Archive

If you’ve read either of my novellas, you might’ve guessed that I love multiverse stories, or any tale about alternate worlds and alternate selves. It’s the essential trope of the LitenVerse books. There’s something so satisfying queer about the multiverse: it takes as a given that the self is fluid and changeable, that we all contain multitudes. 

Of course I’m thinking about this today because of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once swept the Oscars* (fuck yes!!!), but also I fell into a black hole of rewatching Stranger Things this winter. Taken together, the stories feel like polar opposite approaches to the same essential idea that there are other worlds, accessible through technology (handwavey) and magic (even more handwavey).

There are two alternate worlds in Stranger Things. The Upside Down is, essentially, a hell dimension, an evil mirror universe Hawkins. Evil things live there, and occasionally break through to the other alternate universe of Stranger Things, which is its oversaturated nostalgic Small 1980s Town. 

Yes, I’d argue that nostalgia creates its own alternate universes. It’s a canon divergence of the past. Stranger Things’ appeal hinges on its inarguably charming cast, but also on a wildly reductive view of an objectively sucky decade. ST is a highlight reel of the best-in-hindsight bits of culture as viewed through white, aging, cis-het male Gen-Xers**. If it’s got a message or a theme beyond a vague “stand by your friends” or “the Cold War was…bad? But not as bad as the RUSSIANS,” you gotta sort through a lot of incoherent garbage to find it. The 80s of Stranger Things is vibes, set dressing, and soundtrack.

I've been attempting to write a newsletter for...over a month now, but they keep getting away from me. One has turned into a 2000+ word essay about gender feelings and HRT, and the absolute shitshow of trying to access it. One was straight-up too depressing, written in the post-deadline malaise where everything feels hard and sad and pointless. And then one was too boring by my own too-high standards.

So instead, you're getting some bullet points.

• I will be teaching my 4-week horror writing class through Atlas Obscura again. There are still open slots for the class starting next Saturday, and plenty of room still in the March 18th section.

• In case you missed it in my last newsletter, Neon Hemlock is gearing up for their 2023 fundraiser for their novellas and short story collection. They're one of my favorite queer small presses and put out consistently amazing work. You can follow the campaign and get notified when it launches here, or go back and read my mini-interview with Suzan Palumbo.

• Currently reading: Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane, which is completely fucking bonkers in the best way possible, an amazing fantasy that's a fever-dream grounded in a ton of research about ancient Mediterranean cultures. Next, as an extreme change of pace, Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher.

• Currently playing: I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, a deck-building RPG about growing up on an alien planet. I first heard about this from Lindsey Ishihiro, who worked on the game and whose comics How Baby and Motherlover I've been following for years. This game hits so many buttons for me: complex family relationships, domesticity mixed with danger, messy teenage feelings, and weird timey-wimey shit.

I'm hoping to be able to Goldilocks my way through an actual newsletter next month---not too boring, not too sad, not too deep into my swamp of gender feelings. Stay warm and cozy until then, friends.

I'm so excited to be hosting my very first cover reveal (of many? one can only dream), for none other than Lesbian Satan herself, Suzan Palumbo. You might know Suzan from her Nebula-nominated short story "Laughter Among the Trees" or from her work co-founding the Ignyte Awards. Her debut short story collection, Skin Thief: Stories, will be coming out in the fall of 2023 from Neon Hemlock, and look at this cover. LOOK AT IT.

Cover Illustration by Mia Minnis. Cover design by dave ring.

The stories in this collection of dark fantasy and horror short stories grapple with the complexities of identity, racism, homophobia, immigration, oppression and patriarchy through nature, gothic hauntings, Trinidadian folklore and shape shifting. At the heart of the collection lie the questions: how do we learn to accept ourselves? How do we live in our own skin?

I full intended to write a newsletter this month about the brilliance of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken, the perfect one-season anime about teenage girls creating animated films, but my brain has been drained dry by noveling. So here instead is a grab-bag of seasonal horror recommendations in all media — some new, some timeless, all of them well worth your attention if you're looking for some recreational terror.

Floor 9.5, directed by Toby Meakins and written by Simon Allen. Essentially perfect 2 minute horror movie.

Queen of Teeth by Hailey Piper, who’s one of the current queens of horror. This one has: vagina monsters, lesbians, anti-capitalist and anti-corporate sentiment, and an apocalypse that’s honestly kinda heart-warming. If AKIRA was written as a sapphic novella, it might have been something like this.

