Jenn Givhan on Representation, Creativity, and The Sacred

An interview with Jenn Givhan
by Lisa Marie Basile

Jenn, welcome to Luna Luna! I am such a huge fan of your work — and am consistently inspired by your spirit, your ideas, and your literary and personal offerings of magic. Can you tell us all about your newest—incredibly beautiful and important—work, RIVER WOMAN, RIVER DEMON?

“Like the call to write, the call to love is ever about the marginal spaces that separate and bind us—the inky place that asks us to continue revising and reimagining, tying ourselves to this life, to each other, despite or perhaps because of the pain. ”

— Jenn Givhan

Eva Santiago Moon is a budding Chicana bruja—whose bruja mother died in childbirth, so Eva was raised by her conservative and well-meaning sister Alba, who isn't interested in their cultural roots of witchcraft but instead nurtures her family in the kitchen with traditional comida. Eva deeply wants a coven and mother/sister figures who likewise practice the ancient spiritual ways of brujería and curanderisma. When we meet Eva, she is the intensely depressed mother of two magickal, biracial children, a glassworking artist who hasn’t created lately, and the wife of a rootworking, hoodoo-practicing university professor, Dr. Jericho Moon, who owns a magickal shop that Eva affectionately calls "the circus" because she met him at one of his magickal showcases under billowing circus tents.

Eva is a strong, independent Latina mother deeply invested in her cultural roots but has lost her way. While many psychological thrillers focus on rich, white women, Eva is Chicana, lives in the Southwest, and is the mother of biracial children. This story focuses on the holistic spiritual and magickal practices of BIPOC people embodied through Eva and her husband, Jericho. When we meet her, she is at one of her lowest points, suffering from PTSD, depression, and a feeling of disconnect from her roots. 

I’ve found that folks of color, particularly Latinx and indigenous communities, are often marginalized and overlooked in the media and literature (although I’m excited to see much more representation in the witching communities with the rise of brujería in the mainstream). We want to see ourselves represented across the genres and not just in stereotypical roles.

Eva is a fully fleshed-out protagonist, not trying to be a perfect wife or mother, with flaws and troubles that are not necessarily connected to her ethnicity and some that are—just as real Latinx folks in this country. She drinks and says what is on her mind but profoundly loves her family. She is a woman who has lost her way and will find it, a mother struggling to care for her family while maintaining her self-worth during a terrifying murder investigation.

We’ve been told to believe that darkness within ourselves, any manifestation of shadow, is our enemy, but Eva’s dark path as a bruja is the dark night of the soul (la noche oscura del alma) that leads her to deep truths and understanding that will embolden and strengthen her if she can trust herself. We need to listen to our inner voice and our ancestors’ wisdom and not let ourselves be gaslit or steered off course by society or those with skewed or selfish agendas. This story is about believing in oneself and trusting the support system one has created. As Eva comes to understand—she is the spell. Her magick is not external but internal—she's had it all along.

“We’ve been told to believe that darkness within ourselves, any manifestation of shadow, is our enemy, but Eva’s dark path as a bruja is the dark night of the soul (la noche oscura del alma) that leads her to deep truths and understanding that will embolden and strengthen her if she can trust herself. ”

— Jenn Givhan

The inspiration for this story came from my childhood memories and PTSD, as well as a harrowing experience with a narcissistic abuser who had me all twisted up, and I wanted to show how even smart, talented, powerful, empowered women can be susceptible to these gaslighting serial abusers. As a practicing bruja who has healed both personal and ancestral trauma in myself and my family through brujería, I wanted to share the tools and practices that have strengthened and buoyed me in an accessible way. There are many wonderful nonfiction books on magical practices and witchcraft, but I’ve found that my magic is within my imagination, so I wrote a novel. 

The protective magick of this thriller is based on the actual practices of people of color, including my familial practices. It resists stereotypes even as it embraces many classic elements of psychological thrillers and magical realism — such as a character with a murky, traumatic past that blurs or muddles her grip on the present situation, a haunted character who misunderstands what the ghosts are trying to communicate, a strong woman who is being gaslit by at least one man in her life, and a woman who needs to embrace her power. When she does, she kicks some serious ass and rights major wrongs. There's also a focus on sisterhood and counting on other women rather than being jealous or turning to men for help, which all of the above stories and shows portray as well, though not necessarily together.

Even the Charmed reboot, which has so many amazing elements, tends to focus on mainstream Wicca as the central magick, even though the protagonists are strong BIPOC/Latinas. My story looks toward the magick of people of color—brujería,  curanderismo, hoodoo—even as it shares many commonalities with Wicca and other Western pagan practices and beliefs.

The use of folk magick of people of color in RIVER WOMAN, RIVER DEMON is portrayed as realistic throughout, with some magical realism elements common in Latinx literature and culture to offer a grounded and realistic presentation of folk magick while still allowing for the deeper resonances of metaphor that horror and supernatural thriller audiences have already come to expect by nature of the genre, such as giving into the subconscious where belief resides.

In other words, an audience who is already primed to believe that the dead can be conjured to help solve a murder mystery is also ready to suspend disbelief about other elements of folk magick – thus, I make a case for the metaphorical aspects of folk magick and how it helps protect people of color and isn’t just superstition. In this way, I’ve alchemically fused my thematic message within the structure of the work itself—creating, I hope, a place where belief feels organic and relevant. 

Can you describe your literary influences and inspirations? What is the through-line or framework through what and how you write?

My work tends toward magical realism and dark psychological motherhood that reflects on an often darker sociopolitical landscape, but the shadow work exists to reveal the light, and that’s always my goal–to shine that hopeful light amidst the darkness.  

Among my influences are Toni Morison and Ana Castillo, and some of my recent faves are Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, and Victor LaValle’s The Changeling.  

In my witchy reading, I’ve enjoyed Stephanie Rose Bird’s books on hoodoo (perhaps especially Sticks, Stones, Roots, and Bones) and Juliet Diaz’s Witchery, which have helped me infuse and create my grimoire early on in my path. 

I've also been reading and watching ALL the psychological thrillers I can get my hands on since I was a teenager, and lately, especially books/stories like GONE GIRL and GIRL ON THE TRAIN, all the many countless iterations. But I repeatedly noticed how often the protagonists are white women who live in metropolitan areas, often wealthy or from wealthier backgrounds.

There are very few characters of color and even fewer with major roles. As a Latina/indigenous woman raising a multiracial family, I have often felt excluded from these psychological thrillers on a social/structural level, although I am deeply interested and invested in examining women's mental health and psychological issues, including how we’re perceived, treated, and stigmatized culturally. 

My goal for my writing is always to cast women of color in leading roles, active and empowered, fully constructed with flaws and issues outside stereotypes, which means that I am also interested in examining mental health issues in women of color. RIVER WOMAN, RIVER DEMON (like my second novel, JUBILEE) examines a Latina protagonist's PTSD, memory distortion, and anxiety—and contextualizes it in a larger patriarchal, abusive landscape. In many ways, I set out to write a Chicana Girl on the Train.  

“My goal for my writing is always to cast women of color in leading roles, active and empowered, fully constructed with flaws and issues outside stereotypes, which means that I am also interested in examining mental health issues in women of color.”

— Jenn Givhan

I’m always interested in showcasing how writers approach writing — including the hard stuff, the stuck stuff, the mundane struggles, the deep emotional Work that is often neglected in conversations around the craft. Can we peak behind the proverbial curtain of your general creative process? Do you adopt any rituals while or pre-writing?

As I connected with my indigenous and Mexican Ancestors and became more invested in brujería and curanderisma, I began cultivating spaces of honoring the sacred and divine within my home and creating portable altars that I could move throughout the house in a process organic to my creative rhythms and needs as a mamawriter, meaning, my mind/heart/flow has to be fluid and in-flux to allow for the rhythms of my day as they unfold (sometimes homeschooling the kids, tending sick kids, summer days, days my kids need or crave more attention from me, as well as days I’m more chronically ill and navigating self-care needs).

So, for instance, I might set up an altar on the side of the bath where I’m taking a hot Epsom salt soak to help alleviate some chronic pain or unwind after a tough day, mentally, physically, and spiritually. Honoring the sacred with a portable altar and altars throughout my home (my work/writing/teaching space) became a reminder that we carry the sacred within us, and it’s accessible to us anytime, anywhere.  

“Rest is creative. Rest is essential. Rest is sacred. ”

— Jenn Givhan

This also helped me forgive myself and eventually learn not to judge myself, so no forgiveness was needed because no wrong was committed when I could not write or perform a ritual or practice “self-care” in any other capacity than rest. Rest is creative. Rest is essential. Rest is sacred. 

Just as the altar’s sacred space reminds me of the goddess/Spirit/Ancestors within and around me, the altars remind me of the Muse available and accessible anytime, anywhere. The altar is an invitation to openness and receptivity. If we build it, the Spirits will come. But really, the Spirits are already all around us, ready and waiting for us to quiet ourselves enough to listen. So perhaps it’s more, if we build it, we will come to what the Spirits have already fashioned for us out of stars and earth and Universe and light and truth. 

In my writing, this willingness to listen to Spirit and not beat myself up that the material/concrete matter of the pub biz (publishing business) may not understand, accept, or want or applaud what I’m doing and what the Spirit/Ancestors bring me.

Because I deal with trauma-induced responses and depression and anxiety, I need a tangible reminder (lighting candles, holding crystals, and pictures of my Ancestors and Goddesses who sustain me, including Mother Mary and Frida and My Bisabuela and Coatlicue) so that I don’t feel so trampled upon that I stay down in the mud. If I’m down in the mud, Spirit is showing me the stardust to scoop up and bring back with me to the page.

The sacred that we honor (Goddess/Ancestors/Creator/Spirit) also exists within us. We honor ourselves when we honor the sacred. When we honor the sacred, we claim our value and worth as inherent and undiminishable. We are the fire we light, the crystal we hold, the prayer we utter. We are our Muse. 

In this interview series, I’ve been asking writers to share how their heritage, culture, or belief system shapes their work. How do you approach writing or creativity through these lenses?

As a Mexican-American/Chicana and indigenous writer from the Southwestern border, my work explores how we can create safe spaces through the traumas of mental illness, racism, violence, and abuse against women. I strive to speak the multivalent voices of women I grew up with: the mothers, daughters, childless women, aunties, and nanas who have become my voice.

My work concerns many Latina women's complex relationships with family—it is both a liberating and subjugating force, buttressing and repressive, mythical and real. I explore the guilt, sadness, and freedom of mother/child relationships: the sticky love that keeps us hanging on when we’ve no other reason but love. I read Beloved as a young teenager, and every day before and every day since has been marked by the idea that you are your own best thing.

Like the call to write, the call to love is ever about the marginal spaces that separate and bind us—the inky place that asks us to continue revising and reimagining, tying ourselves to this life, to each other, despite or perhaps because of the pain.

All my creative work tends to mother because it comes from a place of reclaiming and healing. My work recites my mother’s chant she sang to me and now I sing to my children when they’re hurt: sana sana colita de rana, si no sanas hoy, sanas mañana. Translated literally, it asks a frog’s tail to heal. Of course, a frog’s tail, if cut off, grows anew. My work asks for impossible healing. And then makes it possible.

Who are some writers or organizations that you’d love to shout out?

Authors Publish

Irena Praitis

Rigoberto González

The NEA

The PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship

Van Jordan

Lynn Hightower

Leslie Contreras Schwartz

I could go on and on – I ADORE the writing community and am immensely grateful daily.

Was there an a-ha moment that led you to write or create? Was there an experience that reaffirmed what you do and why?

I was in the book section of Target perusing thrillers with my family and discussing cover art for my novel RIVER WOMAN, RIVER DEMON when a tween girl turned the corner and shyly asked, "Excuse me, but I overheard, are you a writer?" 

Me: "I am!”

Her: “Oh my gosh, that’s so COOL!”

So then, I asked her: "Are YOU a writer?"

She shrugged and said: "Well, I mean, kind of."

I looked at her with what I hoped was all the confidence I've pulled to myself since I was a young girl & said: "You ARE. I know you are."

Her: "You're right, I am."

This isn’t the moment I began writing, of course. This was just a few months ago. But our pasts, presents, and futures are connected, so imagine this is also me saying this to myself as a young, traumatized bruja, a young girl with no one to teach her or guide her in her Ancestral magic, but with a mama who loves her fiercely. Imagine this is Spirit holding this conversation in the seed of myself, waiting for the right season to bloom. Imagine that future bloom carrying me through the darkness.

My tween daughter Lina and I write middle-grade fiction together; we’re now finishing a novel to send to our agent, Rebecca Friedman. My daughter is the other future iteration of my creation that reminds me who I am—the Goddess with me always, within me, always, as a seed, an egg, waiting. Wise. Witchy. Wonderful.

What's your biggest piece of advice to someone who might be embarking on a creative journey like yours?

Mija, your journey is your own, and let no one veer you from the brightest light shining within yourself, guiding your way. You don't need anyone else's rules or guidelines, or input. Yes, we need companions and helpers and sisters and friends. Wise guides sometimes. Our Ancestors. The Spirits. 

But we are also our wise teachers. Versions of ourselves are yet to bloom. 

For too long, I've worried about what others think, and in the publishing biz, it's too easy to get steered off track and onto others' paths. In Capitalism, we're taught to pin our worth to earnings, product, output, and money. 

Even in the creative world, the contest and competitive and prestige models can make us forget what's truly important – always, always, the creating itself. 

As Eva says in RIVER WOMAN, RIVER DEMON:

"Many people think there is a clear-cut between lightwork and dark, the way so many misunderstand curanderas and brujas, thinking of healers versus Witches, as though healers are a positive force and Witches a negative. On the one hand are medicine folk, who pray to god and Mother Mary and the Saints and intercede to remove the malcontent of those who would use their power for darkness; on the other hand, are brujas who deal in curses and hexes and death.

The lines are not so drawn. Light and shadow are not binaries nor poles but are sourced from the same spring of energy.

When we stand beneath the cover of forest canopy away from the sun’s heat, the shadow that keeps us cool is not an entity created by itself, nor has the light ceased to shine.

Shadow can protect us. Darkness, too, has its blessings.

Brujas know this. Mama knew this."

What seems like a shadow path is sometimes necessary and invaluable. Trust yourself. Trust your light and shadow. Creation happens during both phases. Mija never stops creating. You are all of creation, waiting. Let go of fear. Let go of shame. Let go of anyone else’s opinions or advice. Let go of this advice. And create. 

Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American and indigenous poet, novelist, and transformational coach from the Southwestern desert and the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices. She holds a Master’s degree from California State University Fullerton and a Master’s in Fine Arts from Warren Wilson College. She is the author of five full-length poetry collections, including Rosa’s Einstein (University of Arizona Press) and the novels Trinity Sight and Jubilee (Blackstone Publishing), finalists for the Arizona-New Mexico Book Awards. Her newest poetry collection, Belly to the Brutal (Wesleyan University Press), and novel River Woman, River Demon (Blackstone Publishing), drop this fall 2022. Both new books draw from Givhan’s practice of brujería. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, POETRY, The American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, The Boston Review, The Rumpus, Salon, and many others. She’s received the Southwest Book Award, New Ohio Review’s Poetry Prize, Phoebe Journal’s Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, the Pinch Journal Poetry Prize, and Cutthroat’s Joy Harjo Poetry Prize. Givhan has taught at the University of Washington Bothell’s MFA program and Western New Mexico University and has guest lectured at universities across the country.

Jenn would love to hear from you at jennifergivhan.com, and you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for inspiration, writing prompts, and transformational advice.

