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Interview with contest winner and author Robert Pogue Ziegler

By Patti Thorn, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published November 14, 2008 at 6:35 a.m.

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Robert Pogue Ziegler, 35, is a freelance journalist and copy editor who has previously published short stories in small magazines and is at work on a science-fiction novel. Ziegler lives in Paonia with his wife and son. He often writes under the pen name Robert Pogue.

Photo by Marie Griffin © The Rocky

Robert Pogue Ziegler, 35, is a freelance journalist and copy editor who has previously published short stories in small magazines and is at work on a science-fiction novel. Ziegler lives in Paonia with his wife and son. He often writes under the pen name Robert Pogue.

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And the winner is ...

If you've been following the Rocky series A Dozen on Denver — a celebration of the 150th birthday of the city of Denver and of this newspaper through locally commissioned fiction — you know that we solicited readers to come up with a story to round out our "dozen." Their mission was simple: Write a story set in Denver's future, use the words "Larimer Street" somewhere in the text and keep it to around 2,500 words.

They obliged — in droves.

Nearly 200 stories poured in, of all plots and styles. Today, we proudly announce the winner: Heirlooms, by Robert Pogue Ziegler, 35, of Paonia. Told in beautiful, mesmerizing prose, Heirlooms is the story of a woman attempting to care for her daughter in a barren and forbidding future landscape. We urge you to turn to your special supplement, where you'll find the story.

Meanwhile, we caught up with Ziegler to chat about his story, his writing life and, most important, his plans for the $500 grand prize.

How excited were you to find out that you won? You sounded so calm and collected when I called.

No, I wasn't calm and collected at all! I got your e-mail the night before saying that you had good news, so usually good news with me is like, "You got second place. We're not going to print it, but we're going to give you a hat" or something like that (laughs). ... You know, it's kind of a downbeat story. It wasn't the kind of happy, happy story that I was expecting people would want for this, so, yeah, I was quite surprised.

You mentioned that you already had this story in mind when you learned about the contest.

Yes. I was actually thinking about this story before I read about the contest, and I had imagined it (set) in this Aurora suburb, because I had spent a lot of time in Denver. I was thinking about bleak futures, which I do obsessively — all the time, really (laughs). I imagined a bleak Aurora suburb that was abandoned and had deer and rabbits running through it and coyotes and stuff like that. So the contest came around and I was already on the verge of writing that story anyway, so it was just really good timing.

Have you written science fiction before?

I started writing science fiction about a year and a half ago. ... I was writing more contemporary fiction, and it stressed me out. And I thought, "Hey, I'll write a science fiction book and that will be more fun." And now, I take it just as seriously as I took writing contemporary fiction.

I guess what intrigues me about it is that it's not often used to really look at problems with the world. In (futuristic stories), there's always some great techno fix or a world where there's unlimited energy, and nobody really talks about how that happens. Nobody is really addressing problems like global warming, (declining) oil — or not many people are, anyway. Those kinds of issues are much more interesting to me than warp drive or anything like that. It's a way to really look at problems that have to be dealt with on a cultural level but also on an infrastructure level — problems that are really difficult to deal with.

What were the problems you wanted to explore in this story?

The story takes place in the future where it's post-peak oil. It's a post-finance economy. It's a place where there's horrible disparity between classes and people are just making do with what they have, and it's very difficult. It's just a way of saying, "Hey, these things that we're taking for granted aren't things that we really should be taking for granted." These are things that we really have to address, and if we don't, it's going to be hard.

It's such a sad, bleak scenario. Do you think something like this might really be in store for us?

I hope not, and I don't think so. People are adaptable. We'll probably start making the right choices when we start feeling the right kinds of pressure. When gas hits $10 per gallon. When it costs $12 to buy a California avocado. When we start importing all our wheat and corn from Canada. When there's no more skiing anywhere south of Montana. We'll figure it out, hopefully in time.

But really, fetishizing a nasty future wasn't what made this story fun for me. It was more about imagining the community of squatters. Even though they're completely disenfranchised, they still manage to be self-empowered. They grow their own food, create their own electricity and fuel. They exist in a purely localized economy largely independent from the greater social hierarchy. To me, that's almost utopian. Not that their lives are easy, by any stretch, but ... they aren't so much the abject dregs of a collapsed society as they are the natural answer to some of its ills. They're full of heart, will and ingenuity. They're very American, in the best sense.

Did you do many drafts, or did you know where you wanted to go from the start?

