“Before and After” is such a fascinating, thoughtful tale. What was your inspiration for this story?

Many of my stories come out of a meditation on some subject which has a strong emotional resonance for me. During these meditations I try to extend myself as far as possible, jotting down everything I know about the subject, imagining all the possibilities, all the ramifications, worst case scenarios, et cetera. I try to get all my thoughts down into one continuous file, which I print out and examine, looking for story possibilities, characters, plot ideas, et cetera. Since I’m a fiction writer, many of these ideas already come in the form of scenes and internal monologues, so the seeds of a fiction are already there. Oftentimes such a meditation will yield several stories.

I’ve lost a large number of people in my life: my wife, a child, both parents, a brother, a succession of close friends. When you get to be my age the losses come sometimes at an alarming rate. I recently turned seventy-four, with some health issues of my own, so mortality is a very real issue for me, along with questions about life after death, and how to spend your time meaningfully when you reach life’s final chapters.

I do a self-inventory every year, thinking about the issues and experiences which concern me most, and asking myself if I’ve said everything I want to say about them. I’ve always felt that the fiction writer’s job was to deliver a kind of testimony concerning their time on the planet. “Before and After” is part of that testimony.

There’s lots of meditations on death: death of dreams, death of loved ones, death of the self . . . What made you want to explore all of these different avenues of dying?

I think human consciousness, by its nature, tends to make us a somewhat self-centered species. Our egos encourage the perspective that when we die, so does the universe. I think it requires some effort to acquire the empathy necessary to escape that perspective and become a helpful member of society. (Effort which I believe is certainly worth it.) I don’t believe it’s possible to entirely escape it, however. We all pay a high price for living, whether we possess that empathy or not, and that price is grief. All those different kinds of death can trigger grieving, because they are emblematic of our own deaths and the deaths of everything we love. Grief reminds us that in the end, we’re alone inside these skins of ours.

The narrator seems to ruminate on their own failures: regrets they may have had, behaviors they wish they hadn’t adopted, et cetera. Characters that fail make for compelling fiction. What are your thoughts and feelings on failure as a theme?

I sometimes think failure is the overarching theme for most lives and most literature. Some people say that death is the overarching theme, but what is death but the failure to go on living? Certainly, for the writing profession, failure can be a serious obsession. I know a few writers who feel like they’ve achieved some inarguable success, but they tend to be in the minority. When I talk to older writers especially, they tend to obsess more about their failures than the ways in which they’ve been successful. They can be acutely aware of the honors they did not receive, the acclaim which was never theirs, the sales which always seemed out of reach, or that the “wrong” works became successful, and the works they really cared about forgotten. This is true even of the famous ones I’ve read about—the Faulkners, the T.S. Eliots—when you read about how they felt about their own careers you encounter a great deal of disappointment. There is often something missing, some omission which deeply affects them. But it’s not just writers—older folks of any profession or walk of life often obsess over their regrets. Many of us, unfortunately, don’t know how not to feel like a failure. We haven’t learned how to escape that particular negative interpretation. And that’s all it is—one interpretation among many possible interpretations.

What’s next for you? Do you have any projects or upcoming stories you’d like to talk about?

Recently the paperback and ebook editions of my Rough Justice: Tales of Crime & Deception were released. This is almost all my noir fiction collected in a single volume. My next book release, from the Macabre Ink imprint of Crossroad Press, is Scarecrows: Appalachian Tales, collecting twenty-four stories about my native Appalachia, including five new tales concerning the farmers, miners, teachers, preachers, lawmen, itinerants, housewives, elders, children, and creatures who call these southern mountains home. The stories represent a range of genres: fantasy, horror, crime, humor, and realistic local color fiction of the region.

And a few months after that, Crossroad Press/Macabre Ink will release Everyday Horrors. The twenty stories in this collection focus on my more recent genre-bending tales in which dreamlike materials and rhythms fracture everyday realities to allow the fantastic to shine through. Included are such stories as “A Thin Silver Line” (originally scheduled for The Last Dangerous Visions), the folk horror “Gavin’s Field,” my Wendigo story “An Gorta Mór,” the cosmic horror “The Things We Do Not See,” “Within the Concrete” from ParSec, and “Memoria” from The Deadlands.