Darby Larson has had fiction published online at Mcsweeney’s Internet Tendency, Opium Magazine, Eclectica, Monkeybicycle, 3:AM Magazine, Barrelhouse Magazine, Eyeshot, SmokeLong Quarterly, Dicey Brown, Hobart,
In Posse Review, and other journals. In print, he has work in Opium Magazine, Bullfight Review, .ISM Quarterly, and a story forthcoming in Greatest Uncommon Denominator (GUD). He was Guest Editor for SmokeLong Quarterly’s Issue 8, and also a Web Editor for Pindeldyboz for a six month stint. He lives in Northern California with his wife Sarah, and works full time as an Integrated Circuit Engineer. Visit him on MySpace.

You are primarily a writer of flash fiction, and many of your pieces contain humor, or sarcastic wit, which I enjoy. Is there something about the constraints of the short-short that encourages this voice,
or is it just the style you prefer to write in? What is your criteria for compelling flash fiction?

I don’t really think of myself as primarily a writer of flash, nor a writer of humor. I actually spend a lot more time working on longer, normal-er stories. They just don’t get published as often as the flash stuff I write. The piece coming out in GUD is ~3500 words, and the story in Opium3 was close to this also. These two stories I think are part of a maturity thing I’m going through, more controlled, lengthier to allow for some complexity. I think the constraint in flash that I butt up against the most is that I can’t get it to be as complex as I want it to be without more words. And I never think of word length as a constraint. I never set out to write flash or something else. When we’re talking about constraints in flash, I think what it really is is a kind of time constraint. Or a constraint against the feeling of being bored or burned out with the often painstaking creative process of longer fiction. For me, writing flash is like having the sudden urge to vomit something creative.

Humor is weird to write because I’m rarely conscious that I’m writing humor when I’m writing it, if I’m writing it. I guess if it comes out that way. It’s rarely my intention (Although sometimes it is my intention, admittedly. I had a list published a while ago at Mcsweeneys IT that was very deliberately sarcastic.). A lot of the stories I write that other people have thought were funny have what I think are very dark or sad or strange endings.

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In your story “Don’t Read This Or You Might Get Poked In The Eye With a Dagger,” published by McSweeneys, you, the author, are also the lead character. What prompted you to write yourself into this story, and where did it come from?

I do this by default a lot—write in 1st person and use my name as the name of the protagonist. Then later I’ll change it to some other name, but sometimes I’ll just keep my name because I kind of like my name. I had a piece in Bullfight Review #3 titled “Blink, Darby! Blink!” that came from asking myself the question of what if every time I blinked, my eyes changed color? I’m always doing the thing to myself, ie. what if the thing happened to me? So there’s a sort of fantasy element going on while I’m writing, the fantasy of inserting myself into worlds or environments that I couldn’t possibly experience in the real world. It adds a personal element to the story for me. Plus, another huge reason I like to create entertainment is to ultimately entertain myself, and when a character shares my name it makes me feel more connected to the character as a reader.

This story is my favorite thing I’ve written, partly because I don’t completely understand it. I think it started out with the basic idea of an entertainment being harmful, and taking that to an extreme. There’s a metafiction element as well that’s kind of borrowed from Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World that helped give the harmfulness a purpose. The ending of that story was one of those that just came out of my subconscious and for a long time, I had no idea what it meant. I still don’t really know what it means, but I have an idea. I love it when I stump myself. This is part of my fascination with “confusion” as a reader-reaction. I feel if I can succeed in confusing myself, or if I can embed a metaphor subconsciously and then only discover it consciously later, I’ll have gotten close to experiencing my own stories the way other readers experience them. That’s really my goal I think. I want to experience the stuff I write more than I actually want to write. I’m moving toward some kind of ideal entertainment that will be written only for me.

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I like that you are particular about the journals you submit to. What are some of the better ones, in your opinion, and why?

I don’t think it’s that I’m particular as much as that I’m just lazy. I’ve grown tired of the process of researching markets and submitting. I have stories sitting on my computer that have fallen out of the submission cycle and could probably be submitted somewhere, but I’ve just gotten so tired of that process. There are too many places to submit now, too many different aesthetics to get a feel for and I just don’t have the time. I tend to go back to the journals that have supported my work in the past, back when I was just starting, five or so years ago. I send a lot of things to Opium because they were the first internet magazine I ever came across and they’ve been really supportive of a lot of my stranger/quirkier stuff that I think a lot of other places were afraid to publish at the time, and partly because Opium’s an easy answer — sending it quickly to anyone means less time I have to think about where to send it. Calvin Lui’s journals too (what the heck ever happened to him?), The Glut, Bullfight, mitochondria. My dream journal is McSweeneys. I dig their aesthetic and am rarely disappointed by what I read there.

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Recently, you’ve been reading and writing more non-fiction, trying, as you say, to discover the “creative potential behind it.” What type of non-fiction are you interested in, and what have you discovered about its artistic possibilities?

