BLOG Coyote Tales

Jim Bihyeh writes great horror.

We’ve run three of his stories, all dealing with Coyote, sometime Trickster, sometime Saviour, full time God, and his interactions with the modern Navajo nation. Each one has had a perfectly-realised combination of genuine horror and a sense of the world beneath the one we see, something wild and beautiful and impossibly dangerous.

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“I wrote my first stories on our crappy little IBM word processor that my Grandpa had given us, with its blue screen and constantly crashing hard-drive. I wrote stories of witches burned at the stake rising from their ashes to take vengeance, and vampires traveling in boxes hidden underneath wagon carts of medieval carnival troupes. I was mostly regurgitating different versions of the tales I’d been reading. This was when I was about 11 or 12 years old.

“The first full novel I ever read was Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot . I was nine years old and I was glad my mom never said anything about it to my grandparents. That real evil – economic, soical, romantic and moral – that was rotting that town and those people from the inside out is still so powerful to me today. I think it probably made me want to write those sort of stories – about real people facing extraordinary circumstances.

“But I always liked that experience of the short story: concisely depicting a shard of life in a dramatic and meaningful way. It always reminded me of that advice from Aristotle’s Poetics, that stories never end and they are infinite, yet when they are told they must be of ‘a certain magnitude’. You can’t show too little (that’s what novels are for) and you can’t show too much (that’s what short stories are for).

“And so I sat down and I wrote it almost exactly as it is in the collection. They say, ‘write what you know’, and so I set the story on the Navajo Reservation, where I grew up. And as I did, I connected with all of these memories of my hometown and my friends and the stories we liked to tell. It also stirred up some pretty horrible memories that I’d either put into some shallow graves or had just forgotten. They came back, too. Many led to the other nine stories in the collection.

“I’ve always been fascinated with authors who decided to build fictional universes, who admitted that everything within their subconscious, imaginative world was connected. That everything is bound together but infinite at the same time. That felt magnetically organic to me as a teenager. I first saw it in Stephen King’s fiction, interlinking the novels like Salem’s Lot with Insomnia with The Dark Tower series. Then I noticed that device in Faulkner’s creation of Yoknapatawpha County. And then in Sherman Alexie’s collection The Lone Ranger And Tonto Fistfight In Heaven , you see those character relations spread out like roots through this convincing landscape.

“That the stories would interconnect just seemed to fit, since the collection focuses on Coyote – the trickster – stepping into the modern world to misbehave. It didn’t make sense to me that he would just show up for these isolated reasons. Everything would probably develop around a wider pattern of movement, just like predators in the wild don’t just focus on one particular prey or location. They range widely and hunt imaginatively. It made sense to me that Coyote would probably do the same. The form seemed to fit the character.”

“I’ve also been researching a history of Ganado Mission in Ganado, Arizona for the past ten years. And I started a rough draft last year. It’s boxes and boxes and boxes and files and files and files of information. I’ve conducted dozens of interviews and oral histories. But I think it’s going to be worth it in the end, to help tell the story of a small town and a good people who established the first (and only) nursing school for Native women.

“I’m working on a collection of folktales based on traditional stories from the Reservation – hey, you’ve got to chase the dream right? Truthfully, my ‘dream project’ is whatever I’m working on at that time. I’ve been very fortunate (and persistence) in that I have found ways to write while also working a job that allows me to serve my community and my country, while also feeding and housing me in between writing sessions.”