I caught up with Francesco Dimitri, the author of several critically-acclaimed fantasy works including L’eta sottile, Pan, and Alice nel paese della vaporità. This year his 2007 novel La Ragazza dei miei Sogni was optioned for a film by Draka, a Rome-based production company. Francesco spoke to me about his experiences documenting the Raelian cult and shared his thoughts on magic and the publishing world.

On Cults

The Custodian: I’m really excited, and I’ve seen a couple of your works on Amazon. I know you have some non-fiction stuff and some fiction stuff—do you have a few graphic novels as well?

Francesco: Yes. I do nonfiction, fiction, graphic novels and digital writing—I’ve also been writing for magazines in the past but I don’t anymore.

C: Didn’t you also work as a journalist ?

F: Actually one of my most intense experiences was when I studied a UFO cult for more than a year.

C: Which cult?

F: The Raelians. It was interesting because they knew I was shooting a documentary with my crew and it took more than a year to get their trust and more than a year to actually make the study. At one point we were closed in with them in Slovenia for a week.

C: So were you actually living with them for a year?

F: No, no, just following them for a year and living with them for a week . They are a comparatively benevolent cult so they don’t ask you for all your money or stuff like that—they just ask you to pay a yearly fee, quite reasonable too, and then obviously you buy the prophet’s books and the prophet’s t-shirts…

C: So was he [the prophet Claude Vorilhon] on campus?

F: Yes he was always there—every morning he gave a three-hour long speech. He was unbelievable—you need to be charismatic to pull something off like that. He was dressed in a sort of Star Trek suit as white as the pope—and I’m not making this up! And he says he’s Jesus Christ’s half-brother. But again, you don’t see ‘brainwashing’ in action, you see a charismatic guy and people believing what he says.

C: A suit especially put together by an Italian designer [laughs]!

F: Yeah but no one could approach him. Nobody could even talk to him except for me and my colleagues. What was strange was that after we met him, we became very popular with the ladies. I guess because we had been in the presence of the prophet. Of course we were professionals so we didn’t take advantage of the situation.

C: That’s unreal.

F: I remember that every night there was a party and the prophet would sit there in his suit with his wife and four or five topless women feeding him grapes. But again, there was no ‘brain-washing’ that I could see. Raelians believe their ’prophet’ is the half-brother of Jesus Christ. As long as they don’t hurt anybody, and for what I saw they didn’t, they should be free to go on without being ridiculed. A sane sense of humour is important, but it also important to respect other people’s beliefs. Say they’re right, I don’t want to piss off aliens.

C: I always wonder about how that works—I mean you look back at Moses and Muhammed and how they built these big religions and I guess this is a way to study how that possibly occurred.

F: Yeah time changes a lot. Back then it was comparatively easy to be a legend, with just the right amount of luck: mystery was everywhere, because communication was slower, and even less reliable than it is now… Today you need to be damn clever to build a shroud of mystery with the internet and technology.

On Magic

C: Would you call yourself a practitioner?

F: These days I love the notion of pagan, in the stronger romantic sense of the word – and I mean ‘romantic’ both as an artistic stance and as a cultural position. Pagan means peasant, it comes from the Latin pagus, which is countryside. When the Romantics started using the word for themselves, they were taking back the pleasure and the pride of being outside of the borders of mainstream society—and on the other side, the pleasure and the pride of being a part of the wide world of ‘nature’ (though, of course, the definition of ‘nature’ as opposed to ‘culture’ is all but clear-cut). I love the beautiful myth of the Witch-Cult Hypothesis—but when we say it’s a myth it doesn’t meant it’s false. Once you know your history, you’re free to play with myth as much as you want to. And I’m not an historian.

C: Have you found opportunities to bring a magical or esoteric perspective to your novels?

F: I usually write very realistic novels with strong elements of magic in them. My latest novel, L’eta sottile is about learning magic. The entire book is about this young troubled man who is given the opportunity of learning magic. Not the typical magic of fantasy novels, but the magic that is deeper rooted in Giordano Bruno and the Renaissance with deeper elements of [Aleister] Crowley and Neopaganism in it.

C: Speaking of magic, I don’t know if you’ve read any Dylan Dog—I read a few stories years ago to better my Italian because one of my teachers recommended reading foreign language comics books. I was wondering if you were influenced at all by it. Did you read any when you were growing up?

F: I was, but I grew up much more on American comics, Marvel Comics, X-men all that jazz. I didn’t read so much Italian comics.

On Books and Publishing

C: What’s your opinion on the ebook market?

F: Someone says that my book Pan was for a while one of the most widely pirated books in Italy. Even though, of course, when it comes to piracy having numbers is not exactly easy.

C: How do you feel about it?

F: I remember someone else (I’m terrible at remembering names) once said that a writer’s worst enemy is not piracy: it’s obscurity. I think we are going towards a business model where people can get our stuff for free. With Pan, when I found it had been pirated, I placed posted the link to download it on my blog. I was thinking something like ‘It’s better if you get it from me than from others’, and I asked folks to buy it if, after reading it, they liked it. To be honest, most people bought it: if you trust people they will trust you back. Anyway, I read a lot of ebooks, and I love them, but I think the ebook, as every other format, has its limits.

C: Yeah there’s that idea that it’s [a printed book] something you can hold on to and put it in your library. I remember buying every single Harry Potter book with all of the beautiful illustrations and designs on the covers. Do you think that—looking forward—people will still purchase hard copy books?

F: I’m not sure. Ebooks in my opinion reached a plateau—people will still hold to paper books as well. The real danger comes not from formats but from big players like Amazon because we are seeing lots of bookshops dying. Bookshops are the only places where you can really discover books. Amazon did a great job launching the e-book as a format, and to bring books in every house; but we can’t allow Amazon to be the only player in the park.

C: Do you have any other projects you’re working on?

F: Quite a lot, but I feel like if talk about them I lose steam—I get lazy! Otherwise your brain gets the dopamine in it from talking about it, and feels like the most is done. Also, because the way you build stories when you write is very different from the way you build them when you talk.

C: Do you have any advice for up and coming authors?

F: I started writing professionally by crashing into a party.

C: [laughs] Do you mean really crashing a party?

F: I knew there was an upper class party in Rome for an important professor. At the time I was about twenty and dirt poor, but I put on my only suit and started talking on my mobile phone outside the building like I was too damn busy—a little prat that couldn’t be bothered with the peasants at security—and they let me in. I acted as if I was meant to be there and was so sure of my non-existent social position that I couldn’t be bothered. They bought it! I knew there was this important publisher there, so that’s where we met. On a more practical level, write a lot, write every day, and then write some more. Crashing into parties is no good if you can’t do the damn job.

For more on Francesco Dimitri visit his blog or follow him on Twitter.

Share this: Twitter

Facebook

