Interview by Ed McManis
Author Steve Rasnic Tem has published 525 short stories…and counting. Tem writes in rarefied air, along with luminaries such as Poe, Stephen King, Bradbury. “Bradbury published right around 600 short stories I think,” Tem offers in his soft-spoken Appalachian drawl. This past June, Tem was honored by the Horror Writers Association with their Lifetime Achievement Award. With his typical quiet, self-deprecating humor he says, “If you live long enough, you get an award for it.”
In addition to his short stories, he’s written seven novels, non-fiction books on how to write, and a novella co-authored with his wife, Melanie, The Man on the Ceiling. (Melanie passed in 2015. The book won multiple awards.) Though he says, at 74, that he’s slowing down, the evidence runs contrary. He has three different collections of short stories forthcoming this fall. He’s also presenting at the MileHiCon conference in Denver. (MileHiCon is Denver’s annual big gathering for science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction writers.)
In addition to horror, Tem also writes science fiction and speculative fiction with plenty of realistic and surrealistic touches. Raised in Appalachia, his collection Scarecrows: Appalachian Tales, draws heavily from that world.
Tem lives alone in a modest house just south of Denver. Most striking when you walk in are the two walls—living room and adjoining dining room—covered with family portraits: his kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids. One senses the warmth and richness of his family that’s he’s surrounded himself with which makes his forays into darkness and horror all the more frightening and intriguing.
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Ed: Well, let’s start with your most recent recognition. You just won a prestigious award, right?
Steve: Yes. The Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award.
Ed: How did that come about?
Steve: Well, there’s a committee of the Horror Writers, and they get input from members and they decide. As I told one of my granddaughters, if you live long enough, you get an award for it. (Laughs) I think they may have been looking and said, who’s likely to die soon? Always makes you worry when you get one of these.
Ed: You’re too modest. Looking at your vitae, you’ve won a number of awards, respected awards. Your novella with Melanie, Man on the Ceiling won the Bram Stoker, Horror Guild and World Fantasy awards. And I believe your Appalachian southern gothic, Blood Kin, won another Bram Stoker.
Steve: Some (awards) are in that case over there. The rest I sent down to…there’s a Steve and Melanie Temcollection at the Cushing Library at Texas A&M. I sent some awards down there along with a copy of everything Melanie and I ever published, and most of our papers.
Ed: What’s the connection with A&M?
Steve: The Cushing Library has one of the world’s largest collections of science fiction and fantasy research materials. And they also have Ed Bryant’s papers.
Ed: Oh, really? Great. I miss Ed.
Steve: They also have some of George Martin’s stuff, Lisa Tuttle’s stuff, and others. I thought it would be a great place for our work. The head librarian is quite knowledgeable. So I contacted him to see if he’d be interested and he said, “Yes. Send everything.” We sent about 45 boxes worth of stuff. And I send a box every year of my new stuff. People travel from everywhere to do their research there.
Ed: Speaking of Ed, you remember Mark Barsotti? (A member of the Northern Colorado Writer’s Workshop, founded by Ed Bryant in 1972.) He’s got a rock-n-roll site, and he posted that there’s a collection of Ed’s work coming out.
Steve; Well, they’re having a launch at MileHiCon this week. It’s three or four volumes of Ed’s collected work. Also, articles on Ed, interviews, etc. I did an essay for one of the volumes. It’s a fairly complete collection. I think the first one’s called The Road to Cinnabar.
Ed: Now, you got your B.A. in English at VPI, (Virginia Polytechnic Institute) then your Master’s at Colorado State University, right?
Steve: I studied fiction with Warren Fine and poetry with Bill Tremblay. (CSU) Bill’s retired and living in Massachusetts. Warren Fine was an excellent teacher. He was a student of the novelist John Hawkes. He was an excellent writer. Hawkes, too, of course.
Ed: You grew up in Appalachia.
Steve: You know where Virginia comes to a point on the western side? Little triangle? I grew up in that little triangle near Cumberland Gap, the heart of Appalachia.
