To celebrate the release of Elad Haber’s new collection, The World Outside, we’ve wrangled a little Q & A out of the author.
Underland: Why did you separate the stories the way you did for the table of contents?
Haber: The collection is organized in a semi-chronological order with my early publications up first and my most recent at the end. When I was going through my publications to pick for the collection, I realized that there were clear themes present in various timeframes of my writing so I maneuvered the stories around into themed octets and quartets. The groupings are unnamed though so the reader can intuit the theme themselves while reading the stories.
One of the strengths in this collection, in my opinion, is its variety. I am proud of have published in all kinds of genres and these stories often have wildly different settings and styles but the themes work as a kind connective tissue between the stories.
Underland: You have some interesting takes on fairy tales. What inspired you to look at them in a different way?
Haber: One of my favorite authors is Angela Carter, who was introduced to me by friend and Clarion-mate Christoper Barzak. Her twisted fairy tale retellings were the inspiration for those story ideas. That suite of stories was also part of a school project. I went to Art School for Computer Art and for one of my final projects in web design, I decided to create an online literary journal called The Purple Curtain, the name based of a line from Poe’s “The Raven.” I supplied all the stories for the journal and did all the artwork and programming of the site. I even wrote some Submission Guidelines to make it seem real. I recall getting an A on the project.
Underland: There are a number of stories with characters dealing with loss of fathers or separation of families. Does that come out of a personal experience?
Haber: Yes. I dedicated the book to two incredible men that were instrumental in making me who I am today. My father, Eitan Haber, and my stepfather, Joseph Dekel. My parents divorced when I was young so I grew up with two fathers. Both of them encouraged my various interests, be it Star Trek, computers, writing, and then when I had big ideas in my late teenage years, like attending Clarion when I was eighteen, they helped financially and with enthusiasm for my interests. I don’t think I would be a writer today if my family had not encouraged me. That is something I take to heart as a father myself now. Children’s attentions and interests will sway like the wind but I think as parents, we can help guide those interests, especially in the creative fronts, into productive outlets. Both men have passed away and like many writers, I have processed my grief from them through my stories.
Underland: Your first professional-level sale was “Number One Hit” which came after a break in writing. Was that an idea you had floating around for a while or was there something in particular that inspired it?
Haber: Usually my story ideas come to me in the form of a sentence. A first line or a title. But for “Number One Hit,” I recall clearly I had an early image of a group of bikers in a desert. They were hunters and I knew they were hunting for music. I crafted the story around that image. I was also thinking a lot around that time about the idea of owning music. It was around 2011 or so that I started writing that piece. This was around the time that music streaming services like Spotify and Pandora were coming up and I was thinking a lot about music ownership. For music fans, there was always a sort of pride in our collections. From vinyl shelves to meticulously organized folders full of mp3’s, there was always this idea of “my” music. But these streaming services upended that idea and we would now be storing our music in “the Cloud.” And then I started thinking about, well, what if something devastating happened to the Cloud? What would happen to our music then?
Underland: Tell us about your evolution as a storyteller.
Haber: I believe no writing happens in a vacuum. We are all inspired by the things we read and watch and listen to. When I was a teenager, reading pulpy Star Trek and Star Wars novels, I wrote a lot of space opera. When I started reading Angela Carter and Jose Luis Borges, I wrote dark little stories set in basements and dungeons. I started my career imagining myself a Science Fiction writer, but I started actually selling stories when I wrote that suite of fairy tale retellings, a Fantasy subgenre. I would say my style is malleable and able to shift with the times.
Take for example a story in the collection that was originally published in Underland Arcana, “But My Heart Keeps Watching.” I wrote that about ten years ago in the magic realism vein, but it didn’t sell for a long time. In that period of time, I watched this growing resurgence of modern horror and when I went to revise that story before it sold, I approached it as more of a horror story.
I’m also somewhat obsessive about music. I’m always out hunting for new music and pushing myself to seek out new styles and new bands. I will often pick a song or an album as a “soundtrack” for a story. I don’t necessarily need to listen to it while writing, it’s more of a vibe check. Bands like Radiohead, The National, the Mountain Goats, and many others create such wonderful imagery in their mashing together of lyrics and music. It really inspires me.
