Interview with Chris Scott
storytelling, fatherhood, mystery
Chris Scott is right there, reflected in that sidewalk mirror! He writes weird fiction, contributes to the beautifully absurd ClickHole, and teaches elementary school in DC. He’s written some very odd and fascinating stories (like “Inside It Now” in ergot.) already in his relatively short time in this publishing ecosystem. Please read on to get to know him better! And you can also find him here.
Give us an overview of your Chris Scott writing journey, please.
I’ve always loved storytelling and have done creative writing intermittently throughout my life, though without much discipline. I was an English major in college and took a couple creative writing courses that I loved, but didn’t really stick with it after I graduated, outside of some fiction I kept mostly to myself or occasionally self-published on personal blogs, Medium, etc. I started writing jokes and headlines for ClickHole about 7 or 8 years ago, and that was the bulk of my creative output for a long time, though my heart was still very much in experimenting with short fiction. Occasionally I’d share stuff I’d written with friends who were published writers, and the feedback was good enough that I began to wonder if I could ever get published, too. I finally bit the bullet in 2024, when I made it my New Year’s resolution to place just one short story somewhere -- literally anywhere. This seems in retrospect like a low bar to clear, but I knew next to nothing about this process, and had no idea if anything I wrote would appeal to anybody beyond supportive friends and family, who I strongly suspected were just being nice to me. My first published piece was “Teddy Bear Pancake” in Weird Lit Magazine, and much to my amazement it went on to be selected for Best Small Fictions this year. That encouraged me to keep writing and submitting to different magazines, and I’ve been really thrilled with the response. Starting out, this had felt kind of daunting and foolish, but it’s a risk I’m glad I took.
You often start with a genre or trope and go somewhere quite unexpected with it. One of my favorite examples of this is “Elsewhere.” You seem to enjoy and to write work that could be classified as literary as well as work that could be classified as sci-fi or horror. What’s the deal with that?
Most short fiction I write begins as a really striking or compelling image I get stuck in my head and kind of obsess over for a period of time. Usually the reason that image ended up lodged in my brain in the first place is because there’s something unsettling or surreal about it that I can’t quite reconcile, and that’s exactly the kind of thing that tends to lend itself to some species of horror or speculative fiction. So it makes sense that a lot of what I write would fall into those categories, but not everything. I try not to overthink it or worry about genre too much. I just try to write what feels right to me, draft and edit it to a place I’m excited about, and then find the best home for it. I’ve always loved horror, so I’m happy when any of my stories end up as straight horror or horror-adjacent, but I’ve discovered a lot of them would be considered more literary fiction, as you said, with some surreal or unusual element.
Many of your stories grapple with death and evil in a philosophical sense. How much do these things scare you? Is there anything that scares you more?
Since becoming a father six years ago, I’ve found pretty much all of my fears and anxieties are centered around that, and that pops up in my writing from time to time. Death is not really something that scares me on a personal level, but it has always fascinated me philosophically. The mystery of it, how different religions account for it, how that’s reflected in our lives culturally. Though maybe it scares me more than I let on. One thing I’ve noticed since I started writing and publishing in earnest last year is how certain themes appear and reappear, without my realizing it. Things that I didn’t know I was obsessing over, but I guess I clearly was. Nuclear war, for example. Frayed relationships, people vanishing. I suspect after I’ve done this for a few years I’ll be able to identify my fears pretty easily just by skimming my own body of work. I’ll let my therapist know.
A famous teaching story I’m fond of is “The School” by Donald Barthleme. Have your experiences as an elementary school teacher inspired your fiction writing?
Working closely with young children and having a child of my own, I spend a lot of time trying to see the world from their perspectives. There’s a Zen concept called shoshin, or beginner’s mind, which is more or less just an open, clear mind free of all the habits and preconceptions we clutter it with over the years. That’s been tremendously useful for me creatively. Adults spend our days on autopilot. Everything is preconditioned and routine at a certain point in our lives, but for kids it’s all so new, scary, and exciting. Getting to live vicariously through my son, for example, is a real gift. I’m forced daily to (re)consider concepts and conditions I’ve taken for granted for decades. My story “I Don’t Know What Wind Is” is actually based on this. I was in a horrible mood one morning, all out of sorts about some boring grown-up thing, and out of nowhere he just asked me very sincerely, “What is wind?” It had this cleansing mental effect on me, like a Zen koan. It just completely reset my attitude, having to think about this for the first time in who knows how long. Just that small glimmer of earnest curiosity from him. Some version of this -- not just with knowledge, but with mood and feeling -- happens regularly when I’m teaching and parenting. Beginner’s mind, I think, is a great headspace to go into a new story. I’m sure even without realizing it, I’m relying on that perspective constantly when I’m writing.
When you write a story that poses some sort of riddle, like Three Middle-Aged Men Telling Scary Stories Around a Campfire (or actually, like all stories everywhere), do you like knowing exactly what everything means? Or do you like being partially on the outside of your own stories?
I don’t need to know exactly what everything means, but I never write anything without a very clear idea of what it means to me. Which isn’t the same thing as saying “There’s a definitive answer embedded here that everyone should be on the same page about.” I’m not writing math equations. A few people have asked me about “Three Middle-Aged Men Telling Scary Stories Around a Campfire,” specifically the little riddle at the end of it, but if I wanted to leave the reader with a clear answer, it would be spelled out. There’s a specific reason why it’s left where it’s at, and the effect I want it to have on the reader, but I’d prefer to keep that kind of stuff to myself. I’m really intentional about this, because I never want to waste anyone’s time, or frustrate the reader. I have my own ideas about what’s happening, but I want the reader to have their own ideas too.
Who are some artists who have inspired your writing?
I’ve thought about this before, and I honestly don’t think any writer or artist has had a bigger impact on my storytelling than Chris Van Allsburg, the children’s book author and illustrator. I was really obsessed with his work when I was a kid, not just his most popular books like Jumanji or The Polar Express, but The Stranger, The Widow’s Broom, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick all come to mind. He is such a fantastic storyteller, and such a deeply weird guy, and his illustrations were always so haunting, beautiful, and creepy. They infiltrated my dreams. Just about everything I write can be traced back to him. Then, as I got a little older, Ray Bradbury was the big one. Rod Serling. Old episodes of Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits at my grandparents’ house. All these little mysteries had a vice grip on my imagination from an early age, and their shadows loom large over everything I write. I like writing but I love storytelling, and these storytellers are who made me love doing this.
Do you have any intense interests aside from reading and writing?
I teach gardening and cooking, so I spend a lot of time outside growing food, camping, hiking, biking. I love our National Park System and would like to visit every national park before I die.
What would you like to be asked? Please answer!
What inspired you the most, creatively, in 2025?
I listen to a ton of ambient music when I read and write, because lyrics are too distracting and jazz tends to be a little too kinetic for me to focus while it’s playing. One of my favorite contemporary ambient artists, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, released a breathtaking album this year called Gift Songs. I would say the majority of fiction I wrote this year was created with this album playing in the background. I find that listening to his music, along with some other contemporary ambient musicians like Chihei Hatakeyama from Japan and Federico Durand from Argentina, always puts me in the right headspace to write, and I highly recommend it to other writers who are seeking inspiration.