*Interview With Jody L. Campbell

Interview with J.L. Campbell by 4KIX journalist Suzy Swan of San Bernardino

Swan:  This is Suzy Swan featuring J.L. Campbell, author of Black Raspberries and Other Tales

You’re not just a standard mystery writer.  I get a sense that in reading an excerpt from the self-titled story Black Raspberries, I get a sense that you have a bit of a biting sense of humor, a very vivid imagination, and that your mystery is unraveling as you go.  Am I right?

Campbell:  I’d say you’re right.  As far as mystery, I don’t know if I’m exactly mystery.  I do macabre.  More macabre fiction … Black Raspberries was one of my all time first stabs at horror writing.

Swan:  If someone was to ask you what does macabre mean when you refer to writing 

Campbell:  Macabre is, well … death.  Anything revolving around death.  Involving death.  I do like to write in the humor genre, but I always like to have a little element of death.  I have an obsession, I think, with death.  There always seems to be an element of death or an obsession with death (giggles) in my writing. 

Swan:  And what is your background?

Campbell:  I had two older sisters who used beat me up until I reached a certain age and size, then that all changed.  Now they're just head-cases. (laughs)  The imagination probably came from my mother and the sense of humor probably came from my grandparents.  (chuckles)  My grandfather was a very humorous guy.  Always had little anecdotes; little funny things to say all the time … so …

Swan:  And what is the fascination with death?  Why do you think you have that?

Campbell:  I have no idea.  (chuckles) I have no idea.   I attended a couple of funerals, I mean I dealt with death a lot in my school years.  I had friends and family members that died … and I think a lot of that has to do with my mother being an only child, so we didn’t have a lot of … our aunts and uncles were more great aunts and uncles.  Siblings of my grandparents who actually helped raise us so … our great aunts and great uncles were a generation older than our own parents.  My father was an only child and he passed on in the early years … so …  I mean there was a lot of death in my early years that we experienced and as going through my school years, going through my high school years I experienced a lot of death with friends that got in car accidents or committed suicide ... things like that. 

Swan:  But you take that theme of death and you apply it in the perspective of a small town or in a setting, rather, of small towns and do you do that a lot in your tales; in your short stories?

Campbell:  I do because it’s what I know.  I mean I was reared in a small town.  I’ve been to big cities and all, but I try to keep my stories a little more intimate and in more intimate circles with a smaller group of people (characters) so I don’t have so many characters to develop throughout the story.  It makes it easier on me for number one but I think it also helps build each character within the story so I can focus on that character and make them more realistic. 

Swan:  What would you call Black Raspberries and Other Tales?  A series of short stories or are they related to each other or is it one long story?

Campbell:  No … No, uh … Black Raspberries is actually probably more of a novella.  I think it takes up sixty some odd pages.  Black Raspberries is actually the longest tale throughout the book and then all the other tales behind it; there’s twelve total within the book, but within that book, I wanted to put Black Raspberries in it because it was an older story and it was actually an experience I had encountered at a campground in New Hampshire that I embellished upon.  I actually had the problems with my truck hauling the camper which takes place in the story.  I describe the campground almost to a perfect “T” and describe the people that were in it and then I just embellished upon it from there.  You’d have to read the story … (chuckles)

Swan:  First part I did read definitely sets, maybe because it was a real place, it definitely gives you a very clear setting in my mind of where I am and what I am looking at. 

Campbell:  Right.

Swan:  This book is meant to be read in parts as each story is a short tale in and of itself … not front to end in one night.

Campbell:  Exactly.  Nope … you can mix them up.  You can do whatever you want to do.  Exactly.  They’re not connected in any way.

Swan:  It’s non-traditional in a way when you think about how books are written these days and distributed by large publishing houses.  The emphasis from what I see in the underground, I’d like to say, and literary groups is that short stories serve their … serve a whole different purpose then a front to end type several hundred page book.

Campbell:  Right

Swan:  Why … do you write in this style for a particular reason?  Do you find that it appeals to the crowd that you’re hoping will get to read you?

Campbell:  I write short stories … and it’s kind of hard to say … because I think my short stories are a little longer than a lot of magazines and periodicals are looking for submissions to.  I could edit them down to a certain extent, but I think, if I did, too much, you’d miss the gist of what the story… you know … what part of the story I was trying to emphasize.  I like to have a twisted end with my stories and I believe you have to endure a certain amount of … (chuckles ) other types of fiction or whatever to get through to that.  I just found that a lot of the places that I submitted to wanted flash fiction or much shorter pieces of fiction than what I was accustomed to writing.  I have ideas for novels, but the particular short stories that I write … and I call them short stories because when I write them on the computer in MSWord or Word Perfect, they’re nine to ten pages but if you put them in book format they end up being twenty to thirty pages …

Swan:  uhuh …

Campbell:  You know a lot of your editors would consider them … or publishers would consider them novellas or that type of genre.

Swan:  How is Black Raspberries and Other Tales different from Doses of Death.  Doses of Death is a collection of … it’s a macabre collection of small town terror and you actually did that one in 2005 after Black Raspberries, isn’t that correct?

Campbell:  Yes. 

Swan:  And how are they similar or different?

Campbell:  Doses of Death was actually a collaboration of twelve different authors.  Another author, S.W. Vaughn from up-state New York, and I got together and we solicited … kind of contest-like …I guess, if you will … we solicited ten other submissions for the book.  So there’s twelve stories in that as well.  One of the ways we promoted it was twelve different authors; twelve different ways to die.  And it was an extremely fun project to go through.  It was a lot of work to do, but we did it in a pretty good timely fashion and we got some very good authors involved into the book.  It did just get released in late fall or early winter of 2005, but it’s an excellent book.  There are a lot of good writers in there.  They vary in age groups.  They’re from all over the world.

Swan:  In reading your work, not only the excerpt or tale you wrote for Doses of Death, but also for Black Raspberries and Other Tales … what is it that is unique about … would you say … your stories … in particular I’m picking up on the theme of death and how you handle that as well as your focus and almost an honoring of small towns?

Campbell:  I think I try to develop the character, to make them more realistic … to bring in the human emotion … to make the tale realistic to a point.  I try … I mean Black Raspberries is so … I wrote that so many years ago and I re-edited it for the publication of Black Raspberries and Other Tales, but compared to like what I wrote the story… Flowers of Fortune which I wrote for Doses of Death and the current writing that I’m doing now, I think I’ve developed into more of getting more into human emotion and making it more realistic for people … whether I still add the element of horror or humor or … whatever … I still want the reader to walk away from that story after they’ve read it and say … “Wow.  I mean I can so associate to what he’s trying to say” or make a twisted ending so that they can’t believe what I just wrote.  You know … that type of element … I mean I don’t want somebody to just read something and say “hey … that was a good story” … I want somebody to read my writing and say … you know … “Wow!  I can’t believe that ended that way” … or … “I never saw that coming that way.”  Or I want them to cry or I want them to laugh or I want them to gasp or I want them to scream … and say “No!”  To me, starting a story and going through it, I have to come up with a precise ending that entertains myself before I even write that story. 

Swan:  And if you can achieve those things and entertaining and making someone think differently … shocking them … having them want more, then it’s much more than a mystery writer that you are …

Campbell:  Exactly.  And it’s more entertaining for me to write the stories …