Al Martinez

How did you become a writer? I didn’t actually become a writer; I always was one. At whatever age in childhood one learns to use words I began writing story-letters to a favorite uncle, incorporating whatever I heard on the radio, like the Lone Ranger, injecting myself into the plots of their stories. I did this and drew pictures to illustrate the stories for as long as I can remember. In junior high school, teachers began noticing that I could write, especially one named Calla Monlux.  It was during the depression. There wasn’t enough to eat, my father had taken off, an angry, hostile step-father ruled over a dysfunctional family. A laborer kicked out of the Navy for fighting, he couldn’t find work. There was never money in the house, we moved it seemed whenever the rent came due, we sat in houses without food, lights or heat. Literally, there were times when there was not food in the house to take for lunch at school. It was a terrible time.

Name your writing influences. Calla Monlux was about 5 feet tall, short hair, long dresses; a classic old maid at the time. I remember her expression was a slight, secret smile, as though she knew something the rest of us didn’t know. Anyhow, I stuttered badly back then and when forced to stand in front of class as an assignment to tell what we had done during the summer, I stammered uncontrollably and was humiliated by the laughter of the class seeing me trying to talk. I swore I would never get up there again. When it became clear to Monlux that I meant it, she assigned me to write three “themes” we called them then; short essays. This was near the start of WW2. I remember lying on a hillside near our East Oakland home one evening when there was a blackout. Sirens sounded and the lights of the city blinked off one by one, which made the stars seem brighter. I wrote about it: man may turn out the lights of the city but God controls the lights of the stars. She was blown away not only by the idea but my words. She saw the writer in me and kept me after school, had me close my eyes and read me Wordsworth’s poem “Daffodils.” She kept insisting that I see in my “mind’s eye” what he had written about; golden fields of yellow flowers, gleaming in the sun, swaying in a warm wind. This went on for weeks and then one day I experienced a kind of epiphany. I could not only see the golden flowers but could feel the warmth of the sun and the gentle touch of the summer wind. When I told her this she replied, “You have learned what every writer must learn: how to visualize, how to recreate in words what you see and what you feel.” It was a kind of go forth and write. And I have ever since.  Word seemed to spread among the teachers in junior high and high school and they paid me special attention. I discovered books and fell in love with the rhythms and cadences of Edgar Allen Poe. I found Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Truman Capote and Shakespeare and so many, many others. I bought “Elements of Style” and experimented with writing, i.e., short fiction and poetry. During the war, the man who was to become my brother in law was drafted and I accompanied my sister Emily at 4 in the morning to see him off at a train station. A hundred or so draftees were there and so were newspaper reporters and photographers, stirring a mood of excitement and destiny. I think at that point I wanted to be what they were: a journalist.

When and where do you write? I write at home after many years of writing in newspaper offices. I began with a small Bay Area newspaper, the Richmond Independent, and moved on after three years when I won a SF Press Club award; I stayed at the Oakland Tribune for 16 years, 10 of them as a columnist, and was summoned south to the L.A. Times by Otis Chandler in a golden era. I stayed there for 38 years, 25 as a columnist, writing both in the office and in my home office in Topanga.  I write anytime: early morning, mid afternoon, late at night, depending on what I’m working on and what deadlines I’m facing.

What are you working on now? I’ve begun several writing projects and have settled on my memoirs, covering my life from depression to recession, while observing a slow decline in print journalism for the length of my 60-year career. I lived through an era of front page journalism in the 1950s to modern, electronic journalism in the 2000s, observing pathetic efforts by newspaper owners and editors trying to figure out in which direction they ought to be going. Confusion reigns on the print journalism scene with embarrassing projects like “the Huffington Post” making it, and the NY Times, LA Times and other great newspapers in the country slowly sliding into oblivion. I’m not with them anymore, so the cluttered little home office I had created, a womb of comfort and creation, is my writing den now.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I’ve had moments of writer’s block, I guess, but I have so many projects going at the same time that when I can’t seem to push on through a blockage in one, I go to another and then return to the first one later. I’m never without the facility to write. Writing defines me, my life and my physiology. I am a writer. Period. It’s the only me that exists, ergo I cannot tolerate writer’s blocks.

What’s your advice to new writers? I created the Topanga Writer’s Workshop when I left the Times about 3 years ago. I tell those who want to write to read, to observe and finally to reach down into their souls where answers lie and to bring them to the surface. I tell them about Calla Monlux and tell them to visualize. I recite a short verse she gave me from Alexander Pope: “True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance; Tis not enough, no harshness gives offence, the sound must seem an echo to the sense.”

Bio: Born in Oakland, California, schooled there, three years of college at SF State where I worked on the paper and met my wife Joanne, who is still my wife, activated as a Marine Reservist to fight in the Korean War, finished up my education at UC Berkeley. Began newspapering at the Richmond Independent in 1952, to the Oakland Tribune in 1955, to the L.A. Times in 1972. Worked as a national feature writer for the Times, became a columnist in 1984 and left the Times in 2009. A part of three teams that won Pulitzers, and individually won many, many national awards. I have written a dozen books, hundreds of magazine stories and essays, dozens of short stories and dozens of movies, pilots and episodes for television. My papers are being collected by the Huntington Museum and will be exhibited in March, 2012.

Phillip Lopate

How did you become a writer? Slowly. I always liked to write when I was a kid. I was the one who was made to write the Thanksgiving poems, and the George Washington Day poem, and all that kind of stuff. But I didn’t think I’d be able to be a writer because I thought they were geniuses. So I decided to be pre-law when I entered college. But then I hung around the students who wanted to be writers and they didn’t seem any smarter than I was, so I decided to give it a try.

