Interviewed by Angela Slatter (August 30, 2010)
Interviewed by Jon Armstrong, If You're Just Joining Us (June 8, 2010)
Interviewed by Charles Tan, SF Signal (May 05, 2010)
Excerpt—
Ganesha's personality contains everything from the human to the cosmic. He has a sense of humor. He's a god of creativity and great power. When you grow up, as I did, in the Catholic religion, God's a lot about judgment. Where a Western God judges, Ganesha assists.
Interviewed by Jason S. Ridler, Clarkesworld Magazine (February 2010)
Interviewed by Rick Kleffel, Agony Column (December 28, 2009)
Interviewed by Ron Hogan, Borders Books (December 11, 2009)
Interviewed by Christian Desrosiers, Small Beer Press (November 2009)
Interviewed by Rick Kleffel, The Agony Column (September 3, 2009)
Interviewed by Larry Nolen (August 25, 2009)
Interviewed by Bob Millington, aflightandacrash.co.uk (June 2, 2009)
Interviewed by Virginia Stanley, Director of Library Marketing at HarperCollins (February 20, 2009)
Interviewed by Diet Soap (October 14, 2008)
Excerpt—
Q: Do you feel you've fallen to the ghetto from the literary heights, or has science fiction and fantasy moved up?
A: There are no heights to fall from. All that is an illusion. If you buy into it as a writer, you'll be driven by the belief in a legitimate hierarchy in which you'll feel compelled to find a place, but if you ignore the illusion that struggle vanishes and what you have left is simply the writing.
Interviewed by Locus Magazine (June 2008)
Excerpt—
"The older I get, the more fantastic the world seems. I thought by this time everything would be realism and drab logic and I would have figured out all the mysteries, but the older I get, the stranger it seems. I see things as greater mysteries than I ever did before. The fantastic part of a story is like a manifestation of those instances, feelings, phenomena that there isn't a ready vocabulary to describe. There are a lot of them -- synchronicities, prophetic dreams, natural wonders. People don't talk about them because they can't find the words. That's what I like about the genre the most, the ability to express things metaphorically through the fantastic."
Interviewed by Edward Champion (March 28, 2008)
Excerpt—
Here's the thing. We lived in an all-white community. Racism as far as whites against blacks was tantamount to this time. It was there. Everywhere. But it wasn't discussed. Because it wasn't an issue. I mean, we had, in the high school I went to, there was one black guy. You know what I mean? So it wasn't the kind of thing that would come up. If it's not the kind of thing that's going to come up, I'm not going to talk about it in the book. Because I'm not giving fucking lectures here about the time period. I'm telling a story. This is what happened.
So I may at some time go back and talk about this. But I do remember times. I do remember my dad talking to me about this stuff, and really, actually going to great lengths to explain how this was wrong and what was right about this other thing. But if you didn't have a guy like him telling me this, and you were a kid growing up in this situation, I mean, it's going to take quite a bit to get over it when you got older. That's what I think anyway. I don't know.
[Podcast] A Brief Interview With Jeffrey Ford
Interviewed by SF in SF (March 16, 2008)
Interviewed by SF in SF (March 16, 2008)
Interviewed by Jeff VanderMeer, Amazon.com (October 16, 2008)
Interviewed by Jeff VanderMeer, Amazon.com (October 15, 2008)
Interviewed by Jeff VanderMeer, Amazon.com (October 14, 2008)
Interviewed by Charles Tan, Bibliophile Stalker (February 05, 2008)
Excerpt—
Q: What advice would you give to new writers?
A: Read a lot - short stories, novels, poetry, non-fiction. Read the works of ancestors from all cultures. Write even more -- everyday if you can manage. Find a good teacher, preferably a published writer and learn about revision, but always remember that the most important things to learn about writing you will discover yourself in the act of writing. Forget about the concept of "success" but work hard and have fun and Time will take care of itself. If you run with the pack, the point will always come when you're left behind, so, instead, cut your own path. Try to be kind to other travelers you might meet along the way. To quote Miles Davis - "Forget about the mistakes, there aren't any."
Interviewed by Charles Tan, SFcrowsnest (January 3, 2008)
Excerpt—
Q: I read in another interview that as a kid, you had a form of dyslexia. Could you talk more about it?
A: The term "slow learner" doesn't really capture it. I had all manner of problems in writing and reading when I was a kid. The simplest things were mysteries to me. I was always the last one finished with any writing assignment in school, which, I remember the teacher never failed to point out to the rest of the class. And the mistakes were the classic missing letters and words and spellings reversed and words I'd not intended finding their way to the page. My father read to us a lot, though, and I loved that magic of stories, the things I saw in my mind and how they effected me. I was determined to become a writer, and I think just constantly working at it helped me to overcome many of the problems I had. It took a long long time, though. Even today when I read to myself, I move my lips with every single word. Ironically, I've spent the last 18 years or so teaching a college writing class for people with learning disabilities.