Ed: Had you always planned on being a writer?
Steve: Well, I didn’t have any designs on being a writer as such. I didn’t know any writers, any that had come from where I was. It seemed like wanting to be an astronaut. It’s something I wanted to do, I dreamed of doing, but it didn’t seem possible. The novelist and TV writer, Adriana Trigiani, is from there; she was born the year I left for college. So, I never met her.
Ed: Were you writing in high school?
Steve: First, I had a comic book fanzine, Superhero Fantasy. I got involved with the fanzine movement and wrote stories about superheroes. There were other fanzine writers who were better known. Howard Waldrop was one of them. George R.R. Martin. That’s where I started writing things and I wanted to be a science fiction writer. I’d write stories and send them to Amazing Stories and the editor always turned them down but wrote little notes of encouragement. At the time, I didn’t see them as encouraging, I just saw them as nos. Then I went to college and took all the literature courses they offered. I got some of my ideas back then for my novels, like Ubo.
Ed: Way back then. That’s like 50 years ago.
Steve: I started doing a lot of reading and research on psychology and human violence. Read biographies on Stalin and Hitler. Jack the Ripper and so on. My book, Blood Kin, I got that idea in high school. The ideas came and I knew at some point I’d want to finish them. I felt at some point I’d be good enough to write and finish them.
Ed: Well, Ubo was well received and got great reviews and was nominated for a Bram Stoker.
Steve: That’s probably as violent a book as I’ll ever do. My style usually isn’t that violent or that graphic.
Ed: Do you remember the first story that you sold?
Steve: My first professional sale was “City Fishing.” I wrote that for Ramsey Campbell for a British anthology. I read this little blurb that he was looking for stories and I loved his work. I wrote this right after I graduated from CSU. I typed that story up, sent it, and much to my surprise he bought it. Paid me money for it. That actually may be the only story of mine that’s published under Steve Rasnic. I sold it before I was married. So, I still had my maiden name. (Laughs)
Ed: And when did you and Melanie get married.
Steve: Oh, let’s see. That was ’79 or ’80.
Ed: How did you meet?
Steve: I met her at Ed Bryant’s Northern Colorado workshop.
Ed: Ah, Ed the matchmaker.
Steve: He held the workshop at her house and I sat down in one of her chairs and broke it. So I told her I’d come back to repair it and she also wanted me to critique a novel she’d written. She invited me down. We dated after that and were married a year later.
Ed: Had she been married before?
Steve: Yeah. It was her second.
Ed: You?
Steve: No. I’d never been married.
Ed: And how many children did you have.
Steve: We adopted all of our children. Five. And one passed away. Now I have seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Ed: Now, you have how many published short stories? Four hundred?
Steve: Five hundred twenty-five. Right around there.
Ed: Impressive. Who else is in that top tier? I know Poe wrote a bunch. I’ve read that Stephen King has anywhere from 120 to 400.
Steve: There are people who have published more. D.F. Lewis I think has published more than 700. He’s not writing so much now. There’s a Welsh writer, name slips my tongue…
Ed: Dylan Thomas!
Steve: (Laughs) No, no. This Welsh writer, Rhys Hughes, has published over a thousand. And Ray Bradbury published right around 600.
Ed: Do you have in the back of your mind, a certain number you want to hit?
Steve: No, I actually think I’ve written enough. I keep getting ideas, but I’ve slowed down considerably. I just love the short story form. The ones I feel compelled to write, I write.
Ed: Now, you started in poetry, did you just evolve into short stories?
Steve: I was always trying to find a way to write fiction. I started reading prose poems. There was a Michael Benedikt anthology. (The Prose Poem: An international Anthology) I read that and that got me interested in writing short prose. For a long time I wrote stories that were around 1500—1700 words. I learned a lot about compression and focus writing poetry. A lot of those stories are structured like poems. Lots of echoes, mirroring of images. Precision of language. I just kept pushing, expanding and expanding. Now, the average of my stories are 3000-to-4000 words. I have written longer, but that seems to be my sweet spot. I’ve got one story that’s 55 words.