         I began writing fiction and later switched to poetry and eventually to nonfiction. Since I didn’t have much money—I was working class—it seemed a very risky thing to do. But I made some money as a ghost writer for a while.

         You really can’t get a certificate saying “You’re a Writer Now.” The way that I became a writer is by reading a great deal and wanting to enter into the conversation with other authors, many of whom were dead, and imitating their style, however unconsciously.

Name your writing influences. I guess the first influence was my father, who liked to write poetry. He’d started out as a newspaper reporter, but then, during the Depression, the newspapers that he worked for went bankrupt so he had to take a factory job. But I watched him write. He had a very concise way of writing. He was always trying to take out extra words. I have a more maximalist way of writing, which I suppose was something of a rebellion against his style. But he certainly was somebody who read a lot even when he was working in factories. He introduced me to Dostoevsky and to Kafka and to Faulkner. He brought a lot of cheap classics into the house—Pocket Books and the like. These were the days when the Modern Library and Pocket Books were all geared toward the self-taught worker.

         Then in high school I began reading a lot of those New Directions books like Sartre’s Nausea and No Exit, Garcia Lorca’s poems—I suppose I became a good little Modernist. It was all rather bleak and despairing, you know? Even before I went to college I was reading contemporaries like Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow. In a way, precisely because I was a next generation of American Jewish writer, I felt that they had taken up a lot of the territory. And given my natural perversity and impulse to fall in love with the old, in college I was much more interested in older writers like Fielding and Laurence Sterne and Diderot. I read a lot of Nietzsche, a lot of Flaubert. I had a friends who were much hipper than I, like Ron Padgett, who was a poet in the New York School. He’d say, “Why don’t you read Gertrude Stein and William Burroughs and Raymond Roussel and get with the program?” So I’d read them for a while, but then I’d go back to Stendhal and Flaubert and Balzac and George Eliot. I was very comfortable in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. I was drawn to ironic fiction. Italo Svevo and Machado de Assis influenced me the most, two writers who are ironic, who are playful. I suppose they came out of the tradition of Laurence Sterne and Tristram Shandy. I like that mischievous tone. Some of that was rooted in Dostoevsky, like Notes from Underground, you know? It was the heretic or marginal tradition that I connected with very strongly.

Are there any teachers that stand out? At Columbia I studied with some great thinkers: Lionel Trilling, Eric Bentley, and Meyer Schapiro. They were all rather remote, and in some ways I preferred the remote, withdrawn teachers to the ones who tried to be our friends. I was intimidated by the ones who wanted to go out drinking with us. I didn’t want to do that at all. I think because I had come up from the ghetto in Brooklyn, I had a kind of class mistrust of mixing with teachers. Somehow they were the enemy. I liked teachers I could watch but they weren’t necessarily watching me. That was certainly true of Lionel Trilling. He was a great mind but not a particularly good teacher, not a particularly good lecturer. There was something very poignant about the way he struggled to bring the interior swirl of his mind into the public space.

         Again, I was separating myself from modernism and trying to find an older tradition and thinking that when I wrote it would matter even though I wasn’t taking the next step in Hegelian progression of Art. For instance, at one point I liked Heinrich von Kleist a lot and started imitating him. I think when a writer begins there’s a lot of imitation.

When and where do you write? I write at home, in my office on the third floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn that we own. It’s fairly tiny now because of the piles and piles of manuscripts and books around. I’ve only gone to one writer’s colony in my life, and that was last May when I went to Civitella Ranieri in Italy. That was because they said, “Would you like to spend a month in an Italian castle?” Essentially, I feel comfortable writing at home and I don’t feel like leaving it to write. I’m not a night owl. I generally write during the morning hours and sometimes in the afternoon. You can’t get much intelligent writing out of me after 5 PM. You might say I keep banker’s hours.

What are you working on now? At the moment I’m finishing two books: One is a collection of personal essays, which is my fourth collection after the trilogy of Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre and Portrait of My Body. The second book is a collection of teaching essays about the craft of nonfiction that I’ve been writing for several years. I often have a column in a magazine called Creative Nonfiction. It’s kind of my pedagogy of nonfiction. In a way the two books are Theory and Practice and I hope they’ll be perceived that way.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Only once, when I was running away from my first marriage. I lived in California for a year in 1968. California was strange to me and I think I felt a lot of inner emptiness in the face of all that beauty. I was used to New York City. I’ve never had writer’s block since. I write nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. If I get stuck I switch genres. Plus at this point in my career I’m often asked to write book reviews, articles, responses, and so on, so a lot of what I write is really initiated outside myself and I’m on deadline and have to do something. I do the best I can.

What’s your advice to new writers? My advice is to read a ton and don’t be afraid of being influenced. Allow your brain to be reconfigured by thousands of pages. Don’t be in a hurry to get published, but try to amass a backlog. I think it’s a good idea to try to get published in small magazines, magazines that friends edit—don’t necessarily aim for The New Yorker or Harper’s right off. Get your work out there. I participated in a lot of open meetings when I was a poet and published in a lot of mimeographed magazines. It’s important to start to communicate with readers on however modest a level.

Phillip Lopate was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1943, and received a BA from Columbia in 1964, and a doctorate from the Union Graduate School in 1979. He has written three personal essay collections -- Bachelorhood (Little, Brown, 1981), Against Joie de Vivre (Poseidon-Simon & Schuster, 1989), and Portrait of My Body (Doubleday-Anchor, 1996); two novels, Confessions of Summer (Doubleday, 1979) and The Rug Merchant (Viking, 1987); two poetry collections, The Eyes Don't Always Want to Stay Open (Sun Press, 1972) and The Daily Round (Sun Press, 1976); a memoir of his teaching experiences, Being With Children (Doubleday, 1975); a collection of his movie criticism, Totally Tenderly Tragically (Doubleday-Anchor); an urbanist meditation, Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan (Crown, 2004); and a biographical monograph, Rudy Burckhardt: Photographer and Filmmaker (Harry N. Abrams, 2004.) In addition, there is a Phillip Lopate reader, Getting Personal: Selected Writings (Basic Books, 2003).

