AD: I always wondered where you came up with the title. You may have told me already, but if you did, I’ve forgotten… JS: That name came about as a sort of epiphany in the sudden quest for a new title, remember? I was really attached to my original title… Savage Grace was originally […]
read moreJonathan Shaw
AD: When did you know there was really no turning back? JS: What? You mean there’s no turning back? Shit. (Laughs)… I guess at some point somewhere along the way as I surrendered more and more to the whole process, I just sort of realized one day that I was on some sort of journey […]
read more>AD: His publisher being Heartworm, of course, right? JS: Right. But I had no idea what that was at the time. I just said‘why not?’and then the next thing ya know I get this email from this guy Wes who’s the owner of Heartworm Press and he tells me he wants to publish all this […]
read moreAD: Where Narcisa “stormed into your life…” JS: Right… I remember one night this friend of mine, Inger Lorre, another recovering junkie and a real wild punk rock legend in her own right was hanging out at my place in Hollywood and she asked to read the Scabvendor book I was working on… I gave […]
read moreAD: Is that what you’re talking about when you say in the introduction that Narcisa “stormed into your life.” Could you elaborate any further? JS: Well, cuz it’s really strange how that all just came about. A strange, synchronistic confluence of events… In retrospect it seems like some sort of Destiny shit… When I […]
read moreThe following excerpt was taken from the rewrite of Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes The Love House Hotel was infested with roving herds of frightening aging transvestites and their shifty looking tricks. The ‘girls’ there were some pretty surreal creatures. Like a bunch of pot-bellied truck drivers stumbling around the narrow maze of dark halls in their ratty, cum-stained […]
read more“Hysteria is a natural phenomenon, the common denominator of the female nature. It’s the big female weapon, and the test of a man is his ability to cope with it.” Tennessee Williams
read moreAD: I know where and when you started writing it, from an outside perspective anyway, because I was around when Scabvendor made the transition into what is now Narcisa, but personally, at what point did you start entertaining the idea of actually writing Narcisa as a completely separate project? You said something just before about […]
read moreAD: What about the more recent part of the process? The days and nights you spent in over the months of sitting down and writing up to the point where the first rough edition of Narcisa was turned in for publication with Heartworm? JS: Yeh, well what I described before was only the first stage […]
read moreAD: So how did these old journal entries wind up turning into a whole novel for Narcisa? Describe the process for that… JS: Ok, well, as you know, it all started when I began working on this big long memoir, Scabvender- Confessions of a Tattoo Artist. I’d been working on that book for years, on […]
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