As I mourn and celebrate the loss and the life of Anne Rice along with so many of you, I was reminded of a conversation between authors Tananarive Due and Stephen Graham Jones from earlier this year. Due was interviewing SGJ about My Heart Is A Chainsaw, and there were so many wonderful bits cut from the published piece. It broke my heart to carve out these chunks, but such is the job. During the conversation, a certain New York Times article came up, wherein Rice’s unarguable “enormous abilities” are described as so, “Anne Rice is a writer of enormous ability. She has a masterly way with language, works on a broad canvas, has a vast range of knowledge, brings exotic settings vividly to life and is wonderfully clever, but these gifts are wasted on vampires. May she find subjects worthy of her talents before these dead guys suck her dry.”
The prejudice and often dismissive way in which people treat anything created in the genre space is nothing new for fans. Enjoy this wonderful anecdote from Tananarive Due’s encounter with Anne Rice on the subject.
Tananarive Due:
I had a really empowering moment, a crossroads for me. When I was about to write my first novel, I interviewed Anne Rice for the Miami Herald. She had been criticized for, “wasting her talents writing about vampires.” And, of course, my writer-brain lit up, because it was my very fear, right? That people would say that about me. So I asked her if that bothered her, how she dealt with it, you know how you do when you’re a writer, but you don’t tell the subject you’re a writer. She basically laughed and said it used to bother her, but now, she said, her books were taught at universities. She talked about how you can write about these big, sweeping themes of life, death, loss, survival. I know with your very fine use of language, has anyone … Well, yeah, you just told me, they have tried that line on you. Basically accusing you of wasting your talents.
Stephen Graham Jones:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Tananarive Due:
“Writing about vampires” as if horror writers are supposed to be illiterate, and Stephen King doesn’t have a National Medal of the Arts, right?
Stephen Graham Jones:
No, you’re totally right. You know, when I’d be in a department meeting, I would make lists of my dreams— what would be my dream barb to get like in The New York Times, or what would be the best first line of a review I could ever get, and what I always came back to was “Stephen Graham Jones is completely wasting his talent.” That’s what I always wanted, you know? So I’m still waiting for somebody to say that.
I think about this exchange often, and it never ceases to make me smile. I’m excited to share it with you today. Cheers to “wasted talent”, living on through immortal creations, and endless gratitude to the creators and the makers who inspire and speak to so many of us through their genre work.