Interviewed by John Joseph Adams (2007)
Excerpt—
Q: What is the appeal of zombie fiction? Why do so many writers-or you yourself-write about zombies? Why do readers and film viewers love it so much?
A: The zombie is the perfect icon for our general culture in the US as shown in George Romero's Dawn of the Dead (the mindless shopping mall invasion), and proven by the election of George W. Bush (who else but zombies would vote for this guy twice?). "Act now, think much later, if at all," is the American motto and should be in Latin on the dollar bill somewhere.
[Original Language: Français] Interview de Jeffrey Ford
Interviewed by Jérôme Vincent, ActuSf (June 2007)
Excerpt—
Q: Your grandmother told you lots of stories, and you also had a very creative mother, according to various sources. Did they influence you in your choice of career?
A: I grew up in a household where everybody told stories. Most people don't seem to have time for it anymore. Communication, in a way, was all about stories then. Stories at night, at the dinner table, at the breakfast table on Sunday mornings. My grandmother had some great ones about banshees, death fetches, fortune tellers, etc. My grandfather had been a boxer and a hard hat deep sea diver in the Merchant Marine during the Second World War and had really traveled a lot in South East Asia and the Indian Ocean. He had great stories too. My dad told stories about when he was in the army and when he was a kid, hunting and trapping in the woods of Long Island, or about swimming across the bay to Fire Island and camping out there for a week. My mother was a great reader and had aspirations herself to write mystery novels. She would tell me the plots of them. She was also a painter and a musician and made films in the backyard with family and neighbors as the characters. Even the neighbors told stories. There was a woman who lived across the street who'd been born in Ireland, and she told some ghost stories, supposedly true, that I remember scared the crap out of me. I'm still using bits and pieces of these stories in my work. For a kid with an inclination to be a writer, it was a very fertile scene.
Interviewed by Colleen Cahill, SFRevu.com (June 2006)
Excerpt—
Q: Your collection The Empire of Ice Cream is full of great stories and no two are alike ... Is this something you have to work hard to achieve or does it just come naturally?
A: ... My goal in writing, whether I ever achieve it or not and/or whether it is achievable or not, is to attain a certain mastery in writing fiction. To do this one has to be willing to investigate, analyze, honor, and make one's own, all styles and structures so that I will have them at my disposal when I write. I read an interview with the artist Charles Vess once in which he said that he finally realized that what he needed to be able to do with his art is become so proficient at it that he could easily render anything his imagination could confabulate. He's obviously gotten there, but I'm still on the road enjoying the journey.
[Podcast] The Bat Segundo Show #36: Jeffrey Ford I
Interviewed by Edward Champion (May 5, 2006)
Interviewed by Matthew Cheney, The Mumpsimus (November 22, 2005)
Excerpt—
Q: Many of your stories have autobiographical elements, or at least have narrators who seem to want the audience to believe there are autobiographical elements, moments and characters stolen from the life of Jeffrey Ford. What led you to this technique?
A: To some extent all of the stories are autobiographical. And the ones that most readers would think reveal the most about my real life are often the ones that reveal the least. I got hip to this technique of storytelling from reading Isaac Bashevis Singer. He's on my personal short list of the very greatest contemporary short story writers. He has a way of going into a story as if he is sitting across from you at table at a diner sharing a cup of coffee, talking about something that happened to him two days earlier. Check out especially his supernatural, New York stories like "The Cafeteria." His approach is so believable that when the weird stuff hits the fan, the reader can't help but believe that what he is telling is truth. He uses techniques of the autobiographical to gain your confidence, concrete detail from his own life, no doubt, to form a strong foundation for the world of the story. This deepens the fantastic experience of the fiction.
Interviewed by Jeff VanderMeer (June 21, 2005)
Interviewed by Jay Tomio (June 13, 2005)
Interviewed by Fantasy Magazine (2005)
Interviewed by Nick Gevers, Science Fiction Weekly (2005)
Interviewed by Jeff VanderMeer, Infinity Plus (March 9, 2002)
Excerpt—
On the one hand, Kafka has become a label that gets ascribed to any fiction that is not easily categorized. On the other hand, I know Kafka's stories very well and really admire them. I would say he has influenced my work to some degree, but perhaps not to the extent noted in reviews. In the sense that Kafka practices fabulation in his stories and creates a sense of unease, yes, there is a likeness, but his style is much less self-conscious than my own at this point. It is clearer, more direct. My characters exhibit more emotion and are more active. Perhaps if I keep writing for another twenty years, I will someday write "The Hunger Artist."
Interviewed by Nick Gevers, SF Site (2002)
Interviewed by Gavin J. Grant, Booksense.com (2002)