He has edited the following anthologies: The Art of the Personal Essay (Doubleday-Anchor, 1994); Writing New York (Library of America, 1998), Journey of a Living Experiment (Virgil Press, 1979), a best essays of the year series, The Anchor Essay Annual (1997-99), and the forthcoming American Movie Critics (Library of America, 2006). His essays, fiction, poetry, film and architectural criticism have appeared in The Best American Short Stories (1974), The Best American Essays (1987), several Pushcart Prize annuals, The Paris Review, Harper's, Vogue, Esquire, Film Comment, Threepenny Review, Double Take, New York Times, Harvard Educational Review, Preservation, Cite, 7 Days, Metropolis, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other periodicals and anthologies.

He has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. He received a Christopher medal for Being With Children, a Texas Institute of Letters award in the best non-fiction book of the year category for Bachelorhood, and was a finalist for the PEN best essay book of the year award for Portrait of My Body. His anthology, Writing New York, received a citation from the New York Society Library and honorable mention from the Municipal Art Society's Brendan Gill Award.

After working with children for twelve years as a writer in the schools, he taught creative writing and literature at Fordham, Cooper Union, University of Houston, New York University, and Hofstra University. He is currently the Director of the Nonfiction MFA Concentration at Columbia University.

Harlan Ellison

How did you become a writer? I always was. I came out of the womb a writer. I didn’t realize that everybody couldn’t write. Writing was my natural form. I didn’t become a writer, I was a writer.

Name your writing influences: writers, books, teachers. Mark Twain, Gerald Kersh, Clark Ashton Smith, Joseph Conrad, comic books, Big Little Books, radio drama (especially “The Shadow”) and the best writer in America today, Paul Di Filippo. I wish I could write 1/20^th as well as Paul Di Filippo. If you’ve never read him, get a book called Lost Pages. Read the first story, which is called “Anne,” and if it doesn’t break your heart and make you weep, I don’t know what will.  Also Donald Westlake. Particularly the Richard Stark novels. You can learn more from the chapter in The Outfit where he goes down south to buy the car . . . self-contained. I think it’s the third chapter. I teach it in writer’s workshops. I say, “I’m going to read, just sit and listen.”

            I also learned from Frederic Prokosch. Got a paperback of The Seven Who Fled . . . it was the 1937 Harper Prize-winning novel, but I’d never heard of it. I liked the cover. The next thing I knew I was ensorceled. It’s seven people fleeing a Chinese war lord across the Gobi Desert. That’s all it is. Listen to this, from the section called “Desert”: 

Toward evening the world began to resemble a star; spent, lifeless, purposeless. Nature lay there in front of them quite hideous and exposed, all of her pointlessness and boundlessness at last unmistakably obvious. Any heat, any cold, any sort of sterile frightfulness seemed possible here. There existed no sort of mitigation.

            The men that day became effigies, horrible dolls. Dr. Liu as well as Mme. de la Scaze rode all day beneath curtains, in a kind of impromptu howdah. The porters covered their heads and faces. They moved like dolls, as if their dark limbs were half unhinged. Their eyes peered through toward the east, embers half-dead glowing underneath the aching purple eyelids. They didn’t speak. There was no motion, no gesture except the monotonous trudging, the swaying back and forth on the camels’ backs, the limp and weary swaying of dark arms.

            An empty world. No more hills, no insect, no life at all, not even any colors now, no shapes except the accidental curves of the centuries, no sound, no smell. The utter desert this was indeed, far more lonely than a sea of pure sand, just as a limitless bog is more lonely than the Pacific. A yellow naked body, grotesque and charred; yet possessing, cupped in its hollows, the unspeakable years; on intimate terms with the sun and nothing but the sun, giving its shrunken secrecies daily to the sun, smelling of nothing at all except the sun, each stone palpably adoring the sun and indifferent to everything except the sun.

            Desert: a feeling for which no word could exist. Sensations were nameless, energy was uprooted. The land was measurable, yes: but it might as well have been boundless, and as far as the spirit could encompass it, it was indeed boundless! No mind, reflected Layeville, could stand it here except those who, like plants and animals cast into the wilderness, had thrust aside all recollections of home, of human faces and habits, and had at last grown totally new senses and new ways, having intuitively likened themselves to their scenery.

            But the others felt fear. Layeville saw that day how a certain specialized sort of fear tore at them constantly. Fear of each passing mound, each curiously shaped rock, and most of all, of course, the sun. During that one day their faces grew hollow, hateful, really evil. Once there was almost a fight between two young porters who were inseparable friends. One man moaned all day. Another tried to flee. One night he was gone, but the next morning back again.

            “Where do you wish to go?” asked Dr. Liu, wearily. But the poor wretch didn’t know, of course.

            And they all grew anxious lest they should be attacked, now that they were approaching An-his and the southern edge of the Gobi. They were shuddering with nervousness as dusk approached.

I read this book with amazement. That the human mind could write this way . . .

How old were you when you first read it? I bought it in 1955 or ’56, when I would have been 20 or so. I was already writing.

How did it change you? I understood what poetry was. See, I cannot write poetry. I’ve never written poetry. The only poetry I’ve ever written is:

Always look up

Never look down

All you ever see are the pennies people drop.

