An Interview with Mike Dolan

This month, Elastic Press will release two short story collections. One of those is Another Santana Morning by Mike Dolan, a revamped version of Mike’s original Santana Morning, released in 1970. Here, Mike tells us what he has been up to since then and talks about the sad fate of that original collection.

So, tell us a bit about yourself

I’m originally from L’Angeles, or Lah, as they say. I left there in ‘74 because I’d spent some time already in Bewnie and had fallen in love with the place. Outsiders call it Buena Vista. It’s a small town in its own valley between two mountain ranges in the center of Colorado.

On the west we have a row of 14,000-ft. mountains, the “Collegiate Peaks.” On the north is a long-dead volcano, Buffalo Peaks. On the east is a range of hills including the “Sleeping Indian,” or Midland Hill.

As you can tell by my name, Dolan, I’m mostly Irish myself. My forebears (well, three of them anyway) are from eastern Nevada, but I was born in and grew up in L. A. Dolan means “of Dublin,” and was originally spelled O’Doughlain. The Abbey Players were supposedly founded by a guy with my name, Michael Dolan. But if anybody calls me Michael, them’s fightin’ words.

So, Another Santa Morning is actually a re-release of a collection which was originally published in 1970. What have you been doing with yourself since?

Writing, teaching courses in writing, working as a sports reporter and humor columnist, designing and building a house (that job has been going on since 1974 and you could still call the place “The Great Unfinished.”) I originally wanted to be an architect, but writing turned out to be easier.

Some people would argue with you there! I guess it comes down to whether or not it comes naturally.

I started making up stories to tell my kid brother when we were preadolescents. I told him jungle adventures that my mother says used to scare him silly. Then in 1960 when I was 15, I read a book from the library, L. Sprague De Camp’s Science Fiction Handbook, which included a list of magazines in the back that I could send stories to, and perhaps get paid for. The book had been published in 1953, though, and by 1960 all those magazines were gone.

Is that how you got interested in writing for a living then?

Yes…partly. I’d also been reading SF paperbacks from the neighborhood grocery store, especially collections of stories. It became habit-forming. The work of Robert Sheckley was especially exciting for a teenager because in those I could go to faraway worlds I hadn’t even imagined before.

Why did you choose now to re-release Santana Morning?

Another Santana Morning came about because I’d ended up at the Ray Bradbury website in late 2005, trying to find out something else, and had written a long communication about myself for that. In it, I described how the original Santana Morning had come into being, and had died just as quickly. Brian Grainger, an ambient music composer and performer in Columbia, South Carolina, read that piece and contacted me by e-mail. He’d bought one of the few surviving copies of that original paperback. He’d found it in a goodwill surplus store, in the bottom of a cardboard carton. According to him, he’d read every word in it and had even used one of the pieces, “Journey by Heliodrome,” as his inspiration for a piece of music. He told me about this. I naturally felt honored. I responded by calling up a newer edition of the book that I’d been tinkering with over the years on various PCs, finishing it up, printing out a copy, binding it and putting a cover on it, and mailing it to him.

I’ve been an amateur bookbinder since I was a kid, but making a book that way is far too labor-intensive to ever be practical, so I started trying to find out if there was anyone who would take the new, revamped manuscript, preferably by the Internet, and publish it again as a new edition, so copies could be distributed. What turned up after a few weeks of searching was Elastic Press in Norwich, and the rest you know.

When you say it has been revamped, how much has changed since that original publication? And were those changes a reflection of changing trends and tastes, or something else?

I’d say about a third of the stories are different. One huge difference is the absence of the longest piece in the original collection, a thing I’d written a decade earlier, only a year or so after I’d started writing. In it, I murdered Ray Bradbury out of jealousy for his fame and success. Most of that story, “The Hands,” which comes before the horrible ending consists of scenes I still enjoy reading. I was re-creating my experiences before I met Bradbury, and more or less the circumstances in which I did meet him. Those were heady times, but as a whole “The Hands” was such an embarrassment that I really didn’t want to see it published again anymore than Andrew Hook did.

So, how did the original Santana Morning come into being?

You can learn about that in the introduction I wrote for the edition I sent to Brian Grainger. Andrew took it and put it at the back of his version instead.

I’ll run it down here, briefly…one day I was looking at new titles in a paperback bookshop in my neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, and the publisher’s address in the book I’d opened jumped out at me: it was right here in the same neighborhood!

As soon as I could, I got over there and introduced myself. The guy who had started it, Bill Trotter, had been a book distributor in Chicago, and now he was starting the paperback company he’d always wanted. Only, he had very few manuscripts to work with. I ran home and, in a fever of youthful excitement, I hammered a pile of my stories together into some kind of a whole, including the very personal “The Hands,” and showed up again the following day. And, amazingly, Bill, and the editor he’d just hired, Kathleen Galbraith, decided to take the project and develop it! It came out in print a few months later. It had the yellow cover that has become familiar since online, which had been done by Bill Hughes in New Mexico.

