Thanks to Debbi Mack for including me as a guest at the Crime Cafe!
The interview is here in a couple of formats, including both the podcast itself and a transcript of our chat. Here’s a sample of the latter.
Debbi: I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed reading Del and Louise’s adventures on the road. But the first thing I wanted to ask you before I got to that was, you’ve seemed to have made a career out of writing short stories. Now was that intentional, or are you just drawn to the short story format?
Art: Well, two things. Number one I think it’s tough to make a career from short stories. There’s a lot of great markets out there, both anthologies and mystery magazines and, of course, online. But, you know, in terms of actually making a career of it, I don’t think you reach as wide a readership as you might with a novel. Which is one of the reasons why I was very pleased to have On The Road with Del & Louise come out—to have a book out there as well. But the short story form is one that I particularly appreciate. You know, I started reading Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine way back when I was in late elementary school and middle school. In fact it was one of these fundraising drives that the school did where you go door to door to sell magazine subscriptions to raise money for the school. I ended up, don’t remember if I sold any magazine subscriptions, but I bought one myself to Ellery Queen’s and that’s where I first started reading, you know, short stories, mystery short stories at an adult level; building off of having read Nancy Drew and The Three Investigators and that sort of thing. So, the short story, I was always a big fan from the very beginning. And, of course, having been in writing classes both in high school and in college and then went on to graduate school, the short story is sort of the focus for a number of reasons of a workshop setting. Something that people can bring in, can be discussed in full, as opposed to like a novel portion, which I think is harder to workshop. And so, for a couple of reasons, both as a reader and as a writer, I have kind of both fallen in love with the form and then fallen into the form as a writer.
Additionally, Debbi asked me to write a blog post in advance of the interview, and I talked here about “Going Dark” with my writing—though there’s a question mark on the post title, worth noting.
Thanks for checking out either the post or the podcast—and thanks again to Debbi for featuring me!