I simply cannot write a poem. Many poets that I’ve known, from Galway Kinnell to, you know, everybody, have assumed that because I write so poetically, with such onomatopoeia and such cadence and such a voice, that I should write poetry. “Why don’t you write poetry?” Because I can’t write poetry. Because I just can’t write it. And Tom Disch, Thomas Disch, said to me—if anyone could write poetry, Tom wrote it beautifully—Tom said, “Any person who can’t write poetry should take up the accordion.” Then he said, “Write me a poem. I’ll tell you whether you have talent or not.”

            So I worried it and worried it and worried it like a puppy with a Christmas slipper, and I sent it to Tom. Weeks went by and I finally got a note from him saying, “Take up the accordion.”

            The Seven Who Fled by Frederic Prokosch taught me the poetry of writing. I’ll be writing about something else entirely like [reading at random from the copy of The Los Angeles Times on the table in front of him]: “A man who left a woman in a coma and brain-damaged after punching her in a fight over a parking space went free Monday after jurors failed to reach a verdict in his assault trial. Prosecutors said they plan to try the case again.” And he heard the sound, the sound, that sound again.

When and where do you write? Everywhere and all the time. I’ve written, famously, in book store windows, I write on airplanes . . . anywhere. I always use an Olympia manual typewriter, either an office model or a portable. That’s all I use. Book face type. I do not use an electric because I type too fast. The ball can’t keep up with me. I use two fingers, 120 words a minute, no mistakes. I can’t use a computer. Despise it. It’s like another entity trying to get in my head and interfering and bothering me. Everybody wants you to keep up with the technology, not because they want you to, but because they feel like such suckers for being sold this shit and they don’t want to be all alone. So they try and make you go along with it. Nobody pushes me into doing what I don’t want to do. I’m a happily 20^th-Century man. I use two Dixie Cups with a wax string between them. I have a very low, what Hemingway called, “bullshit threshold.” I think that was one of the great things ever said, by the way. “A writer needs a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector.” That’s exactly right.

What are you working on now? Surviving. Literally surviving. I have a million different things that I’m writing, I have a hundred stories that are half-written, some of which are twelve, fifteen years old. People say, “How can you pick up a story that you started twelve years ago and finish it?” and I say, “Because I have an onboard computer and I can go back years later and begin writing the very next word, exactly where I left off.” It’s a talent that I have. I’m 77. I never expected to be 77. I expected to buy it at about age 14 dueling with Richelieu’s guards on the parapets, but it didn’t happen that way. As Sophie Tucker said, “Old age and illness are not for pussies.” And I have an illness. And a lot of weaknesses and a lot of laziness. I’ve always been lazy. For all the work I’ve done, I feel guilty because I know I could have done 500 times as much work. I could have turned out 200 books, 300 books, just like Isaac Asimov.

Three hundred books, instead of a mere hundred? Yeah. A hundred books is a lot. Plus 150 television shows, 25 movies, and on and on and on, but I could have done more.  Should have done more. What can I tell you?

You mentioned Asimov; he used to say that if he got stuck on a piece of writing he would switch to something else and let his unconscious solve the problem. But are you saying that you’ll come back to something a dozen years later and continue writing without having thought of it in the meantime? Yes, with the very next sentence. The very next word. I love to finish the job. That’s the reason I’ve written so many short stories.

And why you’ve said, “Writing a novel is like going a great distance to take a small shit”? Exactly. I love people who take one cornball idea and write tetralogies about it. That’s like chewing the same goddam food over and over. Once you get the gag, it’s jump the shark. That’s why I don’t watch television: I can’t stand it because I’m a writer and I can figure it out ahead of time. I say, “Oh, Christ.” I make Susan nuts when we watch CSI-something and within four minutes I tell her who the killer is and she says, “Don’t do that to me, I can’t watch the show!” So I try not to do it.

Have you ever had writer’s block? Oh, I absolutely have.

Really? When? From four until about five o’clock on a Wednesday in January of 1973.

How did you cure it? I went to sleep. Went and got laid. Went and had a Pink’s hot dog. Came back, sat down, finished writing. What’s sad about writer’s block is that you forget what you were going to write about. Sometimes I’ll look at a story and say to myself, “Oh, I've got a perfect ending” and then make the mistake of forgetting it. It only happened to me twice with stories I had to finish because I was on deadline. I’ve looked at those stories since and wanted to do them over because I knew I had a better ending. The endings are perfectly fine and nobody notices, but I know the difference between good and bad.

            Imagination is ephemeral. It can be affected by things as miniscule as a cold or as serious as a divorce, or as dementing as becoming a creationist. You go crazy and you believe crazy stuff. Imagination takes what Balzac called “clean hands and composure.” There’s a difference between writing and pretending to write. If you’re a good writer you know when you’re doing it and when you’re only play acting.

Would you include alcohol on the list of things that affect imagination? Well, I don’t drink, so for me to talk about booze is like a Martian trying to talk about shooting craps. I don’t know much about it because I don’t like ever letting go of my sensibilities. My mind does what it needs to; and to do that I've got to have all my senses about me. That’s why I’ve never used booze or drugs. I've been on the road ever since I was a kid and I've always known what booze could do to people. I try to stay in possession of my faculties because I’m already completely crazy. I think you have to be something to be a writer. I’m astonished by writers who are quiet people, who speak softly, who are rational. I look at them and I say, “What the fuck is this creature?” You have to be mad to write. If you’re not mad in one way or another, what you’re writing is boring. Boredom is a kind of long death. I don’t fear death, only boredom. And incontinence.

