What Tom Cruise Believes Instead of Freud

Somebody, it might have been BoingBoing, led me to a Wikipedia article about Scientologist space opera, the wacky cosmogony that L. Ron Hubbard foisted onto his followers. “Hubbard argued that science fiction was actually an unconscious recollection of real past lives that could be uncovered in detail through Scientology auditing,” so apparently while he didn’t believe in psychology, he did believe in the collective unconscious–Dianetics has a volcano on the cover, for example, because it’s supposed to remind us subliminally of the time 75 million years ago when Xenu brought us all to Earth, sat us around the volcanoes, and then dropped a bunch of H-bombs on us.

13 September 2005 | uncategorized |

Interview Roundup: Now Mark’s Heart Is Full

With the publication of Mark Sarvas’s interview with John Banville, The Elegant Variation has pretty much fulfilled its reason for being, and Mark can now retire from blogging. But I’m glad he won’t.

• Before she got famous on Room 222, Denise Nicholas was a theatrical activist in the civil rights movement, an experience that drives her debut novel, Freshwater Road. She talks about how her long-held dream to write about those years came to fruition after she joined a workshop led by Janet Fitch, and took the bold step of burning her diaries so as to avoid relying on them instead of her imagination.

• A bunch of first-time writers, including yours truly, got together with Dan Wickett of Emerging Writers Network to talk about how we got our deals and what we’ll be doing to convince you to buy our books. Richard Nash of Soft Skull drops by to tell us “it’s all about expectations management.” And you know what? He’s right.
  

13 September 2005 | interviews |