Ed: That’s flash-flash fiction.
Steve: It’s called “2PM: The Real Estate Agent Arrives”. It’s been reprinted a few times. I have a number of stories that are a hundred, two hundred words.
Ed: That short form is hard. You’d think it might be easier, but it’s not.
Steve: With flash fiction, I think you need to avoid the twist ending or a pun ending. I avoid all those because I think it negates everything that came before. I try to write those stories with meaningful, sustainable endings. It’s difficult to do. The problem with the twist ending is the reader gets the impression that you’ve written the whole thing just to get to that twist line or ending. To me, that diminishes it.
Ed: Reminds me what one of my first writing teachers said. You have a great image or a couple of lines and the impulse is to put it at the end of the poem. Write your way to it. Instead, he suggested, stick it up front, challenge yourself to make the next image, verse, better.
Steve: I think that’s a better strategy. Put the great lines in the beginning, and see if you can go from there.
Ed: How many novels have you published?
Steve: Seven.
Ed: And non fiction, didn’t you write a “How-to-Write” book?
Steve: Well, Melanie and I wrote, Yours to Tell: Dialogues on the Art and Practice of Writing. We put everything we could think of about writing into that book. I’ve also written various articles for different publications, about writing.
Ed: For the magazine market, do you still query and send stories out?
Steve: For the magazines, you send stuff out. Sometimes you’ll get an editor who says, “Send me something.” If you write as much as I do, you’re always sending something out. Now there are probably more online magazines than print magazines. I publish with a lot of those like The Dark. And I have a story coming out in December in Nightmare. As far as the print magazines, there’s Asimov’s and Analog, the two major (science fiction) ones. I actually have stories coming up in both of those in the near future. I still write a few science fiction stories every year, and I send them to those two magazines.
Ed: I think I saw Wil McCarthy (Northern Colorado Writers alum) in one of those last month.
Steve: Yeah, Wil’s in Analog quite a bit.
Ed: I think he’s going to be at MileHiCon. Who else is going?
Steve: Connie Willis will be there. Most of the local science fiction and fantasy writers will be there. (John Stith, Marie DesJardin, Ronnie Seagren, Gary Raham, David Zindell, James Van Pelt.)
Ed: Connie just had a book come out, didn’t she?
Steve: Her latest is the novel, The Road to Roswell. It’s on my “to-read” stack. She’s also been working on a non-fiction book about writing. She’s been delivering pieces of it as lectures at MileHiCon. This weekend she’s going to be doing a lecture on foreshadowing.
Ed: When you started writing, were you able to support yourself with writing?
Steve: Didn’t even try. Didn’t even try.
Ed: I think Ed (Bryant) was the only writer I knew who didn’t have a “real” job and supported himself writing.
Steve: Well, he really didn’t. Almost every writer I know who tries to be a fulltime writer supplements it with teaching or other small jobs. Melanie and I had four kids in the house who unreasonably wanted food and clothing. (Laughs)
Ed: And things like braces and medical care? (Laughs)
Steve: It was clear to me there was no way I could support these children adequately, even with Melanie’s income also, on a writer’s income. And particularly since I’m stubborn and want to write only the things I want to write. As a fulltime writer you don’t have that luxury. Often you’re on contract writing in other people’s universes. You’re writing tie-in novels, tie-in fiction, I really didn’t want to do that. Early on I became a technical writer, so I was a tech writer for 30-40 years. In the software industry writing outline help and manuals. Started out with Apple and ended writing for Weyerhaeuser, a software program for constructing wooden structures. There are less interesting aspects to that. I had to maintain the plywood specs. (Laughs)
Ed: Somebody’s gotta’ do it.
Steve: Which now I guess could be done with AI.
Ed: I was gonna’ say. Seems like a lot of these jobs will be relegated to AI.
Steve: I liked it. I liked working with software, working with the tools. I liked working with Photoshop. And I still had enough energy to write when I got home. And weekends. That’s when I wrote fiction.
Ed: That takes discipline. Work, attend to your family, then find time to write.
