{"id":1644,"date":"2016-01-15T08:00:22","date_gmt":"2016-01-15T16:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/http\/wordhorde.com\/?p=1644"},"modified":"2016-01-15T11:20:26","modified_gmt":"2016-01-15T19:20:26","slug":"an-interview-with-michael-kazepis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/https\/wordhorde.com\/an-interview-with-michael-kazepis\/","title":{"rendered":"An Interview With Michael Kazepis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sean M. Thompson recently sat down with King Shot Press<\/a> head honcho (and helluva writer) Michael Kazepis to ask him a few questions. Here are the results…<\/p>\n

What do you think the role of genre is in fiction?<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure this is a question I can unpack in a way that doesn\u2019t make me feel like a shithead. My view is, I guess, it\u2019s a marketing tool that can become a cage. I\u2019ll leave it at that.<\/p>\n

Your story from <\/em>Giallo Fantastique<\/a>, \u201cMinerva\u201d is a traditional take on the Giallo genre. What inspired you to write the story?<\/em><\/p>\n

Is it really a traditional take? I\u2019m seeing this response enough to think I fucked up there\u2014I kept trying to think of ideas reminiscent of giallo that weren\u2019t going to feel like a retread. When Ross invited me to send him something, I was trying hard to figure out a recipe to fake my way in because I\u2019ve always wanted to work with him, and you never know if that invitation comes around again. I mean, yes, I watched Deep Red to figure out some colors to write toward. But that was the extent of my research in the genre. Julio Cortazar\u2019s \u201cBlow-Up\u201d gets riffed heavily. The character of Detective Halkias is a more serious take on Casey from Lloyd Kaufman\u2019s Terror Firmer<\/em>. I think the cinema sequence was informed by Godard\u2019s Masculin, f\u00e9minin<\/em>\u2014that Bergman \u201cfilm within a film.\u201d Lynch\u2019s Mulholland Drive was also on my mind\u2014I really like its Rubik\u2019s Cube narrative. The Courier\u2019s Tragedy<\/em>, too. There are lots of scenes like this in literature and film, where the main character sees a performance and it echoes the main story in subtle ways. Here, I thought it\u2019d be kinda funny to have the protagonist, Celia Marrast, watch a stylized snuff film about her brother. Something else is, I originally intended \u201cMinerva\u201d to be set in Rome, but I don\u2019t really know much about Italian culture so I brought the story home to Athens. So that\u2019s why the location is what it is. And you know, the more I think on this question, I guess there really is an overlap between what I did and what\u2019s come before. The failure feels vaguely Borgesian to me. Like, I ended up rewriting Don Quixote<\/em> word for word, and to me it reads like some other story. I think it took about seven months to walk away from it. I can be a very slow writer. Ross was extraordinary in his patience.<\/p>\n

\"Giallo<\/a><\/p>\n

What themes do you find yourself coming back to in your work, if any?<\/em><\/p>\n

Of what I\u2019ve picked up? There are steady patterns of the unreliable witness, ruined cities, coping with parental death, amateur detectives, ghosts, godlessness, some leftist ideas. The struggle to sustain love, which is significantly more difficult than the pursuit of it. Life as a slasher film garnished with surrealism. I\u2019ve been accused of writing all my lead characters as loners and I\u2019ll cop to that.<\/p>\n

