Today I found out that Joel Lane died.
Mark Valentine shared a very personal account of Joel and his work, and we are
very lucky that Mark has chosen to turn his grief into an eulogy that helps us know Joel
and his work a little bit better. Thank you Mark, for sharing your personal
stories of Joel.
I only knew Joel through his fiction, and through the brief professional
relationship we had. I published his short story collection The Lost District
and Other Stories. I was always frustrated that I wasn’t able to find a larger
audience for his work, but his fiction had an unrelenting quality that is sometimes
the hallmark of both great work, and uncommercial work. For a good example of
what I’m trying to convey, check out both the Publishers Weekly review, and Ray
Olson’s Booklist review of The Lost District over at it’s Amazon page. These
are reviews by people who have been made extremely uncomfortable by Joel’s
work, but can’t help but respect (and sing the praises of) the writer who
managed to invoke those feelings with just a few words on a page.
I am very proud to have published his collection. Indeed,
one of the few perks of being an independent publisher was being able to follow
the ones heart, instead of just following the market. And this book is one of those
books that I have a personal connection too. I first discovered Joel’s work in the pages of Karl Wagner’s
Year’s Best Horror anthology, and regularly stumbled across his work from that
point on. This was all long before I was an editor, or even thought of working professionally
in the field. I was a fan. And I was a fan of Joel Lane’s short fiction. I’d see it
every year… in the magazines… in the original anthologies, and in the best of
the year anthologies. Many years later, when I found myself editor in chief of a genre publishing company, I jumped at the opportunity to work with Joel… to follow up his World Fantasy-award nominated short story collection with a
new volume of his amazing, moving, troubling work… to help continue that long, ongoing genre conversation, and
to make sure that Joel Lane's name was a part of it. I
was ecstatic.
Hopefully we can take some solace in the idea that (to steal a phrase
from a different genre) the circle will be unbroken. Maybe, like I did, a new generation of readers and
writers will find and be inspired by Joel's writing. We may be in a small, dark
little corner of the literary world, but in that corner, Joel was a giant. I feel very lucky to have known him and his work.
Obviously, this long view can’t ease the immediate pain of
loss for those who knew him personally. Mark Valentine shared some very
personal remembrances of Joel, and I’d like to share one of my personal remembrances too.
As Joel and I began going through his uncollected fiction and began imagining the shape and form we wanted the book to take on, he
suggested we name it after his story “The Country of Glass.” Due to my father’s alcoholism I had had a
very negative and visceral reaction to that story, and while I was kind of self
conscious about my reaction, I told him I’d prefer to not name the book after
that particularly story, and explained why.
He immediately apologized to me, and offered to remove the
story from the book altogether. I assured him that he owed me no apology… that
the visceral impact his fiction had on readers was what I loved about
his work, and that the story needed to stay in the collection. And while we brainstormed over alternate
titles, he was a perfect gentleman when he shot down several of my completely unserviceable
suggestions.
Around the time The Lost District was published, Joel
suffered a very personal and tragic loss… the sudden and unexpected death of
his father. The circumstances of that death forced Joel to be continually
confronted by the details of that death long after it happened. The world kept
rubbing salt into that emotional wound.
It was during this time that I lost contact with Joel, and
if I’m honest with myself, it was in part because the very real loss that Joel
suffered forced me to consider my own
father and the rift that separated us. I
wasn’t able to comfortably deal with these emotions, and Joel’s emotional turmoil
mirrored my own in a way that, much like his fiction, made me deeply
uncomfortable. But Joel personal grief, as well as his fiction played an important
roll during that period of my life. It helped me realized that I still have a father
who is alive, and accept that though that could be a burden, it was also a
blessing.
Thank you for these insights Joel. I wish I could have
somehow conveyed this to you when you were alive. If we are not careful, our lives can
easily be subsumed by mounting piles of regrets. Of things we wish we should have done. I wish… I wish. And that is a
terrible, terrible irony. Because the crushing weight of regret and how it
shapes us is one of the facets of the human condition that Joel regularly
grappled with in his fiction.
I wish you
were here Joel, so I could tell you one more time… Your work is important and powerful, and I thank you for
sharing it with me and with the world.
