Macromere Press

Macromere: And then we came to the end. 

David: Of another dull and lurid year.

M: That may be true, but we meant the end of He Who Shall Remain Shameless, specifically the final episode in the novel, “Katherine”, which takes place on New Year’s Eve and continues to New Year’s Day. 

D: The continuation to New Year’s Day is debatable, but I thought an end-of-year conclusion would be fitting. I really did think while drafting this book of going past December 31st or January 1st and having David continue to pursue spirits whose deathiversaries fell in January, February, March, and so on until he came full circle to late June. David could have done an entire year of missions, but ultimately I felt it was wise to quit while I was ahead. As a writer I didn’t want to overplay my hand with this one. I believe HWSRS ends when and where it should. 

M: Anything you’d like to say about the ending? 

D: I had to dig deep to write this last story—and I don’t mean research. Throughout the novel David encounters spirits who can be found on the internet and those who can’t. To me it’s fitting that the final spirit is very much in the latter vein, and that through her we find the most out about David we’re probably ever going to know. 

M: You said ‘probably’. Does that mean….

D: That’s really it for David Michael Ewald and He Who Shall Remain Shameless. This book isn’t the first in a series; it’s a one-and-done novel in linked stories. I have no plans to write a sequel. 

M: We are looking into making He Who Shall Remain Shameless available in print sometime in 2012….

D: I appreciate that. I know there’s the rise of ereading—I just got a Kindle myself—but plenty of people prefer to hold the physical book, turn the pages, all that. Ereading and traditional reading should be able to coexist, and I’m happy plans are underway to put out a print edition of He Who Shall Remain Shameless, for all those who dislike reading a book on a screen. 

M: We’ll update our fans here, of course. In the meantime, Happy New Year, David, and Happy New Year to everyone reading this post. We hope 2012 proves to be joyous and prosperous for you all. 

Macromere: We’re just about done with these interviews illuminating He Who Shall Remain Shameless, aren’t we?

David: That we are. We’ve almost run out of spirits.

M: So “Kordula”, the twelfth episode in HWSRS, starts off with the sentence “I was hiding out somewhere in the Czech Republic”. We take it you spent time in the Czech Republic…

D: I did. Winters were just as cold as what’s described in “Kordula”. And there is a Lake Prigl in Brno, the second-largest city in the Czech Republic, where the story takes place. Much of what David sees I also saw to an extent.

M: You’re a believer in writing from experience.

D: I believe you have to. Even if you’re writing strictly genre fiction, pure sci-fi or fantasy, I think for the work to succeed the writer has to have at least some of her- or himself wrapped up in it. The personalization may be well-masked, but it’s gotta be there for the work to resonate.

M: Tell us about the title character.

D: By this time in the narrative David has encountered all sorts of ghosts, from the somewhat well-known like Harriet Quimby and Leo Ryan and Christine Chubbuck to the lesser known like Christopher Coe and Linda Gary, and finally to the very little known like Alice Scribner and the infant David Michael Ewald from Gladwin, Michigan. Kordula falls into that last category, the category of those who have pretty much nothing going for them on the Internet. Kordula in fact may be the lowest-ranked of them all, as she has not even a sentence about her on the Internet. She’s representative of the spirits who are most in danger from the Meritocrat’s decisions—those spirits who are most susceptible to being erased, forgotten. 

M: We find it interesting that Kordula does not want to be remembered.

D: She really doesn’t. She rejects the nature and purpose of David’s missions. And she puts our hero and narrator in grave danger.

M: The stakes are certainly high in this one.

D: The stakes are high in all the episodes, really, but in “Kordula” David has his sights set on the Meritocrat, and that ultimate confrontation is right around the corner….

M: If the Czech’s Saint Mikulos were to visit you today with an angel on one side and a devil on the other, which would side with you, the angel or the devil?

D: Let’s wait until we get to the conclusion of He Who Shall Remain Shameless before I answer that one.

