Editor's Note: This post was written by David Riser, a PhD student in English Literature at the University of Pittsburgh. David is also serving as a Graduate Student Assistant with Archives & Special Collections focusing on working with horror studies collections.
Stanley Wiater is a writer, journalist, and Bram Stoker Award winner. He has written guidebooks to the works of Stephen King and Richard Matheson; conducted interviews for a wide range of publications such as Fangoria and Cemetery Dance; and created the Dark Dreamers series (television and book), in which he published some of his extensive interviews with the creative minds that have shaped the horror genre. I am the graduate student assigned to process his collection: to inventory it, work to help preserve fragile items (like faxes and newspaper clippings), organize it, and eventually, hopefully, create a finding aid so other scholars can locate and use work from this collection. As the collection is huge, including over 80 boxes of physical papers and hundreds of cassettes of audio interviews, I have been primarily in the inventory and organization stages this year.
The work that others can do with archival materials is endless: creating histories, studying writing processes, engaging underutilized work (sometimes even discovering never-published stories and unfinished works), and learning historical context for certain texts or social movements.
Sometimes, the materials themselves seem to tell their own story. Wiater’s extensive career, which included multiple exciting projects often occurring at the same time, often tells overlapping stories through proximity. In his physical papers, innocuous folders contain fascinating, unexpected connections.
For instance, in a folder titled “SK Bangor Directions,” I found the following items: a printout of nonfiction submission guidelines for Playboy; typed and handwritten notes; copies of article pitches written by Wiater; various other magazine submission guide printouts; a newspaper clipping of a “Lifelong Learning” workshop taught by Wiater; a child's drawing; copies of correspondence with Stephen King's assistants Marsha DeFilippo and Julie Eugley; a printout of Wiater’s Stephen King interview for the Barnes & Noble website; an email from a Yugoslavian person asking for a book from Wiater; a printout of a Stephen King profile example by Mark Singer; and a printout of directions to a location in Bangor, Maine. Each item that had a date was dated between September 1998 and February 1999. Finally, the folder contained a small dead spider, which slipped out onto the table as I was leafing through various printouts.
As you may notice, only one of these items is listed on the folder. The folder itself is part of the ‘Published’ sub-series of the Stanley Wiater papers, and this box contains some of his research material, drafts, and correspondence centered around The Stephen King Universe: a Guide to the Worlds of the King of Horror, a guidebook to King’s work that Wiater published along with Christopher Golden and Hank Wagoner in 2001. We can extrapolate through correspondence and through the printout of directions that these materials relate to an event Wiater did with King. In addition to his work on The Stephen King Universe, Wiater interviewed King several times throughout his career, and Wiater’s own short story, “The Toucher,” was hand selected by King for a short story contest in 1980, which spawned a long friendship.
The other contents of this folder, such as the submission guidelines (Playboy has published numerous King articles as well as stories) and pitches, help tell a story about a working writer trying to find a home for his work. Wiater’s correspondence with Marsha DeFilippo and Julie Eugley, King’s assistants, implies future work as much as it demonstrates an ongoing relationship with the King empire. It also highlights, subtly, the work of “behind the scenes” agents in the horror community: assistants, secretaries, spouses, editors. At first encounter, I assumed the correspondence, which proposes that Wiater take DeFilippo and Eugley to dinner, was a gesture of thanks for their work. However, I was excited to see, in the very next folder in this box, that this dinner must have been part of his interview work: Wiater published “The Queens Behind the Kings” in Cemetery Dance magazine issue #31 (1999). This article highlights the role that DeFilippo and Eugley have had in both Stephen and Tabitha King’s respective careers.
Amongst these professional correspondences, the appearance of a child’s drawing—I am tentatively assuming it is from Wiater’s daughter, whose school work and illustrations occasionally appear in this collection—can further paint a picture of the working writer balancing a family, emphasizing the close proximity of his career and his personal life. Perhaps it can even be interpreted as a gesture that dissolves some of those rigid boundaries: in the horror community in particular, friendship, family, and industry ties can blend into one another. Literary communities are often both professional and intimate.
On the other hand, the email printout—Wiater has scrawled the date, the word “email” and circled the sender’s provided address—casts an international lens on Wiater’s work, as it also offers a glimpse of what it means to be a horror fan, and to love horror, in a politically unstable landscape. The fan was writing from the Republic of Serbia, then an emergent nation still experiencing turmoil after the breakup of Yugoslavia, a time in which international purchasing was limited. If Wiater was in fact able to get a book to this person, it also demonstrates the simultaneous scales of the horror community: Stephen King is perhaps the most famous horror writer of the century, and the work Wiater is producing around King’s work is for that wide audience, such as the audience of Playboy. However, this fame operates on the level of the individual, in this single person’s request for access, and one single author’s response.
And the little dead spider? Besides a real life jumpscare for the arachnophobic library worker, the little dead spider illustrates the material precarity of archival materials. Horror literature—as well as writers’ notes, personal correspondence, etc.—is often printed on cheaper paper, which disintegrates and leeches acid onto the paper around it over time. Archives utilize various preservation methods to keep materials safe, but materials are often marked before they arrive here.
Wiater’s collection in particular is eclectic. While a challenge for the archival worker tasked with inventorying, this dis-orderly order is its own kind of narrative, and is of use to multiple audiences: horror scholars and fans, budding journalists, transnational literature scholars, feminist scholars, and many others.
David Riser