The Lost Pages D.F. Lewis Special: Interview by Neddal Ayad

NA	How did you come to writing?
	I think I've always been a writer, but I've not always thought I was! So I didn't do it for half my life. I suppose the first sign was when I was at infant's school and the teacher told my mother that I wrote very imaginatively. My real creative splurge started with poems at university in the late 1960s — where I also collaborated on an epic mythos called "The Egnisomicon" with a friend, inspired possibly by H.P. Lovecraft and William Blake! I wrote a rambling episodic novel in the early 1970s entitled "The Visitor" — inspired by John Barth, Charles Dickens, H.P. Lovecraft...? Later, a novella entitled "Agra Aska" in the early 1980s (which was finally published in 1998.) And, if it is possible for me to be my own inspiration, this novella, I feel, gave birth to my splurge of short stories that started getting published in 1986.
NA	Who were some early influences?
	Well, very early influences were the Beano Comic, Enid Blyton, and Captain W.E. Johns — followed by some of the writers I've already mentioned.
NA	What about authors who may not have been direct influences, but have inspired you in some way?
	There has been a fitfully slow and eclectic development in my reading over the years (I'm now 56). Some may have inspired or influenced me, but I certainly enjoy reading them (often as a musical experience, much like classical music) and, in addition to those I've already mentioned, these writers comprise (in no particular order): Robert Aickman, Marcel Proust, Elizabeth Bowen, John Fowles, Anthony Burgess, T.S. Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, Clark Ashton Smith, Philip K Dick, Jack Vance, Samuel R. Delany, Oliver Onions, Sarban, Anita Brookner, Barbara Vine, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Paul Auster, W.G. Sebald...
NA	Do you have any advice for beginning writers?
	I always hesitate to answer this question because I'm a bit off-the-wall and my approach ever seems against my own better judgement! I suppose the only advice that is possible for any writer to give is one of determination and to keep plugging away whatever the setbacks.
NA	I've seen several people comment on how long it takes them to get through *Weirdmonger*. Any theories as to why this might be?
	I think I predicted this effect right from the start on one of the internet message boards. I suppose it's the deep texture of symbol and subject matter and constructive non-sequiturs, combined with the interaction of graphological, phonological, syntactical, and semantic aspects of the text itself (without being too pretentious!).
NA	The stories in your collection *Weirdmonger* were chosen from some 1500 (!) that were published between 1986 and 1999. How did you select the stories? Now that you've had some time with the collection, if the opportunity presented itself, would you make any changes?
	I tried not to fret too much over the stories chosen — and, indeed, I hoped and trusted they would choose themselves and settle into a predetermined pattern quite outside my control. This is more or less what happened, but I did later try to trick fate by placing the stories in alphabetical order rather than in the order they were originally listed. As to now wanting to change the choice after it is too late with them truly crystallized in print, it would be sensible to say they are the optimum choice. However, my current self has severe doubts over the choice, and I would prefer some to be excluded and others now to be included in their place. There are even one or two in the book to which, today, I would not give house room!
NA	I've been told that there is a patchwork novel encoded within *Weirdmonger*. Would you care to drop a hint or two on how one might begin to decipher the novel?
	Who told you that! Indeed, I think whoever it was may be correct — and I've been trying to decipher it myself. As to dropping a hint, I'd say, every reader for themselves!
NA	I see your writing as part of a micro-movement that I call the "high weird"; contemporary writers who have their roots in the work of Poe, Lovecraft, Dunsany, Machen, and Chambers but who approach the material from a thoroughly modern perspective, build upon the work of earlier writers, and rarely fall into pastiche. Thoughts?
	I must say that I've really liked the term "high weird" ever since you coined it on the internet a month or two ago. It simply seems to ring true about the writers you mention and about what I am trying to do with my prose (as described in my previous answer). "High" has many connotations, some bad, some good. I'm not sure what you mean by never falling into pastiche, as "high weird" is easily subject to imitation, I suspect. It has been said, more than once, that I write in a "genre of one" — and hopefully any exponents of "high weird" do likewise (it would seem the essence of it, to me). But distinctive styles, as I say, are easily lampooned. I leave others cleverer than me to extrapolate on the considerations thrown up by the concept of "high weird" — like your good self? (At this point I'd insert an emoticon of gentle humour...!)
NA	By not falling into pastiche, I mean that writers like you and Ligotti, while not being overly serious about it, don't treat the weird as a gimmick; as in "Hmm ... I have this detective story, lets weird it up by throwing in some references to Cthulhu." I guess what I'm trying to say is that you and the other high weird writers treat the weird as something worth pursuing in and of itself, rather than as a genre exercise or something to be slavishly emulated. (Quite tangled, I know.)
	Hey, that's brilliant, Neddal. Not thought about it quite like that before. There's no way I could put it better. The "tangled" bit, too, is all part and parcel of why it is a brilliant summation. Sorry, do interviewers respond to flattery? But I do mean what I say.