Have you never had the desire to escape your own consciousness, to get out of your own skull? I get out all the time. When I write a movie, I close my eyes and I look at the movie. When I watch the movie I look at the angle it’s shot from. I say, “Oh, this a low shot from across a darkened room looking to a table where there’s a telephone and a glass of wine. And as the telephone rings the glass of wine vibrates.” And I write that. Everybody laughs at me because I write very complete scripts. Most people write master scenes, but I don’t do that. I write what I see, what I hear, what I feel . . . it’s all in the music. Outside the inside of my own skull.

What’s your advice to new writers? Get a day job, make your money from that, and write to please yourself. And don’t be a whore. Don’t be a whore! Everybody works for the dollar. You work for the dollar, I work for the dollar. Everybody works for the Man, whether you work for Verizon or you work for Geico or you work for Bank of America. We all work for evil masters on far glass mountaintops and they will get their teeth into your pocket one way or the other. Spend 90 percent of your day not looking into a screen and spend it on yourself, living life, making friends, actually talking to people, doing things. Ten percent of your day, give to the Man. Ninety for you, ten for the Man. Otherwise, you’re nothing but a whore. You’re nothing but a beanfield hand. And when you get to a certain age you retire. To what? You’ve spent all your energy, you’ve spent all your imagination, you’ve spent all your fire . . . you’ve spent all your bravery. Do not be afraid to go there. That’s my advice: Do not be afraid to go there. Wherever “there” is, don’t be afraid to go there.

Harlan Ellison has been characterized by The New York Times Book Review as having "the spellbinding quality of a great nonstop talker, with a cultural warehouse for a mind." The Los Angeles Times suggested, "It's long past time for Harlan Ellison to be awarded the title: 20th century Lewis Carroll." And the Washington Post Book World said simply, "One of the great living American short story writers."

He has written or edited 99 (and counting) books; more than 1700 stories, essays, articles, and newspaper columns; two dozen teleplays, for which he received the Writers Guild of America most outstanding teleplay award for solo work an unprecedented four times; and a dozen movies. Publishers Weekly called him "Highly Intellectual." (Ellison's response: "Who, me?"). He won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe award twice, the Horror Writers' Association Bram Stoker award six times (including The Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996), the Nebula award of the Science Fiction Writers of America four times, the Hugo (World Convention Achievement award) 8 1/2 times, and received the Silver Pen for Journalism from P.E.N. Not to mention The World/Fantasy Award; the British Fantasy Award; the American Mystery Award; plus two Audie Awards and two Grammy nominations for Spoken Word recordings.

He created great fantasies for the 1985 CBS revival of The Twilight Zone (including Danny Kaye's final performance) and The Outer Limits; traveled with The Rolling Stones; marched with Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery; created roles for Buster Keaton, Wally Cox, Gloria Swanson and nearly 100 other stars on Burke's Law, ran with a kid gang in Brooklyn's Red Hook to get background for his first novel; covered race riots in Chicago's "back of the yards" with the late James Baldwin; sang with, and dined with, Maurice Chevalier; once stood off the son of the Detroit Mafia kingpin with a Remington XP-100 pistol-rifle, while wearing nothing but a bath towel; sued Paramount and ABC-TV for plagiarism and won $337,000. His most recent legal victory, in protection of copyright against global Internet piracy of writers' work, in May of 2004—a 4-year-long litigation against AOL et al.—has resulted in revolutionizing protection of creative properties on the web. (As promised, he has repaid hundreds of contributions [totaling $50,000] from the KICK Internet Piracy support fund.) But the bottom line, as voiced by Booklist, is this: "One thing for sure: the man can write."

And as Tom Snyder said on the CBS Late, Late Show: "An amazing talent; meeting him is an incredible experience." He was a regular on ABC-TV's Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher.

In 1990, Ellison was honored by P.E.N. for his continuing commitment to artistic freedom and the battle against censorship, "In defense of the First Amendment."

Harlan Ellison's 1992 novelette "The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore" was selected from more than 6,000 short stories published in the U.S. for inclusion in the 1993 edition of THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES.

Mr. Ellison worked as creative consultant and host for the radio series 2000^X , a series of 26 one-hour dramatized radio adaptations of famous SF stories for The Hollywood Theater of the Ear; and for his work was presented with the prestigious Ray Bradbury Award for Drama Series. The series was broadcast on National Public Radio in 2000 & 2001. Ellison's classic story "'Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman" was included as part of this significant series, starring Robin Williams and the author in the title roles.

On 22 June 2002, at the 4th World Skeptics Convention, Harlan Ellison was presented with the Distinguished Skeptic Award by The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) "in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the defense of science and critical thinking."

To celebrate the golden anniversary of Harlan Ellison's half a century of storytelling, Morpheus International, publishers of THE ESSENTIAL ELLISON: A 35-YEAR RETROSPECTIVE, commissioned the book's primary editor, award-winning Australian writer and critic Terry Dowling, to expand Ellison's three-and-a-half decade collection into a 50-year retrospective. Mr. Dowling went through fifteen years of new stories and essays to pick what he thought were the most representative to be included in this 1000+ page collection.

Among his most recognized works, translated into more than 40 languages and selling in the millions of copies, are DEATHBIRD STORIES, STRANGE WINE, APPROACHING OBLIVION, I HAVE NO MOUTH 84 I MUST SCREAM, WEB OF THE CITY, ANGRY CANDY, LOVE AINT NOTHING BUT SEX MISSPELLED, ELLISON WONDERLAND, MEMOS FROM PURGATORY, TROUBLEMAKERS (a Young Adult collection), ALL THE LIES THAT ARE MY LIFE, PHOENIX WITHOUT ASHES, SHATTERDAY, MIND FIELDS, AN EDGE IN MY VOICE,

SLIPPAGE, and STALKING THE NIGHTMARE. As creative intelligence and editor of the all-time bestselling DANGEROUS VISIONS anthologies and MEDEA: HARLAN'S WORLD, he has been awarded two Special Hugos and the prestigious academic Milford Award for Lifetime Achievement in Editing. In 2006, Harlan Ellison was named the Grand Master of the Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers of America. In May 2009, he turned down the Cleveland Arts Prize for Lifetime Achievement.

