I recently made a priceless acquisition. A rare Matheson first edition? No, much more valuable: the friendship of a fellow wordsmith who—in classic girl-next-door fashion—was right under my nose, working part-time in another capacity at MBI. I refer to multi-talented author and editor Terence Hawkins, about whose impressive formal credentials (e.g., as the founding director of the Yale Writers’ Conference) you can read more on his site. After his boss kindly clued me in to the fact that Terry was “some kind of a writer,” or words to that effect, I chatted him up, quickly discovering that we share not only many literary and cinematic interests but also a certain, shall I say…unconventional sensibility.
“Some kind of a writer,” indeed: he honored me with a copy of his socko second novel, American Neolithic (to which a sequel is happily in the works), and I can only urge you to get your own. A hell of a writer but, more to the point here, a hell of a guy; our chats go straight to the heart of the Nexus, often touching on my fixations on adaptations and authors who double as screenwriters, and it’s lucky for MBI that once we get going, he’s more disciplined than I about cutting us off. On one of his visits to my office, he brought up yet another of the many hats he wears, i.e., as the prose editor of The Blue Mountain Review, an online “journal of culture” produced by the Southern Collective Experience.
Explaining that even a literal Connecticut Yankee like me is eligible because, as they put it, “Everyone is South of Somewhere,” he wondered if I might like to contribute a piece, possibly involving one of said fixations? Now, there is no sound effect or musical theme for the bizarre coincidences that proliferate in my life, yet if there were, you could cue it now, for that very morning I had started reading Clive Barker’s novella “The Hellbound Heart,” pursuant to my SILVER viewing of Hellraiser, adapted by…its author. Absent a connection to the Group, I hadn’t planned on writing anything about it, but figured that as the laserdisc is packed with extras, I might as well compare them for my own elucidation.
Well, you can do the math. After brief internal debate, I wrote the first few paragraphs of the would-be piece and sent them in a query to Terry, who replied, in effect, “Release the hounds.” And when a draft was done and submitted, I had the pleasure of actual editorial give and take (which, sadly, has not been true of all of my editors). I hope it goes without saying that his input made it a better piece. And so now, here I am on pages 63-66 of Issue#14, my byline prominently featured on the cover, yet—curiously listed under “Fiction,” but since it’s a nonfiction piece about fiction there’s a certain logic to it, and I’m not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth in any case. Thank you, my friend.
BRADLEY ON FILM 