Clay McLeod Chapman is the creator of the rigorous storytelling session The Pumpkin Pie Show, and the author of rest area, a collection of short stories, and miss corpus, a novel. GYWO Editor Laura Jones recently interviewed him.

LJ: Where do you get the myriad of ideas that inspire your short stories and live productions?

CMC: The newspaper. I haven't lived in Richmond for fourteen years now -- but I still subscribe to the Richmond Times Dispatch, and it's all because of this one section called the Nations Briefs. Every newspaper has it, no matter where you go -- but there's something about the RTD's version of it that gets me every time. It's just a column of four to five super-short newspaper articles, sourced out from the AP. There's a seed for a story, if not five stories, buried in the paper each and every morning. And if you don't believe truth is stranger than fiction -- well, I've got to tell you, you should start reading the Nations Briefs. My favorite first line from one of these articles remains: A seventy-nine year old woman who held onto a rabid fox for twelve hours until helped arrived has died. No lie ...

LJ: You created a venue for performing short stories and monologue-style narratives. Did this help you learn the craft of writing plays?

CMC: The funny thing is -- and what I get ragged on a lot for -- is that the majority of things I write, whether fiction or for theatre, never have any dialogue. It's always just one person talking and talking. Yadda-yadda-yadda. With my short stories, which are all first-person narratives, I've always given myself the rule that if it doesn't sound like a one-sided conversation with the natural cadence of someone speaking to a silent scene-partner, it doesn't work as a story for me. This allows for an easy transition from the page to the stage -- so dialogue wasn't going to be but so far behind, I guess. I just resisted writing it for as long as humanly possible. But over time, specifically within the last three or five years, I've cracked open the conversation to incorporate two or more people. I just didn't want to write dialogue until I felt like it was necessary to, which makes for a leaner, more stripped-down form a dialogue.

LJ: You've written both short stories and a novel. Are short stories easier to write than a novel?

CMC: When my publisher signed me up for my first book, rest area, which was a collection of short stories, the one stipulation they gave me was that the next book had to be a novel. I was willing to give them my liver for that first book, so I said, Yeah, sure, anything you want. It really wasn't until I finally sat down and started to write my novel -- page one was a blast, page five was a blast, page ten was a blast -- that I got to page eleven and entered into the no-man's land of novel-length. I realized I had absolutely no idea how to write a novel. I'd never written anything beyond ten pages. What happens on page eleven? My solution -- and it's arguable how well this worked -- was to start over again and begin retelling the same story from a different perspective. This way, it becomes about telling the macro-story (the novel) by way of a series of micro-stories (short stories). It was an attempt to have my cake and eat it too -- a novel but in the form of thematically linked short stories.

LJ: You've done a bit of ghost writing in addition to your published works. Since your own works have a strong voice and penchant for the darker side of storytelling, do you find that writing for someone else is a challenge?

CMC: A lot of the ghost writing I've done has been for ... well, for cheesy horror movies. In a way, it's allowed my penchant for the darker side of things to seep out rather naturally. Depending on the project, the way I've approached ghost writing is to say -- How much of myself can I slip into this script under the radar? It's a challenge, and I've definitely gotten myself in trouble for trying more often than not -- but if I can subtly sneak myself into a project that I'm writing for someone else, I feel like a bit of a dirty-bird. I guess that's why I'm not ghost-writing as much now as I have in years by ... Sigh.

LJ: Do you think that acting creates ideas for better writing, and writing in turn deepens the actor?

CMC: I've heard it said a few times that the best playwrights are actors, themselves, or have had enough acting under their belts to understand what makes for a great role. I think this can be applied to all forms of writing -- fiction, poetry, the whole lot -- and not just playwriting. To be honest, having a performance element incorporated into one's fiction gives the text a certain organic life, a ghost in the machine, that unlocks itself when readers read it to themselves, or when it's read out loud. One of the best compliments is when folks say -- When I read your stories, I feel like the narrator is talking directly to me. There's just something so cool about the notion of these characters, stuck on the page, revealing themselves to the reader by way of the reader engaging the text. I've tried to make that happen by instilling a sense of voice in these narratives so that the voice leaps off the page somehow, whether in the readers' imaginations or in a performer taking on the voice of the character ...

LJ: Can you sum up your life in six words?

CMC: Lucky-as-hell, working-like-hell.

More information at www.pumpkinpieshow.com

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