Really fantastic Writer’s average Joes find their way through bizarre scenarios

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Everyday life. It can be difficult. Especially if you’re a character in one of Alex Irvine’s books. Not that the Orono resident’s widely read stories are about routines. They’re not. He’s interested in what happens when ordinary people face extraordinary situations – really extraordinary. Fantastic, in fact.

Irvine has been garnering national attention as a writer of stories in which “the average Joe” is confronted with preternatural beings and events that make life, well, difficult, and eventually bizarre.

His characters include Jared Cleaves, a factory worker in “The Narrows,” who finds himself a pivotal figure in a recurring supernatural catastrophe that is about to hit Detroit, and Archie Prescott in “A Scattering of Jades,” a newspaper office boy in mid 19th century New York, who discovers his life is intimately bound up with P.T. Barnum and an ancient American Indian mummy – which has come back to life.

His books, Irvine says, are about “everyday people trying to find their way.” Through mind-bending circumstances, it might be added.

“What gets me about science fiction and all genre literature,” he said in a recent coffee shop interview, “is that nobody has to work for a living. That drives me nuts. … I want to write stories about people who work for a living.”

This blending of the “quotidian” with the fantastic has gained the 37-year-old Irvine considerable acclaim.

“Alex is one of the leaders of the post-baby boom generation of science fiction-fantasy writers,” says Gordon Van Gelder, the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a long-respected magazine in the genre. “A couple of years ago, the editors of LOCUS [magazine] went around at a convention asking everyone about the future of the science fiction-fantasy field. They told me one name kept coming up, over and over – Alex Irvine.”

His recent awards are testimonies. “A Scattering of Jades” won the LOCUS Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and the Crawford Award given by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, for best first novel of 2003. It also was nominated for a Nebula Award, one of the highest honors in science fiction. His story “Gus Dreams of Biting the Mailman” was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 2004, and “Snapdragons” was nominated for a prestigious Pushcart Prize in 2003.

Real, everyday people, and who they are, constitute a “really neglected” kind of character in science fiction and fantasy literature, Irvine says.

But if everyday people are the subject, why place them in fantastic circumstances?

Fantasy and science fiction, Irvine says, are both forms of the “romance.” Not romance as in “love stories,” but as in stories that “get at their subjects by deranging something from its ordinary status or situation in the world. … The romance estranges you from something you thought you knew about, and forces you to look at it in a different way.”

Irvine points to some of Stephen King’s stories as examples. “The thing I love about Stephen King is that the worst stuff that happens – like in “Salem’s Lot’ – has nothing to do with the vampires. The vampires amplify your understanding of the characters. … [And likewise,] ‘The Shining’ isn’t about ghosts; it’s about alcoholism.”

So when Irvine’s characters are being followed around by mummies or coping with being crew members on the first expedition to Mars, the emphasis is on their everyday experiences and responses to strangeness.

What’s behind this literary energy is, perhaps not surprisingly, an everyday guy. Born in Ann Arbor, Mich., Irvine studied engineering and then theater at the University of Michigan and worked sporadically as an actor. In the early 1990s he started writing stories and attended the Clarion writers workshop, which he calls “literary boot camp for science fiction writers.”

When he was a graduate student at the University of Maine from 1994 to ’96, Irvine was on a writing roll, spending long hours with paper and pen at Pat’s Pizza in Orono, where he wrote much of “Jades.” Eventually he moved to Denver to study for a doctorate in literature and became the father of twins Emma and Ian, now 5. In the early 2000s he returned to Maine, taught at Gardiner Area High School for a year and then worked as a reporter for the Portland Phoenix, where in 2004 he won a New England Press Association award for his articles investigating the West Old Town landfill.

Last year he completed his doctorate and landed a job teaching creative writing as an assistant professor at the University of Maine.

Irvine sees writers as everyday people, too. At the Clarion workshop, “I realized they’re just people, who [write],” not high priests or priestesses with special cosmic dispensations.

“There’s nothing particularly praiseworthy about being a writer,” he says. “Not everybody can do it, but not everybody can be a mathematician either.”

“Alex’s fiction is always personal and accessible at the same time,” Van Gelder says. “For example, ‘A Peaceable Man’ was written after Alex’s dog died. The story isn’t about Alex … but the personal element of the story is there in a tangible, accessible, but not imposing way.”

The everyday writer has problems, too. Life is constantly intervening.

“I can never keep a writing ‘routine,'” Irvine says. “It’s like anything else, you run hot and cold.”

His days consist of getting up to pack the twins off to school, then attending to household and university duties until he can catch a few minutes to write. In the afternoon, Ian and Emma come home and “it’s kid Armageddon until they go to bed.” He then writes or reads until about midnight, and then it begins again.

Since writers don’t punch a clock, Irvine developed “a way of ‘going to work'” by taking his notebooks to restaurants and coffee shops.

“I became the house writer at Ruski’s in Portland. I wrote most of ‘The Narrows’ and rewrote ‘Jades,’ ‘One King, One Soldier’ and ‘The Life of Riley’ there,” he says.

“Once I tap into the vein of a story, then I can write it anywhere. At first they look at you kind of funny, then they get to know you and it’s great.”

Some of his writing time nowadays is spent at Java Joe’s in Bangor and The Store in Orono. His current projects include writing the story for a Marvel comic, “Son of Satan” due to appear in October, and a science fiction novel, “Buyout,” to be published next year. A short story collection, “Pictures from an Expedition,” is due out this month.

So, who is his most important literary influence?

Tough question. But “for my money Philip K. Dick is the great under-read American author of the 20th century. … In all his good books there’s a guy at the center who’s decent and trying to be kind and generous, and ordinary, and responsible for trying to hold everything together for the rest of us.” Especially when unreal things are happening amidst the real.

Alex Irvine’s approach to literature and reality, Van Gelder thinks, is quintessentially appropriate. “I mean, we live in a world that looks more like something Philip K. Dick imagined. In such a world, how can we define our stories except by what’s real and what is not?”

Dana Wilde can be reached at dwilde@bangordailynews.net.