K.A. Wiggins (Kaie) is an award-winning Canadian speculative fiction author whose quietly subversive works explore the tangled webs of society, environment, and identity through intricate, dreamlike tales of monsters and magic.
Best known for gothic-dystopian YA+ Dark Fantasy series Threads of Dreams, a genrepunk saga of a haunted misfit storming monster-infested, post-eco-apocalypse Vancouver, her work has also appeared in Year's Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, Strange Horizons, The NoSleep Podcast, Fantasy Magazine, and Pulphouse Fiction Magazine, among others.
She also teaches with the Creative Writing for Children Society and leads the Children's Writers & Illustrators of British Columbia Society from her home in the Comox Valley, BC. Find her at kawiggins.com.
K.A.’s BNW-winning story “The Tangle (Did Not Kill Kitsault)” originally appeared in Strange Horizons Magazine.
BRAVE NEW WEIRD: The Best New Weird Horror + More, Vol. 3, is out June 24th.
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Give us the elevator pitch of your BNW-winning story.
The forest hits the road with a vengeance when extractive industry wakes something it shouldn't have. An ecopunk-flavoured cryptid horror-meets-Twilight Zone-esque bit of uncanny ephemera with a side of pseudo-academic structural shenanigans. (Canada's weirdest ghost town! Okanagan wildfires & the Pyrocene! DEI haters in megatrucks burning alive! Bollywood saves the day! Structural refrains inspired by Brenna Yovanoff, but in pompous narrator voice, as if Giles is lecturing you!)
Bloody f&%king hell I am delighted to meet someone else who talks like a carnival barker! I thought I was the last one left.
This world is friggin' Weird in a lot of ways right now, and many of those ways are not the fun kind. What secret tips can you share to help others navigate this mess on a daily basis?
Turn it sideways and make it Weirder (in a good way), obviously. On a more serious note, pick one thing to invest yourself in making better. Preferably small and local, something you have the skills, knowledge, and power to make a difference in on a time frame you can see. It helps focus you, you'll feel more in control and less helpless about the things you can't control, you'll build community and solidarity, and you might just grow bigger skills and make change that sends ripples that change more lives for the better than you can imagine. That's not to say that the big, bad, far away stuff isn't hugely important, too! If you have the range to care and contribute to multiple fights, that's rad. If you don't, just know that it'll feel better (and make more of a difference) to join one small corner of a battle than to panic about all of them and do nothing.
Do you take naps?
Only when I'm sick (which happens a lot, to be fair. Migraines for the win!)
Yeah! migraines for the wi- …wait, no, migraines suck, boo.
On the Tenebrous Discord board, we ask everyone to introduce themselves as a Film-meets-Music Artist (Citizen Kane x Metallica, f’rinstance). It doesn’t have to be your favorite, and don’t spend too much time overthinking it; now GO.
Howl's Moving Castle x Rise Against? Or maybe V for Vendetta x Florence & The Machine? Or Frozen x Linkin Park? I could keep going…
What's the capital-W Weirdest thing that's ever happened to you (that you're comfortable sharing)?
Look, there's a lot of competition for this one, but I'm gonna go with the time I moved to the Scottish Highlands and walked past this one building that I instantly knew from a dream I'd had years earlier. Literally stopped me in my tracks, you could practically hear the cartoon screeeeeech. Dunno what that place was, didn't stop to ask, booked it right out of there. It wasn't the kind of dream you wanted to replay!
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BRAVE NEW WEIRD: The Best New Weird Horror + More, Vol. 3, is out June 24th.