Mary-Alice Daniel: "I Think of Poetry as Remaking An Original Cosmology"

An interview with Mary-Alice Daniel
by Lisa Marie Basile

I would love to hear all about your recent creative journey and pursuits and, of course, your coming books, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing and Yale Younger Poets Prize winner Mass for Shut-ins. I love talking to writers who work across genres, especially. So let’s dive in. What’s happening creatively right now?

I considered myself primarily a poet till 3 years ago when I started my first book of prose, a nonfiction work that accidentally morphed into a memoir. It began as an inquiry into the hidden Black history behind the state of California, which was named after a Black warrior queen from 16th-century Spanish mythology. The book came to include the origin stories of my West African ancestors—then sprawled to encompass my immediate family’s migrations across 3 continents. A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing will be published by HarperCollins/Ecco Press on November 29th. It’s now available for preorder at major and independent bookstores.

While I was in the intensive editing endgame of my memoir, Rae Armantrout sent an email that changed my life. Mass for Shut-Ins, my first book of poems, and a project spanning a decade, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. It’s coming out in March 2023, and I’m now in the frantic final stage of its own editorial process. Three warning signs illustrated within the manuscript headlined the press release announcing my win. Perhaps concerningly, that number has doubled to 6. I offer something obsessive, ominous. My favorite observation about the volume is: “What drew me to your book—the darkness made it stand out. True darkness.”

Mary-Alice Daniel via Instagram

Wow, what a response: “What drew me to your book—the darkness made it stand out. True darkness.”

As both a reader and writer, I have always been drawn to darkness myself, to the layers beneath what we reveal, to the uncomfortable, to the almost ineffable language of sorrow. How do you manage the dark when writing? Do you ground yourself, do you dive head-first into it, or does it alchemize into something else when you write about it?

For some reason, when I read this question, I was immediately reminded of a cheesy Bane quote in the last movie of the Dark Knight trilogy. Tom Hardy says, "You think darkness is your ally. But you merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it."

Probably because of the fundamentalist tenor of my religious upbringing, it's the nature of my brain to perceive everything as a preamble to the prospect (promise?) of Hell. I keep my fingers crossed that I'm wrong about that eventuality, but... it's a concern. Writing is one way I sift through the ideas of damnation and doomsday that I've internalized.

Can you tell us a bit about your general creative process? I’m interested in the quirks and rituals and obsessions writers have. Or, you know, maybe it’s mundane. Basically, how does the Muse exist within you?

I start worrying about some little idea that perplexes me. An absurd aspect of human nature; the oddity that is the English language (my second); the internal logic of a conspiracy theory or cult practice. I then spend literal years unpuzzling it, piece by piece. I’ll spend one whole day fussing over the punctuation of a single line; I’ll waste the entirety of the next day changing everything right back. There’s a natural byproduct of this waste, though; I learn things.

And what about your inspirations? Who are they, and how do they influence your work as a writer or creative? How might they have influenced your recent work?

Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son.

My favorite musician now is Sufjan Stevens. When I listen to him, I feel that connection between those who inherited an imposed faith, a fraught relationship with the spirits. It’s been with us both since birth, seen in our relatively unusual names. He was the Midwestern kid with a Muslim name; I have a Christian one despite my overwhelmingly Islamic ethnic group, the Fulani of Niger/Nigeria.

The most magnificent work of art I’ve ever seen is Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son. A+ nightmare fuel.

The one book I recommend to people (I generally don’t) is Sum by David Eagleman. It presents 40 possible versions of an afterlife, written from the perspective of a neuroscientist with a sublime imagination, a whimsical style. When I’m up all night, harassed by the dread of death—I really, truly, honestly have to die one day?—every once in a while, I get almost excited for some great ride ahead.

Deadpan stand-up comedy is the soundtrack to all my writing sessions.

“I’ll spend one whole day fussing over the punctuation of a single line; I’ll waste the entirety of the next day changing everything right back. There’s a natural byproduct of this waste, though; I learn things. ”

— Mary-Alice Daniel

Throughout this interview series, I’ve been asking writers to share a bit about how their religion, culture, or heritage shows up in their work. What about for you?

If I do a reverse engineering of my work, I see that one of its most significant elements is syncretism, which I define as “the phenomenon of disparate religious traditions colliding.” My native tribe is nearly synonymous with Islam, but I was raised by Evangelical parents in what they made a field of “spiritual warfare.”

Around the ill-defined edges of this apocalyptic battlefield, the indigenous religions of Nigeria survive—within my family, mostly in the form of superstition and credence in curses. I think of poetry as remaking an original cosmology from these contrastive influences.

This is so powerful: "Around the ill-defined edges of this apocalyptic battlefield, the indigenous religions of Nigeria survive—within my family, mostly in the form of superstition and credence in curses. I think of poetry as remaking an original cosmology from these contrastive influences.”

Can you share one or two lines, or even a poem, that inhabits/gives life to this merging of influences?

Mary-Alice Daniel: Here is an excerpt from "For My Uncle Who Died of AIDS Contracted at the Dentist's Office.”

Was there an a-ha moment that led you to write or create? Was there an experience that reaffirmed what you do and why?

“Around the ill-defined edges of this apocalyptic battlefield, the indigenous religions of Nigeria survive—within my family, mostly in the form of superstition and credence in curses. I think of poetry as remaking an original cosmology from these contrastive influences. ”

— Mary-Alice Daniel

When I lived in Connecticut for 3 of my tween years, I walked home in half-light. After school, 4 p.m., it was already getting dark. My portable CD player got me through those depressing walks: inside it spun the songs of Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, and Fela Kuti. I wanted to sing lines like theirs. I can’t sing, so I write.

Who are a few contemporaries/mentors/writers who have made an impact on you?

Only 3? This is a really hard question. Of dozens, the first who come to mind are: poet Safiya Sinclair, who is my role model even though we’re the same age; Kwame Dawes at Prairie Schooner, who champions my work; Elizabeth Scanlon at American Poetry Review, who likes my weirdest stuff.

And finally, what might be your biggest piece of advice to a writer?

Find critics of your work who practice radical honesty. We all have blind spots; they are dangerous.


Mary-Alice Daniel was born in northern Nigeria and raised in England and Tennessee. After attending Yale University, she received an MFA from the University of Michigan and a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. Mass for Shut-Ins, her debut poetry collection, won the 2022 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Her first book of prose, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing: A Memoir (HarperCollins/Ecco Press) will be released on November 29, 2022.

Caroline Hagood on Weird Girls and the Inner Monster

An interview with Caroline Hagood
by Lisa Marie Basile

Lisa Marie Basile: Can you tell us all about Weird Girls: Writing The Art Monster? I am so intrigued by it (as a self-professed weird girl, of course) and so excited to read it. I’m also excited to read with you (and so many other incredible talents) at your reading event, Weird Girls Con.

Caroline Hagood: WEIRD GIRLS: WRITING THE ART MONSTER is an essay collection or book-length essay, depending on how you see it. It's a collection of different essays, but they all overlap, and circle back on one another. I was inspired to write the book since I've always been a weird girl, haha. But, seriously, after reading Jenny Offill's Dept of Speculation, I saw that so very many women writers were suddenly writing about the "art monster," or the writer who gets to focus monomaniacally, monstrously on his or her own work—but the catch was that the ones who usually got to do this were men. I have always been obsessed with the topics of creativity and monstrosity, and so this book came to be.

Ah! I'm so interested in the inner art monster — how it shows up, how it's praised, how it's rejected (so oft by men), and why it's so alluring. Sometimes, I think the inner monster is the only thing that keeps me writing — that fiendishness, that obsession. I especially sync with the art/creativity monster as a Capricorn Rising, the archetype that is often associated with obsessive Doing. It's interesting because on one hand, there's the oft-critiqued "girl boss" archetype — yet on the other, the obsessive, frenzied woman who wants to learn and do more is something that should be embraced. Why do you think so many people are exploring woman as art monster?

I love these questions so much. Yes, I absolutely share your fascination with the inner monster/the obsessive and passionate pursuit of art. It’s at the core of my writing practice. I think the woman who has had to fight tooth and nail for her creativity, and even the concept of the art monster, is as old as time, but I think Jenny Offill put a name (and connected story) to it in her 2016 novel Dept of Speculation.

Since 2016 I’ve been seeing women/femme/nonbinary writers grappling with this concept constantly. Then I think movements such as #metoo and sociocultural situations such as the way women and mothers have been impacted by COVID-19, for instance, coalesced with the whole art monster narrative to form a super-monster that’s trying to claw its way out of every text I pick up these days. I always pull this art monster out of there, and I’m so happy to see her.

Who are some of your artistic influences, and how do they appear or work their way into your own work?

I guess I would say I'm a fan of the obsessives when it comes to literature and creativity in general—the creators who just don't know where to stop, who exist in ways that are determined to be "too much," who write or film or paint in ways deemed to be "too much," and so forth.

I also love my hybrid people, those who write things where you go, "wait, is this a poem, a novel, an essay, and do I even need to know? Nope!" Those are my favorite works of art. I used to co-run a reading series called Kill Genre, and I have an upcoming panel with the same title because I guess that's my thing. :)

I also love hybrid people. I'm over strict genre separation and definitions, although I see why people often turn to them. What would you tell a writer who is anxious about or hesitant to cross-play or blend genres?

I would be like, “Wait, what is this genre you speak of? I’ve never heard of it.” Then I would quote Lady Gaga, “So there's nothing more provocative than taking a genre that everybody who's cool hates—and then making it cool.”

But seriously, I would invite this writer to step out of this limiting way of thinking of writing. I would say not to worry about playing with genre and, ideally, to focus on inventing her/his/their own new genre.

How does lineage or culture shape your work? It’s a question I ask every writer. I love to see how the threads come together.

My mother is a very powerful, wonderful, difficult woman who worships literature, and I really do think of myself as carrying on this piece of our family heritage. She was a businesswoman who wrote and painted on her own time and would take me outside to look at the moon at night to get inspired. I love her for this.

Can you share with us some of your writing rituals? What are the little things you do to collaborate with the Muse?

Well (and I'm pretty sure nobody at all will care about this little detail) I absolutely must have my hair up. I can't explain it, but I cannot write without this whole situation being taken care of. Then I really like to listen to weird jazz without lyrics because it inspires me without distracting me with words.

Then I know it always sounds creepy, but I like to look at the photographs I have of women writers around my work area, such as the one of Mary Shelley writing with a quill. If I don't feel in the mood to write, I just look over at them and it gets me going. They are my coven, and they don't even know they serve this purpose for me (the living ones I mean). I promise I"m not as creepy as I sound.

Um, looking at women writers. NOT CREEPY AT ALL. Gasp! I love it. This is a certain kind of summoning, an odd little ritual where you call forth their essence. Can you tell me why the Mary Shelley image speaks to you so much? Paint the moment for us. 

 I just love the concept of Shelley being dared to write a ghost story and creating this book about a monster who epitomizes the way I view creativity itself: monstrous, sewn together from the “bodies” of so many different artifacts, well-read, obsessive, creative, poetic, tender, full of longing, misunderstood, comedic, lonely.

Who are some contemporaries who have inspired or helped you in your creative journey?

When I was at Fordham, I felt very inspired and supported by what I called my creative writing ladies, professors who participated in the dark arts of, well, creative writing: Elisabeth Frost, Heather Dubrow, and Sarah Gambito.

Then, lately, I've been working with Patricia Grisafi on some really fun witchy projects. I was also recently bowled over by the kindness of Erika Wurth. I've never met her in person (we are "social media" close), but she was still incredibly generous with literary advice and contacts because that's what she believes in. And it's what I believe in, too, very much so.

Join the WEIRD GIRLS CON event
Saturday, October 8th from 5-7 PM EST
Pacific Bears Community, Brooklyn, NY

Caroline Hagood is an Assistant Professor of Literature, Writing and Publishing and Director of Undergraduate Writing at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. She is the author of the poetry books, Lunatic Speaks (2012) and Making Maxine’s Baby (2015), the book-length essay, Ways of Looking at a Woman (2019), and the novel, Ghosts of America (2021). Her book-length essay Weird Girls is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil Press in November. Her work has appeared in publications including Creative Nonfiction, LitHub, the Kenyon Review, Hanging Loose, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, Salon, and Elle.

Bára Hladík on 'New Infinity,' Disability, & Folklore

AN INTERVIEW WITH BÁRA HLADÍK
BY LISA MARIE BASILE

Your newest book, New Infinity, so deeply speaks to me — not just as a reader and writer (and human!) but also as someone with Ankylosing Spondylitis. It’s so rare to see the very thing that’s changed one’s life come to shape in a literary setting — and done so beautifully. Can you tell us all about it?

My latest book is a hybrid experimental novella about a woman living with Ankylosing Spondylitis, a disease that I also live with. It is an ode to the existential experience of degenerative disease and a philosophical reckoning of a woman in pain. It chronicles moments of her life as she tries and fails to connect, have relationships and make ends meet. It ponders the meaning of existence, life, and failure as she gathers notes from medical literature and self-help books to understand her existence.

The book is inspired by ten years of living with the disease myself, and although fictionalized, the story draws from my own experiences. I created a nameless woman as a way to revisit myself, as well as observe her from a distance. The book blends surrealist stories with poems created from found medical literature, self-help books, books about the cosmos, and journals.

I was inspired to create a literary work that centred the woman in pain as philosophically and existentially significant. I wanted to take her out of the attic, and out of the trope of 'hypochondriac woman' so common in the history of literature, and create a literary work that not only expressed her experience accurately, but portrayed it as a radical experience that challenges the very structures of our society and philosophies.

I can't tell you how affirming it is to speak to another writer with Ankylosing spondylitis — and your writing about it is so potent! 

I've personally found the disease really hard to write about. At first, I thought "this is too specific to really share; no one will 'get' it." Over the years, though, I've realized how the disease had filled in so many of the cracks of my life....and it was nearly impossible to avoid writing about. 

This disease feels like it wants to trap you, physically and emotionally, and that is something that I have felt drawn to exploring in a literary sort of way. But it's been a long journey in figuring out how. What's the lesson? What's underneath the desire? How did you come to write about AS and pain and women, specifically, and was it hard for you to share something so intimate and challenging with the world? 

It means so much to me to hear that, thank you! Seeing your work about AS encouraged me to write more specifically about the disease and share publicly. It is definitely a challenge to write about the realities of Ankylosing Spondylitis. Most of the time I don't want to even share with the closest people in my life, so writing publically about it is hard.

But as you said, it is nearly impossible not to write about it. There are so many silencing and isolating aspects of living with this disease that in some ways I have a need to express a primordial scream of this unrelenting physical and emotional pain. Just as birds who made it through another night of darkness call out to each other in the morning, writing is a way to express existence. 

I turned to reading more and more as my illness took hold and I found I was reading a lot of philosophy. At the same time, most of the stories I encountered about illness, women were framed as 'hysterical' or 'hypochondriacs.' I wanted to challenge this narrative and write a story that centered the sick woman as a philosopher. A story where the experience of sickness was in fact a philosophical act that gives insight into the very meaning of existence. So while the disease is specific, the questions about existence are universal. 

Do you ever feel like disability gives you a new lens, a sort of expanded eye, through which to see the world anew? While illness may bind us (and others) in many ways, it also sort of necessarily stretches how we approach creativity and expansion.

For me, yes. I often feel that although my illness is difficult and painful, it also forces me to stop and deeply consider my place on this earth and in the cosmos pretty regularly. If it wasn't for the fact that at times I have to spend a lot of time recovering from basic tasks, I would be a pretty different person. I have become wiser, resilient, and in some ways more at peace with the chaos of the world.

It forces me to find transformation in the most minute of movements or motions, such as creativity or dreaming or simply breathing. Because I can't 'go for a run' to clear my head, I have to find other ways to move through emotions. This is the source of much of where my creativity is born. It is often in moments of pain in which I can only express existing.

Who or what are some of your recent influences?

