What:
I met my gracious blog host Linda at the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine, where I studied “popular fiction.” That was their term for fiction that people don’t feel pressured to read, and usually with spaceships or ghosts or detectives.
I chose popular fiction because I sometimes do use spaceships and ghosts and detectives in my work, though it’s a stretch to call it particularly “popular.” Some literary readers are perplexed by the appearance of the strange in my work, and some fans of genres like horror and fantasy seem disappointed that it’s not even stranger.
If cornered to identify a category for my work, I’d probably call it “weird mystery”: stories about people confronted by the big strange mysteries of the universe which turn out to be more about the small emotional mysteries of their lives. When I write a story about a boy starting the first Scout troop in Lovecraft’s haunted town of Innsmouth, it’s less about the monsters under the sea and more about the ones in our hearts.
For me, the weird is personal, a sign of intelligence (usually ours) at work the universe.
Why:
Though my work is influenced by terror and strangeness, I come to it less from horror fiction than from horror non-fiction.
In my elementary school library (and likely yours, if you were lucky enough to find it), there was a section of books that were putatively true about subjects that only crackpots believed: ghosts, vampires, UFOs, missing people, Bigfoot, and the Bermuda Triangle.
I was shocked at nine years old that adults weren’t discussing the menace of the Bermuda Triangle or doing anything about it.
Growing up with a father whose random and violent moods taught me how to reconcile bizarrely opposing ideas, I wove those books pretty easily into my understanding of the universe. People did odd things for odd reasons. It made perfect sense to me as a kid that, say, aliens had built the pyramids.
I’m far less credulous now (perhaps unfortunately), so I write stories about a universe that’s more creatively attuned to us than the one we really live in.
How:
To me, the central question of extraordinary beliefs is what those beliefs are doing for those who hold them.
Why does a UFO abductee need that narrative in their lives? What is that experience corresponding to? What about being chosen, taken, and considered special by an advanced species makes it so important to them?
In other words, how do we call the strange upon us, intentionally or not? In A Scout is Brave, young idealist Bud Castillo is beginning to grapple (just as I did) with the alarming prospect that other people don’t take books as seriously as he does. The story takes place in 1963 when our whole society was starting to acknowledge that the fictions we lived by weren’t always proportional to reality, and Bud’s experience is all about what we should do about that.
Do we throw away the books that are wrong, or do we try harder to live up to them?
Bud’s brush with monsters from the sea and others (less obvious) on land leads him to answers he wouldn’t expect. Perhaps your brush with him will do the same.
“You don’t have to have been a boy scout to love A Scout Is Brave as much as I did… Will Ludwigsen finds beauty and humor in the commonplace and courageously reaffirms the values our cynical age desperately needs.” – James Patrick Kelly, winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards
Bio:
Will Ludwigsen’s stories of strange mystery have appeared in eclectic venues like Asimov’s Science Fiction, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Weird Tales, Nightmare Magazine, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, among many other places. His collection, In Search Of and Others, was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award. Will taught genre creative writing at the University of North Florida for five years. These days, when he isn’t reconciling the eerie with the absurd as a corporate education writer, he’s doing it for you in his fiction. Will lives and writes in Jacksonville, Florida, with his partner Aimee Payne, also a writer.
Links:
A Scout is Brave: Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Powell’s
Author Socials: Website | Twitter/X | BlueSky
Thank you for visiting.
Linda K. Sienkiewicz is a writer, poet, and artist:
Multi-finalist award winning novel In the Context of Love
Picture book Gordy and the Ghost Crab
Latest poetry chapbook: Sleepwalker
Connect with Linda: LinkTree