I knew basically what the story was going to be about. The difficulty was in making it short. The first draft I wrote I think was over 7,000 words, so the hard part for me was actually cutting stuff.

Can you talk a little bit about your background? We know nothing about you!

I grew up in western Colorado in Paonia. Went to school both down in Durango at Fort Lewis and up in Olympia, Wash., at Evergreen State College. In Evergreen, I was very seriously studying writing, and it was something that I thought I was going to take very seriously much sooner than I did.

And so I did some freelancing. I worked at a weekly in Portland, Ore., writing about arts and culture and things like that. Then I just started moving around. I lived in Tucson for a while and Austin, Texas. I was in Massachusetts. Mostly, I was just trying to find things I like to do. I ended up working landscaping a lot and doing Web design.

I finally moved back to Colorado about six or seven years ago. It was when I was living in Boulder that I really started turning back to fiction and getting to a point where I felt like I was finally mature enough to actually build real and compelling characters. Now, I'm maybe starting to get there, and so I'm trying to get as much time out of my life to write as possible.

What kinds of things have you written?

Long ago I published a few stories in magazines. (Most) give you a letter saying, "Thanks, we like it!" (instead of payment) ...

I've written a lot of short stories, and I'm on my third novel. The first one was definitely a practice novel. The second one maybe I'll go back to, and right now I'm working on a science fiction novel. I think I should actually have a solid draft of it by December or January. When that's done, then I'll seriously try to find an agent and things like that.

What do you do to make a living?

Right now, I do a little bit of copy-editing for Web sites. I have a building over in Denver that I rent out. It's a little fourplex, and it basically pays its own mortgage plus my mortgage over in Paonia ... Basically I just try to scrape out as much time as I can to write, and that's where I am right now ...

I'm married, and I have a stepson. We all live happily up in the mountains in this funky little hippie cabin that we bought last summer. My wife's very supportive of my writing. She's very cool and very chill (laughs). She knows I could be making more money than I am and she's OK with that, so bless her.

Which leads to my last question, the one everybody who entered the contest will want to know: Any plans for spending the $500 prize money?

(Laughs.) Pay my mortgage. I mean, I'll celebrate with some of it and go out for drinks or something like that. But, yeah, there is a mortgage to pay. Not fun but real.

Patti Thorn is the Rocky books editor.

Comments

  • November 14, 2008

    4:40 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    MMcKenna writes:

    Congratulations to Mr. Ziegler; "Heirlooms" is well-written and poignant.

    As an editor in the field, I feel I should point out that Ziegler's statement that in sf stories "there's always some great techno fix or a world where there's unlimited energy" sounds like that of a person with limited exposure to contemporary science fiction literature. I'm glad he's writing sf, but I hope he's also reading it.

  • November 15, 2008

    2:24 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    RPZ writes:

    MMckenna:

    Glad you liked the story. It's definitely possible we're reading different science fiction. I'm always looking for good recommendations if you have titles or authors you'd like to point me to.

  • November 15, 2008

    4:02 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    MMcKenna writes:

    Hi Robert,
    Thanks for the response!

    There are a lot of great authors out there writing future fiction about what life will be like if the current population and environmental trends continue, about racism (or xenophobia), about class disparity, abuse of power, etc. A lot of early sf authors did focus on the concept of science solving all our problems and creating a Utopian society on Earth--after all, we were supposed to have flying cars by now, weren't we?-- but as the future arrived and it became clear that our ability to do damage evolves faster than our ability to perceive said damage and/or take corrective action, literary sf started looking at dystopian futures, while admittedly often conceiving of possible solutions (or at the very least, cool gadgets).

    Recommended Reading:

    Seeds of Change Antho (John Joseph Adams, Ed.) - This is specifically socially relevant fiction by authors whose work often tackles the issues:

    http://www.amazon.com/Seeds-Change-To...

    Great article in Locus which should also serve a recommended author list:

    http://www.locusmag.com/2004/Features...

    When you've chewed on some of this, please feel free to pitch an article to us at The Internet Review of Science Fiction (http://www.irosf.com) and tell our readers whether you think sf is doing a good job examining what kind of trouble we're creating for our kids and grandkids. It's a paying market. :)

    Thanks,
    Marti McKenna
    Aeon Speculative Fiction
    The Internet Review of Science Fiction (IROSF)

  • November 16, 2008

    10:33 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    RPZ writes:

    Wow. Thanks for the hookup, Marti. Good stuff.

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