Author J.B. Stevens has a conversation with Derringer award winning author C.W. Blackwell on his short fiction work, creative process and more.
C.W. Blackwell is an author and poet from the central coast of California. He is a 2021 Derringer winner and a 2022 finalist. As he keeps winning awards, I wanted to learn more about his process. I asked him for an interview and C.W. was kind enough to grant me the opportunity.
C.W., thank you for taking the time to speak with me. Can you tell me about yourself and your background?
Thank you, J.B. It’s a pleasure to be here! I’m a fiction writer from the Central Coast of California. I write crime fiction, horror, and poetry. I work as a crime analyst during the day, and much of what I’m exposed to at work has an impact on my writing. I live in a tourist town, so most of the writing here reflects the idyllic scenery.
But there’s a lot going on here that isn’t usually covered in fiction. We had a record number of street deaths last year, almost all the result of the opioid crisis and fentanyl exposure. The response to this is either apathy or downright hostility, but rarely is there a nuanced look at the folks who are living, struggling, loving, striving, and dying in the streets. I try to cover this blank spot in my fiction. I try to get it right, tough as it is.
It’s interesting you mention the opioid crisis. Smoke and Consequences (your latest Derringer-Nominated piece of flash fiction) deals closely with the devastating results of opiate addiction. What more can you tell us about flash fiction in general, and this piece in particular?
I like to write two or three flash fiction pieces a year. I think it’s a fun challenge to write something that works in such a brief format, but more than that, it improves my writing by learning how to be precise and economical. I’m always learning, always looking for ways to improve.
This story came about during the CZU Lightning Complex Fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains back in 2020. Although we weren’t under mandatory evacuation orders, we had to leave due to dismal air quality. Our neighborhood was blanketed in a quarter-inch of ash. So I passed the time in a way you might expect—reading and writing. I worked a graveyard shift at an evacuee shelter, and I hammered out some of this story on my phone in the wee hours of the morning.
A graveyard shift at an ash-covered evacuee shelter sounds like the perfect spot to come up with dark fiction. I can see the location’s influence on this work. So now I’m curious, is the main character based upon an actual person? How much of this story is real?
It’s mostly based on reality. There were many neighborhoods under mandatory evacuation, and when this happens in isolated communities like the Santa Cruz Mountains, you get opportunists looking to see what they can steal. Quite a few evacuees’ homes were burglarized. These aren’t international crime rings or Pink Panther-style diamond thieves, here. Just folks looking for shit to steal and sell for dope.
Smoke and Consequences came about during the CZU Lightning Complex Fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains back in 2020. Although we weren’t under mandatory evacuation orders, we had to leave due to dismal air quality.
Most of the property was sold on the streets, in pawn shops. You know how it goes. But there was also a vigilante backlash that grew in response to the burglaries, so you have people trying to bring “mountain justice” to the situation and now the dynamic gets really wild. Still, I wanted to bring some nuance to the story and show how even though people can do very shitty things, there is often something inside voicing regret, even if that voice isn’t loud enough to bring change. So there is hope, just not enough to make a difference—and the consequences are heartbreaking. The story is nihilistic that way, but this is an element of noir that I’m absolutely crazy about.
Nihilistic Noir sounds like the name of a super dark writing collective. Also, that’s what I’m naming my fan club (if I ever have a fan club, which is pretty unlikely). Anyway, speaking of fan-clubbing, I love your work. You’ve firmly established yourself as one of the strongest up-and-coming writers in our little community. How long have you been writing fiction?
My whole life. It took me a while to submit fiction seriously, though. In fact, it wasn’t until my late thirties. I was working a job I didn’t like, commuting three hours a day—most of it stuck in traffic. I started calculating all the hours I’d wasted just sitting on the highway and it started to drive me crazy. I learned the harmonica. I listened to books on tape. But I also started coming up with stories in my head and visualizing scenes that eventually ended up on paper. Most weren’t very good, but some worked well enough to submit. To my surprise, some ended up in print. I was hooked.
I cannot even imagine three hours a day commuting. You Cali people are tough as nails. You referenced “coming up with stories in my head”. Those first stories, were they crime/noir fiction? I’ve noticed many people come to our genre through other genres. Is crime and/or noir fiction your first love or did you find it later in your journey?
I found it later, but not much later. Remember that job I hated? About a year into my newfound passion for fiction writing, I got a job as a crime analyst working for the County of Santa Cruz. Now that I was knee-deep in the world of crime, I realized I had an opportunity to bring a certain degree of authenticity to my fiction. There is so much rich nuance to explore. Stuff that never makes it out, never gets reported. So many interesting details. I never write about specific cases verbatim, but my job is certainly a wellspring of ideas. I still love to write horror, but even my horror stories have a noir element.
My Appalachian folk horror novella “Song of the Red Squire” comes out in September 2022 from Nosetouch Press. It’s a crazy tale about a USDA inspector who is drawn deep into the Blue Ridge Mountains where he finds an isolated village with very bizarre harvest rituals. Although the noir element is strong here, I wrote it mostly as a Southern Gothic Horror story. If someone described it as Suttree meets The Wicker Man I would drop dead of happiness right on the spot.
My crime fiction novella “Hard Mountain Clay” comes out in January 2023 from Shotgun Honey. This story is deeply personal in that it takes place where I grew up in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It’s about a family in crisis, struggling to get by in the face of poverty and addiction. I felt such a connection to these characters that I kept coming back and adding scenes, just to spend more time with them, to sit with them a while longer. I did this long after the book was originally accepted for publication. I’ve never experienced this type of connection as a writer before, so it was a real joy.
I just checked out the website for Song of the Red Squire. It looks awesome. I actually have some extended family who run an orchard in western NC… Perhaps this book will hit too close to home. So we’ve talked a bit about your stuff. What other writers are putting out work you enjoy?
Jordan Harper for the energy he packs into every sentence. He makes every word buzz and I have no idea how he does it. Megan Abbott for the way she makes her prose flow so effortlessly, without any indication there’s a writer involved at all. The way she writes is so smooth it’s almost telepathic.
We’ve covered a lot of ground. Is there anything else you would like to mention?
My debut poetry collection “River Street Rhapsody” was just released from Dead Fern Press. It covers a lot of the themes mentioned above, distilled into little stinging drops of acid. What I love about poetry is that you don’t necessarily have to worry about all the things that make fiction work. You can drill down to something like “vibe” and write a poem about it. Poetry is similar to flash in that it teaches you to be razor-sharp. Sometimes I love to agonize over whether the word “the” is really necessary in a stanza, or something small like that. It gives my perfectionist brain some satisfaction.
Thanks C.W., that was fun. I appreciate your time and I enjoyed the heck out of our conversation. Readers, check out C.W.’s Derringer nominated flash fiction story here.
Thank you.
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