You’re best known for your trilogy of books about the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture, which is really different subject matter from this book. How did you come up with the idea?

Well, there actually is a connection. The first glimmer of an idea for Behind the Moon came from this Judith Thurman article in The New Yorker about the Chauvet caves. There’s some anthropologists that have a theory that cave paintings were part of prehistoric religious practice, the original shamanism. Some of the details reminded me of my experiences in the context of Haitian Vodou. I tend to fall back on that kind of stuff in Behind the Moon.

How did the idea evolve from there?

My previous novel The Color of Night had been rejected by my usual New York publisher, which perplexed me because I thought it was one of my best. About nine months went by where I didn’t know what was going to happen with that book, and then my New York editor changed his mind about it and published it anyway, which was nice. But during that gap, I was in the situation where I needed to write something, but I didn’t need to write to please anybody, so I thought I’d do something different, I’d do something strange and hopefully have a good time doing it. 

I rely a lot on unconscious processes and with this project maybe more so than most. Particularly the first movement had this thing going on where I found myself repeatedly fracturing the story line so episodes repeat with minor variations. Then the Marisa character appeared and she has a more conventional story line, and the parts with her in them are more realistic. Once she was in there, it hardened into an area of South Dakota. The upside of all of this, which I’ve really just started to understand from hearing people react to it, is there’s a non-linear process going on that’s in contention with the more linear story line. But that all happened kind of by accident. I didn’t do much planning for this one. 

I really appreciated the overall mood of the book.
One of the things I realized during the overall publication period—I was not conscious of this goal at the time—is not to describe the shamanic journey to readers but to have them actually experience that. So all the vagaries in the writing were toward that end. It’s a pleasant way to write. If you can write without thinking about what you’re doing too much, that’s the best way. 

I read an article in The New Yorker in which you talked said you put yourself in a trance to write. Is that still part of your method?
I honestly think that every writer does it, we just don’t necessarily think that’s what we’re doing. My wife and I were living in London in the early 1980s, and I went to a therapeutic hypnotist for some trivial cause. It was a really interesting experience. One part of me was saying, “Hey, this is cool, I could probably use this for teaching,” and the other part of me was experiencing it and thinking, “Wow, I didn’t know this was possible.” 

I thought it over afterward and I realized that writers try to get into a flow state where you’re writing easily, you’re not conscious of your material tools or craft knowledge, it just happens. It gets deployed automatically in the same way that musicians and athletes deploy their training automatically, and I think the mechanism for getting there is a kind of self-hypnosis through all the writerly rituals you hear about—the sharpening of pencils, writing in a certain place. Those basically are elements of the self-hypnotic induction.

Did you use that method when you were writing Behind the Moon?
It wasn’t so much that I thought, “Oh, I’m now going to do this.” I just realized I had always done it. I was a naturally committed daydreamer from the time I was a small child. Before I had this experience with hypnosis, I was trying to say to students, “I’m going to teach you craft, but the most important thing that can be taught is to enter the world you are writing about with your entire imagination. Once you can do that, describe what you’re experiencing and the whole thing becomes a lot easier.” 

You and your wife, poet Elizabeth Spires, have taught at Goucher College since 1984. How do you balance your own writing with your teaching?
The program has grown so much in the last few years. When my wife and I started it in the 1980s, there were a couple of courses and now we have this whole four-year program with about 60 students in it. A side effect of that is, though I used to teach everybody, now I get them typically in their third year so they’re all worked out and very committed and have some pretty good skill sets, so it’s really a luxurious teaching experience. 

For most of my teaching career, I’ve been able to say, “I’m going to write for two or three hours every morning and do whatever else I have to do after that.” I teach half time, since my wife and I split a single position at Goucher, so it’s not too arduous and probably more important than any of that, I am not one of those writers who feel drained by teaching. I’m actually able to take energy out of it and use it for my own projects. That’s a piece of good luck there. 

How has the Baltimore literary scene changed since you’ve started the program?
Having spent 25 years running around to readings and stuff like that, I don’t do too much of that any more. I’m an admirer of what Gregg Wilhelm and Jen Michalski do in terms of running reading series. And then the academic writing program at Johns Hopkins University—I think we can give them a run for their money at the undergraduate level, but at the graduate level, we’re not really doing what they do.

What can we expect to see next from you?
I have a novel that’s in submission right now, and then I have two contracts. One to do a biography of the late novelist Robert Stone. And then he actually owed a book to a publisher when he died, and they needed someone to curate that whole process, so I’m doing that on a second contract. I’m pretty busy. The unfortunate thing about that is I can’t really permit myself to write fiction until I’ve finished these project and I’m starting to get a little itchy about that. I’m on sabbatical this coming year and I hope to wrap both of them up in that amount of time.

When you start writing fiction again, do you already have ideas that you want to pursue, or do those come out once you start writing?
I do have a couple of projects that I had started before the Robert Stone stuff happened. One of them I might not go back to and one of them I probably will. 

