M. Shaw is a graduate of the Clarion Writers' Workshop (class of 2019) and an organizer of the Denver Mercury Poetry Slam. They live in Arvada, Colorado.
Their novella, One Hand to Hold, One Hand to Carve, tells the tale of Left and Right, two bisected halves of a corpse who awaken with new, separate consciousnesses. It explores familial bonds and individuality as a surreal Body Horror fever dream, and is available April 1st through Tenebrous Press (you can preorder it here).
We spoke with M.Shaw about their day/night job; the special place that “Tiny Dancer” holds in their heart; and the greatest thing in the world: fucked up deer living in the Paris catacombs.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Your bio implies that you do the majority of your writing “in an empty art museum after midnight”?
I'm a night security guard, which basically means the museum is willing to subsidize my writing career as long as I'm willing to maintain a nocturnal schedule and chase away the occasional meth head. This makes certain aspects of my life, like having friends, pretty complicated, but it has its perks. Most nights I barely see anyone, which means it's very hard for people to give me Covid or unload on me verbally about what terrible people they are (both things that Americans do very frequently). Nobody cares that I pace and talk to myself while I write.
Also, the museum is very much haunted. Exhibits move by themselves after hours when they shouldn't be able to, stuff like that. One time a kitchen sink briefly turned on and spit out some water, despite the fact that it's part of a sculpture and not connected to a water line. So, I've got company, which is nice. Ghosts don't bother me. I've lived in a haunted castle before and it's no big deal. It's nice to be able to make art while surrounded by art. When I'm at home, I mostly do chores and sleep under a pile of cats. The cats are annoyed when I pace or talk to myself, so this way we're all spared.
…okay, you can’t just slip in “I’ve lived in a haunted castle before” on the sly and not expect a follow-up.
It’s less exciting than it sounds! I was in a study abroad program in Well, a Dutch village, where we were housed in a modernized castle. Different parts had been renovated at different times; the oldest were around 700 years old, while some others were closer to 200. I lived in a garret room in the bailey where the exterior walls were thick enough to keep warm in the winter, but the interior walls were flimsy enough that I could hear my neighbors having aggressively boring sex, always to "Tiny Dancer." Always.
The resident ghost was a kid named Sophie, who had lived her short life in the castle sometime in the early 19th century. I never personally saw any signs of her beyond the occasional door opening or closing on its own, but folks who lived there year-round would talk to her and claimed to have seen manifestations. As far as anyone could tell, the only "unfinished business" to speak of was "Hey! Look at me! Watch this!"
The ducks, geese, swans and peacocks who lived on the grounds were, on the other hand, legitimately scary and attacked me on multiple occasions.
One Hand to Hold, One Hand to Carve turns the concept of the codependent relationship on its ear. What are some of the themes you were looking to explore with this novella?
I think a lot about how comfort and happiness are often mutually exclusive. Like the characters in this book, I inhabit a world where people tend to conflate the two. People will do anything to preserve their own comfort, even if it means they'll never be happy. That's what codependency is, to me: any two or more people who have embraced comfort at the cost of mutually assured misery. This could mean something as small as a person being unable to cut off an abusive family member because they're so damn used to each other that imagining another life is just too scary; or it could be as big as an entire country running itself into the ground because it would rather self-destruct in a giant, fetid shitsplosion than make the rich white people uncomfortable.
Which, I get it: happiness is scary. It's a huge risk, to get there. That's something I was hoping to underscore with Right's character arc. He ends up casting himself to the winds in a lot of ways, and there’s no guarantee that things will work out. Left is right (I mean, correct) to be afraid of the unknown the way he is. The world outside their little motel room is unforgiving, it is fearful of outsiders, it's painfully short on acceptance for people who don't fit the mold. The questions they face aren't about how they can change any of that; they're about whether each of them would prefer to be comfortable or happy. I think humans all ought to at least ask themselves this question, whatever the answer turns out to be.
Without veering into spoiler territory: there’s an element of a larger mythology at play here, as well. As Weird as the central conceit is—two halves of a body wake up in a morgue—it’s actually a fairly linear narrative…until the twist. Did you always envision it going in this direction, or did it surprise you as well?
I didn't start off knowing things would take the turn they do, but the larger mythological elements were always there. Most of what I write has some amount of what I call "iceberg worldbuilding," which just means that I know more than I show (this gets me into trouble sometimes; I once brought a vampire story to workshop and nobody noticed the vampire).
