Interview with Author Tim Conley

Tim Conley's piece "Popular Demand" caught our attention immediately with its comically unreliable narrator but poignant commentary on human empathy. Learn a little more about the author in the interview below.

What's your favorite obscure novel or short story (a work you never hear anyone else talking about)?

I’m averse to speaking of a “favorite” (singular) because there are so many and one’s favors are never consistent, always changeable. Tor Åge Bringsvaerd’s story “The Man Who Collected the First of September, 1973” has always impressed me, for example, and I’ve never met anyone who has read it. But I could also name Stephen Dixon’s “All Gone” and Helen Weinzweig’s novel Basic Black with Pearls, and dozens of others.

Is there a book or film that significantly altered your perception of reality? 

All of the best books and films do that, by definition. The worst thing you could say about a book or film, coming to the end of it, would be “Hmm, that delightfully confirmed all of my assumptions and biases about everything.” But while I find the premise of the question untenable for that important reason, I’ll try to be obliging by mentioning what a powerful effect Lindsay Andersen’s film If… (1968) had on me when I first saw it as a teenager. It manages to feel simultaneously realistic (to an unsettling degree) and impossible.

Did you have a favorite game of make-believe as a kid? How about now? 

From where I’m standing, make-believe is the only game in town.

How is a raven like a writing desk? 

They’re both inky. 

What do you hope readers gain from reading your work? 

It will sound either arrogant or simple-minded (or both), but I suppose it’s this: reason to keep going. Art—to use the term as generally as I might—can be an enticement to live, to explore, to nourish feelings and thoughts that perhaps weren’t there before, or needed encouragement. And incidentally, science can do the same. It sounds like a tall order, certainly, but somehow it doesn’t have to be. A twitch of curiosity stirs us, rescues us from paralysis and solipsism.

Tim Conley's most recent fiction collections are Collapsible and Some Day We Will Look Back on This and Laugh. He lives amid a growing number of houseplants in St. Catharines, Ontario, in Canada.