BETWEEN TWO FLAMES WITH THE SEVENTH TERRACE

Thank you for joining your hosts Lola Silkysocks and Noggy Splitfoot for another installment of Between Two Flames — where we place authors in our hot seat for what surely must feel like an eternity of environmentally unfriendly gas grilling.

Today we welcome Randy Nikkel Schroeder, author of Fire Sands a slapstick splatterpunk dystopia for juvenile delinquents and defiant children who look suspiciously like adults—half comedy, half tragedy, all bad attitude

Please tell us a little about yourself in exactly forty-two words.

Randy: Hi! I’m just an old 70’s kid who looks like an adult, and a musician who writes to explore linguistic tones, timbres, and rhythms. But before I continue, what’s your obsession with 42? 46 is a much better … Damn. Outta words.

(Fiddles with button)

TST: 46? Hmm, that one is kinda sinister. But with that out of the way, let’s get right to your story. What the heck inspired you to write this mad romp through the insanity of far future Alberta? (besides the obvious – which we can all see by looking out our damn windows every day).

Randy: I wish I knew. Actually, maybe I don’t. The original idea came long ago, when I was at West Edmonton Mall, enjoying the uniquely rich Aberta mall culture. I was gobsmackingly charmed by that ersatz Bourbon Street section, the one that takes all the rich cultural history of New Orleans, all its tropes and icons, and turns it into this delightful, ludicrous, one-dimensional Disneyland hall of simulacrum, just crazy, with an Earl’s and a Moxie’s, just to make sure you don’t mistake it for anything in the zip code, no anything in the universe, of the real thing. 

So I was enjoying the Kraft Dinner and Fries at the Mr. Mike’s on Bourbon Street, that was actually literally a menu item, and I thought, “What if this mall was even bigger? What if it just kept expanding, until it bumped up against all the other malls and kind of began to eat them like some giant predatory snake, and also took all the neighborhoods and all the rivers and all the landscapes, until there was no longer any outside the mall?” That would be a wonderfully surreal example of extractive capitalism at its finest, sucking up and metabolizing everything even slightly interesting and shitting out flattened joy and dead metaphors and great gobs of comfort food and boilerplate. 

It just sort of went from there. (laughs so hard he briefly chokes on his own spit)

Anyway, as the ideas evolved, a lot more grim stuff started to fold into the comedy, shit that makes me sick or disgusted or mad. I think what’s most obvious in the story is how much disdain I have for the manosphere, that whole realm of boring, cowardly, silly, emotional men, glazing each other while huddling and holding hands against a world that terrifies them, while constantly reassuring each other that they’re not really scared. It’s comic. It’s sad. I can’t respect it. But more importantly, it’s toxic. You know? Andrew Tate, those looksmaxxing dudes, who’s that really silly dude, Joe Rogan. Jordan Peterson, poor guy. Really, I’m trying to get better. I’m trying to learn some compassion for all these sweet, shivering baby birds, but they do such a lot of incredible damage. I’ve seen that damage, among folks I love. I seem to have slid out of the womb already loathing frat boys and and bros of every stripe. Though I guess there really is only one stripe. Grey. Wait, grey is interesting. (laughs, then frowns)

TST: We’re definitely more a fan of infinite void black, but sometimes grey is interesting. Do you still see Dusty Buggs? We gotta hope he’s still out there telling tales and causing mischief.

Randy: Sorry, I’m not allowed to speak about that. No—before you interrupt, I can’t tell you why I’m not allowed, either. It’s a safety issue.

TST: Understood. Additionally, why such a fascination with the Porcupine Hills? There’s arguably better hills out there. Just saying.

Randy: Are you freakin kidding me?? There are no better hills anywhere this side of the Carpathians. Don’t get me going. The Porcupines… like, they rise abruptly from the surrounding plains in this long, dark, bumpy silhouette, a mysterious transitional ecosystem, not prairie, not mountain—sparse, depopulated, ridges on ridges stacked with dark pines rather than the sunny mixed forests of the surrounding foothills. And the light is weird: surrounded on all sides by the floodlit prairies, pale sky over top, and here’s this place that always looks like it’s in the shadow of a thunderstorm. 

There are forces at work in those hills, much older than our concepts of good and evil. (giggles)

Stay away, folks! That’s my place.

Anyway, one trope that I really like to explore is how, when a mall swallows a mystical landscape, to put it that way, maybe as it metabolizes the landscape, the landscape is also metabolizing it, the mall around it, backwards, secretly, subtly, dangerously. Maybe some weird scintilla of Bourbon Street is somehow wriggling around deep inside the West Ed Mall Bourbon Street, like a virus—does a virus wriggle? Maybe the extractive and colonizing actions of contemporary political and economic formations are accidentally eating bugs that are going to sabotage or rewire their biome. I think there’s an argument there, if you look around. Our provincial government… Actually, let’s not go there.

TST: You’ve already had a big publishing year with the release of Sinner’s Banquet, a rather disturbed, yet fun (Noggy being of Mennonite heritage, so fun for him at least…) bit of Mennonite crime fiction. How was writing two very different genres back-to-back? Any challenges?

