Young. But neither
should we forget the Melbourne Horror Writers Association and its
newsletter Severed Head, and the magazine Bloodsongs. Steve Proposch, Chris
Masters and Bryce Stevens carried the horror torch for close to ten years
before the formation of the Southern Horror group at Conflux convention a
few years ago.
2) You are an avid reader, from weird fiction and science fiction, to
mythology and the occult. What have the been the most influential works
upon your own writing?

That’s a huge question! In horror, HP Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith have
remained passionate interests for me for thirty-odd years. I regard them as
supreme in the field of the weird, even though many other writers like
Aickman, MR James, Fritz Lieber, Arthur Machen, Thomas Ligotti, Ramsey
Campbell and so on would also rate highly. My own writing has described a
sort of gradual progression from being so influenced by Lovecraft at the age
of 13 that I couldn’t write anything but lame Cthulhu Mythos pastiches, to the
point where I was nominated for a Ditmar in 2003 for the novella
“Uncharted”, a piece of writing that took me thirty years to be able to reach
artistically. And it’s only since then that I feel I’ve really found my own voice.
But even while I say that, “Uncharted” was enormously influenced by M.
John Harrison, who initially carved a career from what one could formula
fantasy (though a warped, skewed version of it) and later moved towards an
inimitable mainstream realist style that I admire almost beyond telling. I’ve
been influenced by many writers in different fields though. In psychology and
the occult I have to name Colin Wilson, Robert Anton Wilson, Genesis P.
Orridge and Hakim Bey as having the most influence on the way I see the
world. (Or alternatively, as having best articulated aspects of the way I see
the world). How these influences are reflected in my own writing is not
always easy to define, but I know that what comes out of my head onto the
page is inevitably affected by what I’ve read. Of ‘mainstream writers’ I would
nominate Samuel Beckett, Paul Auster, Joan Aiken, James Kelman, Jonathan
Carroll, JL Borges, Russell Hoban, William S. Burroughs, Lisa Goldstein,
Terry Dowling, James Sallis, J.G. Ballard, and Christopher Priest as affecting
my own writing the most. I’m also hugely influenced by Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite poet-painter who is the subject of my novel-in-
progress. Then, of course, there are all the writers I love to read for pleasure –
the old pulp writers like your Manly Wade Wellmans and Hugh Caves – who
I find immensely pleasurable and entertaining, but in whose style I wouldn’t
dream of writing. I try and keep up with a bit of science fiction, but I haven’t
anyone much more recent than China Mieville and Charles Stross – both
fabulous writers. What all this influence means in practice is a little unclear; I
haven’t published a novel or even a collection of short stories as yet. But I
will.

3) What influences and inspires your fiction? How do you begin writing a
new short story?
I write extremely slowly. I usually describe my process as being like that of a
jigsaw puzzle. I keep files where I write down story titles, images, plot ideas
and so on – very much as Lovecraft did with his ‘commonplace book’. Over
the years, as my writing attempts have grown somewhat less crude, many of
these ideas have become unusable because they reflect a mental attitude, and
an approach to the craft, that belongs to the past. But sometimes from one of
the germs a story will grow, and I piece it together gradually for (often)
several years until it begins to assume a definite shape. Only then do I usually
tackle it and write it from beginning to end, and send it out into the world. A
hopelessly uncommercial way to write, really. Short stories are supposed to
be easy. M John Harrison writes somewhere that he used to like sending
them off “like boats going a river” until one after another got published. In
my experience, it’s much more difficult than that. But I like to resist whacking
out stories for the sake of it. I usually rework a piece many times, and try to
make it rich with different layers.

4) You are also a poet of some repute. What is it about poetry that interests
you?