Macromere: What’s most striking to us about “Leo”, the tenth episode in He Who Shall Remain Shameless, is that the title subject seems to take a back seat to the increasing tension between David and the Meritocrat. It seems really that the Meritocrat is a stronger presence than Leo Ryan in this story.

David: That’s true to an extent. The story is still entitled “Leo”, though, not “Meritocrat”, so I’d like to give credit where credit’s due.

M: By all means….

D: Leo Ryan was of course the impetus for this episode, which didn’t come about until after several of the other stories had been written. I’d been interested in Mr. Ryan for years mainly because of his tragic connection to the events that occurred at Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978.

M: The Jonestown Massacre.

D: Correct. My interest in the massacre itself came first, and then I found out about Leo Ryan. I was haunted by the fact that a U.S. Congressman, the kind of person I’d always thought of as untouchable, invincible in this kind of situation, could be gunned down so violently and remorselessly. It was as if titles and status and positions and political power no longer mattered. Like: “Oh, you’re U.S. Representative? Big deal!” The Congressional Seal of Protection is referred to in the story, and I do believe Congressman Ryan had faith till the very end that this seal would save him.

M: A 2006 documentary—Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple—factors greatly into “Leo”.

D: I watched that documentary before I had any idea of writing “Leo”. After watching I knew I wanted to do something with it. The film unnerved me quite a bit, especially the footage leading immediately up to the shootings on the Port Kaituma air strip. Watching I thought, I know what’s going to happen, but they don’t. And with Leo Ryan I thought, I am watching a dead man, or a man who’s about to die. He’s alive now, in a sense. That also shook me up.

M: The documentary as an outlet for voyeurism….

D: I did have the feeling I shouldn’t be watching this, and that feeling led to the idea of this being a film that had been reviewed and marketed and distributed and sold. And I thought, Can we really criticize this footage? Can these scenes be considered scenes in the fictional sense? What if these scenes could be improved for maximum audience satisfaction and reach?

M: David shows a bit of his own Meritocrat side here, it seems.

D: The way David sees it is that in death Representative Leo Ryan became one of us, an average public citizen, just another victim of Jim Jones and his cult of personality. But there’s tension there as well, seeing as Leo Ryan is one of the better known—if not the best known—of Jim Jones’s victims. That Mr. Ryan remains the only Congressperson murdered in the line of duty cannot be ignored, and the idea that one of these mighty politicians actually put himself out there and descended to our level is something that David wants everyone to know and remember. So much about the Jonestown tragedy has focused on Jim Jones himself or the so-called Killer Kool-Aid. Leo Ryan was known, but in David’s mind he is, like countless other ghosts, at serious risk of fading.

M: We’d like to go back to our initial point: the Meritocrat seems to be more of a character, or a presence, than Leo Ryan. Could this story really be about the Meritocrat? 

D: That story is still to come, but yes, I agree that the Meritocrat is very much a strong character in “Leo”. My intention in writing He Who Shall Remain Shameless was not to hit the reader over the head with the Meritocrat at every turn but rather keep this entity waiting at all times, hovering about, looking for a chance to strike or otherwise meddle in David’s missions. In some stories such as “David” and “Andrew”, the Meritocrat is very much there, seen and heard as well as felt, but in others, such as “Chris” and “Aegeus” and “Alice”, he’s not much of a physical presence at all, and the reader must anticipate the ultimate confrontation, which is what “Leo” sets up in the end.

M: About that ultimate confrontation….

D: We’ll get there, but while researching and writing “Leo” I knew I had to start curving the overall narrative arc more sharply—to move us more quickly in the direction of that big showdown. That’s perhaps the strongest presence of all in “Leo”—the awareness that the major question driving the novel—Will David defeat the Meritocrat, or will the Meritocrat defeat David?—is going to be answered within the next few episodes. 

Macromere: In “Alice”, the ninth episode in He Who Shall Remain Shameless, it seems that one of the major themes driving the novel in stories is fully realized. You have a real-life flight attendant, possibly the first ever killed in a plane crash in America, but so little is known about her, or available about her on the Internet.

