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GVTV Premieres with Kaaron Warren and Robert Freeman Wexler

September 3, 2009 Introducing GVTV, Genreville's video channel on YouTube! (Yes, I made the logo myself.) For our first broadcast, we bring you interviews with Kaaron Warren (Slights) and Robert Freeman Wexler (The Painting and the City) immediately following their readings at on August 19th.


We're trying to arrange video interviews with everyone who reads at KGB, and sneaking our camera in to every genre-related event we attend in hopes of getting some on-the-spot footage. We're also looking into getting a better camera and a microphone to avoid the crowd noise that almost drowns Robert out in a couple of spots. To compensate for the background noise and make the video as accessible as possible, we've included captions with the help of the Easy YouTube Caption Creator (I did my best with the timing; please forgive the hiccups), and a complete transcript follows.


Kaaron Warren: When I left Fiji—I'm probably the only spec fic writer living there at the moment, so I am a very big fish in a very small pond. So, lots of fuss and lots of attention, I got front page news in the Daily Post and I got an article and all that kind of thing. And then I moved to Worldcon and there's four thousand people there and you know, I'm one of many. It was still very exciting and very cool, but yeah, it was really—it was quite different. The way people perceived me too, I suppose.

There's so many people there and you're on panels with—I was on a panel with Lev Grossman and it was really good to be there with him, and with Kij Johnson as well, and my counterpart—my South African counterpart, Lauren Beukes, who's being published by Angry Robot, fantastic to connect with her. We'd spoken on email before but we really hit it off in person as well.

Marc Gascoigne has been in the industry for... at least twenty years, so he knows how it works, knows the way he wants to run things. They've been fantastic. They're really down to earth. They really love what they're doing. They've been given the opportunity to choose the fiction they love and what Marc loves is the literary side of fiction, like words that work. So he's so excited, he's actually got the freedom to choose the fiction he's loving.

I talk a little bit—a lot about the outsiders, in my fiction, what kinds of people sit within the worlds that I'm creating and talking about and trying to make that world seem very real and natural, rather than—I don't usually write as an outsider, I usually write as an insider, but within that world I'm often talking about the person who's separate, and feels separate, for various different reasons. I'm just fascinated by the way some people are isolated and other people aren't, and what sort of behaviors that we do separate us from others.

Well, I suppose it's, that sense of isolation is a really horrifying thing, that idea that maybe, if you call for help nobody's going to come. We were talking—one of the things we talked about at Worldcon at one of my panels was that idea that when you're maybe in a bushfire or in a cyclone and the systems collapse, and so if your house sets fire, nobody's going to come to save you, and if somebody comes to break into your home there's no police to come and rescue you. So that sense of isolation I find really terrifying. I tend to think that I can rely on the world to look after me, and the idea that someday I won't be able to rely on the world to look after me, I find really scary.

Robert Freeman Wexler: There's a magical element involving art, of course, and literal ability—the literal ability to change the world or the shape of the city or the progress of the city's growing. The painting part has to do with that. The parts that are by—there are two—in the novel, there's two sections of journals that the painter kept. And he came to New York in 1942 to do the painting. So I have his journals interspersed and he was brought to paint the painting that would affect someone's life through magic.

Yeah, I lived here, I liked some things, exploring imagery, whatever. It just felt like the place to do it. Partly because of the art connection, it's an art center and all that, so there wasn't really another place to set it. And I also—I used to not want to set things in such a specific place, but it needed to be here.

I really use a lot of surrealist imagery. A lot of the time, at least what I've noticed, when people talk about surrealism in my fiction, it tends to be "horror" and I'm not really writing horror. It's also not sweet. I guess it's hopeful. Maybe.

Posted by Rose Fox on September 3, 2009 | Comments (0)