FS:First off, congratulations on your 2001 Bram Stoker nomation for your latest work, the novella Northern Gothic! Are your nervous or fairly confident for the 6.8.02 event being alongside the likes of Ray Bradbury, Stephen King and Harlan Ellison?

NM: Thanks! I'm actually not nervous at all about the Bram Stoker, which is one of the two main awards for horror and dark fiction. I'm not nervous because not only do I know I will lose, I am sure I will come in dead last in my category. The awards are run by the Horror Writers Association and all members vote -- it is a non-juried award, like the Oscars. As such, non-members tend not to get an enormous number of votes. I was also added to the final ballot by the Special Additions Jury rather than added by the prelimary rounds of voting that formed the rest of the ballot, so even within the cult fiction community I'm only a cult figure! My friends were impressed that I am up against Harlan Ellison who is also a role model for me.

The only drama is whether I will garner the lowest number of votes in Stoker history. As for my friends, they only want to know if I'll get to meet Neil Gaiman (he wrote The Sandman, a breakthrough comic series and the novel _American Gods_).

FS:Northern Gothic has gained some extremely favorable reviews (and notably so) from Janet Berliner and Thomas Beller. Gothic has effectively morphed the lives of William Patten, an Irish immigrant in the midst of the chaotic and racist 1860's Civil War ridden New York with a sexually potent Ahmadi Jenkins in the late 1990's. What drew you to conceive of weaving the two characters together in a wonderfully fresh and unique plot? What drew you to write about the dark bowels of poverty and labor union issues of New York in 1863 and the sexually prevelant gay community painted in Chelsea in 1998?

NM:Actually, the book started as a short story. I came across an anthology call for "Civil War ghost stories" and decided to give it a shot. The story got bounced around with what they call "positive" rejections (i.e., "Very well-written but...") and one of those positive rejections said "This is great, but it isn't a short story, it is the first chapter of a kick-ass novel!" and I took that hint to heart.

As far as the stories, I lived in the West Village and Chelsea in the mid-1990s so was neck deep in the community and I enjoyed all the crazy characters. I've always been a fan of New York history and was impressed by the Civil War Draft Riots in that, in spite of their violence and influence, there is very little information about them in the public consciousness. No plaques, no folk songs, no holidays or old saying, nothing. Interestingly enough, since Northern Gothic came out, I've run into a number of people working on projects (plays, screenplays, novels) using the riots as a backdrop.

The Berliner and Beller blurbs are great, I think. Basically, I'm one of those writers who get rejections from genre magazines for being "too stylistic" and from literary journals for being "too fabulist" so getting positive reviews from a genre wriiter and a literary writer was a coup, I think.

FS:The themes of racism and displacement (the two main characters not entirely fitting in with their surroundings) run heavy throughout the work. Did you originally intend for these themes to be prevelant? What issues did you want Northern Gothic to address?

NM: The history of America IS the history of racism. In fact, I'd suggest that racism is conspicuous by its absense in too much literature, genre or mainstream. It's like not having, oh, I don't know, post offices, in books. Post offices are all over the place! People get mail! The problem is that the ascension of the Right over the last 25 years has changed the frame of debate so much that talking about race is often considered racist. The "color blind" philosophy of anti-racism has been adapted by the right to get rid of Affirmative Action in some places, and to bad-jacket anyone who points out that racism still exists as a racist. So yes, I wanted to blow through that.

Displacement, or alienation, is important here and in all my stories. It's also a prominent theme in lots of fantasy and horror, which is where I take my cues for most of my work. The notion of not just being out of place, but wanting to be part of something, anything, greater than the self is what gets us naked apes into a lot of trouble -- it's obedience that leads to the Gulag and to Dachau, not disobedience. And the need to belong is what inspires that awful mindless obedience.

Ahmadi's sexuality is another symbol of his displacement and alienation -- it's a cheap trick, I'm afraid, but I'm not above cheap tricks. Interestingly, when I was on a reading tour earlier this year, young women would invariably come up to me after the show and ask "Is your book...autobiographical?" Now mind you; this is a time-traveling ghost story about an Irish-American immigrant in 1863 and a gay black Southerner coming to Manhattan in 1998. Not really material suitable for a roman a clef about me, is it? What they meant of course is, "Are you gay?" In fact, after getting a stupefied from me, they'd often go to my friend Joi Brozek, who read with me from her upcoming novel _Sleeveless_ and whisper "Is Nick gay?" So, who knows if people got the stuff about alienation and displacement. I guess you did at least!

FS:As a former Fiction editor at the influential independent publisher Soft Skull press, what kinds of stories, what voices of narrators grabbed you as a reader and an editor and what themes pushed you away from a manuscript?

NM:Well, I didn't just edit fiction (indeed, we don't do much fiction) but I did much of the list. As far as manuscripts, the unhappy truth is that most manuscripts were utterly inappropriate -- thrillers (often guaranteed to "make a great Hollywood film!" by their authors), right-wing political tracts, jumbles of poems and drawings by college kids clearing out their freshman-year creative folders, and joke books made up a good 70% of the slush pile.

95% of the remaining 30% killed themselves in the cover letter. Here's a hint: don't refer to the editor as "Hitler...yeah, I mean Adolph, buddy!" in the cover because he insists on double-spaced submissions. Don't literally proclaim "I am not a writer!" in your cover letter (poets liked to do this, they were the kings and queens of ego defense). Don't make fun of the name of the publisher. And after a rejection, don't write back to tell the editor off!