Randy: I wonder if anyone’s going to believe it’s the same author! I mean, if anyone actually reads both. Haha. (looks down)

My inspirations for Fire Sands were writers like Angela Carter and Kathy Acker and Thomas Pynchon, so I was trying to jam maximalist writing into a minimalist form. Results may vary! It was a very distinct process, trying to activate those maximalist craft engines and set them loose. Also, the plotting is absolutely ludicrous. It can’t possibly work in the word-count of a novella. It’s way too much. 

Sinner’s Banquet was the precise opposite. Where Fire Sands is all about maximum genre-mixing and -bending, maximum mashup of styles and idioms, maximum generic impurity, Sinner’s Banquetwas all about the traditional stylistic constraints and obligatory tropes of Noir. I didn’t think of it so much as the discipline of writing in the Noir genre, so much as being disciplined by the Noir genre. 

Most of the craft was literally taking things out. Most of the stylistic revisions were quite literally changing a word or phrase back to something more cliched or familiar, less “poetic” or whatever, partly because the recent neuroscience of narrative demonstrates that you only need tiny portions of invention for the style to feel inventive in the reader’s experience. Too much linguistic jimcrackery, as generations of genre readers already know, “gets in the way of the story.” Neurologically. We now have compelling evidence. 

So you can capitalize on that fact to write a Noir, one that hopefully moves at the right pace, and finds the right balance between pattern and novelty in terms of the reader’s cognitive load. Or, alternately, you can use that fact against itself to create a ridiculous maximalist-minimalist nightmare, one that completely tilts out of balance and activates massive cognitive load. Some freaks like that shit! There’s a kink for everything. So I’ve been told. But It’s probably two entirely different sets of ideal readers. It’s all about probabilities, but that’s all stuff from of my boring academic life. If I told you more I’d have to kill you. No, you’d have to kill yourselves. To stem the boredom!

TST: We’re like cockroaches, hard to kill, but we’re flattered you came to us with Fire Sands, we really are, but after having expensively faked our own deaths to avoid so many boring obligations, we’re curious where you found our current contact info?

Randy: I can’t tell you that either. Come on, you know I can’t tell you that. Why would you even ask? It’s a safety issue. 

As far as Seventh Terrace is concerned, I never even considered sending it anywhere else. For anyone listening, have you checked out some Seventh Terrace titles? If it’s your thing, your jam, your kink, your flavour—and maybe seek out therapy if so—Seventh Terrace occupies an utterly unique region in the publishing ecosystem, to my eye at least, as both a writer and English professor, where the lines between comedy and tragedy, mirth and trauma, serious and juvenile, angelic and satanic, ridiculous and sublime, sturm and drang, high and low, dark and light, fair and foul, not to mention pro and con, feast or famine, hammer and tongs, smoke and mirrors—all get seriously blurred, seriously queered. As for where Fire Sands probably, hopefully, fits into that ecosystem, Nigel Tufnel put it best: “there’s a fine line between clever and stupid.”

TST: Thanks Randy! I think we’ll change our names to sturm and drang. Now for the question you maybe can’t answer but we’re gonna ask anyway. Any plans or interest to write more in this deranged, yet totally accessible, universe? A short story, perhaps, for some future Seventh Terrace curio?

Randy: That I can answer, with vigour. Creating that slapstick dystopia was so much fun, with so many leftover characters, possible plot threads, thematic and satirical implications, and unexplored worldbuilding details, plus the whole production and design process with you folks was so much fun and interactive, and the artist you hired, Nyco, so perfect for the tone, that I am at your service. Anytime, anywhere, really.

(Bows)

TST: What’s next for you? Any forthcoming releases, hatchings, or germinations we should be on the lookout for?

Randy: I’m currently plotting a loose sequel to Sinner’s Banquet—more Mennonite Noir in the same damned town with much of the same cast but a different narrator. I also continue to make frequent secret trips into the Sixth Realm of Alberta, continuing to explore that world and its characters. But I guess I just blurted the secret. 

In the realm of music, my little band—Zuggenfunk—has made a hard turn into a synth-and-mandolin genre that’s half bluegrass, half psychedelic, all bad attitude. We call it “Psychograss.” So far I’ve posted one song to my Youtube channel in the new “Pyschedelic Bluegrass” playlist, as we continue to record an EP called, in one of our drummer’s better single entendres, Mandolingus. 

In the same playlist we also posted an ill-advised folk/disco cover version of Led Zep’s “Immigrant Song,” on a dare. So rest assured, we make the same kind of poor decisions that Noir characters always make. Which is probably why we’re up to, last I checked, almost fifteen subscribers! 

(laughs heartily)

TST: Thanks Randy!

Randy: No, thank you Dreaditors. Seventh Terrace is the only press that frequents the same dark corner table at the same bar in the same backwater town in the same badlands region of Hell where I slouch nightly eating spicy magpie wings and sipping girlie drinks. Don’t ever change!

But we’ve probably stroked and glazed each other enough here. Don’t people want conflict and drama, backroom gossip, juicy stuff? Sorry, I’ve got none. This has turned into a love-fest!

(Clears throat and looks pensive)

Randy Nikkel Schroeder works as a professor, rodeo clown, and hand model across the Canadian prairies and American southwest. He is often confused with A.M. Arruin, a rival rodeo clown, who has publicly accused Schroeder of being “a misanthrope, a pagan, and maybe an anarchist.” Schroeder lives in the Porcupine Hills with a parrot and a stable of retired barrel mares. He has won no awards.