This book is heavily influence by Slavic writers - Franz Kafka, Karel Čapek, Jana Benova, as well as surrealist/magic realist writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. My linguistic style definitely draws from the fact that Czech is my first language, and the way we play with structure, sarcasm and storytelling is much for fluid and malleable than english. I grew up reading Czech folk stories that blended magic and realism, and Czech new wave films that masterfully played with nihilism, sarcasm and surrealism. These influences all bleed into my work.

I love to learn about how culture or identity shapes a writer’s creative approach and work. I’d love to hear more.

My parents fled occupied Czechoslovakia shortly before I was born. Growing up in rural so-called Canada, my culture was often misunderstood as scary. I learned to walk through several co-existing worlds, always turning back and searching for where I came from. I grew up watching and reading Czechoslovakian books and movies, which are so creative, dark, mystical and wise. My parents are creative and resilient people, and I am constantly inspired by them. There is a saying, that Czechoslovakians have 'golden hands', in that we can create something out of nothing. This is from where I create, creating something out of nothing so that we may learn where we came from and where we are going.

What are some of the Czech folk stories that stayed/stays with you, and perhaps influences you as of late?

There are so many! Czechs are truly folklore encyclopedias. One of my favourites is the Vodník, who is a mythical slavic water spirit. He is a toad-like man, usually dressed in a tweed suit, who sits by the edge of a pond waiting for children to wander by so he can capture their spirits in tiny porcelain pots at the bottom of the pond. There are many great Czechoslovakian films about Vodník and his family, with shots of water people appearing out of sinks and toilets in tailored suits perfectly dry.

Do you turn to any sort of writing rituals or practices? I’m always so interested in how people approach their work and what that process looks like, especially when the writer creates across genres.

Much of this work was written in my head. With my illness, I am often bound by the limits of my body and must spend large amounts of time recovering. This means I am unable to move much for several days. So in these moments, I dream and write in my head. I imagine stories, themes, images. Often, the story is very formed once I hit the paper. I jot down notes of themes or ideas I want to weave throughout and then I sit down and write it start to finish. I then leave it be as I think through problems, and then I ruthlessly edit. Poetry is different. For me it is more of a ritual or practice. Many of the poems in my book were created by physically cutting up books that I found at the thrift store for under 5$.

I found medical books, self-help books, stories and beyond, then cut out individual words or sections of words. I did this all with meditation or images in mind. Then I would mix them into a special wine glass, and draw the cut words into a divinatory reading, similar to drawing playing cards or tarot cards. This practice is very specific and personal to my artistic work so this is all I will share here, but eventually, a poem would come to life.

Was there an certain ‘a-ha’ moment that led you to writing or creating? Was there an experience that reaffirmed what you do and why?

A babysitter once told me that I told her I was going to be a novelist when I was 7 years old. In grade 5, I was writing a story and every week the class would ask me to read the new chapter. It was a story about a family of six women surviving world war 3. Following these years I had a lot of doubt and anxiety as to where I was going or what I was doing, but thinking back to these moments always reminds me that this is part of me whether I resist it or not.

Who are some of the people you look up to or admire?

Thank you to disabled writers @leahlakshmiwrites @bighedva @pchza.

I’d love to hear one piece of writing advice that you think is essential for other writers.

Focus in on your work, your voice, your style. As much as we can learn from others, stay true to your vision. Be confident that what you are creating is important, even if you don't quite see how, yet. Do it for yourself. You're own satisfaction, sanity, passion, whatever. Do it for you.

Bára Hladík is a Czech-Canadian author, artist and facilitator.

Lisa Marie Basile is the founding editor of Luna Luna Magazine. She’s also the author of a few books of poetry and nonfiction, including Light Magic for Dark Times, The Magical Writing Grimoire, Nympholepsy, Andalucia, and more. She’s a health journalist and chronic illness advocate by day. By night, she’s working on an autofictional novella for Clash Books.

Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes and has appeared in Best Small Fictions, Best American Poetry, and Best American Experimental Writing. Her work can be found in The New York Times, Atlas Review, Spork, Entropy, Narratively, and more. She has an MFA from The New School.

Candice Wuehle on 'Monarch,' Ritual, and Rejecting Writing Rules

An Interview with Candice Wuehle
by Lisa Marie Basile

Lisa Marie Basile: Tell us all about your new work. I am a huge fan of your gorgeous poetry and prose, from your genre-shifting/blending to your exploration of the glittery and the gritty. Can you tell us about your newest work, Monarch?

Candice Wuehle: My most recent novel, MONARCH came out in March. The idea for it came from an actual conspiracy theory that claims MKUltra has a secret division called Project MONARCH that recruits children and teens from beauty pageants to become sleeper agents.

They specifically recruit beauty pageant contestants because of their natural (or studied!) charm, conventional attractiveness, physical aptitude and stamina, and their strong propensity for obedience. This theory asserts that MONARCH agents are programmed using trauma-based mind control techniques. I was just finishing up my dissertation on memory and trauma studies for my PhD and the MONARCH theory became a perfect metaphor for a lot of what I’d been thinking about regarding how much of consumer culture (especially culture aimed at women and body image in the ‘90s) is a kind of trauma-based social programming.

The first beauty pageant contestant I always think of—the one imprinted on my own psyche—is JonBenét Ramsey. A plot about a teen queen reminiscent of Ramsey, but who has lived, grown up, and is now seeking revenge captured my imagination.

The real quest of MONARCH, though, is the main character’s journey to figure out who she is—what part of her is really “her” when it seems so much of her personality has been programmed.

For me, the technology that delivers that answer comes through divinatory practices, so there are scenes of tarot and especially séance in MONARCH that are intended to get at the occulted side of the self. Not occulted as in spooky, but occulted as in: hidden even from yourself.

Currently, I’m working on a collection of short stories that’s a sort of Internet gothic—haunted apps, poltergeist algorithms, a GPS that leads to another dimension.

Lisa Marie Basile: What are some creations that light you up? How do they influence your work as a writer or creative?

Candice Wuehle: For the last few years, I’ve been really inspired by contemporary fiction (mostly written by women). For me, there was a bit of a shift in the literary landscape after Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh was published that made room for the kind of books I’ve really wanted to read all my life.

Many of my favorite books of all time have come out in the last ten years—books that are often marked as “unhinged” but that are irreverent, angry, hilarious, politically and culturally subversive, and deeply intelligent. I’m so inspired by creators who can dialogue with the current moment, or, more likely, who are willing to say something so out of the moment—out of any moment—that when it arrives it feels utterly new.

To name just a few, I love A Touch of Jen by Beth Morgan, New Animal by Ella Baxter, Luster by Raven Leilani, Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, Self Care by Leigh Stein, the novels of Lucy Ives and Melissa Broder and Mona Awad.

Reading very recent work that has an intentional disregard for certain craft conventions, that refuses to be totally “done” or to “make sense” gives me a sense of community and makes me feel more tethered in time than I normally am.

Poets write collections that include aporia, void, and contradiction and that’s understood, but it’s rarer to see that kind of insistence on the truth of personal expression—of a writer’s inherently complex and often incompatible belief systems—represented in the novel form.

“Poets write collections that include aporia, void, and contradiction and that’s understood, but it’s rarer to see that kind of insistence on the truth of personal expression—of a writer’s inherently complex and often incompatible belief systems—represented in the novel form. ”

— Candice Wuehle

Lisa Marie Basile: You shift between genres and seem to do it very naturally. I think a lot of writers feel they must select a lane and stick to it. 

And, as you said, "Poets write collections that include aporia, void, and contradiction and that’s understood, but it’s rarer to see that kind of insistence on the truth of personal expression—of a writer’s inherently complex and often incompatible belief systems—represented in the novel form."

Perhaps there are a few questions here, but how do you approach the concept of genre, and how do you approach giving the same permissions to the novel as poets might inherently have? (I say that as someone who has complex thoughts on what 'genre' means). 

Candice Wuehle: Thank you for this question. So, the truth is I write what I write, and then I see what genre it seems to look like after. The other truth (and I’m going to contradict myself immediately, but that’s part of my point) is I don’t write poetry and prose at the same time.

I haven’t written any lineated poetry since 2019. It doesn’t worry me. I never thought I’d write prose, then I tried to write a poem that showed up as a novel. I’m sure I’ll sit down one day with an expectation to write in one genre and end up doing something else. It seems like most people write to express themselves or to understand themselves. I understand that and I love that and I find kinship and solace and truth in writers who write from that place. But I write to surprise myself.

Since this is Luna Luna, I know readers will understand it when I say I write to see my shadow. That’s meaningful to me because I know others see my shadow and recognize it in themselves; that my work is shadow work for me and for others. What does that have to do with genre? I guess just that if you go into shadow work expecting to see shapes you already know, you aren’t prepared.

So I let the narrative shape arrive the way it presents itself and then I make choices on the second draft that might lend the shape to something more recognizable to a reader, but only if I think that serves the highest goal of the project.

“I write to see my shadow. That’s meaningful to me because I know others see my shadow and recognize it in themselves; that my work is shadow work for me and for others.”

— Candice Wuehle

Lisa Marie Basile: Can you tell us a bit about your general creative process? What sort of rituals or practices do you adopt? Or, you know, have you struggled with creativity at all as of late?

Candice Wuehle: The pandemic has been devastating for my ritual practice, to be honest. During my most creative periods, my ritual was a walk to the university library where I would sit with a cold brew in a jelly jar while listening to colored noise and write (or not write). Equally important to the ritual was the walk back home. I didn’t know that at the time—that the walk back home after writing was the same as Shavasana for me.

A period where what I had worked on integrated into me and began to braid into the next time I wrote. Now, my walk is simply to my home office, a space I love but that I haven’t fully imbued with the elements I think of as important to a sacred space.

I think it has a lot to do with buffering between acts of creation, which is hard to do when there are no imposed restrictions on how long I can write or when.

To put this in kind of crass sports terminology—I’m trying to figure out “how to get in the zone” but it’s tough because the zone is everywhere. Both my psychic and spiritual hygiene have been taxed by the upheaval of the world over the last few years, I suppose.

Lisa Marie Basile: It is clear that you're very interested in the liminal, the magical, the numinous — do you ever approach writing through a divinatory or occult lens/means?

Candice Wuehle: Yes, always, but my practice is very simple. I believe in the vibrations of a space, so light, sound, and the flow of air is important to me. Candles and incense create a sort of spiritual hygiene, while sounds help me to keep my mind flowing at an even pace. I usually listen to pink or white noise to try to stay engaged in flow state. The most significant aspect of my divinatory practice, however, is something I learned from the woman who taught my yoga teacher training, which is whenever you can’t figure something out just sit until it comes to you.

Once I started doing this, I noticed how important gazing is to me. I keep an obsidian egg and a quartz globe on my desk to look at. In other words, most of the time I spend writing looks like doing nothing. Which is, I guess, a sort of trance state.

Lisa Marie Basile: And how does how culture/identity/place/belief bleed into what you write?

Candice Wuehle: For the last few years, ideas of culture, identity, and belief have really consumed my work in the sense that I’ve been fixated on how we come to accept cultural beliefs as integral to our identities, especially in a late Capitalist culture that largely only presents beliefs intended to get us to buy stuff and conform to a dominant narrative that benefits…those already dominant. A lot of my sense of self and spirituality is born of trying to DIY ways to avoid these pervasive belief systems.

So, for example, I heard an interview with former The X-Files’ researcher and current paranormal investigator, John E.L. Tenney, where he said that beings or events we term supernatural (ghosts, UFOs, witchcraft) are actually ultra-natural in the sense that they’re more real than what we perceive to be real. He says, for this reason, they’re desperate to be seen and remembered; to inscribe themselves in space or narrative.

I think the threads of my work — and especially of MONARCH — pull together out of a desire to reflect a more ultra-natural world. A lot of MONARCH is about how our bodies remember what we don’t and how “the body keeps the score” as the trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk would say.

In this sense, messages from the body that come out as anxiety or physical ailments might feel like they come from nowhere when in fact, they’re realer than what we’ve told ourselves is real in the sense that these messages are coming from an experience we haven’t yet processed.

I think a lot of cultural messaging also works in this way—folklore and fairy tales as examples of commonly held, deeply integrated beliefs about familial and romantic relationships that have a blatant falseness to them: Eternal sleep, love at first sight, talking animals. We accept those elements as fantastic, but weirdly not the messaging behind them.

So, this is a little bit of a backward answer to your question in the sense that I’m saying belief systems and culture influence my work in a sort of inverse way; that I’m really more invested in unraveling and questioning than I am in determining any kind of personal or cultural or spiritual Truth.

Who are the writers making an impact on you right now?

Candice Wuehle: Currently, I’m really inspired by Jessica DeFino, a beauty culture critic and author of the newsletter “The Unpublishable.” Her ability to deconstruct the beauty and wellness industry in order to point to its colonialist, patriarchal, and capitalist roots/motivations is just so precise and breathtaking.

Much of what she argues about how denatured our ideas of beauty are—how, for example, makeup is often an erasure similar to the death drive—resonates so deeply with what I was thinking through in MONARCH.

Another Jessica—tarot reader/social worker Jessica Dore. Her wonderful book Tarot for Change and her Instagram account are such a gift. She integrates philosophy, clinical psychology, and myth in order to interpret Pamela Coleman Smith’s deck with such fresh, mind-bendingly deep interpretations.

A friend gave me one of her classes for my birthday last year. In the class, she said something about the intersection of social work and tarot reading that I’ve applied to my own life in a radical way: “you should never be working harder than the client.” Which I took as a mantra while I was teaching creative writing—as in, you can’t do someone else’s creative or emotional work. You can only listen and try your best to hear what they’re trying to express.

Finally, I want to mention Beth Morgan and her novel A Touch of Jen again! There’s a list of things I think about all the time, but I don’t know why (a Buzzfeed “Who Said It” quiz that listed quotes from Don Draper and Sylvia Plath that I failed; Britney Spear’s thousand sit-ups a day; the time my high school English teacher wore a veil to teach Hawthorne).

Anyway, A Touch of Jen is on the list of things that I think of every day. This book is so compelling, so funny and smart, yet it refuses to adhere to a single genre convention while obviously being aware of every genre convention. It’s a book that makes perfect effectual sense, and very little logical sense. Like life!

“When I finally stopped trying to write what I thought a poem or a novel was supposed to look like and wrote what I’d really want to read—which for me meant beauty culture, witchcraft, rage, trash, unlikable emotions, and philosophy presented in a way that some people find pretentious—I felt like I had touched the source.”

— Candice Wuehle

Lisa Marie Basile: Finally, what is one piece of writing advice you live by and would give others?

Candice Wuehle: This is so simple that it doesn’t feel like advice to me, but I notice students and lots of other writers don’t seem to follow this philosophy, so here it is: only write what you really want to read. I come from the most traditional possible writing environment and I became a writer with the idea that only the “major themes” are worthy of “serious literature.”

When I finally stopped trying to write what I thought a poem or a novel was supposed to look like and wrote what I’d really want to read—which for me meant beauty culture, witchcraft, rage, trash, unlikable emotions, and philosophy presented in a way that some people find pretentious—I felt like I had touched the source. I become obsessed with returning to my creative work and it took on a devotional quality.

Candice Wuehle is the author of the novel MONARCH (Soft Skull, 2022) as well as the poetry collections Fidelitoria: Fixed or Fluxed (11:11, 2021); 2020 Believer Magazine Book Award finalist, Death Industrial Complex (Action Books, 2020); and BOUND (Inside the Castle Press, 2018). Her writing has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing 2020, The Iowa Review, Joyland, Black Warrior Review, Tarpaulin Sky, The Volta, The Bennington Review, and The New Delta Review. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Kansas.