In October 2002, Edgeworks Abbey and iBooks published the 35th Anniversary Edition of the highly acclaimed anthology DANGEROUS VISIONS.

In the November 2002 issue of PC Gamer, Ellison's hands-on creation of the CD-Rom game I HAVE NO MOUTH, AND I MUST SCREAM, based on the award-winning story of the same name, was voted "One of the 10 scariest PC games ever." ("I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" is one of the ten most reprinted stories in the English language.)

June 2003: A new edition of VIC & BLOOD, published by 'Books in association with Edgeworks Abbey, collected for the first time both the complete graphic novel cycle and Ellison's stories including the 1969 novella favorite from which the legendary cult-film A Boy and His Dog was made.

December 2003: Ellison edited a collection of Edwardian mystery-puzzle stories titled JACQUES FUTRELLE'S "THE THINKING MACHINE," published by The Modern Library.

October 2004: A new edition of STRANGE WINE, published by iBooks in association with Edgeworks Abbey.

May 2006: Ellison and Oscar nominee Josh Olson (for his adaptation of A History of Violence) collaborated on a teleplay "The Discarded" (based on Ellison's short story of the same name) for the ABC television series Masters of Science Fiction (currently available on DVD.)

November 2006: A new edition of SPIDER KISS, published by M Press, in association with Edgeworks Abbey. The second book in the M Press/Edgeworks Abbey series, HARLAN ELLISON'S WATCHING, was released in a new edition in 2008.

March 2007: Based on Ellison's work, HARLAN ELLISON'S DREAM CORRIDOR (Volume Two) is released. Ellison introduces a dozen tales in this new collection, featuring adaptations of some of his greatest stories by some of the most respected names in comics: including Neal Adams, Gene Colan, Richard Corben, Paul Chadwick and the very last work by the late, great Superman artist, Curt Swan.

April 2007: A special world premiere screening is held of Dreams with Sharp Teeth. For more than twenty-five years, documentarian Erik Nelson (Grizzly Man) has been interviewing Ellison and friends [including Josh Olson (A History Of Violence), Neil Gaiman (ANANSI BOYS), Dan Simmons (THE TERROR), Peter David (Fallen Angel), Michael Cassutt (TANGO MIDNIGHT), Ron Moore (Battlestar Galactica, Caprica), and actor Robin Williams] to produce a feature-length look at the life and work of Harlan Ellison: DREAMS WITH SHARP TEETH. In 2008, the documentary was featured at The South by Southwest Conference and Festival, The Edinburgh Film Festival, The Independent Festival in Boston, and opened both at the prestigious Lincoln Center in New York and The NY Film Forum.

In celebration of his 75th birthday (May 2009) Dreams with Sharp Teeth premiered on the Sundance Film Channel with a simultaneous release on DVD.

A new series of Harlan Ellison books was published for online purchase in 2011 as part of the Publishing 180 program as HARLAN 101: ENCOUNTERING ELLISON and BRAIN MOVIES collections. A mixture of classic stories and essays, and original never-before-available teleplays.

Also a member of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), Ellison has voiceover credits on many shows including Pirates of Darkwater, Mother Goose & Grimm, Space Cases, Phantom 2040, The Sci-Fi Channel and Babylon 5 (in the episode titled "Ceremonies of Light and Dark" Harlan plays the Voice of the 85 computer, and in the episode "Day of the Dead" you can hear him as "Zooty"). Ellison's first TV appearance as a fictional character was also on Babylon 5 in the episode "The Face of the Enemy." He played a Psi-Cop opposite Walter Koenig as "Bester." In a subsequent acting role HE was the mysterious "Grifter" in the series Psi Factor. Mr. Ellison has also done a plethora of spoken word recordings, including his ON THE ROAD series, and short story collections such as the VOICE FROM THE EDGE albums. He has twice been a Grammy finalist for his recordings. For six years, he was the weekly commentator on The USA Network with his controversial HARLAN ELLISON'S "WATCHING" editorial comments.

On 30 April 1999, Mr. Ellison won two Audie Awards (presented by the Audio Publishers Association to honor the best in audio recordings) in the categories of Solo Narration, Male, for reading Ben Bova's CITY OF DARKNESS (published by Dove Audio) and Multi-Voiced Presentation, as part of an all-star cast reading THE TITANIC DISASTER HEARINGS: THE OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT OF THE 1912 SENATORIAL INVESTIGATION by Torn Kuntz (published by Dove Audio).

Ellison won a Bram Stoker award for his collection of stories THE VOICE FROM THE EDGE (Volume 1: I HAVE NO MOUTH, AND I MUST SCREAM). The award-winning audio was followed up by two more VOICE FROM THE EDGE collections: MIDNIGHT IN THE SUNKEN CATHEDRAL and PRETTY MAGGIE MONEYEYES.

In the new animated Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated television episode titled "The Shrieking Madness," Ellison gets to play the familiar character of Harlan Ellison!

In February 2011 the University of California, Riverside gave the prestigious J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award to Harlan—only the fourth of such Lifetime Achievement awards ever bestowed.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) awarded Ellison the fourth of his Nebula Awards. This time, for the short story "How Interesting: A Tiny Man." Ellison is the first SE professional ever to win three times In the short story category, beginning with his claiming the very first Nebula in 1965 for his classic "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman."