I don’t think that’s at all the case! I’ve had very little poetry published, really
mainly some early Lovecraftian sonnets that some people such as S.T. Joshi
seemed to think had some merit. I’ve also published ‘cutups’ inspired by the
experimental technique of Burroughs and Gysin; and some other odd poems.
I used to write a lot of song lyrics with my old new wave band back in the
1980’s; they helped express my poetic side at the time. “Apathy” was a kind
of punk anthem in the mould of the Buzzcocks, which I consider one of the
best songs I ever wrote. One of the few ‘straight’ poems (none-genre, that is)
that has appeared is “James”, a poem I wrote about a friend of mine who
died. But this is small stuff. When young, like many writers (Lovecraft and
Robert E. Howard among them) I fancied myself as poet for some years,
probably because poems seemed easier to write than stories. The symbolists
and imagists are the poets I find myself returning to over and over again, and
the California romantics – CA Smith, George Sterling and their ilk such as
Donald Wandrei. Old-fashioned stuff that most modern poets would find
hopelessly outmoded.

But then you realise that good poems are probably the hardest thing to write
of all. One of my partners is Margi Curtis, and she’s a far more accomplished
poet than I am. Her poem “Voice of the Goddess” has been acclaimed as
helping shape Australian women’s spirituality and feminist theology. I
haven’t given up poetry, though I only write it sporadically these days.
There’s a lot of stuff you’ll probably never see in print. Of course, I have also
done much work as a bibliographer and a critic. None of this stuff has gone
roaring up the bestseller charts, which is why I want to concentrate more on
fiction in the future.

5) You are into esoteric theory & practice (particularly the Magick of
Thelema). What compelled you to become spiritual and how has it affected
your worldview?

Another long story if I told you the whole saga! I have always been interested
in the spiritual side of life. I was raised in a Methodist household – not that
that helped! Worm Technology, my old band, were evangelical Christians!
We had a great time back then challenging the stereotypes of what a Christian
band was supposed to sound like. I’ve had many and varied intense personal
spiritual experiences which would take a book to write about. In the early
1990’s I accepted Liber Al vel Legis (The Book of the Law), was initiated into
several degrees of Crowley’s magical order the Ordo Templi Orientis, and
have been a committed ceremonial magician ever since. This was really
returning to ideas which had appealed to me early on; I ran the Arcane
Science Society in high school. The intervening Christian phase was a
sociological phenomenon which ultimately failed to satisfy my urge for
deeper spiritual meaning in my life. The idea of magick always appealed to
me as a fundamental exploration of human potential. Crowley says that
magick is “the art and science of causing change to occur in conformity with
will”. Through many years now of applying magical techniques to everyday
life, I have come to appreciate this at a deep level. These days, through
running ritual magick workshops, and co-facilitating with Margi and Graham
an eclectic neopagan coven based in Wollongong, I have the chance to explore
these experiences with like-minded others, and to pass on some of my
acquired knowledge about ‘gnosis’ or direct experience of the divine.

6) Are your spiritual beliefs reflected in your work?

Definitely. They are inseparable from it. I must say that a deep vein of
pessimism tends to run through some of my work, and in tales like “Dr
Nadurnian’s Golem” (www.ligotti.net) I feel akin to Ligotti and Lovecraft in
their despair over the stupidity and banality of the human species. The
balance to that is the deep compassion I feel for human frailty, knowing how
frail, weak and sometimes stupid I myself can be. I’m very concerned with
writing from that level of compassion for my characters, who may be misfits
in a world that doesn’t understand them – ‘Outsiders’ to use a term beloved
of both Lovecraft and Colin Wilson - but whose struggle is somehow noble. I
do believe in the nobility of the human spirit, if not in its perfectibility. And I
believe in living life to the full. I have never been able to participate in the
sleepwalkers’ world that takes the mundane as the be-all-and-end-all. Rip
down the veil, I say, let’s see what’s behind it!

7) What is your perception of weird fiction in Australia today?

Weird fiction in Australia is blossoming to some extent. We’re still very small,
and the number of books published in the genre is limited, but it’s great to see
books like the Lothian line, which unfortunately was stifled at birth by short-
sighted publishers.

Novels by Edwina Grey, Jason Nahrung, Kim Wilkins, Martin Livings, Step
hen Dedman, Richard Harland, Cameron Rogers and others fly the flag of
Australian horror in the novel form; while ever-consistent writers like Rob
Hood, Terry Dowling, Rick Kennett and Kaaron Warren are out there
continually producing fine short horror fiction. I’m damn glad to see that
happening. I only wish I were as prolific as some of these others!