Torn Hearts, directed by Brea Grant. So let’s imagine that Reba McEntire and Dolly Parton were sisters and a country music duo, one of them died mysteriously, and their legend has drawn two struggling musicians to invite themselves over with pie and a proposition to collaborate. What could go wrong? LOTS.

It’s September 2007, fifteen years ago. I live in Olympia, Washington, and I’m taking my second year-long break from college. I have moved out of the weird 70’s style party house in the middle of the woods, which had no central heat through the long, rainy winter, and where I discovered mold growing on the underside of my mattress. I now live in a cute house with no mold, where strawberries and kale grow rampant in the backyard. There’s a cute queer working at a nearby bakery that I have a crush on, and I’ve taken a journal there to have some coffee and write while attempting to flirt. 

I have very recently bought my first iPod Nano. My roommates and I exchange music regularly through mix CDs and torrent downloads, through dragging each other to basement shows, through dates to listen to a new record on a roommate’s player. 

The Who’s “Baba O'Riley” comes on shuffle, and I excuse myself from flirting to go smoke outside and listen. The synths and violins send my heart skidding sideways against my ribs, and the song holds me on the precipice of some unspoken revelation. Alas, I live in the birthplace of riot grrrl and grunge, and my hipper friends that invite me to acoustic punk basement shows do not respect my dad-rock roots. So I cannot flirt and listen to this song at the same time. I cannot be cool, or even normal. I can only hold a cigarette smoldering between my fingers and let myself spiral out while listening. 

I wish I could remember the first time I heard it. Did a friend put it on a mix CD for me? Did I dance to it? I could never resist any invitation to dance when I was young, so probably. 

Greetings from the other side of having FINISHED A DRAFT. Was it a good draft? No. Can it be fixed? God, I hope so. This is the biggest problem-child rewrite I’ve ever done, and the end result felt distinctly monstrous. "How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form?" Victor Frankenstein muses after bringing his creature to life. Big mood, Vic!

My “drop deadline” as I was calling it was June 24 — the same day, those of you in America might remember, as the Supreme Court decision came overruling federal protections for abortion. After the leaked draft opinion a few weeks earlier, most of us knew it was coming, but that didn’t actually stop my heart from breaking when the news dropped. I haven’t written much about it online because of the aforementioned drop deadline, but also because I still don’t have words beyond “fuck” and “everything.” 

I used to be able to write in and through grief. The abortion I had at 17, my grandmother’s death, various breakups — I can write some truly atrocious breakup poetry when called for — all of it eventually came out on the page. But I’m not sure how to write a public elegy for reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. I spent that weekend finishing my novel, hating what I was writing, and really just wanting to crawl under the table at Starbucks and induce a coma on command. (I think the baristas must have known; they ended up comping my last 2 of the 5 drinks I consumed that day.) 

It did make me realize that Burned and Buried is, essentially, about the trauma of one’s bodily autonomy being violated. Both characters are the victims of violence. One of the characters is literally consumed from the inside by it, and the other is trapped inside a skin that’s not her own. Very familiar if you’ve ever had an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy or been trans, or both, like in my case. This made the book feel more grounded, but it also made the anxiety deeper. Burned and Buried had gone from commenting on and lightly satirizing the horror genre to me rummaging through my own past hurts, and my fear of the future. No wonder I got stuck on it for a year. No wonder the end result felt catastrophic.

It's baaaaack! I'll be teaching another round of Thrills and Chills: Horror Story Writing starting September 10. This 4-part class taught through Atlas Obscura covers a lot of nuts and bolts about writing horror: what makes the genre distinct, how to construct a scare, plot/pacing/structure, and quick workshops to get you excited to draft a story.

Click here for more info!

Just to sweeten the deal, my co-instructor is small, fuzzy, and extremely cute.

I fell into being a teacher mostly by accident during my MFA. I fully expected to hate teaching. My first semester, I did, and apologies to anyone in that Comp 101 class; it was a bad time all around. I got better my second semester, and by my final semester, I was designing my own classes, running writing workshops, mentoring, and starting to figure out how I function as a teacher. 5.5 years and close to 200 students after I first strolled sweaty-palmed into a classroom and stammered out an introduction, I like to think I've learned a few things. 

