Plazm editor Jon Raymond’s second novel is about to be released. It is entitled Rain Dragon. I am pretty excited about it. Jon literally spent years working on this book and it’s awesome that it is finally coming out. We’ll have some signed copies in the Plazm store pretty soon, and it will be available at fine booksellers, those that still remain, around the country.
Recently Jon did a short interview with his editor at Bloomsbury. It is here on this page. The cover art for the book was created by Patrick Long. Patrick is also a regular contributor to Plazm magazine.
An Interview with my Editor:
What made you decide to write this novel? Is there a personal experience you’re writing from?
Not a personal experience, per se. I’ve never worked on an organic farm, attended a self-actualization seminar, or retrained a corporation using progressive organizational management techniques, all of which happens in the course of the book. That said, as a life-long West Coast person, all those experiences are extremely close at hand. I have friends who farm; everyone in my family has done it; and my dad actually did retrain a public utility using organizational techniques based on the teachings of Gurdjieff.
So not a personal experience, but definitely a cultural experience. A culture that I’d characterize as broadly New Age, responsible for things like Steve Jobs, Whole Foods, and What the Bleep Do We Know?. Back when I started the book, the idea was to write something about this culture—and specifically its spiritual and entrepreneurial aspects—that wasn’t in any way arch or ironic. I wanted to write something that addressed the concepts of vibrations, synchronicity, and magical thinking with as much earnestness as, say, Walker Percy or Graham Greene addressed their Catholicism. I don’t think that’s exactly how it came out, but I tried my best. I do think this book at least deals honestly with how people here construct a sense of destiny in their lives.
The love story part draws loosely on some past experiences, yes.
You have described Rain Dragon as being about “the love of work and the work of love.” Which one of those better describes your experience of being a writer?
The love of work, most definitely. Writing is incredibly hard work, and only sporadically gratifying. But for those of us with a kink for difficulty, it has a certain allure. Not to make it sound like I’m some kind of incredible work-horse or anything. The work of writing is also almost indistinguishable from total indolence, and that’s also one of the big appeals.
As for the work of love, by that I mean the work of relationships. The long unfolding of being with another person. So much of our popular culture is about the big pyrotechnic event of falling in love, the fireworks at the very start of an affair. I wanted to think about love in a more graduated, retrospective way. Love as a long-term project, a series of compromises and re-calibrations. A mutual ambivalence that can sometimes grow into something unexpected and even grand.
A lot of your books and movies are set in the wilderness, or very small communities, often in the Northwest. Is there something about Nature that makes for good fiction?
Nature does play a big role in my fiction, which is sort of ironic, considering I don’t have much interest in Nature in real life. I’ve almost never been camping. My hiking is confined to public parks near my house. I’m almost totally a creature of the city and suburbs. But what’s sad and funny about the Northwest is that most of our Nature is really just an extension of the suburbs at this point. The woods are utterly shaped by the extraction industry of logging. The rivers are models of engineering. The mountains are resorts.
Which isn’t to say it’s not all beautiful and pleasurable to describe. The vocabulary of Nature—the names of trees and plants and things—remains incredible. But overall, I’m much less what one might call a Nature writer than something like a regionalist. Nature happens to be part of the scene I’m looking at.
You’ve now written three works of fiction in book form as well as several movies and TV projects. Are the two types of writing similar? How do you switch from one to the other?
They share a lot. Movies have learned almost everything they know from books. And at this point, books are greatly indebted to movies. The narrative structures are similar (at least in the kind of writing I do), the dialogue is the same, all that. The major difference is one of labor. Screenplays are more like outlines. You’re giving people a blueprint that they’ll go and construct. Fiction, you have to take it all the way yourself. No cameras are going to describe anything for you, no prop stylist is going to do the shopping for you. You are the head of every department, the director, and the craft service provider.
The switching is not really under my control. If there’s a project that needs doing, then I juggle things as need be. I’ve been lucky in that there’s been a lot to juggle over the last few years.
