Interview: David Simmons on Fetty on the Switches

(Interview conducted by Adam Allen)

CEMETERY DANCE: Your first short story collection, Fetty on the Switches, comes out at the end of June. Are you excited for the release?

DAVID SIMMONS: Yeah, I’m hype about the release. I’m really grateful to be working with Clash. That’s somebody I wanted to work with. I’m glad they took on this project.

Fetty is slang for fentanyl, the drug, you know. And switches is a binary switch or a binary trigger device that can turn a semi-automatic gun into a fully automatic handgun.

The reason I went with Fetty on the Switches is that, to me, horror doesn’t always have to be supernatural and stuff like that. I hear about a seizure of, like, a couple kilos of fentanyl, like a couple miles down the street from where I live. That’s crazy because if you put that in the water like Batman, you could f*** a whole neighborhood up. Feel me? So it’s just crazy that it’s right there. And then you got Glock switches, which means that somebody could kill your whole family when they’re intending to hit one target, because when you put a switch on a gun, it sprays in an arc uncontrollably.

So to me, that’s horror. Horror ain’t always got to be like werewolves. It can be, and I like that too. But like, I felt like those two things kind of encompass the type of horror that I write.

How did the title story come about, and how do you approach writing a short story in general?

All my short stories, unless they come from something that happened in real life and I want to build around it, I mean, even if they do come from something in real life, because a lot of them do, I always think about my opening bars. I always think about it like a rap song. My opening line of every short story that I write has to be crazy. When I write it, it has to be something where I picture, if I’m at a reading with a large amount of people that you know or a festival and I’m standing up. I’ve got to have a picture of myself yelling the first line of the story all animated and the audience is like ok we have something here

That’s how I got this short story collection with Clash. Christoph heard me reading at Voidcon a few years ago. It was the first time a lot of people had seen me read live, because it was the first time I had really read live in front of any kind of crowd. And there were a lot of horror people there, like Brian Keene, and just different people, and they had never seen me. So I read this story called “Whole Time,” that’s in the collection, right? Christoph came up to me, and he was like, have you sold that yet? And I was like, nah, let’s rock.

I feel like stories should be able to be performed and finished in their entirety. So that’s kind of my goal when I write it.

 

Funny that you say you approach that first line like a rap song, because I was wondering if Fetty on the Switches had a soundtrack, what would be on it?

I think it depends on the short story. That is a really good question. I don’t know, some stories in that collection to me feel like they’re from different places and I would like the music to be local to those places. So “Whole Time” is a story that takes place in Southeast DC, so I would like some artists from that area like Rare Essence, Junkyard, TCB, UCB. It gives it a presence.

What type of tracks? Man, I don’t know. I think it depends on the short story. That is a really good question. I don’t know, some stories in that collection to me feel like they’re from different places, and I would like the music to be local to those places. So “Whole Time” is a story that takes place in Southeast DC, so I would like some artists from that area, like Rare Essence, Junkyard, TCB, and UCB. It gives it a presence.

Some of those stories are written in the east side of Baltimore, so I would like some east side Baltimore artists like Young Moose and Soda. And someone in South Baltimore, like GGL Slick, he’s from South Baltimore. So I would pick local artists.

Do you listen to music when you’re writing?

When I’m writing? Nah, because I write on my phone when I’m trying to wrangle my daughters. Yeah, don’t ever write on no laptop or nothing like that. I write on my phone in Google Docs one-handed. And sometimes I write whole stories in talk-to-text, but it don’t get my accent right. So I have to go back and fix it all the time. But it don’t matter. I get it done.

I don’t know how, I try to sit in front of a computer, but there’s just too much going on, you feel me? When I was writing Eradicator, my wife might be like, we gotta go heat the bottles up. And I’d be like, all right, bet. And then she’ll be like, did you heat the bottles up yet? And I’ll be like, f***, cause I was standing in the kitchen, you know, writing on my phone.

So what are you working on now? What can we look forward to after Fetty on the Switches?

Well, I’m working on something a little bit different. I’ve been talking for a while with a friend of mine, a writer named Brian Alan Carr, and there was this point of my life that he said sounded pretty interesting, and I should write about it, right? And so I’m kind of working on this, like I won’t call it autobiographical, but it’s a true part of a time period that happened in my life, but also layered into it is all this weird supernatural stuff where Baltimore is getting taken over by this Peter Thiel-type dude who’s turning everything into a giant parking lot. So yeah, it’s kind of a weird, trippy book. So I wouldn’t even know how to classify it, but it’s not quite horror yet.