1. There’s no replacement for just getting in front of a room (or zoom) full of people and trying to get them to learn something.

I think one of the best ways to figure out if you like teaching is by signing up to do a one-day workshop. If it’s your first time, consider limiting your attendees to keep it from feeling unmanageable or overwhelming. Plenty of conventions ask for volunteers to run short workshops for attendees. If you’re a writer, you might also be able to volunteer at a literary organization or do a workshop through a bookstore. You’ll be able to build on that experience, seeing what works or doesn’t, adapt it to different experiences or audiences.

I cannot emphasize how much better this is than going to grad school and finding out whether or not you like teaching by being forced to teach 18 students a semester for 2-3 years. Please learn from my mistake. 

Worker solidarity has become a meme, and honestly? THAT’S GREAT. I am 100% for the mimetic dissemination of radical labor organization. I love that Chuck Tingle wrote a Tingler about unionizing (in the butt). I love to see him and Jorts the Cat talking on Twitter about worker solidarity. 

It feels like this spring has been full of relentlessly garbage news and despair, but Amazon warehouse workers in NYC won their union vote. Food delivery drivers in NYC have gotten huge protections through collective action. Today—JUST today—workers at four more Starbucks have voted to unionize, three in Ithaca, NY and another in Overland Park, KS. 

I first started organizing in 2014, at my job at Divvy Bikes, Chicago’s citywide bikeshare. I’d been working at Divvy for just over a year, and it was, in short, terrible, in ways that will probably be familiar to most people who’ve held a job: I worked outdoors in all weather, including when it was over a hundred degrees, well below freezing, and when there was a foot of snow. There was no pay scale, so people hired at the same time and doing the same work might be making $12 an hour or $15; raises were given out based on “merit” which is another way of saying favoritism. Nearly everyone was kept at 29 hours a week, so the company didn’t have to give us benefits. Safety was a joke. I got harassed regularly, as did all the other trans workers, as did all the women who worked there.

I’ve been trying and failing to write this letter since Monday, because any good news is constantly tempered by the fact that there’s war happening in Ukraine, as well as a fascist movement using people like me as a battlefield in a culture war. It makes it hard to publicly celebrate anything, both in the internal way of “do these small triumphs mean anything, really?” and in the larger way of “why would anyone care in the face of a tidal wave of bad stuff?"

On the other hand, my trans elders and ancestors valued celebration, even (maybe especially) amid spirited attempts to humiliate, violate, and legislate them out of existence. So FUCK IT. Good things are still happening amid the horrid shit, and we’re gonna talk about both. 

Let’s start with a few good things, and their visual accompaniments.

1. I was a clue in the USA Today crossword. Not only that, I probably frustrated the hell out of hundreds of people who’ve never heard of me and were like “why isn’t ‘nina’ fitting here? wtfffff?????” Hilariously, this has gotten me more family and friends congratulating me than the next item of good news.

   

2. DEFEKT has been nominated for the Phillip K. Dick Award, and is longlisted for the Locus award. (I should also point out that it’s also eligible for the Nebula and Hugo, and if you’re able to nominate it, I would personally love that.)

3. I am teaching a class about writing horror with Atlas Obscura. 

4. Let me repeat. I AM TEACHING A CLASS ON WRITING HORROR WITH ATLAS OBSCURA. Yes, that Atlas Obscura. YES, a class about writing horror. I’ve given workshops on this before, but never a four week class. I am unbelievably amped. 

Welcome to the 2022 Q1 Hype Train

Me, six weeks ago: I'm going to write a newsletter of 2022 books that I'm greedily awaiting. Me, on Tuesday: Oh shit, the first of those books is already released. Oh shit, that's a lot of books. Maybe I'll split the list in half. Maybe I'll split it in quarters.

So: here are the books I'm excited for in the first four months of 2022.

I had a long and very melancholy post written, but nobody needs to be subjected to me trying to find meaning in the fact that I've been suffering from vertigo for a month and a half. (Sometimes, my writer brain is insufferable, even to myself.) We're a week from the winter solstice here in the northern hemisphere, which means that

So here's some slapdash bullet-point positivity instead, a list of things that have made what's been kind of a sucky year into one I could suffer through.

• Buying clothes that actually fit and investing heavily in pants with elastic waistbands, which did actual wonders for my overall mood?

