Meet Alex Lobdell

NOTE: This interview was given after the publication of Leaps of Faith, in which Alex has "High Hopes," the story that led to his story "Hosts of the Envoy" in ISIG.

Tell us a little about yourself.

I got into writing because I was a disaster at chemistry. High school chemistry was such a negative experience for me that after one semester of it, I borrowed a page out of the Electron Handbook and jumped over to a more positively charged class: the school newspaper. Newspaper class and I quickly formed a deep covalent bond (or maybe an ionic bond, I’m not really sure) and by the next year I was the editor. When I got to college, I signed up for the school newspaper and became the editor of that, too, halfway through my freshman year. Later I wrote a weekly feature column for the city newspaper and a while after that I became the editor of the newspaper of the Diocese of Helena. During all that, I got a bachelor’s degree in English Writing and International Relations from Carroll College in Helena, Montana, and a master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame. I have been blessed by having more great writing teachers than I have a right to, and I am trying to return the favor by teaching English at Chienkuo Technology University in Changhua, Taiwan.

What inspired your story "High Hopes"?

There wasn’t a single event that inspired it. But one day while I was sitting in a minivan in an outlet-store parking lot in Kittery, Maine, I started thinking about people with dangerous, pioneering, gritty, and/or self-sacrificing jobs and what makes them special. (Obviously whatever it might be, I myself didn’t really have too much of it since, well, I was sitting in a minivan in a parking lot – but one can still think about it.) I got to thinking about how trailblazers, explorers, those with particularly dangerous jobs, soldiers with the toughest duties, and even pioneers of new technology are usually regarded as outsiders by the general population. They are often viewed as pitifully foolhardy, more than likely dangerous to themselves and others, or just downright crazy. This seems to be true, whether they are 15th-century sailors professing the unlikely idea that the world is somehow a big ball, or reckless young men tearing around in horseless carriages powered by explosion engines, or technology “geeks” walking around town with goggles over their eyes and a keyboard dangling on their stomachs.

I thought about how, given a wide berth by the mainstream, these outsiders usually turn to others in their group for support and companionship. They also usually start to wear the uncomplimentary monikers that the others cast upon them with a certain sense of pride and honor: Black Sheep, Desert Rats, Yankee-Doodles, Tunnel Rats, roughnecks, doughboys, flyboys, devil dogs, G.I.s, snake eaters, and bubbleheads, to name a few.

This led me to conclude that, when far-distance space-flight technology finally gets figured out, the first groups of people to work the very dangerous kinks out of it will be just like the trailblazers of the past, and they will probably earn the same kind of disparaging compliments. They will probably be outwardly irreverent, fairly lacking in social graces, have some faults nearly as gigantic as their courage, trust precious few people outside their own group (despite making enormous sacrifices for those outsiders), and not worry much about the retirement benefits they will probably never collect. But with death always dogging them, they will probably know true faith when they see it, and be grateful if someone who has a little to spare can send some their way – because they’re not so crazy that they aren’t a little scared.
That’s what brought about this story.

What else do you write?

I enjoy all different kinds of writing. I enjoy science fiction because of the endless possibilities it presents. I have another Luke Kittery story in Infinite Space Infinite God, and I will have a story in the upcoming Infinite Space Infinite God II.

Short stories are a wonderful and challenging art form because you have to chisel and pare all of the excess verbal flim-flam away and get the job done with streamlined efficiency. I think that appeals to the editor in me. Screenplays are fun, too, because of the unique considerations that have to be given to the element of time, and therefore length. It’s tough to sell a 950-page screenplay. Or a 10-page one. Essays are lively because you flirt with the danger of looking foolish if you don’t do your homework and don’t construct your arguments with care. Poetry is nice, too, because you can do whatever you want and nobody can stop you. If you want your slithy toves to gyre and gimble in the wabe, then you can go for it. Poetry appeals to the anti-editor in me.
 
What are you working on now?

My excellent writing teacher Ralph Beer told me a long time ago that a writer should write about his or her obsessions. When he told me that, I was just an 18-year-old college freshman, so at that time I found myself embarrassingly deficient in obsessions. But it sounded like good advice to hold onto until I could get a more respectable supply built up, so I tucked it away until such time as it might be useful. Now, a considerable number of years later, I have some characters living in my head that are telling me that the time is drawing nigh. They shake me awake in the morning, demanding a back story. They wander through my dreams, searching for their names. When I watch TV, they cast thinly veiled disparagement upon my work ethic by saying things like, “Ooh, look at those lucky characters on TV whose author actually wrote them out instead of watching TV all evening.” So soon I’m going to start writing their story and let them run around on clean, white paper for a while and enjoy a break from the dark, musty confines of my brain. I hope that, once they get out there on that glorious, snowy field of paper (and off my case), many other people will enjoy their company as much as I do. But even if the ceaseless adulation, prestigious awards, and prodigious financial bounty I anticipate from their adventures turn out instead to be nothing more than sidelong looks of sympathy and consolations such as, “Well, at least you have a steady job,” I will still be satisfied that I gave these characters – these friends of mine – a fair shake and a little room to run.