The annual best of anthologies are always ripe sources for weird fiction in
short form, and we are lucky to have Bill Congreve’s and Michelle
Marquadt’s Best of Australian SF & Fantasy (MirrorDanse Books) which looks
like being a continuing series that will include horror stories. Angela Challis
and Shayne Jiraiya Cummings have done sterling work in the last few years
with a plethora of anthologies including the Shadowbox e-anthology (see
http://www.brimstonepress.com.au/shadowbox.htm), Australian Dark Fantasy and
Horror (Brimstone Press 2006), and Book of Shadows(Brimstone Press 2006). And
let’s not forget the magazines such as James Cain’s Dark Animus. You have to
hand it to anyone who runs one; it’s often a thankless task.

It’s curious to me that little decent criticism of our own weird fiction tradition
has been published in this country. If you Google “Australian weird fiction”
you get two hits – one for SSWFT and one for Strange Constellations (see
below). If you take a volume like, for instance, Alice Mills’ Seriously Weird:
Papers on the Grotesque (Peter Lang, 1999), at least half of whose contributors
are Australian, you would expect to find some analyses of the grotesque and
weird in Australian fiction. In fact, apart from Greg Ratcliffe writing on
Rodney Hall’s The Second Bridegroom, Janeen Webb touching on the Australian
‘lost race’ fantasies in “Domesticating the Monster”, and a few scattered
references to Australia throughout, the other Australian critics and academics
choose to discuss Mervyn Peake, Canadian Gothic, or whatever. We have
excellent critics of science fiction here here – Michael Tolley, Janeen Webb -
(whose “The Monster as Hero” in Contrary Modes: Proceedings of the World
Science Fiction Conference, (ed J. Blackford, R. Blackford, L. Sussex and N.
Talbot Melbourne, Australia, 1985. Melbourne: Ebony Books-University of
Newcastle, 1985) and volume The Fantastic Self (Eidolon, 1999) I admire -
Gerry Turcotte, Sylvia Kelso, Ken Gelder (whose The Horror Reader,
Routledge, 2000, is a decent overview of the genre as a whole, and whose
Reading the Vampire, Routledge, 1994 is also of interest.) – but they have
worked very little on Australia’s own weird fiction tradition. Van Ikin, Sean
McMullen and Russell Blackford cover the history to some extent in their
Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction (Greenwood Press,
1999) but even there the weird is considered as a small subsection of science
fiction as a whole. Which in some ways it is. Rob Hood has written on the
history of Australian horror films, and of course David Carroll and Kyla
Ward’s www.tabula-rasa.info has some good article on aspects of the genre.
But what we are really lacking is in-depth critical work solely on the weird
and horror tradition of this country. The academic critics are also, perhaps,
suffering from the usual tendency of their species to consider popular horror
fiction as beneath their notice, unless it is written by acknowledged literary
writers such as Rodney Hall. I suppose all this, Ben, is why we want to start
our journal Studies in Australian Weird Fiction!

8) Which authors and works of yesteryear, do you consider foundational to

Australian weird fiction?

Well, Steven Paulsen’s article “The Search for Early Australian Horror” (see
http://www.australianhorror.com/articles.php?article=10) mentions that
Marcus Clarke, Tom Collins, Edward Dyson, Henry Lawson and similar
writers used elements of horror in their writing. There needs to be more study
of this type of material. Guy Boothby and Barbara Baynton, of course. And
minor writers such as John Lang, Edward Dyson, Ernest Favenc, and Hume
Nisbet, works by all of whom Ken Gelder included in his Oxford Book of
Australian Ghost Stories (OUP, 1997). In addition to those, there are the pulpy
writers of the forties who were published by the paperback houses such as
Horwitz Publications, Calvert Publishing and Scripts - James Workman and J.
E. Macdonnell to name but two are writers whose works in the horror genre
need to be more fully explored. We have to count a couple of adopted Kiwis –
Cherry Wilder, who wrote the odd Gothic, and Roie Norton. It’s little known
that the notorious ‘witch of Kings cross’, artist Rosaleen Norton wrote three
Lovecraftian horror stories published in Smith’s Weekly in the 1940’s; these
have only been reprinted once, in an expensive US edition as Three Macabre
Stories (Typographium Press, 1996). I have a rare pamphlet in my collection
called The Shudder Show, by A.E. Martin, published in Sydney by the NSW
Bookstall Co – presumably one of the companies that published reading for
the railway bookstalls. There must be a wealth of unmined material there
could be traced and written up. With some digging and delving, I’m sure
there are many dark and horrific gems to be found in the soil of Australia’s
literary history.