When I started writing OHtH, OHtC, I intended to end with the brothers parting ways in sadness, but with no inkling of the forces that influence their existence. Getting divorced while writing it changed that. Suddenly I wanted to show what happens after the schism. As far as how the story unfolds, I imagine that's the influence of my love of East Asian horror novels and movies, which don't tend to follow the "Chekhov's Gun" rule nearly as much as Western horror. A more traditional English language horror novella would probably bait the hook more in the early chapters. It's exciting for me when we don't get those hints, even if it destabilizes some plot developments.
OHtH, OHtC is an unconventional narrative, but it slots quite comfortably into the Horror genre. When it comes to genre touchstones, what are your favorites? What influences you when you want to get into the Horror-writing mindset?
My biggest influence when it comes to horror writing is the simple fact that I've had frequent nightmares since I was very small. Right now I take a medication called prazosin for my PTSD because it helps manage flashbacks and nightmares, but sometimes I'll stop taking it for a while, because I miss the nightmares when they go away for too long.
Actually, between the PTSD and the nightmares, horror is sort of just the water I swim in. Many of the elements that show up in my work, like dream logic or lack of closure, come back to nightmares and PTSD flashbacks. I think I got out of Stranger Things what other folks got out of The Breakfast Club, because it's hard for me to relate to being young and figuring out how to live with and care about other people if it doesn't also involve being stalked by an apex predator from another dimension. There's aspects of the whole deal that have made life harder for me, but it's also made it much easier to look into the darker parts of my mind for inspiration. I mean, if I have to go there anyway, I might as well bring back souvenirs, right?
When it comes to genre touchstones, I'm a sucker for work that focuses on the evisceration of the mind as well as the body. Saw and The Purge don't really do it for me because I'm not afraid of death and I'm not under any illusions about the depths of cruelty that humans are capable of. I was in my teens when I first read Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives, books that turn the lens on the terror of normalcy. His characters aren't trapped in their homes by gibbering murderers; they're trapped by the fact that the nightmares stalking them are the things they're supposed to want. I see blood 'n' guts and I'm like "haha, eww," but I watch Get Out and I'm like "wow, humans can stay the fuck away from me."
Also, I will never, ever get tired of fucked up deer. Or the Paris catacombs. If someone writes a novel about fucked up deer living in the catacombs under Paris, it will never leave my side. I almost don't care how it's written or even if it's good. That shit is my medicine.
You run a publishing house of your own: Trouble Department, which focuses on Horror-adjacent poetry and chapbooks. How do you know a work is right for Trouble Dept?
I spend a few hours a day getting quietly amped about Trouble Department's upcoming poetry list. We've got five books in the pipeline, including offerings from Japan and Hong Kong. What I think they all have in common, and what I really look for on the editorial side, is an insistent sense of play, especially when it comes to darker subject matter. I love poetry that plays jokes on the reader, that Andy Kaufman vibe that invites you to laugh along with it, at yourself. Bonus points if it then twists the knife, when I hadn't even realized there was a knife to twist.
We're more on the punk, DIY side of things [than the traditional poetry press]. I started the business when I realized that, when people say, "I wish there were more books like this," what they really mean is that they wish there were more editors and publishers like the ones who put their favorite books out.
The kind of books you dream about reading are being written; it’s just [a matter of finding] a publisher to take the risk. That can be a challenge for less commercial authors—poets especially—when we're talking about books that are only ever going to sell a few thousand or a few hundred copies. But the stuff that makes those books so niche, makes their audiences love them all the more. So Trouble Dept. ends up with these weird books that are like Dirty Computer with poop jokes, or like what Ba Sho would write if he were doing his best Richard Brautigan impression.
My ideal for what the publishing industry should look like is a thousand Trouble Departments, with a thousand equally bizarre sensibilities, most of which I personally won't read but that find the people who are looking for them. The horror community specifically is very fertile soil for such sensibilities, which has guided our forays into fiction, like Blake Johnson's American Gothic novella Prodigal: an American Parable and Liza Sparks' forthcoming All of the Ghosts in the Room.
You workshopped OHtH, OHtC with some pretty big names in the Weird community. How was your experience working with Clarion?
I got more out of six weeks at Clarion than I did out of four years of undergrad. Some of that is down to the fact that I went to college when I was 18 and I went to Clarion when I was 34, but the mentorship I got from my peers and instructors there really was on another level. Taking a first draft that I wrote in two days and handing it directly to Carmen Maria Machado for feedback was one of the most nerve-wracking things I've ever done, but well worth the effort.