Can you tell what it’s about?
A school shooting. It’s got the Columbine element in it. I created this imaginary place, a private school in this pocket between affluent neighborhoods that’s in the Rust Belt sector. The linchpin figure in this is a janitor who lives within the premises of the school who can go out the back gate to get to this other neighborhood, so he’s a person between two worlds. 

You could say that about Behind the Moon, too. The character Julie is literally caught between two worlds.
Yeah, I thought about calling it Girlfriend In a Coma, but that title was already taken.

Richard Chizmar has been in the literary world for 29 years as a writer and creator of the horror and suspense press Cemetery Dance. But, as he shared with us in this Q&A, nothing could prepare him for the opportunity to co-author a book with Stephen King earlier this year. 

You’ve scored this amazing achievement—authoring a book with a hugely best-selling author. How did the book come to be?
I started my publishing business way back in 1988 when I was still a student at University of Maryland College Park. I started with a horror/suspense magazine that was called Cemetery Dance, and that progressed to book publishing in 1991. I’ve sent everything that we published to Stephen King, because he was such a big influence and inspiration. He was always very supportive—I think we published our first Stephen King story in 1991, our first Stephen King book 10 years later. 

At some point, we became friends as well. We email each other a lot, and it’s usually about baseball, football, family stuff—we rarely talk writing. But one day, the first week of this past January—and this shows how quickly this happened—he mentioned that he had a short story that he couldn’t finish, and I said, ‘Well, if you ever want to send it my way, I’d love to read it.’ And the next day he sent me Gwendy’s Button Box, with a note that said, ‘Do whatever you want to it.’ So I immediately sat down, read it, and I sent him a 10,000-word chunk three days later. It was finished by the first week of February.

That’s amazingly fast.
Yeah. It was completely out of the blue, unplanned. He sent me the story on a Friday and over the weekend, thoughts were lurking in my brain, like ‘Oh my God, man, how can you do this?’ And then I sat down to write and my hand was shaking. I was like, ‘Ok, mild terror has given way to sheer terror.’

Yeah, I’m not sure what any writer would do if someone of that caliber entrusted us to finish it.
The cool thing is, as soon as I pulled my laptop out and started actually writing, the nerves just disappeared. I got lost in the story and a half hour in, the words were just pouring out of me. I think I even surprised Steve by sending him such a big chunk.

It’s cool how collaborative Stephen King is. 
When we were writing the story, we talked a little bit about characters, but when we finished we didn’t really talk about it.  Because it all happened so fast, there are still quite a few moments of ‘What? This can’t be happening.’ Somebody sent me a big picture of a poster for Gwendy’s Button Box in York, Pennsylvania, and I’m just like, yeah, that’s my name on there, too. 

Steve did the set up work. It was going to be a short story, I believe. And maybe that was the thing, that it was always destined to be a longer piece. 

As he said, he couldn’t figure out a way to end it. I liked that when his story opens, Gwendy is 12, and she’s given this box that comes with huge responsibilities and ramifications, not just in Maine but the whole world. I immediately fell in love with the character. We’re introduced to her when she’s going into the seventh grade, and I thought that we needed to see her through middle school, high school, and I wanted to end the story when she was in college. It needed to be this coming of age where this really decent young lady is really weighed down by responsibility and all the choices she has to make. When it was time to send him the file, I got really nervous again, and I thought, maybe I should do another paragraph. But I knew that if I did that, I would never send it. So I just hit send and crossed my fingers.

We’re friends, so we’re honest with each other, but he never came back and said, ‘Rich, this sucks,’ or anything like that. He was really happy with the progress of the story. I have several text messages that I may or may not have screenshot. Neither one of us made big changes with each other’s writing. And that was the coolest thing for me as a writer to see the choices he made.

Is it possible to tell who wrote what? 
The early reviews have said pretty universally that you can’t pick out the passages that Steve and I wrote. It’s funny because someone said, ‘I know you wrote the section about the Orioles hat.’ But actually, I had written it as a Red Sox hat, and Steve changed it. Steve says the best thing about working together is when you have both voices that overlay each other so much that it gives birth to a third voice. He’s said that he thinks the fact the Gwendy was a female character really helped us do this, because we were writing outside of our own perspective. And I just keep telling Steve, ‘Man, that was so much fun.’ It was a blast to do.

Stephen King and Richard Chizmar at Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

When did you first realize that Stephen King was such a big influence? 
I grew up in a house of readers. I was surrounded by books and magazines, and my sisters and parents and I went on library trips all the time, which turned into book store trips. I always like scary stories as a kid, and then in 10th grade, my English teacher brought in a photocopy of Stephen King’s “The Monkey,” which was a novella about this evil monkey with cymbals. We read it out loud in class, and when we were finished, I was like, man. The thought was not ‘I want to be a horror writer,’ it was just ‘I want to do this.’ That story took me to a completely different place, and, it sounds cheesy, but it really was a lightning bolt of magic. I came out with a different idea of creating. After that, I read anything of Steve’s I could get.

What made you decide to create your own publishing company?

