Christoph Paul’s Bizarro World

by Christoph Paul

I keep getting asked a lot what is “Bizarro”, but I never intended to be part of the genre or even knew what it was until I put out my third book “Great White House”.

 Working with an editor who lived out in the hills of Vermont, and myself isolated in the Bronx, I started writing strange short pieces to get my writing confidence going again; they were a combo of surrealism, satire, and having fun with genres and turning them on their head.

I was looking for a renewed confidence in my writing as I started as literary novelist and finished an ambitious literary novel for my thesis at Wilkes called “Prophet”, inspired by Dostoevsky and Camus.

 After giving it my all, I ended with an ambitious and beautiful book that was still a few years away from being ready from publication. I was disappointed but instead of giving up I went a different route for inspiration and started getting back into lower art like Grindhouse 70’s films, Horror, and heavy-handed satire and followed that love of lower art and put them into fiction as these stories started to flow out of me.

 They were not post-modern or academic and no reputable literary journal would or want to publish them, but they were entertaining. I started to post them on my blog and people thought they were really funny and I got a small following and caught an editor’s eye.

 The editor and I did not know what to call what I was writing and even though I enjoy being pretentious, ‘Christophian’ was not going to cut it. We didn’t know how to market what I was writing but the stories and strangeness kept coming and we just embraced it but struggled to market them.

 I started to get on a roll writing in this very playful style mix of Gindhouse, humor, satire, and decided to put all together in longer form as a novella about a shark attack on the white house, which I ended up cowriting with a Wilkes alum who goes by the author name Brody Thomas. The idea was so ridiculous, but we loved it and it made us laugh. I realized I had one golden rule: the more ridiculous the idea the tighter the writing and structure.

He was a screenwriter and our goal was to make it feel like a “South Park” movie on the page. We wanted (and still do) to be a movie, but loved the idea of a movie being in book form and just putting it out ourselves under my own imprint The Only Rx Press named after my old band.

 As I started to promote it with a marketing budget of a seventh grade science project using guerrilla marketing tactics of social media and a single poster of the book cover, it ended up exposing me to an audience where someone told me on Twitter, “Hey, I like Great White House it is a cool Bizarro novella.”

Happy to get praise I googled “Bizarro” and saw a writer come up I’ve known and liked for a while named Carlton Mellick III; I’ve been a fan of his for years but I never thought about his genre but I saw there were many others like him and realized that I was part of a genre across the other side of the country that was thriving in Portland and didn’t even know it existed.

 It’s weird (not just the genre) but I prided myself on being independent and just doing my own thing but I really loved finding and being part of a genre; I even went to BizarroCon and it was like Wilkes but everyone was way weirder but in a good way.

 What was interesting about the bizarro crowd was they speak and act very much like screenwriters: very interested in structure, story telling, 3 acts, and of course a great pitch and title. I saw book deals get made there at the Con and now seeing them published as I write this blogpost.

 I think that is what’s so appealing and what this genre is really about, it is like a bunch of lovers and film makers of the cult movie section on Netflix who found their way into literature.

 If you had to label Bizarro that’s what it is: a cult-like B-Movie done with a lot of craft and a fast moving entertaining structure into prose.

 It follows the same rules of good writing: great character development, settings that serve the story, and a structure that is tight and moves usually at a film-like pace.

 The only difference is it is really weird, but weird in a very great way.

 I feel very at home with the genre and it’s ok if it’s not taken seriously or will not win a Booker Prize, it’s getting young people to read books which is the best award an author can ask for these days.

 

 

Christoph Paul is an award-wining humor/Bizarro author of five books of prose and poetry and the singer/songwriter of rock band Moses Moses. He received an MA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University. He has managed an adult video store and worked for the Department of Labor which he found both to be morally dubious. He is currently working on his 6th book.

International Win for Colum McCann

Wilkes creative writing program advisory board member Colum McCann has received international recognition for his novel, Let The Great World Spin (Random House). The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is the largest and most international prize of its kind. McCann’s was selected from a shortlist of ten nominees and brings home a literary prize worth 100,000 euro (approx $139,000 USD). More than 160 titles were nominated by 166 libraries worldwide. 

Let The Great World Spin opens with a true-to-life historical event, when Philippe Petit walks a tightrope nestled between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. It is the life happening beneath the tightrope that McCann explores, using the shared experience to branch out into an homage to the city and its people within it. 

In The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Jonathan Mahler credits Let The Great World Spin as “one of the most electric, profound novels” he has read in years. USA Today praised McCann’s novel, calling it “Stunning… [an] elegiac glimpse of hope…It’s a novel rooted firmly in time and place. It vividly captures New York at its worst and best. But it transcends all that. In the end, it’s a novel about families – the ones we’re born into and the ones we make for ourselves.” 

McCann is a contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Paris Review. His short film Everything in This Country Must, directed by Gary McKendry, was nominated for an Oscar in 2005. McCann’s other works include the bestsellers Zoli, This Side of Brightness, and Dancer.