Lisa Marie Basile is the founding editor of Luna Luna Magazine. She’s also the author of a few books of poetry and nonfiction, including Light Magic for Dark Times, The Magical Writing Grimoire, Nympholepsy, Andalucía, and more. She’s a health journalist and chronic illness advocate by day. By night, she’s working on an auto-fictional novella for Clash Books.

Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes and has appeared in Best Small Fictions, Best American Poetry, and Best American Experimental Writing. Her work can be found in The New York Times, Atlas Review, Spork, Entropy, Narratively, and more. She has an MFA from The New School.

Jonny Black on Writing What Feels Right To *You*

An Interview with Jonny Black
by Lisa Marie Basile

This interview is part of our new Creator Series, a series of Q&As designed to help you get to know people who are writing, making, and doing beautiful things.

I discovered Jonny Black’s poetry in an issue of Ghost Bible — a truly gorgeous literary journal — and was immediately struck by her lush language and her bio’s mention of poltergeists (yes, please, always poltergeists). I was lured in!

Jonny Black is currently working on a novel (I secretly think poets make the best novelists, shh), and can be found at @jonnyblackwrites. In this chat, we discuss her influences, inspirations, and writing the kind of work that truly matters to you, despite what might be popular or expected of you.

I know you write in a few genres, so what are you working on at the moment?

I've got this novella/novelette that I've been working on for what seems like a third of my life at this point! I've been calling it Death and The Necromancer for lack of a better title. It's about Death seeking out a Necromancer to resurrect a cat. I wanted to write something that didn't take itself too seriously, something that was silly even, and it ended up being too real, especially during the pandemic.

I've only just come back to it after about a year. I'm also working on a poetry collection called The Apocalypse Journals. I have about four in the collection and they all happened to be written while listening to Daft Punk's Random Access Memories. I was sad to hear about the dissolution of the band earlier this year. I realized that I'd unintentionally written odes to many of their songs, so I want to keep writing a few more and dedicate it to the band. Each poem is an entry in the various journals of those who have survived the apocalypse and are wandering about the deadened earth and its empty cities.

I am always interested in learning about how writers approach their craft. I think we all get caught up in these ideas of a perfect writing ritual, sharing only when we’re prolific—but I’ve been asking writers to share even the messy parts. What’s your creative process?

Well, I used to write every day in college in my black notebook and I miss doing that. When I was working at a beauty store, I used to eat breakfast in the Del Taco across the street.

I would sit there for an hour or two sometimes, because I had to share a car with my mother, so I arrived very early.

I'd order their chorizo breakfast wrap, cheddar potato poppers (God, please bring those back soon!) and the huge 1-dollar iced tea. Then I'd write until my shift started.

Usually, I had my earphones in and either Kiasmos, Daft Punk, or Rhye blasting away. Now, I try to just write down thoughts I have whenever I get something good. Sometimes I'm able to make the time to write, but working remotely has made it hard for me to compartmentalize my time—I'm often distracted by other things I think I should be doing, and other ways I think I should be productive. I hope that I can get the courage again to go out, sit somewhere way too early in the morning, order some greasy breakfast food, and write.

Who are some of your influences?

Well, Daft Punk is definitely in my top ten, if not top five! Blade Runner, Tron and Tron: Legacy are also huge aesthetic inspirations. I've also been heavily influenced by Sonya Vatomsky's work: Salt is For Curing was my first real poetry book that I dove into and tried to understand.

My insta feed is also a huge inspiration: @brookedidonato, @KylejThompson and Madeline Garner are big ones. I'm also inspired by the cinema and art installations in general. One of the big things I've tried to do with my poetry is make choices like I would if I were directing a film: I think about aesthetic and drama and movement. I try to create a 3D experience with my work.

How does your culture or identity shape your work?

I got the impression that if I didn't write about my brown pain, I wasn't... representing myself, or that I wasn't enough as a writer.

OH BOY, do I have some thoughts. During my education — both high school and college — I got the impression that if I didn't write about my brown pain, I wasn't... representing myself, or that I wasn't enough as a writer.

I struggle with connecting to my own culture and identity because I'm what my sister (and many chicana/o's) calls a "coconut" — brown on the outside, white on the inside. And I'm not very interested in writing about that. I want to write about apocalypse worlds and vampires and gods that live in backyard ponds!

But I'm all too familiar with the concept of poetry as therapy, so I'm sure I'll get there someday. Most of the stories I write do have indigenous main characters, though. It's important to me that I write about characters like myself. And if I can't do it in poetry, I can at least do it in fiction, vicariously, through a character — you know?

With regards to faith, I like to think of myself as a combination of Jane Eyre and Emily Dickinson. She wrote a poem about how her church was out in nature. That really resonated with me. I have a small collection of poetry that is something of a...mary sue fan-fiction take on a chapter in the bible. It's very small, and it was written a very long time ago, but I'll revisit it someday.

Who are some of your mentors or contemporaries?

Reading Salt is For Curing was like a revelation, and I knew that if Sonya could write like this, with this much gothic drama and color, then so could I. I didn't have to write "contemporary" poetry that I'd seen in journals. I could write mine.

I've already mentioned Sonya Vatomsky! I just really just adore their work. Reading Salt is For Curing was like a revelation, and I knew that if Sonya could write like this, with this much gothic drama and color, then so could I. I didn't have to write "contemporary" poetry that I'd seen in journals. I could write mine.

A huge mentor for me has been Nalo Hopkinson because she was my professor at UCR! I wrote my thesis (also includes an apocalypse, ha!) under her guidance and took both a class on comics and class on fantasy fiction with her. she's such a wealth of knowledge and truly a joy to learn from.

I had another professor — I don't know if I should list her name — at a community college, my first poetry professor. I wrote my first real poems in her class. She gave us such a welcoming and warm environment to learn and write in and I learned so much about what could be done with the form in her class. I feel like I was born there. No, I came into my own there and found my voice.

I have very fond memories from that class, including looking out the dark windows into the near-empty parking lot, espresso chocolate cookies, writing my first chapbook, and very lovely classmates.

Jonny Black is a writer living and working in SoCal. She’s been published in Ghostbible Zine, The Roadrunner Review, and The Spectre Review. When she isn’t working on her novel, she’s usually curled up with a good crochet project watching Vincent Price movies. More of her work can be found on Instagram, @jonnyblackwrites.

S. Elizabeth on The Art of Darkness, Publishing, and Taurean Delights

An interview with S. Elizabeth
by Lisa Marie Basile

This interview is part of our new Creator Series, a series of Q&Aa designed to help you get to know people who are writing, making, and doing beautiful things.

I first discovered S. Elizabeth’s brilliance years ago, when stumbling onto their radiantly macabre, meticulously curated blog, Unquiet Things — a space that I consider a sort of post-graduate education in darkness. The author of two books, The Art of Darkness: A Treasury of the Morbid, Melancholic and Macabre and The Art of the Occult: A Visual Sourcebook for the Modern Mystic, I wanted to ask S. Elizabeth about their influences and inspirations. I hope you’ll enjoy this delightfully detailed, magical, and delicious conversation. I have to say, this is one of my favorite interviews ever done.

Sit by the window, grab a cup of berry-flavored tea or an elderberry spritz and dive in.

Lisa Marie Basile: I’d love to hear more about your book, The Art of Darkness: A Treasury of the Morbid, Melancholic and Macabre. I adored your first book, The Art of the Occult: A Visual Sourcebook for the Modern Mystic (and it’s a cool bonus that we’re press siblings!). What inspired this one? As a self-professed darkling, I want to hear every luscious detail — and I think our Luna Luna readers do, too. I can’t think of a better person to have created this compendium for us.

So the short answer is that The Art of Darkness: A Treasury of the Morbid, Melancholic and Macabre is a beautiful book densely packed with visual arts of the haunting, harrowing, and horrifying variety, and which asks the question "what comfort can be found in facing these demons?" It is inspired by a lifetime's worth of obsession with the dark and what can be found seething in the shadows when we stop being too frightened to peek. Or when we embrace these fears and anxieties, and we peer into the void, anyway!

When I was a child, I loved things all fairy and "flowerdy" (my 5 year old term for heaps of blossoms and blooms). think I was a cottage core early adopter, hee hee! I was terrified of ugly, scary, angry, wild things: Lou Ferrigno as the Incredible Hulk; the feral alien otherworldly vibe of my cousin's freaky KISS posters, and honestly, as silly as it sounds, George Hamilton as some vampire guy in a film called Love at First Bite scared the shit out of me! And I think that was meant to be a comedy! And Scooby Doo? Man, that gave me nightmares.

But somewhere along the way, that panic and fright regarding the bloodsuckers and monsters from outer space began to give way to fascination, and whereas I would once hide my face behind a pillow when something scary was happening, I now began to feel the itchy urge to peek. As I grew older, the fascination with fearsome things slowly turned into an obsession, and, much like a nerdy vampire creep myself, I began to gobble up and devour every bit of frightening or creepy media that came my way.

From literature and film, to music and art, from that time forward, I was hungry for all things unearthly and strange, ghastly and ghostly, gruesome and grotesque. I also grew up in a household with a mother who was an astrologer, who had tarot cards tucked into every nook and cranny, and mysterious artworks hung on every wall. All of her relationships, whether friends or romantic entanglements, were with bohemian weirdos and heavily tinged with magic and mysticism.

My former stepfather for a long time ran a small rare occult book business; I worked with him for a spell many years ago, and it was an incredible experience. Just me and these beautiful old books full of magic and witchcraft and demonology all day long! For a bookworm introvert with a penchant for the esoteric and obscure, that was as close to paradise that I will ever get! These interests and inclinations festered and blossomed and grew alongside me, inside me, over the years and are now what inform and inspire my writing, most of which can be found at my blog Unquiet Things, where I ramble about art, music, fashion, perfume, anxiety, and grief–particularly as these subjects intersect with horror, the supernatural, and death.

There's A LOT of art there. Art is another longtime fascination of mine. These two obsessions—art and darkness—became so deeply entwined for me over time that to celebrate them in a book seemed like the most obvious thing in the world.

“I’ve always felt like such an invisible nothing...and I know that I give away of myself more than I will ever get back in return...it’s the sharing of these little pieces of myself in all of these different places that somehow, paradoxically, builds me back up.”

— S. Elizabeth

Lisa Marie Basile: With such a brilliant mind, your trail of inspiration must run deep. Can you tell us what sets you ablaze?

It's funny—this is a question I love to ask artists and creatives when I am the one doing the interviewing, but it turns out that it's not easy to put into words! Or rather, while I can definitely list some inspirations, I'm hesitant to say as to whether or not they are even apparent in my own writing. Dracula by Bram Stoker and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca were two books that I read when I was 11 years old or so, and I was thrilled to read the intense gloominess and atmosphere of excessive dread and mystery that each of these stories conjured for me.

By that age, I had also read and re-read Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy a dozen times and while I knew even then that Harriet was a pretty flawed character, I loved her and wanted to BE her with her notebook and nosiness and creeping into people's houses just to see what sort of boring things that they get up to. In college, I discovered Sei Shōnagon. This Heian-era mean girl and OG blogger sorta felt like an adult, more polished Harriet who moved up in the world. I have long loved the writings of this Japanese author, poet, and a court lady : her elegant lists, her acerbic observations, her beautifully intimate and wonderfully catty diaries–all of her anecdotes and opinions and inner dialogue, from the excruciating minutiae of everyday life, to the exquisite poetry she composed connecting and expanding these trifling, fragmented instances to the broader aspects of lived human experience; these strangely random and tangential stories have informed and inspired my own writings for many, many years now.

Also, I’d probably be remiss in leaving out that frustrating old H.P. Lovecraft. His stories are dense with florid description and also packed with racism and xenophobia but he is a part of my past self and I can’t pretend I never read his writings or that his concepts of madness-inducing cosmic horrors haven’t inspired some of my favorite contemporary authors–writers who have taken these ideas and improved upon them immeasurably.

Also, I won’t lie. When I am writing a review for a particularly odious perfume, I may employ the use of a internet Lovecraftian adjective generator for my purposes. Cinematically, I love the works of Jean Rollin and Dario Argento–the former, visual poetry of sensual horror, uncanny beauty and perverse, morbid delights, (read: swoony lesbian vampires) and the latter a creator of gorgeously lurid giallo films. All of these movies are equally absurd and nonsensical, but dang are they pretty. If it’s got exquisite humans wearing breathtaking fashion and swanning about castles or stately manors or even glittering discos or murky alleyways–I am all-in.

Conversely, I do love the gentle, heartwarming charm of a beautifully animated Studio Ghibli film. I love both King Diamond and Weird Al. Lana del Rey and Anna von Hausswolff. Golden age illustrations of elegantly levitating fairies in a lush vibrant summer garden and the gothic charcoal rendering of melancholy moth singed by a candle’s flame. My own writing is probably some strange patchwork of all of these things, the sentimental, the spooky, the silly.

Sometimes I can even channel a less-talented, dopier Mary Oliver:

7am garden poem
Burying elderberry seeds
in the fog of last night’s rain,
mosquito bit, caterpillar cursed,
a spider looked at me sideways—
I know my business, bugs!
Tend to your own!

Lisa Marie Basile: How does the muse inhabit you? Give us a peek at your creative process — the good and the challenging.

For a very long time my process involved being too terrified and paralyzed with the thought of failure to begin a project, making myself miserable for a number of days/weeks/months dreading doing anything about it while not doing anything about it, and then zipping it all together at the last minute because the only thing worse than failing is not coming through with a thing you had promised to do.

The ONLY thing that lit a fire under me and made me write the thing was that I didn’t want someone upset with me for not having written it. Nowadays I’ve come to the conclusion that I hate the feeling of that dread—it takes up so much space and energy and it sucks all of the life out of everything else you’re doing in the meantime!—more than I fear the failure.

I do whatever it takes to get myself in front of my computer and work on the thing every single day, even if it’s just a few minutes. It always turns out to be longer than that, but the trick is, I was able to get myself there because I promised myself “you only have to do the bare minimum today.”

Somehow, that makes it not so scary for me, and as cheesy as it sounds, those snippets add up over time and by the time your deadline rears its head you’re like “oh, I only need to make a few tweaks, everything I need is all already here!”

Another trick (yes, I have to trick myself a lot) is something I read in an interview with one of the big deal writers for The Simpsons. He said something along the lines of just sit down and get it all out on paper or the computer monitor or whatever, no matter how bad it is, just write it and come back to it again later. The next day, it’s already there. Like a crappy little elf wrote it for you overnight. It’s turned the process of doing something that feels impossible (beginning a thing from nothing) into something that feels more bearable (re-writing/editing a thing that’s already there.)

Something else I’ve learned is that if I am stuck, just walk away. Banging my head against the wall and agonizing about it never helps? But you know what does? For me, anyway? Going on a walk. There is something deeply meditative about placing one foot in front of the other and carrying yourself forward. You don’t have to think about anything else about making it to the next mailbox or the next block or around the neighborhood or whatever.

The funny thing is…that’s when all of the thoughts sneak in! I’ve read a few articles on how walking engages some sort of cognitive function in your brain that just isn’t activated from sitting at our desks. Our sensory systems work at their best when they’re moving about the world. So for me, taking a walk helps. I end up planing my day, I compose poems and emails and silly tweets for Twitter. I daydream and let my imagination run away with me.

Sometimes, in the mindlessness of steps walked becoming miles traveled, the inner paths my ruminations take will lead me to interesting places with new ideas or present solutions to problems I was subconsciously working out. I come up with my best interview questions, my favorite article titles, and my most intriguing lines of inquiry during these strolls. For other people that might mean stepping away from their project to work on a puzzle or do some gardening or make a quiche or whatever. Do anything for an hour or so that is NOT the writing that is stressing you out.

