Just a quick intro from us today, since it’s basically bedtime. We have for you, as our last(ish) post of 2023, an interview with Clark T. Carlton, whose most recent book published in June this year. So, get yourself a hot drink and give this a read!
Don’t forget you can also follow Clark on twitter!
Have you always known you wanted to be a writer? How old were you when you wrote your first story?
Yep, I always knew when my first poem was published in the PTA news letter in the second grade that I wanted to write. In the third grade, I wrote my first story, a fairy tale, about a boy and his sister who want to free their five brothers being held as prisoners by an evil king. The boy and his sister journey through the woods to find a tree with a bird’s nest full of magical wish eggs. They climb the tree to crack open the eggs in order to make their wishes when they are attacked by a giant crow. When they fall from the tree, they are attacked by the king and his army. The sister uses her wish to destroy the king and his army.
I showed the story to my real life sister who told me it was terrible and that I had stolen from other fairy tales. She was somewhat right and it was an important lesson about being original.
I wrote my first novel in high school which I am sure was just awful. Back then, I was a Glee boy, in a pop choir, something I don’t like to talk about now. Some of the other members of the group were like me, leading secret lives. We were hiding our drug use and smoking, our petty crimes and our forbidden sexual behavior from our parents and our churches. I had the nerve, when I was sixteen, to psychoanalyze a group of teenagers I thought had treated me poorly. That novel was stolen by the people I wrote about who burned it in a fire after breaking into my house. They also punctured my water bed which is how long ago that was.
What pieces of media would you say were formative for you? Do you see any of their features in your own writing?
Although I watched television growing up, I wasn’t impressed with it. Back then it was known as “the boob tube” and as a “cultural wasteland” and it was. Just a few shows really grabbed me and that included reruns of the original Star Trek as well as programs from the BBC. Decades later, television was liberated by HBO and other cable networks to become one of the best art forms. We have an abundance of quality programs courtesy of Hulu, Max, Amazon Prime etc. When I was a child there was very little television that was smart, edgy and stimulating. I was more taken with books, comics and movies.
When you close your eyes and imagine an apple, what do you see? An actual apple, a sketch of one, a blackness? Do you think that impacts your writing process?
I’m a very visual writer and I can’t imagine just one apple. I do imagine an infinite space of blackness and then see an enormous, planet-sized piece of fruit that slowly revolves and as it does, it morphs from being a Golden Delicious to a Honey Crisp to a Granny Smith. And it has a ball of gorgonzola for a moon. I also see the blemishes and bruises on the apple and imagine enormous worms popping out to crawl around its wrinkled equator.
If you wanted to learn about craft, which three authors would you suggest reading?
I was literally shaking when I finished reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. Her craftsmanship is extraordinary. Like many Indian or Indian-American writers, she has a command of our language that is informed by British, Indian and American English and it’s a gorgeous melange that is meaty and intricate yet always clear. Her short stories are also a treasure.
David Leavitt is also a master of craft. His readership goes beyond a gay following as he simply writes great literature. Like Lahiri, his prose is stimulating and immaculate. He has an enormous ability to surprise while remaining intimate.
J.D. Salinger is the first author I was obsessed with. Like so many teenagers, I identified with and championed Holden Caulfield in his hatred of “phoniness,” but I also identified with Holden’s tendency to fool people with his lies. That’s what authors like to do — to get people to pay attention to their fabrications. The Catcher in the Rye is highly entertaining and beautifully crafted in its personal account of a young man’s breakdown. The prose in this book has an honesty that is daring. It reached inside me to make me laugh and massage my heart.
When you’re building your world, what do you focus on? How do you try to make it come to life?
I don’t feel like I am focusing when I am creating either my sci-fi/fantasy world in my Antasy series or when I was recreating the Los Angeles of the late 80s/early 90s of my new novel, A Bitch for God. I feel more like I am channeling, or what actors call “connecting” when they become one with the character they are creating. I’ve also heard this called a “beta state” or “beta waves” or “the flow” and it’s like entering into a trance. I don’t have a problem getting into this state which is initiated by connecting with my feelings. I have always been someone with strong emotions, a lot of sensitivity and concern for the problems of others. I do what I can to better the world and am always paying attention to bad news. I think what some people call “writer’s block” is really just an absence of feelings, a lack of something to say, a deficit of concern. Someone like Stephen King can write a book a year because of the depth of his feelings. I imagine that mostly he channels from a constant state of fear, that it’s his way of dealing with it.
What projects are you currently working on? Can you share any details yet?
I paint between books and at the moment I am painting a psychedelic forest. And that’s actually the setting for my next novel, based on a lesser known fairy tale but one of my favorites as a kid. In one way I am going back to the first story I ever wrote! I plan to go into the not-so-happily-ever-after when one character’s gift turns out to be a curse and the other’s curse turns out to be a blessing. And the magical being who cursed/blessed them is known as a fairy godmother to some and as an evil witch to others.
Three pictures that capture the aesthetic of your book?
A Ouija board. The Hollywood Sign. The Pied Piper by Maxwell Parrish.
Three songs you would put in your book’s soundtrack?
MacArthur Park, the Donna Summer version — this is a featured song in the book around the building of a parade float. I would also include Last Dance, also by Donna Summer, which takes on a different meaning as the marker of the end of a happier era. And I might include Losing My Religion by R.E.M. which is from 1991, the time of my novel’s setting, but that might be too on the nose for my book’s theme.
What would be your dream project?
I have a producer interested in turning A Bitch for God into a limited series for Amazon Prime. We’d love to get Reese Witherspoon to play Lakshmi Steinmetz. I’d also love to see my Antasy books turned into either a film trilogy or several ten-part series for Prime, Max, Netflix etc.
Which of your characters would you most want to fight a zombie apocalypse with?
Terraclon, from my Antasy series, is a low caste boy turned military commander. He used to be obsessed with fashion but learned he has a talent for inventing war devices. He’d do more than just fight zombies — he would figure out a bait and a trap to destroy them by the thousands.
You’re stuck on a desert island and you’re allowed only three (LGBT) books. What are you taking?
Arkansas by David Leavitt. Dancer From the Dance by Andrew Holleran. The Color Purple by Alice Walker.
You can collaborate on anything with anyone in the LGBT community: who would it be and why?
I would want to collaborate with Neil Tenant and Chris Lowe of the Pet Shop Boys. I would have them rework the songs my partner and I wrote for a synth-pop opera set in ancient Babylon about the building of the Hanging Gardens. It’s a love triangle between Nebuchadnezzar, the young woman he falls for and the young Greek gardener that she is in love with. The hero of the piece is a eunuch and a priest who is forced to dress as a woman.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Clark T. Carlton is an award winning novelist and playwright and has worked as a journalist, screen and television writer, and as a producer of so-called reality television. He was born in the South, grew up in the East, went to school in the North and lives with his family in the West. As a child he spent hours observing ants and their wars and pondered their similarity to human societies.
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