Sewickley Academy Teacher and Fiction Writer Up for Bram Stoker Award

Last year,  writing teacher and author Lawrence Connolly had two books short-listed for the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Awards.   

Neither book made it to the final round, but , who has been writing fiction books and stories since the late 1970s, recently learned that his newest book, Voices, was not only short-listed again this year, but officially nominated for a Stoker. Other nominees include Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King and Peter Straub.

Connolly plans to attend the award ceremony March 31 in Salt Lake City. Dacre Stoker, great grandnephew of Bram Stoker, will preside over the ceremony. Win or lose, it's a terrific honor.

Many of the stories in Voices have deep roots in southwestern Pennsylvania. Patch recently spoke with Connolly about his stories and his knack for writing horror.

Last year, your collection, This Way to Egress, as well as your second book, Vipers, were both recommended for inclusion on the preliminary ballot for the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Awards. How is this year different from last year?

Each year HWA compiles a list of recommended books in a variety of categories, such as novel, collection and anthology. The lists tend to be pretty long. This year the story-collection category listed 21 books. By comparison, the preliminary ballot, which is the second step in the nomination process, contains about 10 books in each category. That’s as far as Egress and Vipers got, and I was pretty excited when that happened. Two books on the preliminary ballot! I figured that put the odds in my favor. One of them had to make the final ballot, right?  Alas, it wasn’t to be.

How did you learn that your book of short stories, Voices, was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award?

HWA had scheduled the official announcement for this year’s nominations on Feb. 18, a Saturday. I had writing to do that day, more than enough to keep me busy well into the evening, and I was determined not to check my email until I’d done my quota of work. But that didn’t happen. I checked first thing in the morning, and there it was. Within the hour I was receiving emails from all over and getting absolutely nothing done. It was a good day!

What does it feel like to know that authors such as Stephen King have also been nominated? 

Stephen King is one of my favorites. I started writing professionally a couple years after he made it big, and I still have a first edition of The Dead Zone containing a personal note from him congratulating me on my first sale (to the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories).

This year, King’s son, Joe Hill, is also nominated for a Stoker, as are some of my other favorites. When I got a look at that final ballot and saw all those names, I found myself recalling something Dante Alighieri wrote in The Inferno when he imagined being accepted by his betters: "And more honor still, much more, they did by welcoming me as one of their own." That's how I feel about this nomination. It's not about the competition. It's enough to be allowed to stand among the masters and be counted as a member of their band.

How did you get into creative writing? Who were some of your inspirations and how did you get into writing horror? When were you first published?

My earliest influences were the science fiction writers, primarily Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and William Tenn – who became a terrific friend and mentor when he move in up the street from me when I was living in Mt. Lebanon. Not surprisingly, my first professional sales were to science fiction publications, but I soon moved on to Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Magazine, which paid a lot better and had a massive circulation back in the early 1980s. After that came reprints in Year’s Best Horror Stories, some lucrative movie options, and a reputation as a horror writer.

Have you won other awards? What's next on the horizon for you?

I’ve had a number of stories optioned for film over the years, and I’ve done some collaboration on a project with David Slade, director of Twilight Eclipse, 30 Days of Night, and Hard Candy. We kicked around some ideas the last time I was in L.A., and I left him with a treatment that still might become something. One never knows about these things. All that’s ever certain is what’s been done, and to date there’ve been two terrific short films based on my Twilight Zone story “Echoes.” They played the festival circuit and won some impressive awards. One of them is currently available on YouTube. It’s quite good. (Here’s a link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5qYvUOuFwQ)

Currently there’s a producer in New York interested in adapting my short story “Shooting Evil, about a man who inadvertently take some photos of a vampire. No contract yet. As I said, one never knows. 

I’m currently working on some new stories with spring deadlines and a new Veins Cycle book titled Vortex, the third book in the series after the novels Veins and Vipers.

Do you teach or participate in any writing programs?

As a young writer, I learned the craft simply by reading and writing. The magazines were my classrooms, the writers my professors. I sent my first stories in over the transom with no real sense of how the odds were stacked against me. Perhaps that was a good thing, since I made my first sale within a year. More sales followed. Now here I am with a collection of the best of those published stories, and it’s nominated for a Stoker. It only took 32 years!

As for teaching in writing programs, I’m currently one of the residency writers at Seton Hill University’s graduate program in Writing Popular Fiction. I’ve been affiliated with them for 10 years, and for the last 23 years I’ve been teaching some amazing students in a Sewickley Academy course called Art of Composition. It’s all about paying forward, nurturing a new crop of artists, and ensuring that I’ll have plenty of good books to read in my retirement -- whenever that comes.