NA	How important are Surrey and North East Essex to your work?
	I'm not a writer naturally imbued with the surroundings and accoutrements of normal existence. In actual fact, I do not see myself writing the stories at all. They are quite beyond me — and I disapprove of some of their subject matters and proclivities. As to locale, many of my stories were written indeed in South London (Surrey), and I used some of the names of places around there in my early stories together with grotesque caricatures and extrapolations of the residential area of my then home. North East Essex is now my current home (and my original home as a child) — and although its sea/pier etc. are important, they could have been any sea or pier!
NA	Locale does seem to have a prominent place in some of your work, especially in the stories set by the sea. Is there anything in particular about the sea that excites your imagination?
	The sea originally was and has become again for me very important. In my infancy, I was brought up next to the sea and a pleasure pier. I've now returned, in middle to later life, to this same environment. The sea is a single living creature. I meet it every early morning on my walk to work. It's inspirational. It's a trip-switch.
NA	When you say that you don't see yourself writing the stories, do you mean it in a Gnostic sort of sense? How do you go about getting "you" out of the picture?
	It's not a conscious effort. It's something that seems to happen naturally when I set the pen-tip to the paper in a preset creative mode. Not a wishy-washy out-of-body experience. More a slanted view of reality that I've managed to train into existence at that trip-switch of a button. A bit like music — which I see as fiction injected straight into the vein, rather than ratiocination via the eyes or ears. Sorry, I can't speak in anything but seemingly pretentious terms. But if questions are to be answered, they need to be answered honestly, without fear of over- or understating. (What is Gnosticism?)
NA	What are some of the other "trip-switches"?
	Well, the actual act of writing (poising the pen above the paper with no pre-planning or obvious prior inspiration), as I say, creates some hair-trigger trip-switch. Music, other people's fiction, serendipity, stumbling across a neologism...
NA	You seem to work fairly quickly. How long does it generally take you to complete a piece?
	For some reason, I usually need to ensure that I complete a piece within a single sitting or a day's multiple sittings that are effectively one sitting. Recently, I have been involved in a writer's group that meets in my home whereupon, at times, we have an exercise in speed writing on a specific title pulled from a hat. Most of my new 21st-century stories have evolved from these "incidents". So, I suppose this process represents two sittings. During my past "heyday" of writing in the 1990s, I used to write at any and every opportunity, e.g., during travel, even surreptitiously at work. I have lost this passion.
NA	When you're working on a piece, do you follow any sort of methodology?
	I try to logicalize the illogical. I will start with any "monster" splurge of "paint", then work outward and inward, later to be honed or moulded into a presentable "story". Not Andre Breton's automatic writing. Not slavish pre-planning and toeing-the-line of "acceptable" storytelling. But something somewhere in between, I guess. The proof of the pudding's in the eating. But I wouldn't be trite enough to say that!
NA	You're a big fan of classical music, I believe. Does music impact your writing? If so, how?
	Yes, you're quite right. Over the years, classical music (which, for me, covers all sorts of modernistic sins!) has been a greater passion for me than even writing or reading fiction. Not that I know anything about it technically. Writing has become a musical discipline for me, combining, say, Stockhausen and Schubert. I can't explain it better than that.
NA	What was the genesis of the "magazanthus" *Nemonymous*?
	The word "Nemonymous" came first. It stemmed from discussion about literary theories (such as the "intentional fallacy") on an internet mailing group. I don't know how it happened, but one day I found myself promising to start a short-story magazine with anonymous authors but with the intention of "late-labelling" or "denemonization" in subsequent issues! Partly spurred on by the apparent folding of various print magazines and journals in 2001, I decided to try to restore the balance somehow. "Megazanthus" came later (with issue 3 of Nemonymous). Perhaps, your "magazanthus" makes more sense, because it was intended to be a cross between a magazine and an anthology. But "megazanthus" seemed to flow better somehow — and I later saw it was "me" to "us" via "eyeless" (I-less) in "Gaza" to the "nth" degree! Or just one letter different from a plant called "megalanthus".
NA	Can you please explain the concept behind *Nemonymous*?
	There was indeed an original concept, I recall, with a cluster of concepts that automatically occurred during the "practice" of operating *Nemonymous, these later ones being largely out of my control, as they stemmed from readers' reactions and extrapolations from the core magazine ... many indefinable and inscrutable, but reportedly creating a new experience in the reading of the fiction process. The first concept derived from that internet discussion I just talked about, together with a feeling that some well-known magazines were folding. I decided to plug the gap with something I thought might be provocative (gimmicky?) — yet hopefully constructive — so as to make the product different enough to be noticed. So, yes, its concept, you ask? In hindsight, I suppose Nemonymous One* was the world's first ever self-contained printed volume of multi-authored anonymous stories collected as such. "Late-labelling" was indivisible from this, where authors were identified in the following issue, a feature I introduced because I was worried I wouldn't get any authors without this promise. Yet, one of the most acclaimed stories in *Nemonymous* remains anonymous to this day, at the request of the author. Another factor constituting the evolving concept was — with the arrival of email submissions making this possible for the first time [see *Nemonymous* for details on the publication's anonymous submission system] — the act of offering to consider stories submitted for publication anonymously (and in the latest issue only reading submissions anonymously). I believe (and many readers of *Nemonymous* have made similar unsolicited comments) that it is logical that short fiction stories (separately and as a gestalt of the collection) seem to work differently when read without their bylines — and, as it happens, when read without overcontextualisation (artwork, etc.) — and, consequently, I also believe that any editor/publisher should only consider submissions anonymously until and beyond the point of making a final decision regarding acceptance or rejection of the story by an unknown author. Why this is not standard practice now is a mystery to me. (Contracts, of course, can come later and then authors would reveal themselves to the editor).