Steve: It does require discipline. It also teaches you discipline. That’s one thing about short stories. I was eager to get those out and finish those narratives.
Ed: I think it was Raymond Carver who talked about that, the advantage of writing short stories, regarding available time.
Steve: Well, novels are a different kind of discipline. The thing about novels is you have to put off gratification, sometimes for years. That’s why I didn’t like writing novels. At least with the short story, I had the gratification of having completed something every few weeks.
Ed: And then if the novel doesn’t work, or bombs, there’s all that time lost. Now, you said that Melanie was also working full time?
Steve: She was a social worker. She worked in adoptions and she also worked with the disabled and with the elderly. So, she had three phases of her career.
Ed: And these were themes that were in her work. I remember there was that story about the prosthetics?
Steve: Oh, “Prosthesis.” That was actually our first collaboration, the first story we wrote together. I had the idea originally, and I wanted to add a female point of view so I asked her to take a look at it. She had some ideas, so we decided to collaborate. It was published in Asimov’s. Sometimes I’d have an idea, or she would have one, and we’d trade off. We had very similar ideas about what was good writing. Interestingly, when we collaborated, it made a third voice that was different from either of our own voices. We have a collection of our collaborations called In Concert.
Ed: What does your typical day look like?
Steve: Now that I’m retired from the day job, it varies considerably. I don’t set my alarm clock. I usually wake up around eight or nine. I’ll do email, a little bit of writing. I’ll have lunch, take a nap. Then I’ll do some more writing. And usually I’ll do some writing at night, in between watching movies. So it’s pretty scattered these days. I’m always thinking about fiction, though. I’m always ready to add a paragraph or a line. Usually stories these days take me about three months, counting the percolating time. Oftentimes I’ll work on a story for at least a month before I really know what the point of view is.
Ed: Do you have an editor?
Steve: No. With Melanie, we were each other’s editors. Now, if I finish something, I’ll set it aside for a week or a month, and I’ll actually try and imagine what Melanie would have said about it.
Ed: Oh, that’s great. She’s still working with you.
Steve: Setting it aside for awhile, I’m able to separate myself enough from it, put myself in her perspective. And then I do what I call a finishing draft. Use of language, word choice, things like that.
Ed: Across your career, what’s the biggest change you’ve seen in your writing?
Steve: I think my stories are more complex and less…genre driven. I think I’ve skated more toward the edges of the genre.
Ed: So, you’re defining more of what your stories are, rather than having the genre define them?
Steve: The new collection is coming out called Everyday Horrors. And the stories are mostly recent stories in which I start with a fairly close realistic portrayal of something. But at some point, it veers sideways into some kind of a surreality. When things become surreal and impossible, some real truths emerge.
Ed: When things get surreal, is it a spiritual shift? Psychological? Another world…what do you think that is?
Steve: I think that a lot of the truths about experience aren’t expressible in realistic terms. I think sometimes a fantastic image or a weird event better encapsulates your feelings about real life. I think most of us have had that experience where something happens and we don’t quite know how to express our feelings about it. We don’t know how to interpret it in any realistic way. It has moved us psychologically or spiritually to different places, and those are hard to talk about. I think that using surreal imagery is one way to express those events.
Ed: As a horror writer, what do you find terrifying?
Steve: Besides the next election? (Laughs)
Ed: It’s got me losing sleep and going down rabbit holes.
Steve: I hear that constantly from people. People aren’t sleeping, depressed, unfortunately some people are near-suicidal now. Stress. People are already imagining the worst.
Ed: I can’t get over the hump that this country’s about to elect a sexual predator as president.
Steve: I think there’s been a change in the way people see things in the last couple of decades. People are tending to distrust science, distrust rational thought. There’s a feeling that we are powerless and there are things happening behind the scenes that we don’t understand. That we don’t understand the basic mechanisms of reality. And so, people are in different ways coming up with their own theories about what explains things. It’s like we’re back before mass communication and science. It’s as if people are relying on myths and fairytales and outlandish stories told by the town drunk. It’s why some people believe there’s a national party controlling the weather and hurricanes. God knows the reason why someone would do that, even if they could do that. It makes no sense at all.
