Nic Kelman interview.

The world of literature is a lot like the pool at a fat camp. Most people wouldn’t mind getting wet, but no one wants to take their shirt off and jump in. Once in a while, a brave soul will clamber the high dive and cannonball, making a splash (recent authors like Stephen Chbosky and Stephenie Meyer splashing higher than others).

Author Nic Kelman drops into the water like a depth charge, rupturing the waters harder than anyone else, yet so far under the surface it’s almost unnoticeable to typical onlookers. Though this important event might be ignored for the most part, anybody trying to make a splash will most likely land in Kelman’s leftover shrapnel. This man’s publications can cause torrents that any other author attempting to tackle similar subjects will no doubt be thrown into, and compared against. Harshly.

Living in New York City, he writes and teaches gifted and autistic high schoolers. His works, both literature and photography, have appeared in multiple magazines, reviews, and anthologies. The author of two published books, Nic was gracious enough to answer a few questions for us here at The Oddnotes.

ChrisGrose: Does your talent have to do with how passionate you are about the material you choose to write on? I'd imagine very few people would try tackling a subject like you did with your second book, Video Game Art, and expect to be taken seriously by scholars and critics when they assess your statement that video games are a form of art.
Nic Kelman: I always think a writer has to be passionate about their material - if you're not interested in it, why would someone else be? When I'm working with students, I always tell them to write whatever evokes an emotional reaction of some kind in them - it could be something sad, something funny, something that makes them angry - but it has to make them feel something.  It's that material which will have the same impact on their readers.

ChrisGrose: You make the claim that video games are following in the historical footsteps of literature and movies. Could you explain that?
Nic Kelman: I think Video Game Art goes into this point in a lot of detail, but basically I think the very format of video games - IE a series of increasingly difficult obstacles to overcome culminating in a final goal - embodies in a very direct way the narrative structure of most movies and the oldest forms of literature. I think this has a lot to do with games power over us.

ChrisGrose: I'm sorry, I know it really has nothing to do with anything, but I've been recommending your books to my friends, and one of them is a HUGE Metal Gear Solid fanboy. He picked it up because he saw that Snake and Abe share the cover, and while flipping through found that there were no pictures of anything Metal Gear. Amidst complaints, he asked if you designed the cover or not, and why you would put him on it.
Nic Kelman: Getting material for the book was actually incredibly difficult. Many companies had never been involved in a book before and didn't understand what we were doing. I asked more or less everyone for material and more or less everything we ended up with was in the book. Basically, we were lucky to even get the rights to use one single Metal Gear image...so it wound up on the cover...of course...

ChrisGrose: I read Video Game Art in one sitting, before I even made it home from the bookstore. I may not have if I hadn't seen it open up with the image from "Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne". I thoroughly believe it was one of the most undeservingly overlooked games in recent memory. It helped usher the trend of cel-shading on character models and told the story in a very interesting manner, but it wasn't as far out there as, say, "Killer7". I was glad to see that the game wasn't overlooked by everyone else on the planet. Did you enjoy the game, or did you choose it solely because it best represented the subjects covered in the book?
Nic Kelman: Again, we used what we could get our hands on, so there were certainly other games with similar design work that we simply never received material for, but yes, I did think Nocturne had some outstanding designs and that is why I tried to track them down to begin with.

ChrisGrose: Your first novel, girls, was begun as your thesis at Brown. What drove you to write such an unprejudiced account into the thoughts of men, and was the work began with that ideal in mind?
Nic Kelman: There's actually an essay about this very question in the back of the paperback version, but basically I had seen a friend of mine go through one of the very, very short (one sentence!) episodes in the book and that's where it began - with that sentence. The rest of the book basically built on that and grew out of it.

ChrisGrose: You started a theater company?
Nic Kelman: While I was in college, yes. We did a number of absurdist plays - it was lots of fun!

ChrisGrose: I feel like this begs an explanation: You conducted research on the effects of orgasm on problem-solving in males. How was the, uh…research…conducted?
Nic Kelman: Using the honor system!


ChrisGrose: Literature, theater, video games and cognitive science; is there anything you aren't interested in?
Nic Kelman: Um...sports?

ChrisGrose: You do photography, you write fiction, and you keep The X-Men Encyclopedia in your personal library. Have you ever given any thought to making a photographic novel?
Nic Kelman: I haven't actually...but that's a really interesting idea! Thank you...

ChrisGrose: You've gone to several prestigious universities, you've won countless awards for your writings, and you teach gifted and autistic high school students in your spare time. Is it hard being so awesome?
Nic Kelman: lol...

Kelman graduated from MIT with a major in Brain and Cognitive Science and a minor in Film and Media Studies. A man after my own heart, he did work at the NYU Film School and started The Midnight Players, a theater troupe that contributed all proceeds to charity. Still not satiated with his education, he went to Brown University for a Creative Writing program and his thesis was given the James Assatly Award for graduate fiction.

Check out http://www.girlsbook.com/excerpt.html for a look at his incredible novel, girls, and keep an eye out for more from Nic Kelman.


-Chris “Sharp on the Outside” Grose.