• Mainstream media handwringing over The Great Resignation juxtaposed with glorious shitposts from r/Antiwork

• #Striketober and #Strikesgiving.

• Finally going on HRT...and 4 months in, seeing almost no changes from the low dose I was initially prescribed. I mean, the common side effects at this level are facial hair (which I had covered already, thank you Mediterranean heritage) and some fat redistribution/muscle growth (I was already uncle-shaped). We'll see what happens, I guess?

• Texis by Sleigh Bells. According to Spotify, I'm in their top 0.1% of listeners, and this because their music is the soundtrack of Burned and Buried.

• Tentatively wading into reading more romance. Standout books this year were KJ Charles's Will Darling Adventures, Morgan Rogers' Honeygirl, and Rebekah Witherspoon's Treasure. I've got books by Cat Sebastian, Alyssa Cole, and Courtney Milan on my radar for future reading, but am VERY open to recommendations for other queer romance authors.

• Untentatively wading into more queer horror with David Demchuk's Red X, Eric LaRocca's The Strange Thing We Become and Other Dark Tales, Wendy Wagner's The Secret Skin, and Sam J. Miller's The Blade Between. 2021 books that I missed but am hoping to catch up on are Queen of Teeth and Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy by Hailey Piper, LaRocca's Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, S.T. Gibson's Dowry of Blood, and Lee Mandelo's Summer Sons.

• I got into a SEVERE reading funk for most of the year, and discovered the magic of audio books. Listening to Cara Gee narrate Stephen Graham Jones's My Heart Is a Chainsaw was a revelation. I've got Darcie Little Badger's Elatsoe (performed by Kinsale Hueston) and P. Djèlí Clark's Ring Shout (performed by Channie Wait) queued up next.

• Seeing DEFEKT go out into the world. A weird little book, but definitely one I'm proud of.

• Seeing "The Bad Dad Redemption Arc Needs to Die" get published at Uncanny Magazine, which has long been one of my bucket list magazines.

• Teaching, even if I don't feel like I did as well by my students as I usually do. 2021 was hard, and returning to in-person teaching was somehow even harder than switching everything to online. But seeing my students try new things or get excited about their own or their classmates' work remains immensely rewarding.

I'm working on a list of 2022 books that I'm hype for (THERE ARE SO MANY), but will probably wait until after Christmas. If you are going to WorldCon this week, I will be there starting (oh god) TOMORROW. You can find my full schedule here on Twitter or, if you're logged in, on the DisCon site. Hope to see you there, either virtually or at a safe distance in-person!

And one that I'm sure some clever author will steal for their re-imagining of CS Lewis's The Great Divorce. Instead of a rainy town as purgatory, it's a rainy office two months after all employees were forced back after working from home. They've changed everything to an open floor plan with no set work areas. There's not a vaccine mandate, but the shared kitchen and snacks are off-limits though, "for hygiene." There are 3-hour mandatory meetings every Friday, until some manager hears rumors of unionizing, and then there are 4-hour mandatory "town halls." Instead of a bus driven by Jesus up to the foothills of Heaven, it's a bus to a mandatory company retreat driven by a butch lesbian named Leroy. Nobody's actually sure who planned the retreat; they all got the email on the same day, signed by different HR managers who don't seem to exist.

Okay, maybe I'll write that book. It would fit nicely into the LitenVerse.

As a millennial who lived through the dot-com bubble and the great recession and then the Covid-19 depression, I've been reading tales of the Great Resignation with -- like most of us -- immeasurable amounts of schadenfreude. I don't know anyone in my generation that didn't bounce from terrible job to terrible job their entire working lives; that hasn't dealt with abusive bosses and customers, harassment, wage theft, blatant racism, passive-aggression, or the weird flip-flopping between "we're like a family!" to "I don't care that your father died or your child is running a fever, I need you to come in on your day off." Out of my own long, lengthy, and weird resume that spans two decades, I have only enjoyed...maybe three of those? And only felt valued at one. (And it's the one I'm at--fully remote, flexible hours, pays well, company culture of trust and chill, and my boss sent me flowers for my wedding. I'm never leaving.)

So, funny story: back in late April, I threw out the two months of work I’d done on Burned and Buried and pretty much started over.