Ed: And you’d think it would be the Republicans controlling the weather before the Democrats.
Steve: I believe in the two-party system. I believe that there are rational conservatives just as there are rational liberals. I don’t think those are the people in charge anymore. I used to have this saying that I stopped saying because I thought it might be offensive. I’d say, “People will believe any damn thing.”
Ed: I think that’s true. Any damn thing and for no good reason.
Steve: So now I think about how could I survive if the worse happens? Being a white male with a certain amount of income, I’m pretty safe. Unfortunately, people of other genders, of other colors and cultures are at risk. Back to your question about fear, the other fear as an older male is of losing my mind. Alzheimer’s.
Ed: Is that in your family history?
Steve: Yeah. My mother had Alzheimer’s. She died at 92, but had it from about 80 on. There’s also the fear of the usual health stuff, about being by yourself in your final years. And then the usual fears I’ve always had about something happening to the people I love. Those are the things I tend to write about too.
Ed: I’ll admit for me it’s the opposite. Growing up with nine siblings, I kind of like being alone.
Steve: And for a lot of writers, they tend to write about things that are age appropriate. Trying to find a spouse, trying to find a career, then trying to find some meaning in life. Middle-age and beyond, empty nest issues, mid-life crises. When you get to be my age, I’m interested in what it means to be in your last decade of life, mortality. Unfortunately, that’s material that’s less commercial.
Ed: Is legacy something you think about?
Steve: As far as legacy, I have the Cushing Library where I send all my stuff. So, I have that. I have a will and a trust, things to give my kids.
Ed: Who gets the rights to your work?
Steve: My brother would manage it, but my kids get all the benefits. It stays in the family. Won’t be a great amount of money, but it will be some. I also believe in death cleaning, the Swedish Death Cleaning philosophy. I’ve had friends who’ve died leaving a mass of stuff other people had to deal with. I’ve been downsizing and downsizing.
Ed: You say it’s Swedish Death Cleaning?
Steve: Yes. It’s a tradition. So if I find things in the house I know I’m not gonna’ use, I get rid of them. I keep thinning my book collection. Every few months I get rid of things. I’m constantly looking around the house for something I don’t think I need. Basically, I want to minimize the sheer number of objects my kids will have to deal with. One of the truths of aging is your kids aren’t gonna’ want your old crap. Tastes change. They have their own tastes. Most of our old stuff ends up in a thrift store or the dump.
Ed: We’ve got a garage full of Linda’s parents’ stuff. We did keep their juke box.
Steve: One thing I did a couple of years ago, I had my kids come over. I took out boxes of family pictures and let them take what they wanted. I had all those things they made in elementary school, scrap books—
Ed: All that artwork you used to put on the fridge. That’s a good idea, have them take what they want. Now, do you have an agent?
Steve: Not now. I let my agent go almost ten years ago. I handle my own stuff. If I have another major novel project I may get one.
Ed: And for your website?
Steve: It’s www.stevetem.com. I have a web guy, but mostly it’s set up so I can do all the updates myself. My Facebook page and my Twitter and my Bluesky page. I maintain all of that myself.
Ed: Can you give one bit of wisdom for new writers today?
Steve: Well, if they’re short story writers I’d give my usual advice. Read at least a thousand short stories. Analytically. Pay attention to how the story begins, how it ends. What was the strategy involved in choosing that beginning and ending. How does the story develop between those points. The other thing is, I’ve found that most of what I know about writing I learned, surprisingly enough…by writing. Working my way through narratives. There are a lot of decisions taking place when you become fully enmeshed with a character, and the character comes up with ideas and perceptions that maybe you hadn’t expected. You have to decide; so, if you choose to take one, it may send you down into another area. It’s good to decide what your theme is and then have all those things directly relate to it.
