Today, I’m thrilled to talk with New York Times best-selling and Bram Stoker Award-winning author Stephen Graham Jones about his newest novel, My Heart is a Chainsaw. Fans of Jones will love this spectacular homage to the slasher genre while new readers will appreciate the imaginative way he bridges the gap in their horror knowledge. As he has done in previous books, Jones weaves literary prose into a deeply emotional journey that doesn’t just end in gore but shines with hope. Read on as we talk about why we need to be afraid to feel human, how to not write a novel, and why telepathy would ruin art.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. Can you tell us a little about yourself? When did you start writing?
Hi, yeah thanks for having me. I’m from West Texas and I’m Blackfeet. I started writing when I was nineteen, but I never had dreams of being a writer. Where I grew up, you either farmed or went to the oilfields, and everyone I knew that went to the oilfields always came back with grievous injuries to their hands. So, I was going to farm. But then my mother surprised me. She noticed I always had a paperback in my back pocket, so she saved up enough money to send me to one semester of college, to see if I’d like it.
I started writing during the second semester. A couple of police officers came in one of my classes, looking around. And I’m getting lower and lower in my seat because every time throughout my life whenever the cops came in a room, they were always there for me. And sure enough, they did, but not for whatever I thought I did.
One of my uncles had been burned over most of his body, and the town I was in had the best burn unit in the region. They had airlifted him there and I was the only family they could find. They delivered me to the ICU, and I sat there for three days. All I had was my spiral notebook, so when I got bored, I wrote a story.
When I went back to class, I was supposed to turn in a personal essay. Instead, I tore the pages right out of my notebook and handed the story to her. I figured I’d get a D- or something. But she liked the story so much she ended up typing it up and entering it into a departmental contest. Which I won and got $50 for. I’ve been writing ever since.
You’re a professor of as well as a writer. How do you balance work, writing, and family?
The rule I have for myself is, I choose writing over everything but family and health. Instead of watching that reality show or going to that sporting event or hanging out at the bar, I just write. The way it works for me is writing has always been this shell I can form around myself, where I can be in my world and not have to deal with responsibilities and duties. I don’t want to take the car to get an oil change. I don’t want to mow the lawn or work on the rain gutters. I don’t want to do any of that stuff—that sounds terrible to me. But as long as I’m sitting at the keyboard and playing with dragons, I’m working. So, I hide at the keyboard.
What does your average writing day look like?
If I’m writing a novel, I’ll probably work on it four hours total. Not at a single stretch. I used to do the three-day novel time test, back in the early 2000’s. If you don’t know what that is, you dream up a novel on Friday and Monday at midnight, you turn the novel into the contest. The first time I did that, I did write a novel. But I thought the way you did it was to stay awake all 72 hours. I had all these snacks and Vanilla Dr. Pepper and things to keep me awake. But no matter what, I’d still wake up on the keyboard with 16 pages of the letter n. I did finish and it wasn’t very good. It has the best ending I’ve ever done, but the rest wasn’t very good.
The next year, at the stroke of midnight, I made a playlist. I’d write to the playlist and when it ended, I’d take a nap or watch some of Nightmare on Elm Street or shot free throws in my driveway. I did something for an hour. And what I found was my ideal writing session was an hour and a half. After that, I can definitely still keep spitting out pages, but it’s all junk. In those 72 hours, I wrote a novel and it ended up getting published. Ever since then, I try not to write for more than an hour and a half at a time if I can help it.
Is there a magic formula to writing?
I think if we knew the answers, if we had telepathy, we wouldn’t have art. Because we’d just transmit our feelings and thoughts directly. But because we don’t, we have to encode what we think and feel into sculptures, novels, music, poetry, and let someone try to decode it to get a version of our thoughts and our feelings.
Every story is different. Every novel is different. Sometimes you outline, sometimes you just hack your way through the tall grass. I’ve written stories in twenty minutes that get published and go far. And then I’ll put every drop of blood in my heart into a story, think it’s perfect, and it never gets published. You don’t get to choose which ones connect with readers. Sometimes a book, novel, or story stretches far, and I never can figure out why. You do everything you can, but there’s some element of magic or kismet or something. There’s nothing you can bottle, it’s lucky anytime someone finds what you’re writing and likes it. That’s the magic you’re looking for.
If you had to summarize My Heart is a Chainsaw in five words, what would they be?
I’m a novelist so compression is not my strong suit, but I’ll try. Summer. Sun. Blood in the water. No, that’s six words. Okay, I’ll try again. There will be blood. That’s four. Well, I’ll keep thinking.
Throughout your career, you’ve written quite a few books and stories. What was your favorite book or story to write?
