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The Write Up: The Story Behind the StorytellersWhat does it mean to be a writer? What is the creative process? How do you publish your work? What inspires you to write? When did you become a writer?Each month screenwriter, novelist and performer Owen Egerton sits down with all sorts of writers—from playwrights to poets—to talk about their lives and careers.“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” — Ernest Hemingway“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.” — Gustave Flaubert“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”― Jack KerouacSupport for The Write Up comes from Headwater’s School, providing a Montessori foundation leading to an International Baccalaureate Diploma Program.

Amelia Gray On Nightmares, Religion, and Marcus Aurelius

Amelia Gray

It’s always a treat to talk with Amelia Gray. Her imagination, wit, and insight ensure any conversation will shine. And, like her stories, humor and darkness weave through all her words.

Gray came to the KUT studios while visiting Austin from her home in Los Angeles. We chatted craft, risk, and the joys of writing. We talk about her writing routine and how she mines her own fears and desire to inspire her fiction. We also trace her career and how she sees herself in the current literary scene.

I’ve long been a fan of the beautifully dark and bitingly funny fiction of Amelia Gray. Her short story collections AM/PM, Museum of the Weird, and most recently Gutshot, rank among my favorite books to pick up for a quick, smiling nightmare.

Her novel Threats digs deeply into grief and melancholy, so deeply that the pages seem soaked in an unstable sadness, a madness that runs through the characters, the setting, and the prose itself. As NPR described it, “Amelia Gray's psychological thriller takes us to the brink between reality and delusion."

The dream logic and expansive bizarreness of Amelia Gray’s fiction can have a reader gasp and laugh in the same shudder. Compassion and outlandish cruelty hold hands, and it’s the combination of these opposing elements that make Gray’s work such a delight to read. We squirm, we laugh, we turn the page.

Like Kelly Link and Manuel Gonzales, Gray is part of a modern tradition that seeks to re-mystify the world. The inexplicable becomes the norm. But her writing is in no way escapism. Magic and monsters can appear, but more frightening still are the grounded-in-reality lovers and mothers.

Gray has also been compared to David Lynch and even body-horror filmmaker David Cronenberg. She dips into horror, but it’s a stranger, more nerve-tickling horror than you’d expect from the establishment of the genre.

Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, VICE, and The Wall Street Journal. To read Gray is to risk. She takes readers to dark, honest places. And like a nightmare, we may dispute the logic, but the emotion and terror are inescapable.

Owen Egerton is an author, performer, and screenwriter. His works include the short story collection How Best to Avoid Dying, the Zach Scott produced play The Other Side of Sleep and several screenplays. As a screenwriter he has written for Warner Brothers, Fox, Disney and many others. He and his partners’ screenplay Bobbie Sue was ranked on the 2008 Blacklist before selling to Warner Brothers. A new paperback edition of his novel The Book of Harold, the Illegitimate Son of God will be released in 2012 by Soft Skull Press. Egerton has been honored as one of Austin’s top comic performers and voted Austin’s favorite author in 2007, 2008 and 2010 by the readers of the Austin Chronicle.
Rebecca McInroy is an award-winning show creator, host, and executive producer for KUT, KUTX, and KUT.ORG.
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