Alan DeNiro, author of Total Oblivion, More or Less (Nov 30-Dec 12)

Please welcome Alan DeNiro, author of Total Oblivion, More or Less. Alan will be chatting on LibraryThing until December 12th.

It's really great to be here. Would be happy to talk about the new novel, the short story collection, or anything else that you'd like!

Your novel gets called "post-apocalyptic" over at Amazon, and the description certainly fits. Do you think that sort of story is somehow a natural mode of storytelling these days? Maybe I'm wrong in thinking we're seeing more such lately?

Hi there...thanks for your question. I think that's definitely the case. Speculative fiction in particular always seems to take its cues from what's going on in the larger culture and mutating it when necessary. I do think that where we are currently in history where fears of disaster are in the air more than other times, and so writing fiction in this mode involves making what's out there and making it weirder and stranger in order to reflect on it. Of course, I also think that EVERY era has its own issues to deal with--it's just a matter of what their particular inflections are. What I attempted in the novel, at least, is to try and avoid some of the usual post-apocalyptic tropes by using a transformation of the landscape and society that was truly in the realm of the fantastic, not anything in the realm of plausibility. But hopefully that provides a kind of fun-house mirror as to where we are as a culture.

Care to talk about what it was like to shift from short stories to the novel? And from Small Beer to Spectra/Ballantine?

Also, I've heard you're connected with Mercy Corps--can you tell us about that?

adeniro@4,

I still wonder why the post-apocalyptic mode is more popular now (if it is) than during the Cold War, when apocalypse sometimes seemed so near.

And I just googled Mercy Corps - very interesting, do tell us more, please.

5

Hi there! I would say that the transition from poems to short stories was a LOT easier for me than short stories to novels. This isn't the first novel I've written, but it's taken a long time--and especially, with the canvas of this novel--to really reorient my writing style to live and breathe with writing in a long form.

The transition between publishers was a good one. One of the largest differences--which doesn't involve the presses themselves, per se--was the fact that I didn't have an agent for the short story collection, and did with the novel. And I was lucky to have great editors with both books. At both places, they honed the books to where they needed to be in terms of the editing (and re-editing!) process. And of course, the folks at Small Beer have been extremely supportive with Total Oblivion. It's a long term relationship and friendship that's fostered with working with an exemplary small press like that. Gavin and Kelly were a huge inspiration in us starting Rabid Transit Press--first with a zine, and now a novella series. That was...2002? It could be argued that Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet was the most influential genre magazine of the decade--certainly, it changed the game in how people perceived what a little magazine could do, and provided the impetus for people to start their own.

With Mercy Corps, I'm not directly connected with them, but I am doing online fundraising for them in conjunction with the release of the book. Mercy Corps does really fantastic work with refugees and other people displaced because of war and natural disasters, among other crises, and so it seemed like a natural fit to hopefully send some needed funding their way. Obviously, Total Oblivion is fiction but people being uprooted from their homes...that's a daily reality across the world, sadly.

So I've set up an online fundraising page here:

http://www.mercycorps.org/fundraising/adeniro

And to tie it more directly with the release of the book, if anyone donates in any amount to the page, I'll send the donator a customized one of a kind paragraph, by email or post...set in the world of the novel. So hopefully that will add to people's enjoyment of the novel as well, while helping out with much-needed action.

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Hey there, it certainly is an interesting compare and contrast.The apocalyptic content--if it could be called that--seems more "viral" this decade than a kind of centralized threat from a nuclear strike, say. Obviously there were other types of apocalypses (many!) written about besides post-nuclear war, but with the Cold War that seemed to be the over-arching catastrophe that imprinted all the others. To use a crude metaphor, it's the difference between a nuclear warhead and a suitcase bomb, and how those different types of fears inflect what we consider when speculating about how society falls apart--and how those stories reflect back on our (kind of) stable current situation.

Reminded me of this book I remember reading as a teenager called the Drowning Towers, by George Turner. Fantastic book involving the collapse of society and one family's struggle with it. Was a great investigation of class divisions. Amazing characters and an elegiac (though still gritty) setting.

And then I saw the Drowning Towers is in your library! :)

I must confess I haven't read Drowning Towers yet, though.