I feel like I’ve just discovered the world of really good quality nonfiction. My wife bought me a subscription to the Believer a year ago and I devoured every issue cover to cover. Growing up, I was never exposed to quality writing, wasn’t a lit major in college, wasn’t even really aware that I enjoyed it until five years ago, so I’m still kind of in a state of discovery of it all, figuring out what works for me and what doesn’t. I’ve discovered essays (not so much memoir) that amaze me as much as fiction does, and I want to explore that more. While I consider fiction an exploration into things that are concrete (imagery, characters, setting), nonfiction is an exploration into things that are more straight-forwardly conceptual, philosophical, political, etc. and not hidden under metaphor. It’s a chance for that part of the brain to have some fun.

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You were in the Army during the Clinton Administration, and are now toying with the idea of writing a military memoir. What perspective would you bring to the book?

Memoirs aren’t something I think I do very well. I’ve never written anything memoirish that met my expectations (possible exception: the first thing I ever published in print was a creative nonfiction piece in a community college journal (American River Review) called “Baskets of Apples” about my memory of an operation I had when I was six to drop an undescended testicle.). It’s a different kind of writing than what I’m used to now. The reason I’m even considering this is to further explore what it meant to be in the military in the middle of the Clinton Administration, ‘94 - ‘97, long after the first Gulf War and long before 9/11. This was the height of US military presumptuousness. After the first Gulf War, the idea of “war” was no longer such a horrible thing in our minds the way it was post-Vietnam. It was get-in-get-out with negligible casualties. There didn’t seem to be anything going on in the world. Occasionally we’d hear murmurings of “Sudan” or “Bosnia,” but most of us were 18 and 19 and had never even heard of these places. So meanwhile, when there’s no war to go to, everything is for simulation, for training, nothing experienced. I think there’s an irony there somewhere, some kind of humor, like why am I out here practicing shooting at targets when there’s no one in the world I could ever imagine actually shooting? It felt like we were kids playing games with huge machines (I was a mechanic for Bradley Fighting Vehicles, so lots of time was spent fixing and driving tanks around) without the threat of ever doing it in actual combat. This may turn into just a straight nonfiction thing, not necessarily a memoir, I don’t know yet. Maybe part of it too is that of all the memories I have of my lifetime, those years are the sharpest, and I feel a need to document them in some way, even if it would only be interesting to me.

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You live near Sacramento, California. Does this setting find its way into your writing? Do you think place plays a role in whether or not a writer is successful? How do you, as a writer, define success?

Where I live has found its way into my writing, actually. I live in Folsom, very close to Folsom Prison, and I’ve written at least a few stories where Johnny Cash makes cameos, and one that is very obviously set in Folsom. But I don’t really have a strong sense of “this is where I belong” or anything. I don’t have a desire to write about this place. I have more of a desire to write about places that don’t actually exist.

I read an interview with Tom Robbins who hails from Seattle a while ago and he was talking about how writer-friendly Seattle is, that the rain and the overcast skies make you want to stay inside, supporting an introspective and personal creative process. I like that. I like the idea that place supports the process, and not necessarily the content.

In all honesty, the Writer-Darby is kind of a recluse while the Engineer-Darby spends all his time with computer nerds. These two personas don’t intersect and each defines “success” separately. It’s easy to define success when it comes to my career; if I enjoy it and I make enough to pay the bills, then I’m successful. Success with respect to writing is not so easily defined, and less significant in my case. Because writing is not my career, because I willingly put more money into it than take from it, by definition, it’s a hobby. I don’t feel like I’m in the same game as a lot of other writers who are hoping to break out. I enjoy my career and am not looking to change my lifestyle to that of an “author” any time soon. I’m certainly not doing it for money. I’m not doing it to be famous or popular. Or maybe I am doing it to be popular. Not popular as in me, the person, but just my ideas. I want affirmation that my ideas are interesting or have some kind of merit outside of my own headspace. That something I thought of can provoke a reaction in someone else the way it provoked a reaction in me when I thought about it. If that happens, regardless of whether it’s on a grand scale, I feel like I succeeded.

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What novel would you like to see turned into a movie? Which musical artists would be included on the movie’s soundtrack?

Interesting question! Something complex like Gravity’s Rainbow or Finnegans Wake. Finnegans Wake would be interesting. I remember thinking a lot about what kind of movie it would be while I was reading it. Ten hours long with no breaks, totally unwatchable. Some kind of collaborative thing with Tim Burton, David Lynch, and the Cohen brothers. Scary, atmospheric music, like “Shostakovich” performed by Nine Inch Nails. Some old songs that are always eerie in films when out of context like “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” by Hank Williams.

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You work as a physical design engineer of integrated circuits. What does that mean, exactly?

Ah, the question I dread at every family gathering. I don’t know how “lay” my audience is here, but integrated circuits = microchips. I work on chipsets, specifically. Northbridges, more specifically. Chipsets are controller chips that are connected to the microprocessor on the motherboard in your PC. If you’ve ever heard people say things like, there are millions and millions of transistors in one tiny chip, I’m one of many designers trying to figure out how those millions of transistors should be arranged in a “floorplan” that represents the way the chip will eventually look. Kind of like an interior designer using a floorplan to decide where furniture goes.

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Quick, complete this word association: snap.

Seven. For the self-congratulatory*snaps* God performed on the seventh day.

Contact Darby

Read:

“Three Small Stories”
published by Monkeybicycle

“My Fantastic Death”
published by eyeshot.net

“Heavy Shoes”
published by In Posse Review



Filed Under: The Writer Profile Project |