NA	Although your name doesn't appear anywhere within the various issues of *Nemonymous, it's a bit of an open secret that you are the editor. How does editorial anonymity fit into the Nemonymous* universe? (Nemoverse?)
	It just seemed obvious that I should retain my own nemonymity within the printed pages whilst making a whole song and dance on the internet! One day, there will just be the *Nemonymous* volumes to stand as testament to themselves. The Internet will have exploded up its own fundament! Furthermore, in recent weeks, I've created a new nemonym for my own writing: Weirdmonger. D.F. Lewis no longer exists on my various websites.
NA	What are the goals?
	The goals and methods have gradually evolved as I've gone along. No prejudgement from the authors' names. A reading experience that approaches the gestalt of the stories as well as their intrinsic separateness. To evoke a brainstorming approach to reviewing — and to fiction publication (a new and illuminating experience for reader and writer alike, as it reportedly turned out). To only accept or reject stories whilst they are still anonymous to the editor/publisher. A more nebulous (numinous) philosophy of nothingness and nobody (nemo). And these repercussions (rather than goals) are still evolving even as we speak. Imagine my surprise, for example, when I recently discovered that John Fowles differentiated in 1964 between the nemo and the ego...
NA	What have been the highlights of the first four issues?
	It would be invidious to pick out various stories. The overall highlight has been the reader and writer reaction that *Nemonymous* has evoked after four issues (with 71 original stories all financially remunerated) — a reaction that has been positive and surprising. And the way some of the goals/repercussions (mentioned just now) have naturally evolved in a pattern I would never have predicted when I set out in 2001.
NA	Have you kept track of the ratio of new or unpublished writers to established writers?
	All the writers that have appeared in Nemonymous are writers to their very bottom bone. Some are established, some not so established. Two people from the classical music world that I sometimes inhabit have been in *Nemonymous* with their first published stories — just an example of why I am so proud to be its anonymous editor/publisher.
NA	Have you captured a definition of "Nemonity"? Where did you first come across the term?
	"Nemonymity" I first discovered somewhere inside my head! A funny place ... I don't like to linger there too long! The definition needs to be crystallized from the various thoughts I've just adumbrated. The beauty is that nemonymity will never be fully crystallized: becoming an eternal ricochet, after I've gone. Pretentious, again? Actually, all the publicity on the internet in which I indulge will soon be forgotten. Then *Nemonymous* will be the only thing left (with no named publisher or editor).
NA	You're running several discussion groups, blogs, and contribute to at least two message boards. How has the internet affected your work and how important is communication?
	I simply enjoy internet communication. I don't think it's the ideal medium for fiction to be read ... but that hasn't stopped me setting up various blogs as vehicles for republishing all 1500 of my stories (other than those in the *Weirdmonger* book). I'm proud of the Weirdmonger general discussion forum and the Wordhunger fiction collaboration forum (both have now been going for about five years). Indeed, the internet's ability to communicate and disseminate will never lose its novelty for someone of my age. It's simply magic — or a science-fiction plot in practice!
NA	Could you talk about your latest publishing endeavour? (Perhaps odyssey is a better word?)
	I have been republishing the whole of my own fiction back catalogue (except for the material in the *Weirdmonger* book collection of my stories) — a project that, I believe, will eventually represent the most fiction items by one author ever published in most separate independent print publications (around 1500)! Many of these have been indeed residing in hard-to-find print sources (as well as in more available professional sources). Therefore, with the arrival of free weblogs, there was the opportunity to republish them as a means of free entertainment (?) and to help advertise the *Weirdmonger* book and *Nemonymous*. Also, I think there is a serious debating point about publishing fiction on the internet in general. Many people have told me that it is a permanent feature with as much provenance as publishing in print. This huge project of mine is paradoxically a refutation of that contention. Furthermore, I felt I needed somehow to codify my own bibliography; and I decided to do this publicly by uploading all the material "in body" to the internet. Finally, I'm enjoying this exercise — and I hope others are, too!
NA	Finally, what frightens you?
	The thought of my computer breaking down, my wife losing her handbag, and my grownup children ringing up with problems.