I’d been making progress on the new draft, but I was frustrated with it. It felt like the story was somehow becoming LESS mine as I rewrote it. More boring, more conservative, less surprising, less layered. There had always been aspects of the original draft that didn’t work, and the solutions were all paper thin and not fit for a publication. I could tell there was a good story in it, but I didn’t have the skill to fix them; just paper over them and misdirect attention elsewhere.

(A writing mentor once commented that my writing style is generally so clean that it’s easy to not notice how I use it to cover over structural issues, and WHEW. I felt that one in my bone marrow.)

Hello and happy spring, friends! May and June are shaping up to be busy for me, so here’s a quick rundown of where you can find me over the next couple weeks.

First off: you will NOT find me anywhere until after May 15th. That’s because I’m getting MARRIED ON ZOOM to my beloved, Nibedita Sen, in the telepresence of many friends and family members and also our cat. I am including one (1) photo of our engagement/pre-wedding shoot for posterity, and so we can all scream about how amazing Nibs looks.

I’m still buried deep in novel rewrites and wedding planning, so no essays or reviews are forthcoming for now. Instead, this is just a quick round-up of links of queer and trans books that are making me excited this month.

I’ve been hearing amazing things about Zeyn Joukhadar’s The Thirty Names of Night. It’s been nominated for a Lambda and won a Stonewall Book Award from the ALA. I picked up a copy yesterday at Book Culture (an indie chain here in NYC) and read the first fifteen or so pages in a sort of humming trance; the prose has a dreamy, golden-hour quality to it, with a narrator whose senses seem to be honed with grief.

You all know I’m trans, right? I put it front and center on all of my bios: “Nino Cipri is a queer and trans/nonbinary writer,” followed by several examples of how to use the singular they/them/their in sentences. I write about trans, queer, and nonbinary characters and communities. Presumably the people that like my books ALSO like this integral facet of them?

So it’s weird to see my book positively promoted in venues that also decide to assign me a gender and pronoun (apparently at random, too, since it’s about 50/50 whether they use he or she) or address me as a name I stopped using five years ago. Other weird things: assumptions about my history or my personal trauma or my family relationships; wanting my opinion about old transphobic stories that I haven’t bother to read and probably never will; public discussions about what to use for me; personal guidance on how to deal with trans loved ones, coworkers, strangers, etc.

It is finally SPRING here in NYC, which means a dizzying back-and-forth between beautiful, bright, warm days that you long to spend sprawled out in a park with an open picnic basket, and gloomy rainy weeks where you leave the house only with enormous reluctance and resentment.

Is this an accurate description of the weather? Is this a metaphor for my mental state? Probably both.

Updates

PERSONAL NEWS, BOTH SMALLISH AND BIGGISH, BECAUSE IT SURE HAS BEEN A WEEK.

Fanfic is my ultimate comfort read-slash-coping mechanism, and my relationship to it is not always super healthy. Where I used to read fanfic to participate in fan communities, when I’m depressed, I consume it for the quick hit of dopamine it delivers—like doomscrolling on Twitter, but with more smooching. It’s a functional bellwether for my stress levels and overall mood. Do I have more than fourteen tabs of it open on any given device? Am I losing sleep because I opened AO3 at midnight? Can I remember any details of the 100,000+ words of fanfic I read this week? When my reading habits are the equivalent of channel-surfing at 2 AM purely so I don’t have to be alone with my thoughts, things are probably not great. This is not the fault of fanfic, but of my own depression.

So I always celebrate when I’m able to start reading for pleasure instead of compulsion. I will never, ever, ever write a take that denigrates fanfic, but I’m extremely happy that I’m able to read other things again.

Favorite recent stories

I was a theater kid all through high school and college. For a long time, a career in theater was the end goal, though the role I imagined for myself changed constantly; playwright, director, performer, light board operator, stage manager. I wanted to do everything, and so I did: acted, danced, worked as a puppeteer, wrote and directed plays, aimed spotlights, ran sound and light boards, constructed scenery and props, ushered people to their seats, ordered people around over headsets that were older than I was.

Once I was out of school, the reality of working in the industry quickly outpaced my love for it: low pay and bad conditions for non-unionized theaters, high competition, rampant sexism (especially on the tech side), and all the interpersonal drama that theater people are known for. I realized that the jobs I could get with my experience and limited network paid worse than a job as a barista, so I did that instead and never really looked back.