It may be My Heart is a Chainsaw. I’ve never lived with a novel as long as I did that one. I lived with that story for eight years. It took that long to actually get down into what was going on. And the more I talk about it, the more I realize how personal of a novel it is. I think I ended up doing that thing writers do, where we end up putting ourselves into the book. Back in 2012, I wrote a book called, Growing Up Dead in Texas. I wrote it really quickly, so I didn’t have time to make stuff up. My main character is Stephen Graham Jones and most of the events in his life are events in mine. Everyone always calls it my memoir, but I don’t. To me, My Heart is a Chainsaw is more emotionally autobiographical than Growing Up Dead in Texas.
Favorite character?
If it’s not Jade, it’s probably Darryl from Mongrels. My werewolf novel.
Most challenging novel or story?
The most challenging for me to get down on the page was probably The Bird is Gone, in 2003. Because every chapter is wildly divergent, a different style, from the next or the last chapter. And it was really hard for me to use that kind of patchwork narrative approach and still have some sort of thrust to it. But I’m super proud of that novel, I love The Bird is Gone, it was so difficult to do.
You write multiple genres. Do you have a favorite?
Yeah, I think it’s horror. No matter what I start writing, whether it’s fantasy, science fiction, crime. They all tend towards horror. A good example is this fantasy story I have called When Swords Had Names. I set out to see what it was like to play in a fantasy world, to write in this golden age of monsters and wizards. The story is about one guy who figured out that if you carve the meat from a dead centaur’s body where horse and man merge, it’s the best meat you’ll ever eat. So that’s what he does, he goes around and tries to get that meat. To tell you the truth, I get bored if there isn’t evisceration or decapitation on the horizon.
Are there any messages you think you can convey or capture in one genre over another?
I’ve never thought about genre like that. I think what good horror does, it allows the protagonist to overcome the monster, whatever it is. We get a redemption. To know that by the end, we’ll somehow make it through. But horror is always whispering to us that it’s not free. There’s always a price. You don’t just kill the monster and go to school on Monday morning. You have to deal with the consequences of having to kill that monster.
Take slashers in particular. Yes, the final girl puts the slasher down at the end. At least, temporarily. But at the same time, her parents, her friends, her pets—everyone is dead around her. She’s the last girl standing. So yes, she’s won. But at what price. And it’s not that she had to spend these things to win. It’s that in order to overcome the slasher, she had to become almost a monster herself. It asks, how does she go on from there. To me, that’s important. Dealing with the fall-out of horror rather than the horror itself.
What scares you?
The dark, I guess. Seems kind of wimpy, probably. But I’m scared of the dark because it’s populated with my imagination, with anything I can put there until the lights come on, and then I think I’m safe. But as soon as I turn the lights off, my imagination activates. I don’t even like taking the trash out at night because I always think the werewolves are going to get me.
Why do you think people like being scared?
I think being scared reminds us that we’re human. We grew up all over in the savannahs of the world without sharp claws, without big teeth, without being particularly fast. Which is to say, we were a snack for everybody from eagles to leopards to snakes—everything just wanted to eat us. Horror, I think, was just part of our daily existence. It got hard-wired in. To be human was to be scared. But in today’s modern world, we’ve shined lights into all the corners where the shadows are. We keep the leopards and scary stuff out of suburbia and the places we live to keep us safe. Horror can remind us that we’re human. It puts teeth back in the darkness for us. And being human, we need those teeth in the darkness.
What are you reading, listening to, watching right now?
Right now, I just started watching Yellowstone and I’m really liking it. Let’s see, I just finished reading Heartbreak Soup, the comic book series. It’s amazing how much I care about these characters in this made-up city, or town, of Palomar in Mexico. And the book I’m reading, it’s a re-read from my teenage years, all of the Robert E. Howard Conan stories and I’m just impressed by them all over again. They’re blowing me away. Listening to… lately, I’ve been queuing up this artist, Jen Whitmore. I’m really liking her stuff, even though this album is older. I tend to find things super late.
What book would you recommend to readers? To aspiring writers?
I’d tell readers to read just about any book out in the world. To aspiring writers, I think, Ursula LeGuin. I think you can learn a lot from how she tells a story. And the novel I’d pick, maybe, The Left Hand of Darkness.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
Read outside your genre. It’s too easy if you write fantasy novels to only read fantasy novels. I think the danger that you’re courting when you do that, is you produce stuff that’s only for fantasy readers. You do want to produce stuff that fantasy readers want to read, of course. But if you think of fiction like a field, whether it’s literary, fantasy, or crime. I think it’s really important to step over the fence into other fields so that burs catch on your pantlegs. When you come home to work in your field, your genre, those burs fall off and they’ve been seeds all along. I might be walking in a non-fiction field about botany or something, and I come home to horror and that bur falls off and grows into a strange, weird plant. That’s how we get new DNA into our genres and keep them vital.
What’s next?
I have Memorial Ride, which is a graphic novel out in October. And I’m pretty sure I have a haunted house story out in Spring. And I just wrote a slasher novel that’s slated for next summer.
Any chance we’ll see more of Jade in the future?
Absolutely, yes.