David: It’s true. Researching this one was difficult. It started, of course, with my interest in early aviation, and I’d read about this plane crash that occurred on the night of October 10, 1933 in northern Indiana, over a little town called Chesterton to be exact. What caught my attention of course was that the plane, with only seven people on it, had possibly been brought down by an explosive, which would make it the first-ever act of airline terrorism in America. It’s still a mystery, though, because the bombing was never verified, and speculation also existed that ammunition and other equipment brought on by a passenger who was a hunter combined during flight in such a way to cause an accidental explosion in the cargo hold. Regardless, I doubt the case’ll ever be solved. But what sealed the event for me in terms of HWSRS was, as always, the human element: Alice Scribner, the lone flight attendant, only twenty-six years old and on her way to meet her fiance who was waiting for her at the airport in Chicago. 

M: And the fact that there’s so little information on Alice Scribner….

D: Works well with the theme you alluded to earlier. Alice Scribner is a perfect fit for one of David’s missions because she is so little known. When searched for on the Internet, other Alice Scribners come up but not this particular Alice Scribner—at least not immediately. I had to do a lot of searching, and researching, and even then I could find only a few sentences. But this worked for writing the story as part of He Who Shall Remain Shameless. One of David’s main goals is to get a picture of Ms. Scribner on the Internet—because currently nothing’s there. This troubles David greatly. Alice Scribner has even less of a presence than the baby David Michael Ewald of Gladwin, Michigan. He wants to help this deceased flight attendant tell her story to the world, because absolutely none of it’s there right now. At least something should be there, he feels. 

M: As one reviewer puts it, “Alice” is particularly strong because in it David truly feels for the ghost he’s trying to help. 

D: He has to. He doesn’t want a repeat of what happened with Linda Gary, and he knows the Meritocrat is ready to thwart him at any moment. His flying, talking, laser-blasting cell phone companion Ishmael has advised him to actually talk with people, the living as well as the dead, and “Alice” is David’s attempt to turn things around. He does feel on a certain level for each ghost he encounters in this novel, but with Alice it’s a palpable emotional connection, especially at the end. 

M: We do very much like the conclusion to this one. 

D: Thanks. I tried. 

Macromere: Since today, September 6th, is the 17th anniversary—or deathiversary, as we should now be calling it—of Christopher Coe’s passing, would you mind telling us about “Christopher”?

David: Not at all. “Christopher” was one of the early ones in the genesis of He Who Shall Remain Shameless. It was written after “Chris” and “Harriet”, and I’m pretty sure it was actually the third story out of all of them to be written. I felt I had something with the concept and themes behind the first two stories, so I thought I’d keep going. I wasn’t sure who was next until I was alone in a classroom at San Francisco State University, where I was then taking some classes for a graduate certificate in post-secondary teaching, and I scanned the bookshelves. I always scan bookshelves when I’m in a room. Anyway, there was a lot of fiction on these shelves, books that no one had picked up or held or otherwise touched in a good long time, and one of the spines was very thin. It stood out to me because it was a Vintage Contemporaries paperback—you know, the ones from the eighties and early nineties that have a very specific design, quite sleek and respectful.

M: They don’t make ‘em like they used to.

D: I took this slim volume down and it was I Look Divine by Christopher Coe. I’d never heard of Christopher Coe. His author photo in the front of the book was haunting. He wasn’t exactly looking to the side, but his head was turned from a direct confrontation with the camera, and he looked as if he didn’t really want his picture taken. I couldn’t tell if he was smiling or if he was about to cry. I felt a strong sense of tragedy in this photo, a tragedy that continued into the work itself.

M: We’re ashamed to admit none of us have read I Look Divine yet.

D: You should. It’s a good book. Highly unsettling. Very short. It’s shortness was the thing that struck me the most about it. It’s a novel, but at only 109 pages in paperback format it could really be considered a novella. It works as a novel, though, and it works well. I mean, is He Who Shall Remain Shameless a novel or is it a short story collection?

M: We say it’s a novel. A novel in stories.

D: But is that just a fancy way of saying a linked short story collection?