But I never stopped loving live performance. I dropped a one-week grocery budget on tickets to and twice that to see . I’ve seen in a tiny grange hall in rural Vermont, puppet troupes in barns and elementary school gyms, one-woman shows in drag bars, revivals of Grand Guignol one-act horrorshows in haunted forests. I once watched the actual worst-ever one-act with a drunken crowd at the Abbie Hoffman Died For Our Sins Festival in Chicago. It included a bisexual love triangle, a hip-hop peptalk from a Black homeless character, and a recorder solo. I think it was supposed to be a musical homage to Midsummer Night’s Dream? It was a lot.

This is cross-posted from my Patreon, so apologies if you are seeing this twice! I generally try to keep the two separate, but this seemed relevant to the vibe of COOL STORY, BRO.

News first, because I actually have news to share!

• made the ! Anyone can vote in the poll, so if feeling moved, you can scroll to the bottom of the linked page and vote for your 2020 favorites.

There’s a particular image in my head that I’ve been trying to work into a story since May. Nibs and I moved to into an apartment in NYC in May, an odd little C-shaped pre-war place in Queens. Our front door stares at another door, which also is to our apartment—a weird closed loop. Maybe it’s a safety regulation? Or maybe this was originally two apartments? All I know is that my front door’s peephole looks directly at the door to my bedroom, and I have a creeping horror of one day looking and seeing the door—which stands only a couple feet from where I sleep at night—standing ajar.

1) First, I'm fine. Nibs and I are back in Vermont, and probably will be for a while. It's weird, after spending so much time traveling, to be really, viscerally stuck in place for a while, but I'm coping. Mud season (a real thing here) is slowly giving way to spring. The frogs in my mom's pond are kicking up a racket, the maple sap trucks have stopped tearing up the dirt road, and garlic and lily are starting to shoot up from the garden. It all helps to distract from the anxiety that's continuously gnawing on my brain. 

2) I'm teaching a horror writing workshop to benefit Argo Bookshop on Thursday, 4/9, from 7-9 EST. It's $20 to participate, but I asked them to save a couple spots for folks that can't afford that. 

3) Publishing announced that YAY. 

Hey all! I’m going to be over on r/books in a bit to chat about whatever you want.

Come say hi and ask me weird questions!

Happy Friday, friends. Most of us are approaching weeks 2 or 3 in isolation at this point, and I’m curious. What are you reading, watching, and listening to in order to get through this? Comment below because I NEED RECOMMENDATIONS.

Among other things, I’ve been mainlining a very goofy, very tender anime. Cool points if you can name the anime from without reverse image-searching.

This tab has been sitting open on my laptop for the past ten days or so. I don’t really need to say why, right? Most of us have been watching world events unfold in unfathomable geometries to here and now: a weird, unimaginable, simultaneously over- and underwhelming present.

This week is bad for a lot of people, for a lot of reasons. I have about 95% of a newsletter written about the amazing plotting in The Wicked and the Divine. It’s great. I quote Aristotle AND Emily Nussbaum, along with two or three academics because I went overboard on my research (again). I was planning on posting it tonight, but honestly: would anyone read it? Getting into the nitty-gritty of what constitutes tragic irony isn’t the greatest distraction from the news.

I’ve seen a lot of folks mentioning amazing books that feel eerily prescient ( and ) or examine how societal infrastructures bend or break under the pressures of pandemics. Ling Ma’s comes to mind, and Nisi Shawl just wrote an excellent roundup of such stories for , which happens to include a short review of my novella , along with a delightfully scathing review of using teleconferencing technology to listen in on a panel, which Shawl describes as “suboptimal; they [fellow panelists] sounded as if they were talking through the anuses of dead frogs.”

Quick reminder: if you like my thoughts about the nature of stories, you might also like my fiction. You can buy my short story collection Homesick or preorder my novella Finna .

(Hi! It’s been a while! November was consumed by doing a book tour for Homesick, and December was a necessary recovery month. But I’m back now, and will try to be writing regularly here again.)

The first half of 2019 was a year of lukewarm genre films for me. Some of these films I only saw out of a sense of completionist duty (Avengers: Endgame, It 2), friends’ excitement , nostalgia for source material or because I assumed it would deliver two hours of cathartic destruction -- which, in my opinion, was ruined by the annoying human family drama; ether give me a less trite subplot or give me more death-via-kaiju). 