There’s a book by George Saunders called A Swim in a Pond in The Rain…. Four Russian writers, and he analyzes the stories and the decisions that they must have made along the way. I learned a lot from reading that book. Another good book is Nancy Kress’ Beginnings, Middles and Ends. It tells you about the relationship between those three elements and the strategies involved.
I think it’s interesting, a lot of bad writing or writing filled with errors or which seems to lack authenticity is because the writer hasn’t fully inhabited the main character. I think a lot of times if you’ve gotten inside a character, you can solve a lot of problems that have to do with tone and word choice.
Ed: What are some of your own works that are favorites, close to your heart.
Steve: That’s getting harder and harder to say. There have been so many stories I’ve liked, so many I’ve forgotten. The Man on the Ceiling, the novella I wrote with Melanie, that was a really important book for us. I’m also quite pleased with a story I published, I think it was last year. Called “Memoria” It’s the closing story in my new collection, Everyday Horrors. Those are two that come to mind. Sometimes I’ll come across old stories I’ve forgotten about and I’ll read them and say, “Hey, this guy’s pretty good.” (Laughs)
Ed: Are there stories that you wished hadn’t been published?
Steve: Well, out of 525 stories, there are about 25 that will never see republication. Even in my collections. They either don’t work or I can’t figure out why I wrote them in the first place.
Ed: Who are you reading right now?
Steve: Right now for Halloween, I’m rereading The House Next Door, by Anne Rivers Siddons. One of the best haunted house novels ever written. I’m reading a lot of Claire Keegan. She’s an Irish writer, a realistic writer, but she writes some of the best prose I’ve ever read. Her fiction is like jewel-work. It’s perfection. There’s also Maryse Meijer. I enjoy her work quite a bit. She’s edgy, skating along the edge of horror.
Ed: What’s your take on book publishing today?
Steve: I don’t think we could have predicted what publishing is like today. It’s completely different from when I started. Particularly with the ease of print-on-demand (POD) and the ease with which people can bring books out. It’s harder than ever to sell them of course. A lot of the magazines have gone online. For someone like me who grew up with print and wanted to be in those books on the shelves in libraries, digital publication just isn’t the same thrill for me. But I certainly do it because it does pay.
Ed: Are you as worried about AI as some other writers?
Steve: Well, it depends upon the situation. I don’t see AI replacing fiction writers. The AI fiction I’ve read has been terrible. AI non-fiction is a lot more reasonable, but it has to be carefully proofread. That word intelligence is a misnomer. There’s no intelligence involved in AI; it’s all just advanced pattern recognition. There’s no active intelligence going on.
Ed: A faux-intelligence?
Steve: For fiction, if you’re trying to have a character interact with human beings, a non-human entity cannot create that. It requires a mind with heart and soul and feeling. I can see AI replacing writers in non-fiction areas. I don’t see it in fiction. That doesn’t mean publishers won’t try it. I resent it like every other writer. I resent that my texts are being used to train AI. I didn’t give my permission for that.
Ed: Now, you have a couple of books coming out, right?
Steve: My latest books are, Rough Justice: Tales of Crime and Deception. That’s basically my collected noir fiction. Just came out in paperback. It sold out in hard cover. There’s Scarecrows: Appalachian Tales. It’s a mix of fantasy, horror crime, and realistic stories set in Appalachia. The next book will be out in a week or so and that’s Everyday Horrors. It’s 20 stories steeped in both reality and the surreal.
Ed: I’m looking forward to the new publications. Thanks for sitting down with me.
Links: website: www.stevetem.com
X: @Rasnictem
Facebook: steve.tem
Bluesky: @stevetem.bsky.social
About the interviewer: Ed McManis is a writer, editor, & musician. His work has appeared in more than 60 publications, including The Blue Road Reader, California Quarterly, Nimrod, Narrative, Lascaux Review, etc. He, along with his wife, Linda, have published esteemed author Joanne Greenberg’s (I Never Promised You a Rose Garden) memoir, On the Run. His latest chapbook from Bottlecap Press, is “The Zombie Family Takes a Selfie.” He’s known Steve for 40+ years and isn’t a-scared of him or his horror stories.