Garth Von Buchholz
is a writer of dark fiction, poetry, lyrics and drama. His work has been published in literary journals, performed to music, and produced for stage (but not for film).
For 20 years Garth has also worked professionally as a non-fiction writer, reporter, editor, production designer and publisher. In the mid-1990s, he went into business as a Web designer, founding an Internet start-up that he later sold when he entered the corporate world as a senior Web manager for a major financial company. After that, he worked in a similar role for a municipal government organization. He is now president and chief usability analyst at DigitalPractices in Victoria, BC, Canada.
His most recent work includes 13 Dark Poems, a self-published chapbook (available through his Website, Castle von Buchholz http://vonbuchholz.com/); Captivated, a new poem to be published in Nefarious Ballerina; and, Thirst of a Thousand and Will the Circle Be Unbroken, two short stories that will appear in upcoming anthologies this year. Garth is the co-founder of the Dark Fiction Guild, a new association for writers, editors and publishers of dark fiction.
Garth can be contacted at Castle@vonBuchholz.com
1) If you could have dinner with any writer in the world living or dead, who would it be and what questions would be on your mind?
This year is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, so as a long-time devotee of Poe, I would have to choose Eddy. I've read so many reliable books about him, different perspectives about who he was as a man, but that's never a substitute for your own impressions of someone. I'd want to know what happened to him in the last days of his life, when he was found on the streets of Baltimore, dressed in strange clothes, raving, yet not drunk by any means. I'd like to ask him what he would have written if his life had not ended so abruptly at the relatively young age of 40. I'd also like to ask him why he hadn't been more prudent about his relationship with his foster father John Allan so that he could have benefited from a some kind of inheritance. And I would tell him, in the most grandiose terms, how his success as a writer, cultural icon, and key literary influencer is still burning brightly 200 years later, while many of the literary giants of his time (some of whom had been critical or condescending towards him) are either forgotten or irrelevant to modern readers. Who the hell would care if it were Longfellow's 200th anniversary this year?
2) Tell us the scariest moment of your childhood.
It's actually a series of scares that were the same. I used to get hallucinations when I had a flu, and they were mortally terrifying to me. I'd see my bed sheets start moving rapidly or start thinking of numbers that would fly off to infinity, and I mean infinity where it felt as if my mind was rocketing into the black hole of the universe. Made me wonder if that was what death would be like someday.
3) If you had to be stranded on a desert island for a year, name the top five albums/CDs you would want to have with you to pass the time and why?
You didn't say if I'd get a CD player and a solar-powered power source with it, otherwise that would be a cruel joke, wouldn't it?
Here are my top 5:
: 666 by Aphrodite's Child. A bizarre art/music performance project from a Greek band in the 70s that set the Book of Revelation to music. It's spooky, exciting, crazy, spiritual and awe-inspiring.
2 Beethoven piano sonatas performed by Rudolf Serkin. I've played them so many times that I've dreamed about the music. Whenever I hear other pianists play the sonatas, it just doesn't make me feel the same emotions. Ludwig would have loved Serkin's interpretations.
3 A good "Various Artists" collection of classic Christmas tunes. I love traditional and modern Christmas music and would never want to spend a Christmas without filling my house…or desert island…with it.
4 Gretchen Goes to Nebraska by King's X. A masterpiece of hard rock, soaring vocals and harmonies and brilliant lyrics. One of my all-round favorite albums of all time.
5 Innocence Mission's first album (self-titled). It has gentleness, beauty and bittersweet emotion, all of which would be tonic to the soul if one were alone on an island.
4) What is your favorite song from the seventies and why?
I think the 70s had the best films but most of the better known music from the 70s was a jukebox full of catshit. If I get nostalgic, I usually prefer the music of the 80s.
One song? OK. Wheels of Confusion, by Black Sabbath, off their Volume 4 album (when Ozzie was still with them). It's a slow, grinding song until the end, but it's just majestic, and it expresses a world-weary, existential view of life in a triumphant way: "So I've found that life is just a game, but you know there's never been a winner." I think if I were on my deathbed and you played Wheels of Confusion for me, it would bring me back to life.
5) Does death scare you? Why?
Enough that a speeding car headed my way will make my heart dance like Nureyev, but in a philosophical sense, no, I'm not afraid of death because I have faith in where I'm going. What scares me, honestly, is life, i.e., wasting my life, making the wrong decisions, ruining my health in increments, doing things to people that I know I will regret, missing moments with people and strangers that I should not miss, not achieving the things I know I should be achieving. Horror to me is reaching the end of your life, whenever that is, and suddenly it's all laid out before you like a storybook and you realize that you've taken something wonderful and rare and invaluable and thrown it on the trash heap of foolishness. It's a Blunderful Life. That's when the Devil laughs.
6).What is your greatest worry at this very moment?
See #5 above. Seriously,
7) What is your stand on the legalization of marijuana?
Legalization for medical purposes, yes; for recreational purposes, no. Now to all my pothead friends out there, I should elucidate. The thing I hate about drugs are what they do to people's lives, the lives of their families, and the lives of people in their communities. Now maybe pot is not really harmful or addictive; but the worst part of it right now is how it's rooted in crime. So, you say, if we legalized it for recreation, then organized crime wouldn't sell it anymore and the government would tax it like cigarettes or liquor. The part that still bothers me, though, is that even if you eliminate the criminal element, it's one more way people are polluting their bodies and minds and altering their normal behavior. I like to drink, but the by-products of booze are horrific. Do we really need one more way for families to get screwed up, one more way for drivers to be impaired on the road, one more way for healthy, young intellects to be addled?
8) Tell us of a loved one no longer with us, and explain how their death has changed your life.
I'm torn about whether to talk about my Icelandic grandmother or my father, so I'll talk about my father since his death was more recent. He died several months after sustaining brain damage during heart surgery, which was ironic because one of his greatest fears was becoming "a vegetable." How can someone so alive be…not alive? That's the great mystery for all of us. My Dad was more of a traveller and an adventurer than I am. My father grew up in Nazi Germany and was conscripted as a child soldier at 15 years old (more of a navy cadet to be exact). His young life was horrendous, even after the end of the war, and then as a refugee to Canada he faced other challenges. Yet he always loved life, and was proud that he was smart enough to be a survivor. He liked a song called "I Hope You Dance," a country song about living your life to the fullest, and sent me posters of the lyrics before he died. After he died, the song kept ringing in my ears, and as a result, I decided to move to British Columbia, his home province, a somewhat risky move I had always dreamed of doing yet never had the guts to do before. "If you have the choice to sit it out or dance…dance!"
9) Tell us in detail, the scariest nightmare, you’ve ever had.
I've always wanted someone to ask me that. The one that's always stood out for me was a short yet vivid dream where three or four extremely violent creatures, demons I suppose, enter an ordinary person's home (while I am watching, as if through a peephole in the wall), and with supernatural speed and bestial ferocity, carve up the people in the house, tear everything apart and leave the home in smoldering ruins. Every time I read a story about soldiers invading a home in Iraq, see something on TV about criminals who murdered a sleeping family in their own home…or hear a noise outside my home….I think of that nightmare. Let's just say it left an indelible impression on me.
10) You wake up on the set of Mork and Mindy. They invite you for a threesome. Its TV land, nobody is going to know. Are you in or out?
1 comments:
Excellent interview!
The dream experience was particularily creepy! Two words though...HAMSTER DREAMS! :O
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