Ellison's latest "wish-list" book, BRAIN MOVIES: THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAYS OF HARLAN ELLISON': VOLUME ONE, (published by Publishing 180) is the culmination of 35 years writing television. This is the first time his original scripts have been collected in book format. Volume One contains: two drafts of "Memos from Purgatory (The Alfred Hitchcock Hour), "Soldier" 81 "Demon with a Glass Hand" (The Outer Limits), "Paladin of the Lost Hour" & "Crazy as a Soup Sandwich" (The Twilight Zone) and "The Face of Helene Bournouw" (The Hunger).

This past year (2011) saw the publication of 6 new books by Ellison. BRAIN MOVIES: THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAYS OF HARLAN ELLISON® VOLUME ONE (Introduction by J. Michael Straczynski), BRAIN MOVIES: THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAYS OF HARLAN ELLISON® VOLUME TWO (Introduction by Patton Oswalt,), HARLAN 101: ENCOUNTERING ELLISON (Introduction by Neil Gaiman), and HARLAN 101: THE SOUND OF A SCYTHE AND THREE BRILLIANT NOVELLAS SPANNING ELLISON'S CAREER (Introduction by Ronald D. Moore), BUCKF#CK: THE USELESS WIT AND WISDOM HARLAN ELLISON and (for the first time together) THE GLASS TEAT & THE OTHER GLASS TEAT OMNIBUS.

This year (2012) will see the publication of the expanded SEX GANG book (first published in 1959 and up to now, never before reprinted). This two-volume set will be titled: PULLING A TRAIN and GETTING IN THE WIND.

He lives with his wife, Susan, inside The Lost Aztec Temple of Mars, in Los Angeles.

Judy Muller

How did you become a writer? I became addicted to praise at a very young age. So the first time a teacher praised my writing, I was on my way. Then I started writing for the school newspaper and got hooked on the fix of a regular byline, feeding a hungry ego that constantly craved more. At some point, fortunately, the intrinsic joy of storytelling took over from the need to be recognized for it. Not entirely, of course. I was flattered enough to answer these questions, for example. Guess I haven’t hit bottom yet.

Name your writing influences. Reading E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web as a child was the first memory I have of understanding that there is real skill in using words to evoke a sense of place, using dialogue to evoke character, and using narrative structure to keep the reader hooked until the end. If you can’t remember this book, I recommend re-reading White’s description of the smells and sounds of the barn in summer. Magical.

            Because I write primarily for broadcast (TV and radio), I write “to the ear,” which is a simple way of saying I try to write the way I talk, conversationally and not always in complete sentences. That last sentence, for example? Way too long. I have been fortunate to be mentored by some of the finest broadcast writers, starting with Charles Kuralt when I was at CBS News.  He taught me that “spare” and “elegant” are not mutually exclusive concepts. He once wrote a complimentary note to me, about a commentary I had written.  It is, to my way of thinking, the highest praise I have ever received. I still have the note, and only a thin shred of modesty keeps me from framing it and putting it next to what most people would consider the Really Important Awards on the shelf.

            Another journalist who had an impact on my writing is Ted Koppel. Working for and with him at Nightline was both inspiring and instructional. When he made changes in my script--and he did not always feel the need to so (he was that rare commodity--a secure anchorman)--he made the script better with a simple re-shuffling or clarifying. Clarity--cutting out the verbiage--was his hallmark.

            And, of course, I have been influenced by many writers over the years. Irony, a sense of the absurd, understatement--these are some of the qualities I treasure in a writer. Calvin Trillin can say more in a few lines of poetry (okay, doggerel) than most writers can say in a thousand words. And Elmore Leonard creates entire worlds out of simple lines of dialogue. Brilliant.

When and where do you write? When? Morning, if possible. My brain, fueled on caffeine, does best before 2 p.m.  After that, it’s not good for much. A few mindless rounds of Angry Birds, perhaps. I also do very well under deadline pressure. So despite my preference for early hours, I can write anytime if the alternative is abject humiliation for failing to “make my slot,” as they say in television news.

            Where? As someone who has done most of her writing in a noisy newsroom, I can write just about anywhere. I once had to finish a script on my laptop while riding in a bumpy helicopter, returning from covering a forest fire. I cannot recommend this writing venue as conducive to excellent prose. My best writing-- at least the most pleasurable for me--is now produced at the small table where I am presently sitting. It is in a corner nook of my home in Colorado, with views out the window of the San Juan Mountains, a meadow and a forest. Also the occasional deer and elk passing by. The house is a straw-bale construction, making it unusually quiet. You can hear the snow melting and dripping from the roof. When I sit here, it is very easy to get into “the zone.”  Hours of writing can elapse before I even realize it. This is where I wrote my last book, Emus Loose in Egnar: Big Stories from Small Towns, a look at weekly newspapers in rural America.  

What are you working on now? This is a really rude question. It makes me want to say, “THIS!” But that’s just a defensive reaction to the fact that I am not doing the work I should be doing. I am planning to develop a commentary series called “Senior Moment” for--I hope--airing on public radio. I have been planning on developing this for months now. I was going to do it today, but instead this interview provided me with a handy diversion. I like to think (and there really is some truth to this) that the writing process actually begins before a word is typed into the computer. Some part of my brain is actively developing this stuff, I just know it. It would really, really help if I had a deadline. “Writing on spec” is not a concept that I really understand.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Not for long. The only time I really froze while writing was while working on my first book, “Now This—Radio, Television and the Real World.” I made the mistake of reading a work by one of my favorite authors at the same time, which led me down the dark, dead-end alley of “compare and despair.” It took a couple of weeks to recover.

What’s your advice to new writers? Don’t give it away. In this age of the blogosphere, where everyone seems to think they have something worth saying and are willing to say it for free, you should work tirelessly at the craft of actually saying something well. Then get paid for it.

