Gene Stewart
Gene Stewart lives near Omaha, Nebraska, with
his wife and their 12-legged mad scramble — three
small dogs with more enthusiasm than sense. He’s
been publishing short fiction since 1990 with a
long hiatus for illness. His work is available via
Fictamystica in print-on-demand editions. Please
keep checking fictamystica.com for new releases.
A Fictamystica newsletter is in the works, too.
Gene Stewart – What Is He Up To?
I was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, a railroad town in a valley, but after Kindergarten moved into the mountains to first Munster, then Ebensburg, the former a farm hamlet on a mountain top, the latter a county seat.
Married into the USAF and traveled all over for 21 years or so, going to Japan, Germany, and all over the states. My wife is now a contractor. We have three boys, all grown now. At the moment we’ve lived here in Bellevue, NE longer than anywhere else, ever. This holds true even for my childhood, oddly. Still feels like quarters to me.
I’ve read since age 3 and written since age 8. I take writing very seriously and consider wide, deep reading and endless writing the only genuine route to accomplishing anything of value. I write about ordinary people facing the extraordinary.
Awhile back, having kinda had it with trying and failing to conform to genre formats — inevitably sabotage crept in — I sat back and wondered if there might be a core tone or key approach I tended to take with most of, or all, my work. Something needed to change or I’d burn out, perhaps, or worse, produce desultory extruded fiction product.
I started analyzing what I wrote and a pattern reveled itself, which I reduced to a focus on writing realistically about people encountering unseen worlds or beings, then being changed, sometimes elevated or expanded, sometimes destroyed
What did I get from this analysis?
Fictamystica is what I naturally wrote. Regardless of genre trope or topos, regardless of tone or type, at core my fiction was Fictamystica, my term for Mystical Realism.
Exemplars abound, this being, turns out, quite a popular, if little-discussed, approach to literature. Whether it’s substance, style, sub-genre, or gloss is up to the reader to decide.
One of my favorites is A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsey.
Another is The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft.
Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Neil Gaiman, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Oliver Onions, Richard Marsh, May Sinclair, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, John Fowles, Arthur C. Clarke, John Barth, Anthony Burgess, Rod Serling, Alfred Hitchcock, Joseph Campbell, Pink Floyd, the Doors, M. C. Escher, René Magritte, William Turner, Edward Hopper, J. W. Waterhouse, Gustav Klimt, et alia.
All those names and more evoke at least part of what I mean by Fictamystica. They offer glimpses or vistas, peeks or peaks of worlds and beings generally unseen by our mundane gazes. They hint at vastly more than what we see as our senses filter out most of what’s there. They reveal in the twitch of a veil the changes looming over and in us, and the changes we can make in our unseen surroundings.
Combine this obsession with ekistics, the science of human settlements, and haptics, the study of how things feel to our senses, and epistemology, teleology, eschatology, and other -ologies, combine those with an obsession with sentence, paragraph, scene, and chapter, and you begin to see a gleam of a facet of my literary obsession, certainly a life’s work. It’s how my mind works.
Please accept this as an overture to a long, fruitful discussion of writing, art, and life; of Fictamystica.
Samael Gyre
Samael Gyre is an insider.
No, literally.
He’s inside me, Gene Stewart.
He may be inside us all.
He knows things that make me wince. He is my dark aspect, refined. He writes in blood. My blood, usually.
Sometimes it will be yours.
He leaves me gutted, so watch yourself.
He is more than a pen name and less than an alter.
Or maybe that’s me, an altar he sacrifices on.
Spelling changes everything.
Is it me writing as Samael Gyre, or Samael Gyre writing through me?
Call him a spirit of darkness that possesses my words. Call him a spirit of words that possesses my darkness. Either way, we aim for no compromise. Our work refuses to flinch. It explores nightmares and reveals secrets. We ransack hiding places. We know what no one admits, and says it clearly.
Samael Gyre is a shaman of the unseen in us all.
Seriously, his work bites. It can take out chunks.
Read Samael Gyre’s work not carefully so much as cautiously. He means you harm. He means to leave at least a bruise if not a wound. He means to mark you, knock you down, and leave you in the process of changing.
Toward what?
Your choice.
If you’re lucky.