Lisa Marie Basile: Do you have any creative rituals? Do tell.

I always have to have my hair tied back. I have some weird sensory issues and if I get overstimulated from a stray hair tickling my nose, I get to the point where I want to sweep everything off my desk in a fit of melodrama and lay on the floor and sob.

Perfume is a must! If I’m trying to get serious about a piece I am writing, I will wear something with a bit of gravitas, like Serge Lutens Gris Clair, a sort of somber, sedate lavender. Or, for example, right now I am writing a book about fantasy art and I am wearing Celestial Gala from Scent Trunk, all milky gossamer wings stardust’s effervescent chill. I keep close at hand a notebook full of scribblings…words or turns of phrase from the books I’ve been reading, passages that are beautiful or strange or that I want to look into further. This is a precious little book of inspiration that sometimes sparks an idea for a whole new thing or that can maybe just serve to fill in a blank or two.

Lisa Marie Basile: Whenever I read your words, your descriptions (especially in your fragrance series, Midnight Stinks), or even these responses, I think, ‘damn, you are SO Taurean!’ Please indulge me — how does Taurus move through your life?

Taurus sun/Capricorn rising/Libra moon, here. When I was a child, my chief obsessions were flowers, glittering jewelry, pretty dresses, and watching my grandmother cook. Before the age that others begin to make an impression on me; before I learned to read and discovered other interests through the characters inhabiting the worlds of those pages; before I realize my mother is an astrologer who has apparently charted my every move well in advance—before all of those things, I was a kid who liked to be by myself, who was quiet and reserved and slow to warm to others.

I loved to help my grandmother roll pie crusts, and form doughy dumplings to drop into broth from the tip of a spoon; I liked to crawl into my mother's garden and play with the snapdragons and marigolds (although I really hated getting dirty!) and I loved—LOVED—playing "dress up" and planning fancy tea parties.

As an adult, all of those things remain true. Of course, my selective absorption of all of my mother's Linda Goodman books (I really only ever read about my own zodiac sign, ha!) probably solidified much it at an impressionable age. I continue to move through the world in the most Taurean of ways, I think. I love my solitude and I am still quite reticent and aloof when it comes to being in groups of people.

I'm not unfriendly, it's just...I can't handle more than one person at a time! So I'm afraid I retreat into myself on those occasions. And the memes are painfully true—I do have stupidly expensive taste. No matter what it is, I mean I could be walking into Petsmart for cat food or at the hardware store (even though I hate the hardware store!) and somehow zero in on the most expensive cat treats or toilet seat or whatever. It's not a helpful superpower!

I love both luxury and comfort; I have got a cabinet full of probably thousands of dollars worth of perfume, and yet I sleep in a ratty old tee shirt that's got holes in the armpits because it's so beautifully, perfectly worn-in, and cozy. I love to cook and I love to eat, and you can see that in my soft, round body. But you can also see that in the way I enjoy feeding people something delicious, that makes them feel good. I still love flowers and I still hate getting dirty, so while you may see me in my garden, gingerly digging in the dirt to plant something small, or harvest a tomato or two, generally my thumb is not particularly green and you'll never see me camping. I am not "outdoorsy!"

I'm in my head a lot—I am a pro-daydreamer, but it's not especially high-brow or cerebral up in there. I don't have scholarly, academic, or philosophical leanings. Although certainly lots of pre-writing work and fleeting bits of poetry and wordplay swirl around in there. Still, I have to coax all of that out onto a computer screen or a notepad and get it all tangibly in front of me to make sense of it.

I don't know if that's particularly Taurean, but I imagine my Capricorn rising gives me a weird ambitious/competitive streak that is probably a good and necessary contrast in order to motivate me to do anything with any nonsense that does make it out of my brain.

TLDR; because in typical, plodding, make-a-long-story-longer Taurean fashion, I am taking a long time to get to the point: I love food and beauty and luxury and comfort; I'm reserved and in my head a lot and I didn't mention it above but yes I can absolutely hold a grudge forever but if I love you, I am probably going to love you forever, too.

Oh. And I am absolutely OBSESSED with Scorpios. While I don’t mean to generalize, I can say that in my experience, there are two types of Scorpios: the one that is Very A Lot, they don’t hold back, you always know what they are thinking and they practically flay themselves open for you. They want you to have all of them, even and especially the ugly and scary bits. They wear their shadow side on their sleeve and their shadows aren’t very subtle, either.

The other kind of Scorpio is not exactly the secretive, silent-type, but their shadows are shrewd and sharp and you might not get to see them right away; you always recognize they are there and you are inexplicably drawn to them like a moth to flame.

I am the furthest thing from a Scorpio, but I am also a secret Scorpio.

“Before the age that others begin to make an impression on me; before I learned to read and discovered other interests through the characters inhabiting the worlds of those pages; before I realize my mother is an astrologer who has apparently charted my every move well in advance—before all of those things, I was a kid who liked to be by myself, who was quiet and reserved and slow to warm to others. ”

— S. Elizabeth

Lisa Marie Basile: I am always curious as to how someone’s background, culture, identity, or belief system shapes their work. Can you share a bit about this?

I think my work is hugely informed by my identity in terms of invisibility. It’s a strange/scary thing to talk about because I don’t want anyone to ever think I am somehow mocking their experience as being a nonbinary person, for example, but I was having a conversation with a friend a few months ago after they had come out as nonbinary. I admitted to them that I have never felt like a woman/girl, like a she/her — but that he/him and they/them feel wrong too. I had previously said this to my sister, who responded with “so…do we call you IT?” She was only half serious, but I almost started weeping.

This is going to sound weird and probably very wrong because who wants to be referred to as “it”? Me. I do. That felt perfect to me after a lifetime of living as me, as one who doesn’t feel like a “someone.” I don’t even feel like a person, much less a man or a woman.

I don’t feel like this thing or that thing, because most of the time I don’t even feel here, as a thing that exists. I think my writing and what I put of myself out into the world is very reflective of these feelings of impalpability and unreality, even though I’ve never any of this out loud, in these words.

Lisa Marie Basile: Who do you look up to? I’m so curious about contemporary writers and artists who inspire you.

Three writers and friends who continuously inspire me are Sonya Vatomsky (@coolniceghost ) whose poetry is swoony and sharp and sly and whose essays and other writings are so, so fucking smart; Maika (@liquidnight ) whose words are always so compassionate and thoughtful and perceptive–even when writing about their own experiences, you, the reader feel so breathtakingly, heartbreaking seen; and Nuri McBride (@deathandscent ) a perfumer, writer, and curator whose work centers on olfactive cultural education, and anything she creates is going to be an astonishingly researched, illuminating, insightful journey. Sonya, Maika, and Nuri have all bolstered, supported, and encouraged me in the most gentle and relentless of ways, and they are each deeply special, wondrous humans.

Lisa Marie Basile: I am curious about your thoughts on publishing, promoting, and merging the professional with your, well essence — of creativity and beauty and exploration. I have truly struggled with it all.

In fact, I feel changed — perhaps not always positively — by the experience of publishing. It has taken time to rebuild my Artist self, to step back from going and doing and making and simply rest or take stock. I think once you (or I) share with the world, something dies a little (#scorpio) and you have to work to resurrect it. What are your thoughts on it all?

I thought I would feel more changed by the process of publishing, to be honest. I thought having a book I had written out in the world, on people's shelves, in their hands, would somehow...I don't know...make me feel less sad about having a complicated relationship with my dead mom? Less traumatized by a past relationship full of abuse and gaslighting and manipulation where my identity and self-esteem were ground into the dirt, into nothing? Less shitty about having a less-than-ideal-looking human body that I've been shamed for ever since I can remember? Less scared of everything, all of it, all the time?

Turns out: nope. Having published a book, having published—two books—by this time next month, just means I am all of those things still, but also with some publications out in the world. I still work the same day job I've had for the past 17 years; I don't love it, but in typical Taurean fashion I like my stability and I don't feel comfortable with the idea of just quitting my job and trying to write full-time.

I don't want to "hustle," I don't want to have to agree to write about things I am not interested in so that I can afford to pay my bills. I am just not into any of that. While I am doing as much promoting of my books as I can, I'm not doing anything that feels disingenuous, that doesn't feel like me: you'll never see me doing book tours or speaking on panels or even live-AMAs or anything like that. I promoted them by interviewing the artists in them. I worked them into perfume reviews or little fashion ensemble collages that I then share on social media, or sharing playlists of music inspired by them. These are all things I enjoy doing, and would do anyway, and it was actually a treat to include my book and writings in them. And along with that, I guess I haven't felt anything inside me die because—except for the writing of the book—I don't think I gave *every* piece of myself to the process.

And that's not me patting myself on the back. It's me being boring and practical. I have a job to fall back on. If this book or that book flops, it's not going to kill me. Maybe my ego. But not financially. I'm not rich, I don't have a lot of money. And the money I have made from these books is negligible (that's another thing people need to know about writing books, I think.

There's just...not a lot of money in it.) I know that's not a very exciting or beautiful answer but I do think it is a genuine, practical, Taurus answer. I did exactly what was required of me for these books, in exactly the way I wanted to do it, and no more. Although...I did at one point say that I was NEVER going to be on a podcast (too scary!) but then over the course of the next six months I was interviewed on four podcasts, so ...so much for that, I guess.

I don't know if I adequately answered that question. I've been burnt out, sure. Since 2019 I have written three books (well, I am working on my third) I continue to blog and write for other platforms when it interests me, I post regularly on social media, I started a Patreon that I try to write for once a week, I started and grew a TikTok account where I share perfume reviews almost every day, I put together a press kit, I am in the midst of developing a newsletter and while all of these things sound like professional tools, to me, it's just a lot of fun.

I love doing stuff like this, it's all a beautiful exploration to me. It's A LOT and I need a break every once in a while but I'd probably be doing all of that even if I never published a book! As crappy as social media makes me feel sometimes, the comparison aspect of it, that is, I LOVE it. I really do.

As shy and squirrely as I am, this is how I share and connect with people. I love all of the like-minded souls and kindred spirits that I have encountered through all of these platforms. I've always felt like such an invisible nothing...and I know that I give away of myself more than I will ever get back in return...it's the sharing of these little pieces of myself in all of these different places that somehow, paradoxically, builds me back up.

S.Elizabeth is a writer, curator, and frill-seeker. Her essays and interviews focusing on esoteric art have appeared in Haute Macabre, Coilhouse, Dirge Magazine, Death & The Maiden, and her occulture blog Unquiet Things, which intersects music, fashion, horror, perfume, and grief. She is the cocreator of The Occult Activity Book Vol. 1 and 2 and the author of The Art of the Occult (2020), The Art of Darkness (2022), and The Art of Fantasy (2023)

Lisa Marie Basile is the founding editor of Luna Luna Magazine. She’s also the author of a few books of poetry and nonfiction, including Light Magic for Dark Times, The Magical Writing Grimoire, Nympholepsy, Andalucia, and more. She’s a health journalist and chronic illness advocate by day. By night, she’s working on an autofictional novella for Clash Books.

Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes and has appeared in Best Small Fictions, Best American Poetry, and Best American Experimental Writing. Her work can be found in The New York Times, Atlas Review, Spork, Entropy, Narratively, and more. She has an MFA from The New School.

Gustavo Barahona-Lopez: On Poetry, Masculinity, and Heritage

An interview with Gustavo Barahona-Lopez
by Lisa Marie Basile

This interview is part of our new Creator Series, a series of Q&As designed to help you get to know people who are writing, making, and doing beautiful things.

Gustavo Barahona-López is a writer and educator from Richmond, California. He is the author of the poetry chapbook, "Loss and Other Rivers That Devour,” and in 2023 his debut full-length collection will be published by FlowerSong Press. I wanted to chat with him about his work and influences.

Lisa Marie Basile: Tell us a bit about what you’ve written — and what we can expect from you going ahead.

My chapbook, “Loss and Other Rivers that Devour” centers on my mourning my father’s death and how my identity and sense of self shifted along with the process of grieving. I wanted to write about the complexity of our relationship and my grief. Just as there is love so too is there hurt and actively pulling away from my father’s example.

I never felt that I fit my father’s narrow view of masculinity and part of my journey of grieving included forging my own sense of manhood.

In 2023 I will also publish my debut full-length collection with FlowerSong Press. It centers on themes of language, heritage, colonial erasures, trauma, and some speculative imaginings of the future.

Lisa Marie Basile: Can you tell us a little more about how identity or culture plays into your work?

I am the son of Mexican immigrants to the United States and that has a huge influence on my writing. This is in terms of language (in my case Spanish), cultural references, and experiences. Growing up as part of this community has also inspired me to write about the many abuses perpetrated against migrants to the United States.

For instance, I wrote a microchap centered on migrant children dying on the U.S.-Mexico border. Additionally, I write a lot about masculinity and how I have sought to undo a lot of the gendered socialization that my parents impacted upon me.

Lisa Marie Basile: Looking back to your point about gendered socialization, you said, "I never felt that I fit my father’s narrow view of masculinity, and part of my journey of grieving included forging my own sense of manhood."

I'm wondering, as a poet, does writing about the complexity of family, grief, and gender (re)open these wounds, or does it help you confront, synthesize, or articulate the nuances of it all? I know some poets find writing about traumatic issues cathartic while others find it tricky — a sort of Pandora's box, if you will.

It’s a mixture of both for me. Writing poetry has been key for me to process my feelings around my father’s death and my relationship to his teachings on gender. Since part of my socialization was to repress my feelings to the point that I have trouble recognizing them, expressing myself in my poetry led me to realizations about my own emotions.

While in some ways it is cathartic to write about past trauma there have been multiple times where I have cried after writing a line or a poem because I touched a particularly tender part of my past.

“Since part of my socialization was to repress my feelings to the point that I have trouble recognizing them, expressing myself in my poetry led me to realizations about my own emotions. ”

— Gustavo Barahona-Lopez

Lisa Marie Basile: Are there other authors who you enjoy and who also handle masculinity in a way that resonates with you?

The author that comes to mind when thinking about complicating masculinity is the work of Tomas Moniz and his book “Big Familia.”

Lisa Marie Basile: And what does your writing process look like? I’m always curious to hear how other writers tend to their craft.

I write best when I have an extended period of time to myself. Preferably this would be outside of my home like a local coffee shop. Since my wife and I’d baby, Issa, was born a year ago though time to myself has been scarce so I usually write late night after the kids have gone to bed these days.

Lisa Marie Basile: Can you share some of your general inspirations and influences with us?

My literary influences include Martin Esparza, Tomas Rivera, Sandra Cisneros, Eduardo Corral, Vanessa Angelica Villarreal, Jose Olivares, Marcelo Castillo Hernandez, Alan Chazaro, Muriel Leung, Lupe Mendez, Pablo Neruda, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Gloria Anzaldua.

Lisa Marie Basile: And who are some contemporary creators, writers, or peers that you look up to on the regular?

Muriel Leung, Alan Chazaro, and Gustavo Hernandez.

Gustavo Barahona-López is a writer and educator from Richmond, California. In his writing, Barahona-López draws from his experience growing up as the son of Mexican immigrants. His poetry chapbook, "Loss and Other Rivers That Devour," was published by Nomadic Press in February 2022. Barahona-López was a finalist for the 2021 Quarterly West poetry prize and was awarded a Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) residency fellowship. A member of the Writer's Grotto and a VONA alum, Barahona-López's work can be found or is forthcoming in Quarterly West, Iron Horse Literary Review, Puerto del Sol, The Acentos Review, Apogee Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, among other publications.

Lisa Marie Basile is the founding editor of Luna Luna Magazine. She’s also the author of a few books of poetry and nonfiction, including Light Magic for Dark Times, The Magical Writing Grimoire, Nympholepsy, Andalucía, and more. She’s a health journalist and chronic illness advocate by day. By night, she’s working on an autofictional novella for Clash Books.

Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes and has appeared in Best Small Fictions, Best American Poetry, and Best American Experimental Writing. Her work can be found in The New York Times, Atlas Review, Spork, Entropy, Narratively, and more. She has an MFA from The New School.

Andi Talarico on Magic, Writing, and Italian Inspiration

An Interview with Andi Talarico
by Lisa Marie Basile

This interview is part of our new Creator Series, a series of q&as that are designed to help you get to know people who are writing, making, and doing beautiful things.

Andi Talarico (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based writer, poet, and self-proclaimed witchy poo (astrology, tarot, ritual work). She’s the co-founder of Writing The Cosmos (which I have the great fortune of running with her). As an endlessly fascinating human with a great deal of knowledge about all things literary, magical, and mystical, I wanted to chat with her about her creative inspirations and her upcoming workshop Luna Le Vag, a holistic spa in Brooklyn, NY.

In this interview, we discuss her workshop, influencers, inspiration, and how her culture shapes her work.

Lisa Marie: Tell us a bit about your recent creative project, the Full Moon Ritual workshop you’re holding in Brooklyn this month.

The idea for this workshop came from my frequenting of this lovely Brooklyn business called Luna Le Vag, a holistic spa in Brooklyn that’s run by two inspiring young women, Jordan and Naomi. Their spa does a lot of work with natural care (and pampering!) for the vagina (hence their name) but there’s more to it than that - I could tell that they cared about community-building, networking with other businesses run by women and people of color, and I started to think about a way that I could possibly contribute. I noticed that Luna Le Vag was already offering classes in workshops in areas of interest to me: healing arts, reiki, energy readings, intentional cannabis use, and more.

Because my hobbies revolve around things like the study of astrology, tarot, and ritual, I thought it could be useful - and hopefully fun! - to offer a workshop based around the Full Moon and ways to harness its energy for use in reflection, self-care, and intentionality. All of these practices are beneficial, but I find it especially important to have conversations around and engage with these rituals as part of building community. The more we practice intentionality, the more we participate in our lives fully and authentically. The idea for the workshop is twofold:

First, we’ll be performing ritual as a group, which is its own healing and community-building modality, but Second, I’ll be sharing ways in which all of these practices can be personalized to benefit each person, so they can take these skills and apply them authentically in their own lives, whether alone or with others.

All of this is done in tandem with the good people of Luna Le Vag who will be there to participate, contribute, host, and share their beautiful space with us, as well as their food and refreshments, as this workshop will run all evening, in order to give us time to relax into things in a more organic way. To sum that all up, I’m running a Full Moon Ritual workshop on Thursday, August 11th, from 5-9pm, at Lune Le Vag at 1096 Broadway in Brooklyn. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own tarot deck but we will have extras on hand. No prior knowledge of tarot, astrology, or spirituality is needed to participate.

Lisa Marie Basile: Who are some of your creative favorites? Who lights you up?

Oh wow, what an enormous (and great) question! As it relates to my ritual-craft, I find a lot of inspiration in the words and writing of people like Patti Smith, Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson, Sappho, Jeanette Winterson, Kim Addonizio, Diane di Prima, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, Isabelle Allende - people who suffuse their work with a type of magic and openness, who use language as a way to get to truths both known and not. The reading of tarot is a narrative structure; the joy of Astrology comes from mining its depths for meaning; a guided meditation is a way to marry language and imagination. At the bedrock of all of these things is language, incantation, possibility — my love of writing directly feeds my study of the esoteric and magical, and vice versa.

“The reading of tarot is a narrative structure; the joy of Astrology comes from mining its depths for meaning; a guided meditation is a way to marry language and imagination. At the bedrock of all of these things is language, incantation, possibility — my love of writing directly feeds my study of the esoteric and magical, and vice versa.”

— Andi Talarico

Lisa Marie Basile: I’d love to hear about your writing process, struggles, or any rituals you turn to when creating. How are things going?

It definitely depends. There are days when all I need is to take my laptop to a coffeehouse and immerse myself in the din of the city to feel inspired. Other days, it’s much more introverted: I need every single detail of my home to be in order before I’m able to sit down, light some incense, turn on some beautiful, wordless music, make myself the perfect cup of coffee, and then sidle up to the page. Some days I need to write by hand.

Other days I feel the need to type. I try to listen to my needs and balance them with what I’m trying to get done. I do think I write more now, in these past few years, than I used to, likely because I started practicing better life habits more intentionally and tracking them.

It also became easier when I (mostly) shut off the constant inner critic and understood that Prolific usually beats the hell out of Perfection. If I don’t consider every word precious, I can let them all spill out onto the page and then parse them later. You can’t edit from nothing, but you can always edit from an imperfect something.

Lisa Marie Basile: Tell us a bit about how culture, identity, place, or belief inspires or influences your work?

I believe my heritage deeply informs my work - and by work, I mean writing as well as magic-making as well as the way in which I move through the world. While I’m proudly of mixed ethnicity and heritage, I was raised Catholic with a strong emphasis on our Italian-American side of the family, and though I’ve loooong been lapsed in the practice of the Catholic religion, I do still carry an abiding love for ritual, ambience, the mysteries of the spirit, even prayer as it corresponds to incantation. And incense. That one definitely stuck, haha. There’s a certain type of bloody passion that exists at the heart of Catholicism that still speaks to me and through me.

Though my craft has many influences and forms, the majority of the rituals that I practice come from the folk magic traditions of southern Italy. I’ve always felt more attached to the folk magic that took places in kitchens and gardens and bedrooms than the high magic traditions, especially those which exist within a hierarchy. And frankly, if I wanted some man wearing fancy robes to tell me how to live my life, I would have just stayed in the church. I respect the freedom, feminism, and resourcefulness of folk traditions and that love informs much of how I live and work.

Lisa Marie Basile: Who are some contemporary creators, writers, or peers that you look up to on the regular?

I think we’re in a really interesting time in history as far as witchcraft and ritual are concerned and I find a lot of inspiration from the people sort of heading up that public discourse. The work of Pamela Grossman comes to mind, as does Mary-Grace Fahrun, the astrological writings of Chani Nicholas and Gala Mukomolova. I deeply appreciate the life work and educational offerings from Marybeth Bonfiglio at Radici Siciliani, Herban Cura, and Mallorie Vaudoise.

Andi Talarico (Cancer sun/Pisces moon/Sagittarius rising, she/her) is a Brooklyn-based writer, poet, and general witchy poo (astrology, tarot, ritual work.) She’s taught and coached poetry/performance in classrooms as a rostered artist, as well as tarot and astrology workshops through WORD Bookstore and more. In 2003, Paperkite Press published her chapbook, Spinning with the Tornado, and Swandive Publishing included her in the 2014 anthology, Everyday Escape Poems. She also penned a literary arts column for Electric City magazine, and curated the NYC-branch of the international reading series, At the Inkwell, from 2016-2019. Her work has appeared in The Poetry Project, Luna Luna Magazine, Brokelyn, Yes, Poetry, amongst others.

Lisa Marie Basile is the founding editor of Luna Luna Magazine. She’s also the author of a few books of poetry and nonfiction, including Light Magic for Dark Times, The Magical Writing Grimoire, Nympholepsy, Andalucia, and more. She’s a health journalist and chronic illness advocate by day. By night, she’s working on an autofictional novella for Clash Books.

Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes and has appeared in Best Small Fictions, Best American Poetry, and Best American Experimental Writing. Her work can be found in The New York Times, Atlas Review, Spork, Entropy, Narratively, and more. She has an MFA from The New School.

Homespun Haints Is Your New Fave Ghost Story Podcast

BY ALEXANDRA COHL & BECKY KILIMNIK

Becky Kilimnik is the co-host and producer of the podcast Homespun Haints, an interview-style and storytelling podcast that celebrates the oral tradition of storytelling as an art form—with ghosts. Throughout its inception, Becky has also pulled from her other expertise as an artist and musician; she composes and plays all of the original music on the podcast and creates original artwork to accompany each episode. Now in their third season and with over 25,000 downloads, Becky and her co-host Diana Doty have cultivated a space where people can feel comfortable sharing and processing the paranormal experiences they have had.

Listen to: Korean Folklore, Death Days, and the Haunted Queens Apartment, or Quarantined With A Ghost

And, as someone who grew up in an Appalachian town and who has deep ties to the art of storytelling, Becky applies both her personal history and her Anthropology degree from Northwestern University to these interviews and in the pre- and post-production stages to really capture just how personal and unique these ghost stories can be. The podcast delights listeners in both expected and unexpected ways: fulfilling the desire for a creepy tale while also inviting laughter, self-reflection—and sometimes tears—with the stories that are told. 

You’ve said before on your podcast (specifically the episode with professional storyteller Dr. Hannah Harvey) that “The tradition of storytelling as a celebrated art form is so uniquely Appalachian” and that “It doesn’t seem to have the same weight given to it culturally in other parts of the country.” I’d love to start there: What was the moment (or moments) where you really began to realize this and what were those major differences? 

Becky Kilimnik

I spent the first part of my life in northeast Tennessee with only limited exposure to other parts of the world. When I turned seventeen, however, I moved to Chicago to go to college. My first year there, I slowly began to realize there were no storytelling festivals to attend, and no one talked about “storytelling” as a fun pastime. Of course, people there tell stories, just like people all over the world tell stories. And Chicago itself is an amazing hub for two very unique types of storytelling: improv comedy and jazz music. But, the cultural emphasis (which evolved from the combined traditions of Scottish, Irish, and African immigrants and Cherokee residents of the area) on non-scripted orality, practiced in front of a mirror, performed on stage or in front of peers, fluid and changing with every performance, for both the purposes of entertainment and sharing of knowledge, didn’t exist in the same form. And I found the same to be true in other places in America that I’ve lived as well.

Do you remember the first time you heard a ghost story? If so, what was it, and how do you feel like it started to shape who you are today?

I don’t think I could tell you the first ghost story I heard! Honestly, I think my mother was telling me ghost stories before I could even talk. I do remember the first time I heard a professional storyteller tell a ghost story, though. It was at a music workshop I was attending in Jonesborough, TN (I’ve been playing violin since I was four years old so I did a lot of these such workshops), and they hired a storyteller to entertain us during our first night there. I remember her handmade, brightly colored costume that hung off of her arms in twisted strips and how pieces of her costume would whip around her as she gestured.

I also remember the gasps of my little sister as the storyteller moved about the stage, telling us about the woman who ate her own body as she nearly died of hunger one cold winter night. In the story, the woman’s husband finally came back to their log cabin with a deer for dinner, but the woman, now nothing but an animated skeleton, leaped out from behind the cabin’s door and consumed him, too. And that was the end of the story. 

At first, I hated the story because I wanted more. I wanted to know if the skeleton woman still wandered the mountains in search of food (of course she did!). I wanted to know what happened next and if the storyteller made the story up herself or pulled it from folklore. But then I realized that none of those things really mattered in a good oral story. The story often ends at the climax; there is no resolution. And the art of the story itself is not in the following of a traditional short story structure—the art is in how the story is told. The drama behind the storyteller’s movements and the inflections in her voice.

At that moment I was instantly in love with storytelling. The ability to entertain and enrapture large groups of people merely with words and gestures seemed like pure magic, and I knew it had to be something I incorporated into my life.

 Tell me a little bit about the origin story of Homespun Haints; what prompted the idea for it, why you chose the format for the podcast that you did, and how you see it differing from other paranormal-based podcasts.

Homespun Haints

One of the first things I’ve always asked people when I meet them is “do you have a ghost story?” I’ve always been intrigued by the way people interpret events in their lives that they can’t quite explain. It makes us vulnerable and human, and no matter how people carry themselves, when they start to talk about a ghost encounter they’ve had, they reveal their soul to the world. As far back as I can remember, I’ve had an insatiable hunger for those stories and those moments.

I wanted to find a way to capture those points in time where the person telling their story bears their deepest fears to an audience and connects with their listeners in a profound way. I initially considered starting this project as a written blog, but then I remembered the storytelling traditions from my hometown, and I realized I had to do something that was linear (and oral), experienced moment by moment by the listener as the story unfolded. Podcasting presented itself as the perfect solution. Because of my musical background, I already had experience with recording and editing audio. The rest just took some planning and research. 

I feel this podcast is different from other traditional paranormal podcasts because our primary focus is storytelling. Even though all of our stories must be ghost stories to fit with our brand, their magic comes not just from the events within the stories but also from how the story is told and how we react to those stories emotionally. We consider what we’re doing to be more of an art form than anything else.

Oftentimes, your episodes can be a mix of serious, spooky stories, along with dark (and sometimes light!) humor. Why is that approach so important to you and your co-host, Diana Doty? Why not go the “uber spooky” route? 

Initially, we did think of going down the “uber spooky” route, but our personalities got in the way. We started throwing humor in because we couldn’t help ourselves! And I think that’s fine. It wasn’t a planned approach or branding initiative; it’s just who we are. Our listeners have told us that a lot of what they like about our show is how genuine we are behind the mics, and we enjoy just being ourselves—weird, spooky women who love to laugh.

By Becky Kilimnik

Plus, a good story is always better if you access more than one emotion while listening to it. A scary story is just a scary story. But a story that makes you laugh, cry, and cover your head with a blanket is going to stay with you for a long time. We want to provide warmth, humor, and fear, and create a well-rounded experience for all of our listeners, no matter what their comfort level with the paranormal is.

You’ve also expressed that in mainstream American culture, the paranormal community (such as who is invited on these types of podcasts) can often times be very whitewashed. Why do you think that is, and what have been the ways that you’ve worked to change that on your own podcast?

If you go on a ghost tour or look up the famous ghosts at a historic site, the stories you’ll hear are disproportionately about rich white people. If you hear about a person of color, especially about an enslaved person, the story may be completely made up or altered to make it more palatable to a white audience. Though plenty of stories have been told in all communities throughout the ages, these sanitized, white-centric stories are the ones that have more often had the advantage of being written down and shared across different types of media.

As storytellers and story-preservers, Diana and I want to do whatever we can to preserve stories from all communities, especially communities that have had their stories lost in the past.

It’s been a little bit of a struggle, I’ll be honest. When we started the podcast, we turned to our friends and family to serve as guests for the show. And many of those people are in very professional jobs and were uncomfortable talking about their ghost stories in a public setting. Many of our guests from the start chose to come on only with our assurances that their anonymity would be protected. When we did start reaching outside of our own circle for guests, we wanted to be sensitive to the fact that, when we have a guest on our show, we know they are doing us a favor. We needed to have a large enough listener audience to provide significant value to our guests in exchange for their time. We promote whatever projects our guests are involved with on our show and in our show notes, so the larger our audience, the larger the value of that exposure is.

Now that we are large enough that we can provide that value, we’ve really set an initiative for this season to seek out more people of color to come onto our show and share stories with us. Part of that work is ensuring that we are creating a space where people of color and their voices will feel safe and respected, so we’re also very upfront with our guests about this initiative; that we want to share diverse viewpoints that much of our audience may not even have considered or know about.

Ghost stories are both entertainment and history, both of which are, unfortunately, very whitewashed in mainstream media and literature. If you’d like to learn a little more about this, I suggest watching the documentary Horror Noire on Shudder, which discusses the evolution of Black actors and characters in the horror fiction genre. Also, there is a great episode of A History of Ghosts called “The Whitewashed Ghost” that discusses the psychology behind the white-centric ghost tour.

LISTEN TO: Filipino Folklore: Manananggal, Engkanto, and Duwende, Oh My! or Sometimes There’s Just Ghosts, on Appalachian Storytelling

I know that you and your co-host really encourage people to share their truths on your podcast—that it isn’t a place to question people’s ghost stories but rather a place to affirm their experience of the world. In the many interviews you’ve conducted and the stories you’ve heard up to this point, what have you learned about the history of supernatural stories and their cultural significance? Has anything surprised you or contradicted what you believed when you first started this podcast?