At College Park, I found journalism limiting. After two years of writing sports articles, I thought, I don’t really want to do this, but I liked writing feature stories, and that led me back to fiction. I was selling short stories to smaller magazines, and I would get contributor copies and I thought, I can do a better job. I had no idea how difficult it was, but I decided to jump in. I started the magazine six months before I graduated. I didn’t make any money for the first few years at least, but I knew it was what I wanted to do. Once I branched out into the book business it became more profitable, and we’ve outlasted everyone. We were stubborn and definitely worked hard, and we’re still here.

Do you have a favorite Stephen King work?

My favorite is It. I was at University of Maryland Baltimore County playing lacrosse when the book came out, and I had just walked away from the game after playing in high school and college. I was lost, trying to figure out what I was going to do, and I just remember reading It, savoring it, and not wanting it to end. I was one of those rare people who felt like 1,200 pages wasn’t enough. It did the same thing that “The Monkey” did earlier, re-focused me and reminded me and helped me. A month later, I was writing for the school newspaper, and then I transferred to the University of Maryland to get a journalism degree, and everything changed. I always look back at It and it kind of saved me.

Besides the fact that it’s your hometown, what makes Baltimore so appealing as a setting for fiction?

The
question that is asked a thousand times of artists mining the plentiful
but seemingly worthless ore of Baltimore (it’s not gold, it’s iron and
slag and we try to spin into something that glitters, if only when the
sun hits it just right.) For me it’s the age of the place—as old as just
about anything in the area that eventually became the United States—and
its also the romance of sailing ships and the sea and the true polyglot
of people and their faiths. No matter what they put up in this town, it
was built upon something that makes for a better story: Burke’s beneath
the chicken fat of a Royal Farm at Light and Lombard; orthodox
synagogues and the bones of organ grinder monkeys beneath the new
restaurants of little italy, heavy metals deep in the soil beneath
Harbor East. I make sure I find someone who still remembers and launch
them onto the canvas of my fiction, which is really one very long
story—a mural—being written one panel at a time.

You’ve
also lived in Los Angeles, a city that attracts lots of aspiring
writers, actors, musicians, etc. As a devoted Baltimore, what was it
like living there?

I tried, but I never really liked it. I
arrived too late in life (mid 40s) Tried to enjoy Dodger Stadium but it
only reminded me of where I wasn’t (Camden Yards); became good friends
with a guy from Pigtown, John Elliott IV, who photographed red carpet
events and when we were at PINK’S (the famous LA hot dog joint) we
talked about the old Polack Johnny’s on the Block … went to Mass at
the futuristic LA Cathedral (shot part of my rosary documentary there)
but wished I was at St. Leo’s on Exeter Street.

How has your work as a journalist informed your short stories?

The
two cannot be separated. Baltimore is the great subject of my work – I
still recall trying to figure out at about the age of 20 two seemingly
crucial aspects of becoming a fiction writer: whether to create a truly
fictional world (re-naming everything, inventing new streets, etc.) or
choosing some exotic locale (or a series of them for my stories) and the
real answer for why I chose Baltimore (one of my better decisions) was
it just made a very difficult craft much easier.

The
characters in your stories come from the streets, but they tend to
believe in something bigger (be it Catholicism or the music of Johnny
Winter). Do such things offer more than solace from reality?

O’Malley
took a lot of shit for the BELIEVE campaign. It was one of his ideas I
supported. I believe that mysticism and faith can change things,
particularly in a charming city like Baltimore where the average
person—and in Baltimore it’s a pretty tough ‘average’—is just trying to
survive. We all need something bigger than ourselves— whether it’s the
Ravens or Transubstantiation—whether we believe it or not.

Music
plays a major role in some of these stories. What is it about the music
of Johnny Winter, Frank Zappa, and Dion that resonates with you?

Of
all people, Mr. Lewis—you, who once wore Ike Turner’s pajamas—you know
this is a question that must be discussed over a long evening of good
food and drink only to declare that we didn’t even scratch the surface. I
was 6 years old in 1964. On February 8—my namesake grandfather’s 60th
birthday—I was one kind of kid. After Sunday, February 9 (when The
Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show), I was another.

Gibby
Lukowski loses his virginity on a tugboat, and his family worked the
waterfront for generations. Wasn’t your dad a tugboat captain?

My
father was a chief engineer for the Baker-Whiteley towing at the City
Pier on Thames Street from 1957 until the company—then known as
McAllister—replaced the seafarer’s union workers with scabs. I have a
long chapter in The Wire: Truth Be Told about the great baltimore tugboat strike of 1966.

What are your favorite “Baltimore” books?

I don’t really read Baltimore books. My favorite Baltimore movie is Barry’s Avalon. I was re-watching it in 1995 when my former father in law—Ralph Rudacille, father of Deborah, author of Roots of Steel—was
struggling to beat cancer. Somehow the combo of a Baltimore that was
gone (Avalon) and this proud former steelworker from Dundalk fighting
for his life unexpectedly brought me to tears. Mr. Rudacille—as Pop
Pop—makes a cameo in the story “Nine Innings in Baltimore.”