M: Maybe….Does it matter?

D: Probably not. Sooo…I was fascinated by Christopher Coe, and I decided to research him. I couldn’t find much. But his life, what little of it there was available for the public, what more of it could be created and thus saved by the David Michael Ewald of He Who Shall Remain Shameless, that was worth writing about. So I wrote a new encounter that became “Christopher”. 

M: It’s certainly the shortest of all the stories in HWSRS.

D: It is. Just under 2,000 words. I remember submitting it to the online magazine Morbid Outlook because they wouldn’t accept any story over 2,000 words. And Morbid Outlook accepted it. No changes were made to the submitted story, but significant changes were made between the story published in Morbid Outlook and the version included in He Who Shall Remain Shameless.

M: Such as….

D: Such as an expansion of this idea that drives the entire novel, or novel in stories: Other people on the Internet have Christopher Coe’s name, and David Michael Ewald the narrator and hero is afraid that the Christopher Coe of I Look Divine and Such Times will be replaced permanently by all those other Christopher Coes, even Christopher Coes that have yet to be born. That’s what it means to be ‘Internet dead.’

M: Replaced on the Internet, erased from the Internet—and thus from all public memory. Forgotten in the worst way possible.

D: You got it.

M: A big part of “Christopher” seems to be the discussion of one’s art, and how one’s art may not be enough to sustain the memory of the artist.

D: Exactly. Certainly Mr. Coe’s two novels are out there, but he died tragically before he could write and publish more, and in this meritocracy we now live in, I—like the David Michael Ewald of HWSRS—felt it’s a tragedy to have to be ranked, and therefore judged, in this way.

M: So it comes down to sales rankings.

D: It shouldn’t have to, but that’s one of David Michael Ewald’s biggest sticking points with the Christopher Coe of “Christopher”. The sales rankings of those two novels have to increase, or else.

M: What about your own sales rankings, the ones for He Who Shall Remain Shameless?

D: Believe me: I’m prepared to join Christopher Coe.

M: As are we. Thanks for taking the time etcetera etcetera.

D: Etcetera.

Macromere: The fourth episode in He Who Shall Remain Shameless takes place on August 18th, and it centers on, of all ghosts, a four-day-old baby named David Michael Ewald. You say this baby actually existed….Who was he?

David: I really don’t know all that much about the David Michael Ewald who was probably born on August 14th and definitely died on August 18, 1954, only four days old according to the one webpage I found. That’s part of the point of the story, actually. Like me, the David Michael Ewald who narrates He Who Shall Remain Shameless—

M: You mean the adult protagonist of the novel, right?

D: That’s right. That David Michael Ewald, the hero and narrator of He Who Shall Remain Shameless, also found only one webpage listing very little detail about the death of this four-day-old David Michael Ewald in the summer of 1954, in Gladwin, Michigan. And so, driven by the guilt of knowing his namesake could be a primary cause for this baby being forgotten forever, he makes the deceased David Michael Ewald his next mission. 

M: We must say, the first three stories in the novel are fairly straightforward, but this one goes off the deep end, IOHO—in a good way, of course.

D: Thanks. I’ll take that as a compliment.

M: The narrative gets quite meta at that point. After all, there’s the hero and narrator David Michael Ewald, the ghost of the deceased infant David Michael Ewald, some mention of you, the “little-known writer living in Denver” David Michael Ewald…and are there more David Michael Ewalds?

D: I don’t live in Denver now, so that “little-known writer living in Denver” could be another David Michael Ewald, and beyond that there’s the possibility of more David Michael Ewalds, waiting to intrude at any time.

M: You mentioned earlier that this story was one of the most overhauled from first draft to last.

D: Definitely. In the original version there was no Meritocrat, who makes his first full appearance in this one, and there weren’t any appearances by Christine Chubbuck or Harriet Quimby or Ai’dah either. It was pretty much just David Michael Ewald going to this house in Gladwin, Michigan to talk to the ghost of David Michael Ewald. That first draft was static, and it wasn’t until I got some feedback from my friend Blake Sanz that I was able to move the story in the direction it needed to go. Even then, this was one of the toughest to write.