Award-winning broadcast journalist Judy Muller is a professor at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She has also been a commentator for NPR’s “Morning Edition” and host of a topical radio program called “Town Hall Journal” on KPCC FM in Los Angeles. For the last five years, she has been a contributing correspondent to KCET TV’s “SoCal Connected,” where her reporting has won numerous honors, including a George Foster Peabody award, a Columbia DuPont, an Emmy and two Golden MICs. Her latest book, about weekly newspapers in America, is entitled Emus Loose in Egnar: Big Stories from Small Towns (July, 2011, Univ. of Nebraska Press). She is also the author of Now This--Radio, Television and the Real World (Putnam).

            Prior to coming to USC, Muller was a correspondent for ABC Network News, reporting for such broadcasts as Nightline, World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, Good Morning America, and This Week.  During her 15 years at ABC, she covered such stories as the Rodney King beating trial, the Presidential campaigns of Paul Tsongas and Bob Kerrey, the Los Angeles  earthquake in 1994, the O.J. Simpson case, and numerous environmental stories throughout the West.

            From 1981 to 1990, Ms. Muller was a correspondent for CBS News, where she was a contributor to CBS Sunday Morning and CBS Weekend News. Her primary duties, however, were in the Radio News Division, where she anchored a daily commentary, “First Line Report,” “Correspondent’s Notebook,” and was the summer anchor for “The Osgood File.” She also covered the space shuttle program, both national political conventions in 1988 and the 1988 Bush Presidential Campaign.

            Ms. Muller was previously an anchor for KHOW-AM in Denver and WHWH in Princeton, New Jersey. She began her career in journalism as a reporter for the Colonial News in Princeton, New Jersey. From 1970 to 1973, she was a high school English teacher in Metuchen, New Jersey. A 1969 graduate of Mary Washington College of the University of Virginia, Ms. Muller has received numerous journalism honors, including an Emmy award for coverage of the O.J. Simpson case and an Edward R. Murrow award for coverage of the impeachment of President Clinton.

Sam Harper

How did you become a writer? I grew up in a large, chaotic household. There were six of us under the age of seven, and two sets of twins. One afternoon when I was 10, I was flipping through the channels on our big black-and-white and landed on Each Dawn I Die, an old Jimmy-Cagney-in-Prison movie. Jimmy kicked and screamed as a guard dragged him off to solitary. I didn’t quite understand what he was complaining about. He got his own room in a quiet corner of the prison. Meals delivered. And lots and lots of alone time. I decided that I wanted a career that provided similar amenities, or at the very least, a quiet room to create order out of chaos.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.) As I was writing this and that, I read my favorite authors (Barry Hannah, Robert Olmstead, Ian McEwan, Mark Helperin, etc.) but very often I’d finish a book and think, Jesus, I’ll never be as good as that guy, so why bother? Two teachers and an editor pulled me from this pit of self-doubt and encouraged me carry on. My 10^th grade history teacher convinced me that I had a “voice,” and though I’m sure I didn’t know what that voice was, he put me on the path to find it. A history professor read a humor piece I’d written in the college newspaper and became the only person in my life who ever suggested that I become a screenwriter. And the editor at the trade magazine where I worked after college slaughtered my copy, teaching me more about writing in three years than I’d ever learned. Mostly, he taught me to keep it short.

When and where do you write? I get up between 4 A.M. and 6 A.M., make coffee, shuffle into my home office and get to work before the world gets noisy. On good days I’m in there all day, playing darts.

What are you working on now? I’m finishing an animated feature film for 20^th Century Fox. I’d tell you what it’s about but then I’d have to kill you. Yes, working in animation is like working for the CIA. Tell the competition that you’re writing a story about a talking otter and you could end up dead. Or worse, unemployed. Also, I’m adapting a children’s book, Frindle, by Andrew Clements, that I hope to direct this fall. And I’m laboring over a cover letter to publishers and agents, trying to convince them that my recently completed young adult novel is fantastic.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? In 1998, I spent six months writing the same 65 pages over and over again. It was my true Shining moment. Desperate to break out of this creative vacuum, I showed the pages to my agent. He said, “This needs work.” I threw the pages out and decided to try something unrelated to anything I had ever written. That led me to a little fatherhood 500-word column in my son’s nursery school newsletter. Somehow my ruminations on fatherhood opened up a creative compartment that had been closed through the Shining year, and my flow returned.

What’s your advice to writers? 1. Turn off the Internet. 2. Stay in the chair. 3. When you’re stuck, do something (preferably legal) that takes you out of your creative routine. 4. Turn off the Internet. 5. Forgive yourself. You don’t suck, you’re just writing a first draft. 6. Turn off the Internet. 7. Write every day. 8. Give the email a rest. 9. Writing is like parenting. If you’re patient and firm the words will obey, if you’re impatient you’ll have a rebellion on your hands. 10. Only write if you must, otherwise invest in a Bait & Tackle shop.

Sam Harper is a writer, screenwriter, and director. He was Associate Editor at Advertising Age magazine, and has been published in Parenting, Fatherhood Today, and Laugh Your Shorts Off: Short Stories to Make You Giggle By Award Winning Writers. His columns on parenthood appear on various web sites. His movie credits include Rookie Of The Year (1993), Just Married (2003), Cheaper by The Dozen (2003),Cheaper By The Dozen 2 (2005), Open Season (2007), Housebroken (2009), and the upcoming Rio (April, 2011). He also did un-credited work on Night At The Museum, The Little Rascals, Dunston Checks In, Fat Albert, Like Mike, Aliens In the Attic, Garfield, and Marmaduke.