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for me, and it’s about to get busier. This week I’ll be reading at Rhizome in Washington DC and paneling at the Baltimore Book Fest, followed by shenanigans in Seattle, New York, and the Midwest. Sadly, this means my Halloween activities are curtailed by travel and deadlines. 

If you, like me, lack the time for seances, graveyard tours, or trick or treating, this curated list is for you: some of my favorite short horror (and horror-adjacent) films, all of them under thirty minutes.

Actually Creepy and/or Disturbing

I’m taking a quick break from writing about narratives this week to instead talk about the business side of writing. I saw the following thread literally minutes after tweeting out about upcoming events I’d be doing next month to support my debut story collection, Homesick.

I don’t know if I can tell you how profoundly Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark affected me as a kid.

I don’t just mean that it scared the pants off me or gave me nightmares (though it did both). The stories in the series—folklore collected over decades and adapted for young audiences—are some of the most effective short-form horror I’ve ever read. They’re weird, incisive, and surreal, with twists that are far creepier than M. Night Shyamalan could aspire to. It inspired my friends and I to start creating our own scary stories, sharing them after lights-out or testing them on playgrounds.

And then there’s the art.

So last week, I posed this question on Twitter:

Stories about doubles and dopplegängers abound. My first encounter with them was probably Stephen King’s The Dark Half, which follows in a long line of stories about cisgender men struggling against their own divided psyche. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde set the mold for Anglophone literature that focused on the supposed duality of man, featuring protagonists struggling to overcome his darker natures. Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Wizard of Earthsea takes a slightly more Jungian approach, with a man who unites facets of his splintered self.

It’s September, which means it’s basically October, which means I have license to dive face-first into my first and foremost love: high-key creepy narratives.

In my (utterly biased) opinion, the narrative structures of horror stories are intertwined with the genre’s function, far more so than in other genres (except maybe comedy). The purpose of horror is to evoke feelings of terror, horror, revulsion, and empathy. Postmodern and contemporary horror, especially experimental narratives, bends and breaks narrative structures and audience expectation to add an extra level of oh god WHAT NO.

Really excellent horror doesn’t stay on the screen or the page, after all. It doesn’t allow the audience the safety of the fourth wall, of feeling removed from what’s happening. Horror in any media shakes the audience’s faith in their reality. It makes us aware of everything the shadows might conceal, and forces us to confront them head on. Authors, developers, artists, and filmmakers have created a multitude of different tactics to discomfit their audiences in new and unexpected ways. I barely need an excuse to nerd out about them for a while.

I wrote last week about the Bread and Puppet Theater, a radical puppet theater based out of Glover, Vermont. This week, I want to examine one of their stories a little closer.

I first saw “King Story” (also called “The Great Warrior”) performed in 2009 when I was part of Bread and Puppet’s apprentice program, and it has stuck with me ever since. This short, ~15 minute play is one of Bread and Puppet’s oldest and most enduring works. I found from 1968 that includes a script and pictures of the Great Warrior; the picture below is from 2013, as is the video.

Back in 2009--although it makes me die a little to remember that was ten whole-ass years ago--I spent a summer working as an apprentice puppeteer to the Bread and Puppet Theater. Bread and Puppet was a familiar presence throughout my youth in Vermont; my mom took me to one of their massive circuses in the nineties, and I attended their shows semi-regularly in my teens. Besides their performances--which went from a three-day festival to smaller weekly ones--they were also a presence at summer parades around the state. They were easy to spot, with massive, papier-mâché puppets and stilt-dancers in tattered finery. They had a profound impact on the way I think about stories, art, political theater, and creativity.

So I write fiction, mostly. But I started out writing (awful) poetry and (less awful) screenplays. I’ve written comics, essays, plays, rabble-rousing emails, op-eds, reviews, fanfic, and I’m a big nerd about stories in all kinds of media and genres, so much that I spent most of the scant free time in my MFA reading analyses and theory about narratives and how they’re structured across genres and media.

We live in a world of stories. What can a short story writer learn from analyzing the structures of, for example, a long-running shonen anime? Or a mixed media art installation? How do we understand the narrative beats of a fight scene? What makes a narrative “experimental”? Can you literally read a room, or a building, or a street? I don’t know! But I want to find out.

I am emphatically not an expert

This newsletter is an excuse to assign myself monthly homework. I keep finding stories in strange places, and want to figure out what makes them tick. If you’re up for learning with me, come and join the study group. It’ll be fun.