Quite a story! What changes have you seen in the publishing world over the past 40 years?

Here in the U.S., it’s been a consolidation of the industry that has focused all its interests on a few well-represented authors, leaving everyone else out in the cold. James Patterson ran an advertising agency until he realized he could make more money by operating a Fiction Factory. He does very little of his own writing, farming out the work to a stable of invisible underlings.

Stephen King’s work has been sliding inexorably downhill in quality, but his agent, Kirby McCauley, can still win bidding wars for him in Manhattan, so King goes on raking in the millions. The whole thing’s as notoriously unfair as the Hollywood television business, where the cop shows and sitcoms have taken over, and another Twilight Zone couldn’t possibly be made. Which is why I fled to the U.K. to find a publisher.

Do you think the U.K. is more open to giving less well known writers a chance at publication?

I think Britain is much more tolerant of small presses, and shows them far more respect. This is how writing started! Charles Dickens, Dostoyevsky in Russia, and Alexandre Dumas in Paris, all had their work published one pamphlet at a time. These sagas were only collected into book form many years afterward. Those pamphlets used to be sold on street corners all over places like London, for a few pennies each. The story goes that all London went into mourning the day that Dickens’s character, Little Dorrit, finally died.

I suppose there was a much wider audience then (in the sense that we now have TV, computer games, etc., all competing with the written word), and fewer writers fighting for the readers’ attention than there are now.

Writers and their audiences could connect on a much closer level, I think. Those epics weren’t sold at airports like today’s cookie-cutter bestsellers. Our publishing business now is more like MacDonald’s and Holiday Inn. You find the same book for sale everywhere you go…and all the rest can only be seen in the back aisles of the biggest, most cosmopolitan bookstores. That’s not to mean the bookstores you find in the shopping malls. All you find there are the same airport bestsellers, the ones with the glossy covers and the $15 price tags. I used to work as a typesetter at the kind of printing company that still produces those multi-million-copy books, printing them on high speed presses a hundred thousand copies at a time.

Do you think the change in readers’ tastes over the years has been guided by what the publishing companies have made available? And do you think that is why the short story receives less interest than it did even a couple of decades ago?

American publishers no longer control or shape the tastes of their readers. That’s being done by the advertising agencies and the mass media, i.e., cable and satellite television (the broadcast networks are almost dead except for the poor and those trapped in their homes by other circumstances). It’s like politics. You promise what you think the mob wants to hear. Then you break those promises as soon as you know you’ve got a sucker on the line. I’m sorry if I’m starting to come across as sounding bitter and disillusioned, but I had to live with the fact that in 1971 40,000 copies of the original Santana Morning went into landfills as part of a road building project in Pennsylvania.

What inspires/motivates you to write?

It has always been the same impulse…that of finding a receptive audience. That’s the button which, if you press it, sends me off on talking jags like this one. After Brian Grainger first told me how much he’d always loved the original Santana Morning, and had passed it around to all his friends and relatives, who also ended up loving it, I quickly put together a second volume which I printed and bound, and also sent to him. It’s called A Dawn of Centaurs, and contains stories I’ve been writing ever since Santana Morning was published. Now I have to find a publisher for that book someplace. I’m probably going to need help raising interest in it.

I wanted to get into my sex-letter career for a moment.

Oh, please do!

In the early ’90s an article in a how-to-write yearbook I’d been getting since the ’60s mentioned sex-advice magazines as a possible market for short fiction. The idea was, you pretended to be someone suffering from trouble with your love life, and you wrote a “letter” about it, filled with as much hot sex action as possible, and sent it to one of these magazines. And they sent you money. For about five years I began selling the wildest fantasies to half a dozen of these publishers. At one point a lady in New Jersey was buying everything I sent her, and paying $100 a story for them! Her boss had just bought up a competitor’s entire line of magazines, so she had about 30 monthly issues to fill. It was the hottest period of my life for selling stories.
After that, one of my friends here in Bewnie invited me to join the Chaffee County Writer’s Exchange, which was publishing a series of books and a monthly literary magazine. I ended up editing the books and the magazine. And teaching writing classes to the other members. Besides, the sex-letter business was going under at about that same time because of the Internet, where you could find far more exciting online porn than anything a printed magazine had to offer. So my life went into a different phase.

What happened next?

What happened next was bad. Someone else joined the Writers’ Exchange, who envied me what I’d started and did everything she could to get me kicked out, which she finally talked the rest of the membership into doing.

I didn’t mind, though, because for eight years or so the Writers’ Exchange had taken up almost all of my time. After that little bit of backstabbing skulduggery I got my life back!

Well, thanks for your time, Mike. It has been a pleasure, and the best of luck with Another Santana Morning.

Actually, I’ve done this interviewing stuff lots of times myself, both for my magazine The Arrastra (no longer mine) and while reporting for The Mountain Mail 20 years ago. So it’s fun being on the other side of an interview for once.