M: John Kerry once said that googling yourself is a sin. Any comment?

D: I’m a sinner, but not half the sinner that the David Michael Ewald of He Who Shall Remain Shameless is. After “David”, the tragedy of his character becomes progressively more apparent.

M: As always—

D: No need to say another word. It’s my pleasure.

Macromere: Today, July 15th, is the 37th anniversary of the death of Christine Chubbuck, whose ghost happens to be the second the hero and narrator of He Who Shall Remain Shameless encounters. To give us some insight into this story, we talked to the author himself….

—

Macromere: This is the one that started it all.

David: That’s right. I wrote “Chris”, the second story in He Who Shall Remain Shameless, back in 2007 before any of the others. For years I had been taken, like many people, with the story of Christine Chubbuck’s on-air suicide, but I hadn’t been able to find much of anything at first. A rendering of her face, a few tidbits here and there, but it wasn’t until late ‘06-early ‘07 that I began to find more information about her. I knew that the footage of the incident had either been lost or destroyed or was well-hidden, never to be revealed, and this footage seemed to be what the majority of people on the Internet were talking about. They all wanted to see it.

M: And that led you to the story….

D: What actually led me to the story was the death of Anna Nicole Smith. I remember it was February 8, 2007, and I was working for a public relations firm in Palo Alto. There was a bar in the offices, a “keginator” as they called it, and also a television above the bar playing CNN that late afternoon. I remember standing at the bar watching the TV when no one else would. They had already seen it, I suppose. But I watched, and I wondered about how much attention Anna Nicole Smith was getting. And I thought also then of Christine Chubbuck, and how she’d died in Florida too, and then I went back to my cubicle, opened my notebook and started writing. I didn’t want to write about Anna Nicole Smith; I wanted to write about Christine Chubbuck. Not just Christine Chubbuck—I wanted to write about the people who wanted to see the footage, I wanted to write about us. And so I went at it…I got some stares from coworkers who walked by, but I had a draft by the time I left work that day. 

M: “Chris” was originally published in The Bend in 2007….

D: It was. The story went through some changes after that, but a lot of it’s stayed the same. David Michael Ewald’s mission in Sarasota, Florida, hasn’t changed from that first draft I wrote in February of ‘07 to what readers will see in He Who Shall Remain Shameless.

M: “I was in Sarasota to find the footage….”

D: I wanted to convey the sadness of what happened that day in July of 1974, but I also wanted to explore the aftermath, the obsession.

M: We believe you have, and we think readers will agree. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us, David.

D: Thank you.

Macromere: Today is July 1st, the 99th anniversary of Harriet Quimby’s death and, not coincidentally, the day He Who Shall Remain Shameless really begins. Any thoughts on Harriet—and “Harriet”?

David: “Harriet” was the second story I wrote for what would eventually become He Who Shall Remain Shameless. At that time I didn’t know I was putting together a novel in stories…I just knew that the first story, “Chris”, had been successful, and I thought I’d run with this idea of a guy going around the United States—and soon the rest of the world—seeking out deceased people who could be found on the Internet but who may not have the staying power they could have. The concept was still in its early stages, but at the time I was reading up a lot on early aviation, and I was fascinated by Harriet Quimby, the first American woman to get her pilot’s license, and I thought, Why not have the same narrator from “Chris” encounter the ghost of Ms. Quimby in Boston? Her face haunted me…especially the one of her in her monoplane, smiling, with the amulets around her neck. She had such dark eyes, I felt I was there with her, in that plane, when I looked at that picture.

M: She was a beautiful woman.

D: Definitely. But what struck me was that she was 37 when she died, and she died, according to everything I read, childless, unmarried, which was surprising to me. A woman at that time, I had thought, would be married and have children by the time she was 37. A stereotype, I know, but I did see a connection between Harriet Quimby and Christine Chubbuck, who had also died childless and unmarried—but at 29.

M: Harriet Quimby was different than the majority of women at the time….