Our biggest surprise has been how cathartic the storytelling experience can be for our guests! After telling us stories that they’ve kept pent up inside of themselves for years, many of our guests will burst into tears, thank us, tell us that talking to us is akin to therapy. We were not expecting that at all when we started out. We thought we were just going to be sharing some ghost stories; we didn’t realize how many people would benefit from having a place to dig deep into their own pasts, and share stories they didn’t realize they were hiding from. Our commitment to having a non-judgmental, safe space has really paid off in that regard!

Obviously, this isn’t the case for all of our guests. Some of them have told these same stories dozens of times before. But for those that haven’t, it speaks volumes about our culture’s attitude toward true supernatural experiences. Many guests tell us how they’ve experienced ostracization from society, ridicule from family members, even fear of losing their jobs, when they’ve revealed these stories to others. Which is sad when you consider how profound and life-changing some of these experiences have been for some of these people.

Again, this was something that really surprised me, as someone who grew up in an area where sharing ghost stories was just a way of life. I believe everyone should have the opportunity to share their story and should not be punished for seeing the world a little differently than their peers.

So, you do even more than co-host and produce the podcast. You also create original artwork, stop motion YouTube mini-stories, and the original music for each episode. Talk to me about the art first: for the episode artwork, what is the style, and how do you decide which piece out of the whole episode to express visually?

By Becky Kilimnik

I would define my style as “quirky surrealism.” It’s not something I specifically developed; it’s just kind of what comes out of my hands. I began creating a piece of art for each episode because it seemed easier than hunting through stock photography sites for something that fit. I can’t tell you where inspiration for these things comes from—things just pop into my head and I try to replicate it. That’s how the initial pen and ink drawings started. I also began doing a few watercolor paintings as well because they were quick and easy and I could do them in color.

Toward the end of the second season, I started following some pop surrealism artists on Instagram (especially the paintings of Jesús Aguado @jm.aguado), and I became inspired by their work and wanted to try my hand at something similar. My first few works were a combination of oil pastel painting and drawing; pastel has always been my go-to medium for color, and I really enjoyed getting back into it. But, they’re messy and time-consuming, and my husband began grousing about the condition of our dining room as I was working. So, I thought I’d give acrylics a try. I’ve never used them before but I do remember watching my mother paint when I was a young girl, and I took to the medium right away. I’m really enjoying them and will probably stick with them for a while until I become bored and move onto something else.

As for what to express visually for each episode? I try to think of what piece of someone’s story would be the most visually impactful. When I picture the story, what do I see in my mind? And is it something I think I can pull off with a paintbrush? There’s not much more to it than that. The great thing about working with acrylics is that if I don’t like something that I started, I can always paint over it!

What about the YouTube channel? Why stop motion and how does this function as an extension of the podcast? 

Our stories are home-grown (hence the “Homespun” in Homespun Haints) but they’re also on the bizarre side. Therefore, I’ve steered away from doing anything too polished visually for the aesthetic of the podcast—I want it to retain a little of that slapped-together feel. 

I grew up in the eighties, when stop-motion animation was everywhere, from Claymation shows to special effects. For me, this technique always existed between the realistic and the strange. Plus, I do digital art all the time for my day job and it’s really relaxing to just stop and create with my hands.

Stop motion animation is also quirky, funny, and old-fashioned, just like many of the ghosts we talk about on the show. This style of animation also gives me a chance to create videos from hand-drawn components, just as the art that illustrates the episodes is hand-drawn. Every once in a while, I’ll accidentally get my thumb in a frame as I move pieces around and I just leave it. Those little mistakes just augment that homespun feel.

Now tell me about the music. What is the process behind creating the music for each episode and how does it impact the storytelling aspects of your podcast? 

I have several pieces of music that I’ve composed, performed, and produced that I use and re-use throughout the episodes. I generally change it a little from season to season (the first season was piano, the second was digital music, the third is the organ and violin). I came up with the theme song when we first started the show by messing around on the keys; everything since then has been some sort of variation on that theme.

Now for the more detailed answer. I’m a classically trained violinist with strong ties to the bluegrass fiddling of my home area. After I moved to Chicago, I became bored with classical violin and fiddling and started performing with progressive rock and glam rock bands. For eight years, I played in every bar throughout the Hyde Park, Rogers Park and Wicker Park neighborhoods. One stipulation for me being able to play with these groups was I had to learn how to improvise. When you’re hungry, you’ll learn how to do anything. So, I spent nearly a decade refining my improvisation chops. 

When I started the podcast, I had barely touched my violin for ten years. Hence, the piano. But quarantine altered everyone’s fate. I accidentally formed a band with some neighbors one drunken night, and before I knew what was happening, I was shredding on the old fiddle again. A few months later, I seem to have acquired a great deal of equipment, pedals, cables, and other strange musical items that just keep appearing in the living room. At one point, a Theremin even showed up.

Now, whenever we need new music for the podcast, I pull on those violin improvisation skills of yore. I’ll pull out my fiddle, go up to a mic, and mess around until something I like comes out. Then I create variations on that, and use editing software to mix, loop, overlap, and combine the tracks until it sounds like something that works with our show.

As for how it impacts the storytelling? I am committed to never using music to enhance or detract from our guests’ stories. Therefore, we only use it at the beginning, end, and interludes in the podcast. Music never flows over our guests’ words. I believe the story itself is enough and adding anything to it would be a disservice to the speaker’s words.

In the production, how do you manage to enhance the oral storytelling (with guests who may not always be natural storytellers) without stripping them of their individual voice? 

This is a tough one, but something I’m quite proud of. In a heavy edit, I may move pieces of someone’s story around so that it flows a little better—for instance, if someone accidentally tells the end first, and then says “Oh I forgot to mention….” I may even add extra spaces in between sentences to build suspense if a guest is nervous and speaking quickly. I will often remove excessive filler words (uh, um, like, you know). But I never touch colloquial language. I would never alter an accent. And, we always give the guest the opportunity to listen to their episode before it airs.

Most guests, however, do not require heavy editing. We’ve found that most people, whether they realize it or not, are natural storytellers. Most of our job is just to help them be comfortable, help them figure out a good starting point, and then sit back as the story flows out of them. 

What do you feel like folks outside of the paranormal community get wrong about it? 

Oh, that’s a tough question. I think there may be the assumption that people who enjoy paranormal stories or who are involved with paranormal events, are a bunch of “scary devil-worshipping creeps.” But in actuality, every single person we have met has been an amazing human being. I think people who love this stuff are used to being on the outside; they have a lot of empathy for anyone else who is used to not fitting in. And they’re just the nicest people ever. 

I think there’s also a belief that anyone who believes in ghosts is either completely ungrounded in reality or is trying to take advantage of gullible people (think common beliefs about fortune-tellers and palm-readers). My co-host, Diana, is a former physician with some pretty hefty scientific training under her belt, and our guests are down-to-earth people that just happen to have had some unexplainable experiences. When we’ve interviewed spiritual mediums (and we’ve had quite a few on the show), they are also very truthful about their abilities and their beliefs and have no intention of taking advantage of anyone. In general, we’ve found a great group of people, we’ve formed some strong friendships, and we’re so excited to be a part of such a warm and inviting community.

Burning the Boats that Brought Us Here: Madeleine Barnes Interviews Kelly Grace Thomas

BY MADELEINE BARNES & KELLY GRACE THOMAS

Boat Burned by Kelly Grace Thomas 
YesYes Books, 2020
110 pages, $16.20

In Boat Burned, Kelly Grace Thomas’ debut poetry collection (YesYes Books, 2020), we join a perceptive, vulnerable, authentic speaker in confronting and untangling the effects of generational and collective trauma on the body. In “Vesseled,” the first poem in the book, she writes: “He boarded me. I burned.” This truth is one she “can’t throw overboard,” and the ocean is her witness as she observes what remains of her. 

Thomas’ poetry invites us back to the sea, and its stillness invites us to reflect on tensions that cast shadows over our lives: chaos and order, self-punishment and worth, violence and liberation, trauma and recovery. The speaker desires “to divorce the earth,” and studies leaving “like a chart.” For Thomas, family is a synonym for “horizon.” In the speaker’s family, three women privately struggle with eating disorders but never talk about it—she longs to leave, but struggles to find the exit ramp. It is critical for her to go beyond the horizon, and through interrogations and deconstructions, she attempts to recover. She endures the mangling effects of self-surveillance; secrecy is a lack of oxygen.

Drowning remains a possibility, but the third and final section of the book reveals the beginning of the speaker’s journey toward a reconciliation with her body: “Body, why can’t I remember you / right? I know you’re no life / boat.” Here, the narrative transforms into one of triumph, asking us a critical question—when we are at sea, how do we want to drift? What structures and pressures make this choice ours and not ours?

In writing this book, Thomas endeavored to “recover from womanhood,” and in this interview, she reveals more about what this means to her. She also offers words of encouragement and gives thanks to poets who write about similar themes. She reminds us of all the ways that capitalism profits from our inability to love ourselves; self-love is a life-sustaining skill that no one teaches us. Reading her book, I was reminded of Alice Walker’s assertion that “telling and honoring the truth carries the possibility of transformation and delight.” Thomas uses both metaphor and direct language to deliver her truth. Her candid poetry strikes back against the layers of stigma, silence, and misinformation that compound trauma. “They can’t sink us,” she writes, “if we name ourselves / sea.”  

MB: Boat Burned (YesYes Books) openly examines private struggles with trauma and the body. You write with incisive clarity and strength about conditions that thrive in secrecy and are still stigmatized, even in literature. In “Where No One Says Eating Disorder,” you write about a family in which everyone is struggling privately: “When I was young, I pretended / we weren’t sick. Three women. / Three rooms.” We watch the woman in this family struggle in silence and isolation. The poem concludes, “We were so hungry / for anything / to love us back.” Why was it important to you to include your family members’ experiences of trauma and disordered eating in this book, real or imagined?

KGT: Plain and simple: I had to. This story, this struggle, is so much bigger than me. That was important for me to recognize share with readers. So many elements of disordered eating are shrouded in isolation and shame, and that’s what the disorder feeds on, how it survives. Eating disorders are sustained by silence. The less we talk or write about it, the sicker we remain. It took me years to admit that I was punishing myself and trying to control the world around me with food.

Carolina Public Health Magazine states, “A shocking sixty-five percent of American women between the ages of 25 and 45 have disordered eating behaviors, according to the results of a new survey sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and SELF Magazine.” That means roughly every two out of three women struggle with this. There is so little education and prevention, let alone conversation. I wrote this poem to show readers that this disorder is one that affects many. Growing up, every woman in my household had an eating disorder. We did not admit this to anyone, not even to each other, until almost twenty years later. We spent two decades suffering in isolation. The important question is: Why? 

I’d always wanted to write openly about body image issues and eating disorders. This plagued me, but I worried that writing about my body made me a cliché. Women have been programmed to equate their appearance with their intrinsic worth. Industries thrive on women’s insecurity. The less we love ourselves, the more companies profit.  This narrative is changing, but progress is slow because these conversations are often had in private. It’s time to start figuring out how we can help—it’s time to heal. It felt irresponsible not to contextualize my own eating disorder within my family—all of us were suffering, yet felt so isolated.

MB: You’ve spoken in the past about metaphor, and this book does a wonderful job of using metaphor to describe a struggle with the body. You write, “I thirst for shelter / I have no faith in. My body: a church / where no one prays.” We watch the speaker “confuse body / for boat.” A mother “unzips the body. / Passes it down. You also show us that there are no metaphors for some aspects of living with an eating disorder. In “No Metaphor For My Mouth,” you write, “I have no more lines memorized. // Nothing dainty // to make you // weep.” Did you make conscious decisions about balancing metaphor with direct description in this book? Recovery-wise, what is the benefit of setting metaphor aside and facing the reality of an illness, however stark?

KGT: What a great question. I don’t think this balancing was conscious, but as I wrote, my writing became more direct. In “Where No One Says Eating Disorder,” it was important to me to depict silence before the first line. In my view, metaphor makes hurt accessible. Metaphor gave me the key to enter the house; it also gave me the hammer. Once inside the house, I could stare at the walls and try understand why I built them before tearing them down. 

When I first started to write poetry, I questioned lines that spoke directly. I thought that perhaps they lacked the musicality or depth necessary to capture pain. I have come to realize that there is nothing more vulnerable than letting a simple, direct statement hang in the air, unadorned. It lets readers look pain in the eyes.

MB: In the incisive poem “In An Attempt to Solve For X: Femininity As Word Problem,” you write, “The difference / between shame and guilt is showing / your work.” Shame and guilt continually provoke the speaker, who fights to “turn this shame to sanctuary.” In “At The Bar My Friend Talked of Bodies,” shame is a toxin: “No stomach can digest / shame: a congregation // of rocks. Patient in a / poisoned well.” Does writing play a role in mitigating or coming to terms with shame?

KGT: Yes, writing is an investigative path out of shame. We can’t conquer what we don’t understand. Just like fixing a crack in a foundation, I needed to find the first fracture. When compiling the collection, I noticed that many of my poems speak directly or indirectly about the shame I felt about womanhood, which in turn was linked to my body and perpetual guilt. I have listened closely to the world while taking notes on why shame can sometimes feel like an appropriate response to what the world tells women.

So often I am quick to swallow blame, and the lines you referenced are an attempt to show the reader I know what it is like to live as an apology. It was a chance to call myself out on the page, publicly, directly; it was a promise to write myself stronger. Boat Burned let me identify the guilt and find a path out of the shame. By the time I finished the book, I was no longer ashamed of who I am.

MB: In a recent interview published in [PANK], you spoke about water: “Water will always be stronger than boat. Stronger than gender. It is the hands that hold us, the mother that covers us, the power and grace, that allows us.” What is the relationship between water, control, fertility, and recovery in your work?

My relationship with water is one of the most important relationships in my life. There is a quote by Isak Dinesen: “The cure for anything is saltwater — sweat, tears, or the sea.” This is one of my core beliefs—we came from the sea, and my body and soul are always trying to return. 

Growing up, there was a lot of adventure and uncertainty in my life. There was bankruptcy, divorce, eviction, addiction, and of course, eating disorders. The water felt like the only thing that could hold me without making me feel like a burden. I spent a lot of time on boats, sometimes in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do but stare at the sea. Its steady quiet always returned my gaze, pulled me into the peace of a blue horizon, and challenged me to sit with what I was running from. I couldn’t have accessed this stillness without water.

I use water to think about the ebb and flow of life. The ocean holds an understated power. It breaks and breaks, yet still survives. Its breaking is inevitable. We cannot change or influence the ocean; we cannot prevent low tide. The ocean is not concerned with us, and I love that. I reach for water for strength, and to heal whatever is breaking within me. There is so much healing to be done, and water reminds me that healing and recovery are possible.

MB: Eating disorders are still deeply misunderstood and stigmatized. In what ways did you choose to push back against stereotypes or tropes surrounding eating disorders in your writing?

KGT: It is counterproductive to talk about shame and without mapping the origin. Women especially have been programmed to hate their bodies. In The Self Love Experiment by Shannon Kaiser, I read that a whopping 90% of women hate their appearances. This breaks my heart daily. Eating disorders are not only stigmatized but glamourized. In the media, eating disorders are portrayed as a phase. There are so many after-school-special-like tropes I wanted to avoid in my writing: the teenager working out until she passes out, the bathroom scale with its cold steely gaze. These tropes aren’t inaccurate—but so often, movies on this subject are made by people who don’t suffer from eating disorders, and they wind up creating caricatures of sufferers’ pain. Plot points can occlude the real story. Sometimes, a character’s eating disorder is “cured” in an episode or a season. 