What I like: Confidence. Mastery of craft. A speedy pace. I like stories where things actually happen, rather than 70,000 words about how some middle-class cardigan-wearer is unhappy. For political non-fiction I liked not just leftist screeds, but material with both humor and rigor. For poetry, and oh Lord, was there a lot of bad poetry, a diversity of subject and form were important to me. I got to see a lot of books that were all poems about teaching community college or all about the trucking industry or prison or Vietnam or suicide. The other major flaw of poetry submissions were 'collections' that collected nothing more than 'every poem written between 1992 and 1999' or something.

FS: Has being an editor influenced your writing and how?

NM:In the novel _Blueblood_ one character asks another, a critic and former Abstract Expressionist painter, how one could tell a good painting from bad. The answer: look at 10,000 paintings. The same with me. I have a much greater appreciation for the bones of a book now -- structure, the revelation of character through action rather than mere description, the importance of paragraphs as well as sentences, etc. I'd still never write a poem, but now I can read them for pleasure.

The two most important things that I realized, as opposed to simply knowing because I had been told, are:

a. "but it really happened" is the poorest excuse one can give for a story
b. The first things that need to go are often the best, most clever, and most pleasing sentences or scenes.

FS:From your fan site and your daily journal, you use the term Nihilistic Any backstory on that? Also, daily journals (or blogs) have become extremely popular as of late -- what made you want to jump in and start your own journal? Have you found a wider audience of readers and friends from blogging?

NM:Oddly, I just answered this question on my blog: It's been on my online name since 1989. A friend of mine showed me an online venue called TinyMUD and I picked the name because:

a. I had just been flipping through a copy of Normal Man and "Nihilistic Kid" was a name shouted out in the roll call for the Legion of Superfluous Heroes
b. Existential skepticism seemed like a smart position to take in a 'virtual' environment
c. It abbreviates nicely to NK, which is reminiscent of my actual name Nick.

It also sounded a lot cooler and more accurate when I was 17. Who knew that the Internet would take over the world and I'd be stuck with the name when I was 30! One of the descendents of that original TinyMUD is even the subject of a dissertation and a forthcoming scholarly book by Lori Kendall, a sociologist who teaches at SUNY Purchase. In that book, my pseudonym is 'Bileriffic Sid' because sociological ethics forbid researchers from disclosing a subject's "real" name.

The blog has helped with the book too. It had guaranteed that someone, and usually more than one person, shows up at out of town readings. Many of my readers bought the book, and about 1/5th did so on my birthday when I wrote that rather than buying me something from my non-existent wishlist, they should buy themselves a copy of Northern Gothic. Over the course of the day, the book's rank jumped from 850,000 to 2480. About a dozen people hit Borders all over the country and bought it that day or the next at well (hint: it is in the Science Fiction section, squeezed in with the hardcovers and non-rack sized books), so that was very cool.

FS:WWNKD, a hysterical comedy strip on your site composed by Kynn Bartlett -- what made you want to be the subject of a visual diary?

NM:I didn't! The fansite was just a joke at first -- I'm just lucky that Kynn didn't make it pink with lots of red hearts like a Backstreet Boys fansite. I think that was his original conception of the site, but now he basically does what I tell him. Mostly, I don't even know when strips will pop up -- Kynn just pays close attention to our conversations on the MUSH we hang out on, and the next day there will be a strip. Of course, since I am an egomaniac, I love the strip. It's especially cool because Kynn can't draw, so we have to squeeze that one panel for all its worth.

FSYou've been a frequent contributor for many collections, namely journalistic (Before and After: Stories from New York and Fortunate Son) Do you have any pending projects? plans for future projects? Do you have a preference for journalism vs. fiction?

NM:I'm doing a bit of freelancing. A major feature on the founder of industrial music, Genesis P-Orridge, for Razor, a "men's magazine," is coming out in May. I'm a contributor to _Everything You Know Is Wrong_, Disinformation Books' sequel to the very popular non-fiction anthology _You Are Being Lied To_. That will be out in late May too. And I have a few short stories and two novels in the ol' brain pan, one of which will mix Lovecraft and Kerouac.

As far as fiction versus non-fiction, I have moods. I like fiction better when I'm writing it, and I like talking about and tinkering with fiction. Journalism for the sake of journalism and "personality journalism" (90% of the stuff on tv and radio) is just terrible. On the other hand, I find the possibility of life as a fiction writer horribly depressing. Non-fiction, meaning journalism, essays, scholarly work, etc. is far more important to me because I am attempting to have an actual impact on the culture, on politics and on the ideas in people's heads. Non-fiction provides a more direct line to all of these things than fiction, which is too often used as an escape or to console people about their lives. Of course, non-fiction can also cater to wish-fulfillment and escape, but mine doesn't.

Oh, and non-fiction pays much better. I turn cartwheels when I sell a short story for five cents a word to magazines like Strange Horizons (www.strangehorizons.com) or Speculon (www.speculon.com) but don't even waste the energy to spit in the face of a non-fiction rag offering twenty cents a word. A buck a word isn't unreasonable for non-fiction because there is an audience out there that fiction doesn't have any more.

FS:Any advice or words of encouragement for SSN readers?

NM:Read it all. There is no difference between genre and literature -- it is impossible to determine categories only through quality (e.g., Orwell's _Nineteen Eighty-four_ was science fiction, but through popular acclaim is now "literature").

Genre is a matter of marketing category: any number of "literary" novels have fantastic or speculative themes -- DeLillo or a third of B&N's "Discover" novels, and any number of "genre" novels have writing equal to or greater than that of the top of the lit fic bunch. Samuel Delany reinvented the modern novel at least twice during his career alone, but even in the 1980s, there were uptown bookstores that wouldn't carry his stuff, as it was all 'sci-fi.' Don't let the corporate drones tell you how to think. Read it all.