Do you have any writing rituals?<\/em><\/p>\n

It used to be that I\u2019d take smoke breaks and long showers as ways of measuring space between writing scenes. I try not to smoke anymore. I don\u2019t have the free time that I used to. Mostly it\u2019s just sit and do this when I can. Coffee during the day. I\u2019ll drink VISO at night because it\u2019s less abrasive than coffee or an energy drink. Sometimes I\u2019ll wake up at 3am and work when it\u2019s quietest in the house. Today, I overslept and felt mostly unproductive. I\u2019ve noticed that if I don\u2019t regularly change up my diet, or where I\u2019m working, I won\u2019t get anything done. I get stir-crazy if everything\u2019s continually the same. Almost four months ago, part of the middle finger of my right hand was crushed hydraulically and hasn\u2019t healed yet\u2014this week I was told the distal phalanx (or, fingertip, in doctor speak) doesn\u2019t seem to be healing with the rest of the injury, so I\u2019m presently hoping I won\u2019t lose that part. I spent the first couple of months after the accident in a painkiller haze, and that\u2019s set me back, in terms of schedule. Life is moving slower than I\u2019d like it. So I haven\u2019t had a consistent ritual in a while.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s your favorite Giallo film?<\/em><\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t watched enough of them to form an educated favorite. Recently, I liked Deep Red<\/em>. As a teenager, I remember enjoying Suspiria<\/em>, Tenebrae<\/em>, other Argento stuff. I remember seeing a few films with David Hess in them, because I knew him from The Last House on the Left<\/em>. Bava\u2019s Bay of Blood<\/em>, that.<\/p>\n

Do you like the cold? Do you find your environment influences your writing, including the weather and the season?<\/em><\/p>\n

I live in an old apartment that used to have baseboard heaters, but I tore them out because they smelled bad and never replaced them. I\u2019ve got a portable radiator that I\u2019ll occasionally plug in and that helps some. Usually I just layer up. I think some level of discomfort is essential for work to get done. Especially since it\u2019s easier to be lazy this time of year. I find myself wanting to work from bed a lot, even knowing I\u2019ll fall asleep. That\u2019s a struggle because I\u2019m already tired from working at my job and fixing things around the house. But as far as the weather goes, it\u2019s not the being cold that bugs me, it\u2019s the wind, when it can cut. That shit\u2019ll split my knuckles in a day and draw blood. I end up hating the notion of going outside.<\/p>\n

\"LLD\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Do you have anything you\u2019d like to tell our readers about? Special things?<\/em><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a novel I\u2019ve been working on for a few years now called Nothing Crown<\/em>, and it\u2019s written like a post-apocalyptic road novel. It\u2019s about a street kid that walks from Jerusalem to Paris to pursue rapping. Think something akin to Children of Men<\/em> meets, like, Illmatic<\/em> (Nas) . . . in the Levant.<\/p>\n

I also run King Shot Press<\/a>, which is a post-bizarro publisher of radical fiction. Last year, we released some really great books by Cody Goodfellow, Eric Nelson and Chris Lambert. This year, KSP is releasing Lambert\u2019s sophomore novel, Killer Unconquered<\/em>, the second part of a bigger novel-in-series. Violet LeVoit, who won the Wonderland Book Award back in November, has her debut novel coming up, I Miss The World<\/em>, a Nicholson Baker-esque novel that follows two siblings through the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. November was very surprising in that Scott Nicolay, whose forthcoming book Noctuidae<\/em> is part of the next batch of KSP titles, took home the World Fantasy Award the same weekend that Violet nabbed the Wonderland. His book\u2019s about a hike through an Arizona canyon that leaves two people stranded with something very big. Lastly, there\u2019s Troy James Weaver\u2019s Marigold<\/em>, in which a 30-something floral salesman searches for reasons to keep living.<\/p>\n

Thanks, man.<\/em><\/p>\n

Thank you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sean M. Thompson recently sat down with King Shot Press head honcho (and helluva writer) Michael Kazepis to ask him a few questions. Here are the results…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[214,343,450,215],"class_list":["post-1644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-giallo-fantastique","tag-interviews","tag-king-shot-press","tag-michael-kazepis"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/https\/wp.me\/p3axmL-qw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/https\/wordhorde.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/https\/wordhorde.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/https\/wordhorde.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/https\/wordhorde.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/https\/wordhorde.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1644"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/https\/wordhorde.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1644\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1647,"href":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/https\/wordhorde.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1644\/revisions\/1647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/https\/wordhorde.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/https\/wordhorde.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/https\/wordhorde.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/https\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}