After 20+ years, I still suffer from ED-related thoughts. Some people who have eating disorders think they are fat, which can lead to feelings to worthlessness, because this country and the media has linked body size to worthiness. We have also been told that shame isn’t sexy, so we punish ourselves further for feeling shame, which buries us further in stigma and silence. At 39, I am still struggling with the relationship I have with my body, which will continue unless I do the work of active unlearning and reprogramming. I am learning not shudder at bad lightning or inquiries about my weight. I want to show people that eating disorders are not rooted in vanity. They are rooted in feelings of unworthiness—so many feel unworthy love and so much more. 

Like so many people, I felt unlovable in the body I was in. I wanted to feel like I was worth something, and when I developed an eating disorder, I felt like it was making me worthy of the love I sought. When I would lose a lot of weight, I got lots of positive reinforcement. The problem is that this is an illness. It took me forever to admit that. 

MB: Are there any writers who deal with the body in their work in ways that influence you? Conversely, is there anything that frustrates you about other people write or talk about eating disorders?

KGT: There are so many poets who write about the body beautifully. One poem that comes to mind is Jennifer Givhan,’s “I Am Fat, & When You Read this Poem, You Will Be Too.” This poem should be required reading. I also think of the book Helen or My Hunger by Gale Marie Thompson, and To Know Crush by Jennifer Jaxson Berry. Courtney LeBlanc also writes about the body, disordered eating, and body dysmorphia. These poets are outstanding. It frustrates me when people view body image issues as temporary, like a haircut. I’m reminded of Lucille Clifton’s poem, “i am running into a new year.” She writes: “it will be hard to let go / of what i said to myself / about myself / when i was sixteen and /twentysix and thirtysix / even thirtysix.” At 39, I am still trying to heal, still trying to let go and forgive. People don’t understand that this is a long road.

MB: Section IV, the final section, has so much momentum—poems like “How to Storm,” “New/Port,” and “The Only Thing I Own” show us a speaker who finally allows herself to rage. She finds motivation to recover: “There is a part of me / worth keeping.” She implores the body: “Let’s hold each other // honest as wind.” In “Boat/Body,” you write, “I will not kneel / for a man’s affection,” and “They can’t sink us / if we name ourselves / sea.” Can you speak to your experience of writing section four, and the role of anger in both writing and recovery?

KGT: The last section of this book, which I view as a nod toward acceptance or forgiveness, was the hardest section for me to write. While in the middle of writing Boat Burned, I told a young woman friend that I was writing a collection of poems “to try and recover from womanhood,” and “to teach myself how to love myself.”

She asked me if it was working. I was honest and told her it wasn’t. At that point, I wasn’t sure it was possible to recover from womanhood through writing. But I knew that I couldn’t finish this collection in the same place I started. I needed to burn the boats that brought me here, and to walk away and never look back. So I kept on writing and revising until something inside me changed. Silence and subordination were no longer compelling. 

In every Speilberg movie, you never see the monster until the end. When we can’t see it, the monster remains terrifying. Writing the last section was about confronting the monster to make it less menacing. The more honest I got in these poems and the more I sent them into the world, the less scary these monsters became. When I am too afraid to address something in my life, I need to put it in a poem. A poem is the first step toward confrontation, the first brick in the road to recovery. This book took about 3 years to write. I am no longer the person I was when I started writing it. I had to chase the why, to unpack every lie I swallowed, to take off the sadness that wore me like a dress, before I could heal. 

 MB: You run a series called Body of Art where you talk to other poets about the body and its role in their work. Are there any takeaways from your conversations with other creators that stand out to you?

KGT: Oh my gosh, there are so many takeaways, the biggest one being that no one teaches us how to love ourselves. I believe that there is a direct correlation between loving oneself and leading a fulfilling, liberating, and conscious life. We learn Algebra and the Periodic Table, but no one teaches us how to love ourselves. Every day I study and practice how to be kinder gentler toward myself. Like so many around me, I need more practice. It shouldn’t be such a struggle, but it is. 

MB: Are there any words of encouragement that you might offer to a creative person who is struggling with an eating disorder? What you would tell someone who is on the verge of seeking treatment, but hesitating and doubting the value of their voice?

KGT: I would tell them that there is another side, but there will be a crossing over within yourself—you will need to decide that recovery is worth it. You will have to unlearn everything the world has told you. I would also shout from the rooftops: Write. About. That. Shit. I remember when “Where No One Says Eating Disorder” was published. I was flooded with messages from so many women saying things like, “You have no idea how much I relate to this.” Or “Thank you, no one ever talks about this.” Women ages 18-65 thank me every time I read a poem about an eating disorder. 

Whoever needs to hear this: You are not alone. You are not your reflection. You do not need to be what the world tells you to be. Talk and write about what you are going through. There is freedom in language. If you need someone to listen, find me on social media. I’m here if you ever want to talk about the other side. 

Kelly Grace Thomas is an ocean-obsessed Aries from Jersey. She is a self-taught poet, editor, educator and author. Kelly is the winner of the 2020 Jane Underwood Poetry Prize and a 2017 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle, 2018 finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award and multiple pushcart prize nominee. Her first full-length collection, Boat Burned, was released with YesYes Books in January 2020. Kelly’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2019, Los Angeles Review, Redivider, Muzzle, Sixth Finch, and more. Kelly is the Director of Education for Get Lit and the co-author of Words Ignite. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband Omid. www.kellygracethomas.com.

Madeleine Barnes is a doctoral fellow at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of You Do Not Have To Be Good, (Trio House Press, 2020) and three chapbooks, most recently Women’s Work (Tolsun Books, 2021). She serves as Poetry Editor at Cordella Magazine, a publication that showcases the work of women and non-binary creators. She is the recipient of a New York State Summer Writers Institute Fellowship, two Academy of American Poets Poetry Prizes, and the Gertrude Gordon Journalism Award. Her criticism has appeared in places like Tinderbox Poetry Review, Split Lip Magazine, and Glass: A Journal Poetry. www.madeleinebarnes.com.

Interview with Writer Chaya Bhuvaneswar

By Anita Felicelli

Editor’s Note: Anita Felicelli interviewed writer and physician, Chaya Bhuvaneswar, about her award-winning story collection, White Dancing Elephants, which was the winner of the 2017 Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize and a PEN American finalist for debut shorty story collection in 2019. Jimin Han called the book a “daring mix of ancient, contemporary, and dystopic stories carries us to the heart of rarely exposed longing, loss, and the politics of violence and endurance in remarkable, elegant, heart-stopping prose,” while Kirkus Reviews called it a “evocative, electric...an exuberant collection.”

Felicelli asked Bhuvaneswar poignant questions regarding the collection, writing about anger, motherhood, pregnancy loss, gender, and sexuality. You can read the interview below.

Anita Felicelli: We rarely see depictions of Tamil women's anger in books or films. In this book, there are many stories that explore this culturally forbidden emotion in an exceptionally full way. Can you talk a little about your process and what you tap into when exploring anger, how you translate this anger into language on the page and any challenges around that?

Chaya Bhuvaneswar: I love this question as a starting point, because it reflects an artistic choice to engage and acknowledge anger, to let it flower and see where it leads. That act is so critical, to refuse to swallow down our anger, especially within a Tamil culture so fundamentally dependent on women’s willingness and ability to gracefully stay ‘in place.’ It’s hard to imagine now: the things my father would say to me, the things other men in our community felt they had the right to say and do.

One year during undergrad, I actually wrote down a long list. Not only of what they’d said, but also what people outside the community had said to me in high school and college, the mocking slurs. So many stories come from that flint – those two experiences – violence ‘inside’ and violence ‘outside.’ I think the anger that flames out from those two striking against each other is at least partly what powers my work.

Once I start writing a given story, I would say there are no barriers I feel to fully exploring any emotion of the characters. The most challenging aspect of any piece of writing for me may be to understand how to structure the story around that emotional core, to find that balance between spontaneity and coherence.

AF: I found the miscarriage story that opens the collection really beautiful. We almost never see desi women characters who complicate certain cultural expectations related to motherhood. Can you talk a little about your choice to write the title story in second person as an address to the unborn fetus?

CB: For me, writing is the most productive when it’s unplanned. I hadn’t even planned to write that afternoon—I was jet lagged— but I was sitting in a small hotel lobby nothing like the one in the story in Amsterdam, and I missed my son. Missing him made me realize how much I also missed the child I miscarried. How I thought of that child as a distant child, not gone. Some of the most interesting stories to write emerge from writing about a person, place, even a thing, where the act of writing teaches you what you think and feel, what you didn’t know when you started putting words on the page. Meanings emerge as you write.

I am also interested in emotions that surprise me. Until my miscarriage, I was still so caught up in the unresolved work of forgiving and accepting my parents as people. I was still preoccupied with my parents, often angry at them, certainly disappointed at not getting the help from them I’d hoped to have in order to balance working full time with having a young baby. They, too, were quite angry at me for many reasons, not too many of which actually made sense, kind of a constant, bitter, broad anger that in a large way, I had “failed” as a traditional daughter.

Until that miscarriage, I didn’t even understand how much I loved and would love my own children and how that intensity would so completely displace the old intensity with my parents. I didn’t understand until the early morning that I saw the bleeding and couldn’t stop it, how much I could grieve a loss. I’m grateful to that story, “white dancing elephants,” if it makes sense to be grateful to a story, because it gave me the insight to shape my work life around that love of my family. Where “family” so clearly means my children and partner, not my parents in the same way. I’m very proud of my parents now. I’m proud of how they economized and saved up enough to have the retirement they’d hoped to; how they cared for my brother; how my mother, even now, is sewing us masks.

AF: And I'm always intrigued by whether or not sad or dark dimensions of life are aestheticized in various authors' stories. I feel we talk about this too little, about the role of aesthetics when rendering violence or tragic topics. In the title story about miscarriage, the voice is very lyrical. To what extent are you thinking about aesthetics or the "voice" of the story as you write?

CB: Unless the narrator of a story wants to objectify violence, I never want to, and if the narrator wants to dwell on those details, he’d better have a damn good reason. I don’t think I would have been able to or wanted to write from any viewpoint but Jayanti’s, the survivor’s, in “Orange Popsicles.”  I wouldn’t want to write from the viewpoint of one of the rapists, who savored the quasi-pornographic aesthetics of what they were trying to do to her. I think so much of the violence I’m interested in is emotional, verbal. Lyricism can be a way the survivor, the listener, copes with that violence.

AF: And equally, there's a strong thematic thread of female-on-female betrayal, simultaneous friendship and betrayal, in many of these stories. As a writer, do you think consciously about complicating the narrative of perfect victims and perfect villains?  I'm interested in how Sula might have influenced you in your writing of Talinda, for example. Or do these complications arrive for you at a more subconscious level?

CB: Everyone has themes and obsessions they continue returning to. For me it’s both betrayal and the fear of being betrayed, as well as the equally interesting process by which someone determines that they have “no choice” but to betray another. What I work on, in life as well as fiction, is to conceptualize “betrayal” from the point of view of the person who is doing the betraying.

Sula is such an important work and one I’ve repeatedly returned to. The rose birthmark. This quote:

“Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

I remember reading that during a period of my life when I did not feel like I could make the time or space to write, and gradually reckoning with how true it was, how dangerous we can become to ourselves, when we don’t do all of what we’re supposed to do, when we don’t realize our purpose.

AF: How does your work as a psychiatrist inform your sense of gender and wild conduct in the book? When you're writing, do you think of characters on a clinical level, or do you see fiction as a completely distinct path into human disarray and foible? I think of a character like Maya in “The Shaker Chair” who acts against social norms evidently due to mental illness - does she have more of a backstory in your mind? How did you decide to place the story within the point of view of the Black psychiatrist Sylvia who treats her and is simultaneously repulsed and drawn to her?

CB: It’s taken me awhile to understand the answer to this question. I would say all gifted writers are acute psychologists. I’m often stunned by the psychological acuity of writers describing characters’ motivations. The level of understanding and insight is extremely humbling. But at the same time, writers don’t have, or want to have, the “therapeutic” mission, or at least, don’t want to have to include that aspect. I remember wincing, but acknowledging the truth of Zadie Smith’s statements, for example, emphatically differentiating “writing” from “therapy.”

Writing is driven by the writer’s desire, the urge to know and tell a story. If a story is brutal to the characters, but works as a story, that’s enough. So even though writers also share that psychological insight, there is no real connection between writing and psychiatry. In psychiatry, the sole purpose is healing. There’s nothing more important than the patient’s well-being.

AF: I'm fascinated by the erotic or sexual in these stories, the way sex so often shades into deep betrayal in these hugely energetic and dynamic stories in the collection. It feels, often, cathartic and visceral. I'm thinking in particular of the characters in “Orange Popsicles” and “Talinda” and “Chronicle of a Marriage Foretold” and “In Allegheny.” Can you talk a little bit about the intra-gender social dynamics you were tapping into with these stories?

Women’s desire is often mocked and judged. It was important to me to write stories in which there was no judgment, period, and the characters were allowed to want whatever they wanted. Perhaps that sense of freedom and absolute permission, permission on the basis of the women’s humanity alone, is what creates a sense of catharsis.

AF: In your story “Neela: Bhopal, 1984,” you use a fantasy or magic realist mode. To what extent do you think the political demands a more fantastic mode? Was this always a magic realist story or did it undergo different genre iterations?

Works by Arundhati Roy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Margaret Atwood and Haruki Murakami have been so important to me in thinking about this. It’s hard to tolerate the bleakness of political realities without creating some lens to view both small details and larger outlines. The fantastic mode is a way to approach the pain of looking at these realities – like what we’re seeing now, a calculus by which Senators’ response to a January briefing about the coming COVID-19 pandemic was to buy stock rather than warn the public or insist that the federal government prepare. Their profits were worth more to them than the millions of people who would die.

I’m not sure, though, that any theme or subject “demands” any particular mode. There are devastating, very realistic and understated political stories that don’t employ fantastical elements at all, like by the Pakistani-American writer, Daniyal Muennedin. And Chekhov, of course. So political. His story “Sleepy” is one of my favorites – realistic and completely chilling, the consequence of literally working someone to death. Above all, it’s important not to let ourselves look away from a given political reality. Fiction can be a way to face what has to change.

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Chaya Bhuvaneswar is a practicing physician and writer whose work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Awl, jellyfish review, aaduna and elsewhere, with poetry forthcoming in Natural Bridge, Quiddity, apt magazine, Hobart and more. Her poetry and prose juxtapose Hindu epics, other myths and histories, and the survival of sexual harassment and racialized sexual violence by diverse women of color. She received the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and a Henfield award for her writing. Her work received four Pushcart Prize anthology nominations in 2017. Follow her on Twitter at @chayab77 including for upcoming readings and events. She is the author of White Dancing Elephants.

Anita Felicelli is the author of CHIMERICA: A NOVEL and the story story collection LOVE SONGS FOR A LOST CONTINENT. CHIMERICA appeared on The Millions’ Most Anticipated: The Great Second Half of 2019 Book Preview, Fiction Advocate’s What to Read in September, and Ms. Magazine’s Hidden Gems of 2019. It was an Alta Fiction Pick for Winter 2020. LOVE SONGS won the 2016 Mary Roberts Rinehart Award. Anita’s stories have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Alta Journal, Midnight Breakfast, Terrain, The Normal School, Joyland, Kweli Journal, Eckleburg, Catapult, and other places. Anita’s work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, won Greater Bay Area Journalism awards, placed as a finalist in several Glimmer Train contests, and received a Puffin Foundation grant. She graduated from UC Berkeley and UC Berkeley School of Law. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her spouse and three children.