9) You often write literary criticism when time permits. Which authors do you
enjoying studying and who are neglected by the community at large? Why do
you think this is?

Well, as to authors I enjoy studying, they relate closely to my favourite

reading, of course. I moderate discussion groups on the web about Terry
Dowling, M. John Harrison and William Hope Hodgson. Since my primary
interest is in weird fiction, I have a similar attitude to that of S.T. Joshi, whose
three books on the weird tale should form the core of any critical library about
the subject (added to Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature). But I’m
always discovering new writers that I wish I had time to pursue. There’s too
little time to read them, let alone write about them all! I return again and
again to Samuel Beckett, a towering figure in modern literature and theatre –
the element of horror in his work is strong – but I’d love to write about Djuna
Barnes, Poe, Dennis Etchison, Vernon Lee and so many others! If by your
question you mean what fantasy and horror authors are neglected by the
community at large, well – I think among those who are criminally
overlooked at this moment are Davis Grubb, Russell Kirk, MP Shiel, and
(predictably) Terry Dowling! I have quite eclectic tastes as you may have
noticed. Why are these authors neglected? Literary fashions and fads are
always coming and going. But we are also increasingly a short-term-memory
culture. Harlan Ellison has decried the loss of our literary history which
means that most kids these days have never read James Hilton’s Lost Horizon,
and consequently have no concept of what you’re talking about if you refer to
Shangri-La. Much of our Western culture is built around the sound-byte
mentality, and older, longer, more leisurely works are simply dropping out of
favour, though they may still have much to offer. As too, works which
challenge the readers’ preconceptions and offer meaty intellectual weight. The
charts are dominated by literary fluff much of the time; I enjoyed the Da Vinci
Code as much as anyone, but it’s not lasting literature. Give me James
Bradfield, Angela Carter, Patrick McGrath or Joyce Carol Oates anytime.

10) Is there a clear Australian voice within weird fiction worldwide, or is it

still emerging? What makes a work of weird fiction uniquely Australia? Have
the British and American influences been too influential?

The British and American influences were hard to escape in the early days, in
what was basically a colonial situation. Nowadays our culture is more
assertive, more sure of itself. You have writers like Luke Davies and Tom
Shapcott who bring a poetic sensibility to their novels. Weird and horror
fiction, I think, needs to engage with the mainstream in terms of reading
what’s going on there, keeping up with trends, in order to ensure that a real
quality is brought to bear. I believe there is a clear Australia voice in our
general literature, otherwise writers like Tim Winton would not be so
popular. (He’s written a horror novel too, folks, in case you didn’t know – a
standalone novella called In the Winter Dark). Naturally, our most unique
feature is partly landscape – the dark heart of the Australian bush, the
massive size of our continent, the dryness of the desert, the way our cities
cluster like tiny shellfish around the edges of the land as though fearful of
penetrating the interior. Psychologically, there’s a deep well to draw on here.
I think our voice has still to develop, though. We’ve never had an Aussie
Stephen King, and publishers are reluctant to back horror novels here because
they don’t sell strongly enough. Weird fiction continually encounters this
problem anyway – its appeal, as Lovecraft said, being limited to a small
audience of people who are of “the requisite sensitivity”. I don’t have a
problem with that. I’d rather weird fiction be tapping the truly bizarre than it
be watered down to appeal to some perceived wider market.