D: She was independent, strong-willed, ambitious. She wrote for Hollywood, she wrote articles for magazines, and she wanted a career in aviation. She was on her way to solidifying that career when she died tragically, under mysterious circumstances.

M: How much research did you do to write “Harriet” in particular?

D: A significant amount. I went to the library and checked out books on early aviation…the one that ended up being the most helpful was a Time Life book…It was helpful mostly because of the pictures, which gave me a better sense of what it was like then, how people dressed, how they might have interacted. Taking in those pictures I got a better sense of being there, and this strong sense of time and place helped me to write “Harriet”.

M: You mentioned you received an e-mail from a stranger shortly after “Harriet” was published in The Harrow….

D: Yes. He wasn’t a descendant of Harriet Quimby but rather of William Willard, Harriet’s passenger on that tragic day of July 1, 1912 and a key figure in the story. I was surprised and touched when this descendant, William Willard’s great-great grandson, wrote me to say how much he liked the story and to ask if I had found any further information on his great-great grandfather through my research. We exchanged e-mails, and I found out more about William Willard. He too has a fascinating—and sad—history.

M: Well, David, we appreciate you taking the time to give us some insight on your process for “Harriet”. Until next time…

D: That would be July 15th.

M: July 15th it will be.

Macromere: The protagonist of He Who Shall Remain Shameless is named David Michael Ewald, which just happens to be your name too. From the outset did you intend the novel to have this metafictional aspect? 

David: It’s not really metafiction, because I’m not the David Michael Ewald in this novel. The David Michael Ewald in this novel is younger than me, for one, and he has more hair on his head than I have. We have a similarity in that we’re both tall, but beyond that….I was never in a bike accident like the one he mentions, nor did I ever work for a company in San Diego the way he did before he embarked on his series of missions to save or somehow help the deceased. Not to mention, if I discovered my cellphone could fly and hover and shoot lasers and talk in a British accent, I’d react differently. I’d run away.

M: So…this protagonist is a fictional creation.

D: Most definitely fictional. There are plenty of other David Michael Ewalds out there, and who’s to say some of them aren’t fictional too? We can only go on what the Internet gives us, unless I move to North Carolina and replace the David Michael Ewald who’s living there now. But I wouldn’t want to do that. I like living here in Denver.

M: But you are mentioned in the novel….

D: A few times. “That little-known writer who lives in Denver,” I believe the Meritocrat puts it in the fourth story, “David”, which is also about another David Michael Ewald—only this David Michael Ewald is no longer with us in the flesh, unfortunately.

M: So you are something of a character in He Who Shall Remain Shameless.

D: Not really. I never make an appearance. I set about writing He Who Shall Remain Shameless with the intention of keeping myself out of it as much as possible. I succeeded.

M: Well. This really has been an informative interview sesh, David. Thanks for dialoging with us today.

Audio Reborn!

Macromere: Um…We see the Audio page is back up on your website.

http://davidmichaelewald.com/audio.html

David: It’s back all right. My wife, who reminds me often of why she’s my better half, asked me why I’d taken the page down in the first place (she doesn’t go to this site). I explained to her that almost all the stories had undergone significant revision since the recordings, including the one I’ve just made available once more, “Arthur”. But “Arthur” isn’t altered as heavily as many of the other stories, and it really is some of the best work Matt Gunnison did. How can his version of “Sweet Arthur Conley” not win over listeners?

M: “Arthur” is the eleventh story out of fourteen, though….

D: I admit it does come a bit late in the narrative, but it’ll still give listeners a good idea of what the book is about, a good feel for the material, the style, all that. As my wife pointed out, it can’t hurt to put up one recording, and even though the final version of “Arthur” has new material not in the recording, listeners can still enjoy Matt’s narration—not to mention his singing—and then purchase the e-book for the full, unabridged, final version.

M: Speaking of the e-book, the release is close….

D: Very close. A few days away at most, right?

M: That’s right. We’ll put up a new post when it’s out on Amazon and B&N, and elsewhere.

D: Great. Looking forward to it.