Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.

Rachel: I’m a huge fan of Jordan S. Carroll’s nonfiction, so it’s super exciting to see him venture into fiction as well. Especially because it’s about pro wrestling, which is inherently hilarious to me. Please tell our readers about it!

J.S: My short story “Romeo Popinjay vs. Iron Hans in the Beauty and the Beast Match You Won’t Want to Miss” is a fantasy narrative about a professional wrestling promotion in an early modern world where some of humankind’s ancestors or cousins have evolved in alternate directions. It’s also a bit of a buddy comedy about a big hairy wrestling savant teaming up with a vain heel who prefers to go it alone. 

Rachel: I need it. What inspired you to write this story?

J.S: I’d been reading books about the evolution of human cognition by authors such as Gary Tomlinson and Merlin Donald, and they led me to imagine a hominin species evolving more-than-human powers of imitation and rehearsal or “mimetic skill” instead of developing symbolic thought.

Originally it was going to be a folk horror story in which some wildmen of the forest who’ve been forced to do repetitive manual labor join in solidarity with humans to start a peasant revolt. But then I thought about the time I saw Mojo the monkey fight at an SOS Pro Wrestling show here in Tacoma. He was amazing. That’s when I realized that my wildmen would make really good pro wrestlers.

Rachel: Is there a visual image—a painting or a photo—that inspired you?

J.S: For Iron Hans, I was really inspired by videos of George “The Animal” Steele gnawing on turnbuckle pads. Romeo Popinjay’s wrestling persona draws on performances by Gorgeous George, the pretty boy wrestler who audiences loved to hate. I tried to find YouTube clips of many of the moves I wrote about. I watched a lot of Wrestling with Wregret. Other inspirations included Scott Beekman’s Ringside: A History of Professional Wrestling in America and Josephine Riesman’s Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America.

Rachel: Ringmaster in particular has been on my TBR list forever, having heard her interviewed on a number of podcasts. But anyway. Why do you write? What drives you?

J.S: Writing is a way for me to make sense of things. Plus it’s fun to have a good excuse to read and think about a lot of topics that I would not have otherwise considered.

Rachel: What’s the secret to editing?

J.S: I read things out loud to myself—even nonfiction. I also spend an inordinate amount of time cutting prepositions.

Rachel: So far I’ve enjoyed everything that you’ve come out with (and I suspect our readers will too). What’s next for you?

J.S: I’m writing a novel titled Fellow Creatures. It’s a gothic picaresque adventure about a shapeshifting ghoul. He’s bouncing around a world that recalls 17^th century Europe, but all the wars of religion are fought over the best method of preserving the dead to ensure that they can be resurrected intact on judgement day. Needless to say, being a cannibal makes his life difficult. I don’t want to give away much more, but the title is a phrase often used by religious radicals such as the Diggers and the Ranters around the time of the English Civil War.

You can find “Romeo Popinjay vs. Iron Hans in the Beauty and the Beast Match You Won’t Want to Miss” here. I post about new publications and projects here.