Nick DiChario

 
Questions and Answers:
 

As a child I was pretty self-motivated when it came to reading and writing. I didn't come from a family of academics, teachers, or intellectuals, where a lot of kids learn the value of reading, writing, and creative expression as a natural part of their childhood. I came from a tightly-knit family of Italian immigrants with an incredibly strong work ethic. I developed a love of stories and storytelling on my own. No one else in my family seemed interested in it, which delighted me (as it might have any child). It was almost as if I'd discovered a new toy that no one else wanted to play with. Later, I had a lot of terrific mentors and teachers, and I owe all of them a great debt, especially Nancy Kress and Mike Resnick.
 

As a child, all the Marvel Comics writers were my favorites. I was a huge fan of The Avengers and Conan the Barbarian. In fact, I have number one editions of each, both signed by Stan Lee, who I met many, many years ago when he came to speak at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY.

The Conan comics led me to Robert E. Howard, whose books I fell quickly in love with, and somewhere along the way I picked up Tolkien's wonderful Hobbit and the Trilogy of the Rings. After that I began reading the occasional science fiction novel.

I can't remember the exact evolutionary steps that made me want to write the stuff, but certainly Frank Herbert's Dune was one of my first favorite SF novels. That was the one that pulled me all the way in, probably. But I could just as easily cite Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, or Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness, or Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles.

No one can really describe the incredible intellectual and emotional rush you get from your formative experiences with such mind-bending literature to someone who hasn't been there. But for those of us who have felt it, we enjoy a common bond, a deep understanding and love for the field, which is evident if you've ever been to a science fiction convention.
 

Some authors who come immediately to mind are Kurt Vonnegut, Cormac McCarthy, Ann Patchett, Molly McCloskey, Carlos Castenada, Mark Twain, Karen Joy Fowler, J. D. Salinger, Steven Millhauser, Nicholson Baker, Raymond Carver, Tama Janowitz, Clifford Simack, China Mieville, Lucius Shepard -- oh, and my brilliant editor Robert J. Sawyer of course! Honestly, the list goes on and on.

As you can see, my tastes are all over the place. There are so many great books published every year and nowhere near enough time to read even a small number of them.
 

When I graduated college I took a creative writing workshop at Brockport University with authors Nancy Kress and Gene Wolfe. That's when I began to get a sense that maybe I could become a published author someday too. Up to that point it was always a dream of mine that I never quite expected would come true.

I left that workshop with a serious intent to get published. I took a few more workshops with Nancy and some other really terrific writers, including Jim Kelly, John Kessel, and Karen Joy Fowler. When Mike Resnick bought "The Winterberry" for his short story anthology Alternate Kennedys I was on my way. Mike and I ended up collaborating on several stories (published by Obsura Press under the title Magic Feathers) and I learned a lot from him. I'm forever grateful for that, and for the fine introduction he wrote for my first novel.
 

Character is everything in fiction. Characters translate the reading experience for us. If a character is under-developed, unoriginal, not up to the task of carrying the burden, our experience suffers. But the great ones live on. Hamlet! Frankenstein! Ishmael! Huck Finn! Cinderella! The Wicked Witch of the West! The Cat in the Hat! Frodo and Bilbo Baggins! Hemingway's Nick Adams and Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway! (Okay, so I like the name Nick.)

You get the idea. There is no such thing as a great story without a great character.
 

This is a very nice segue from the previous question. The character of Tink Puddah appealed to me right from the start. I knew that I wanted to write about him long before I had the entire plot thought out, and I also knew I wanted to write on the central theme of alienation.

The story came about slowly after I got to know Tink. Parts of the novel came out easily and naturally, some of it I had to pry out with a crowbar, and some of it ended up on the "cutting room floor," to borrow an old phrase from the film industry. But that sense of alienation that so many of us feel at one time or another in our lives was something crucial to me.

In my second novel, Valley of Day-Glo, the central theme shifts slightly (but importantly) to one of loneliness, as seen mainly in the characters of Broadway Danny Rose, Millie, and the Exploding Wren. I think novels that really touch readers and stay with them are those that deal with basic human emotions. Loneliness is certainly something everyone can understand at a very deep level. But Danny's voice is completely different from Tink's.

The absurdists kept calling out to me too. They wanted me to have some fun. Who was I to say no?
 

It would be nice if the publishing industry was set up in such a simple way, but the publishing industry is run by human beings, and therefore overly complicated. There are marketing departments and sales forces and genre categories with sub categories attached to them, all arranged to make sure a book can be judged by its cover. Whether this is good or bad doesn't really matter. It is what it is. Like anything else, I suppose it's good for some and not so good for others.

As writers we have no choice but to work within the system. So I'm happily a Fitzhenry & Whiteside author, through Red Deer Press, under the science fiction imprint of Robert J. Sawyer Books.
 

Brief Biography: 

I began writing when I was just a kid. I would write and draw my own comic books, make up all the characters and stories, sketch out the panels and color them with crayons. I always wanted to be a writer.

When I graduated college, I began submitting stories to science fiction magazines. One of my first short stories, "The Winterberry," was nominated for a Hugo Award and a World Fantasy Award. Since then, I've been published in science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and mainstream publications in the United States and abroad, and I've been very fortunate to see some of these stories reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century, among others.

My first novel, A Small and Remarkable Life, is set in the middle 1800s and is as much historical as it is science fiction (maybe even more so). I did a lot of historical research on how people lived and survived in those days, and some of it even got into the book.

My second novel is completely different. Valley of Day-Glo is a far-future, post-apocalyptic comedy written in the absurdist tradition of some of my favorite authors (Franz Kafka, Mikhail Bulgakov, Samuel Beckett, Kurt Vonnegut, for example.) The story has a completely different style and tone from my previous novel, and I hope my readers will enjoy the departure.
 

AWARDS:

World Fantasy Award nominee,

Nominated for two Hugo Awards,

John W. Campbell Award nominee for Best New Writer

A Small and Remarkable Life was nominated for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best SF Novel of the Year (2006).

Some of Nick's plays have been presented in Geva Theatre’s Regional Playwrights Festival in upstate New York.

WEB SITE:

Visit Nick's web site at www.Nickdichario.com.

Some of Nick's short fiction can be found at www.Fictionwise.com.

Nick can be reached through his website or at Nick@Nickdichario.com.

Nick is the fiction editor of HazMat Literary Review, a magazine dedicated to publishing new writers and politically and socially aware poetry and prose: www.Hazmatlitreview.org.