The greatest value I got out of it has been the way my cohort has stuck together in the years since. I don't know that I've ever been part of another group in which everyone wants so genuinely to see everyone else succeed, and I very much include our instructors in that. The value of community in developing yourself as an artist cannot be emphasized enough, I think. Writing well is one thing, but having people who care that you write well is just as important.
What books did you read way too soon that likely scarred and helped sculpt you?
What's amazing about the books that I read way too soon is how I managed to side-step letting them shape me too much. Many works I encountered in my teens are the kind that people never get over if they read them during a formative age. Jack Kerouac, Anne Rice, etc. I did have a H.P.L./Robert E. Howard phase, but thankfully that led me to look at Weird Tales magazine under Darrell Schweitzer and later Ann VanderMeer's editorship, which pointed me in a more open-ended direction.
That said, I read Frankenstein when I was 11 and I'm still stuck on it. When I was even younger, I was into "boys' adventure" novels, specifically ones about wilderness survival. Call of the Wild, Hatchet, My Side of the Mountain. I spent quite a lot of page-time with boys close to my age, who were doing things like sleeping inside a bear carcass to keep warm or eating strange berries they found in the woods and hoping for the best. One Hand to Hold… is very much a testament to those early obsessions of mine.
What albums did you obsess over as a teen? What albums do you obsess over now?
The albums I obsessed over as a teen were pretty unfortunate. I imprinted on Foo Fighters' The Colour and the Shape and went from there.
My first concert was Make Yourself-era Incubus, which I assume I was allowed to go to by myself because my parents hadn't listened to their back catalog. The opener was this anarchist LA techno-pop group called theSTART who had links to Emma Goldman essays on their website. A few months later I went to a Jimmy Eat World show, which was hilarious because their song about being bullied in middle school was everywhere at the time. The openers were this random hardcore band, and then Desaparecidos played their album Read Music/Speak Spanish, which is basically half an hour of "fuck the suburbs." The venue was full of polo shirts who didn't know how to handle it.
The anti-capitalist punk stuff was where my taste drifted much more over the ensuing years. Someone at a convention in 2006 gave me a copy of Gogol Bordello's Gypsy Punks (Underground World Strike) and the deal was sealed after that. I call this progression the “Weezer to Bad Religion pipeline."
I listen to a more eclectic mix now, but the albums that stick in my rotation long-term are mostly from artists in various parts of Asia in the 20th century. I have no idea why this is. Maybe I figure that, since there's a good chance I won't be attending many live concerts in the future, I might as well at least hear something different from what I'm used to. A lot of what I find are compilation albums because that's what managed to struggle across the ocean. Jun Togawa's Tokyo Barbarism is particularly big for me right now, even if I am 35 years late to the punch. I've become obsessed with translating her lyrics into English, because I keep looking at the translations that exist online and they don't really capture the feel of the song as I hear it. I end up with these versions that are, shall we say, liberated from the shackles of literal accuracy in the name of art. A normal, fun hobby to be engaging in.
What do your next writing projects look like? What's your big dream for your writing career?
I was talking to a friend recently about the books we and people we know are trying to write. Some are looking for their Great Gatsby, that will sell well enough, reliably enough to put their kids through college; others are going for their Lord of the Rings, a lavishly self-indulgent tour of the author's inner world and celebration of its lore. I think I'm trying to write Their Eyes Were Watching God: emotionally intense, unflinchingly honest about social issues, but leaves you with the feeling that joy may be possible even in the most horrible place and time. The stories I write often come from a place of loneliness, or regret, or disillusionment with society, because I've never been able to effectively fight those feelings by avoiding them. The trick is in finding that place of joy after you've confronted the troubles, which is hard to write about because it rarely looks the way we're told happiness should.
Americans love #livestrong-esque narratives where the hero not only beats his cancer and resumes his professional athletic career, but becomes the best in the world at his chosen sport and trades his wife for a celebrity. I'm more interested in the story of the discarded wife, who doesn't have corporate sponsorship and isn't the best in the world at anything, who needs to recover and find happiness in a way that doesn't involve getting a hospital ward named after her. The culture I grew up in makes those stories much more difficult to tell, but I'm working on it.
In more specific terms, I should probably finish my tour of the Jewish afterlife written in the form of a bird identification guide, which I started 2 1/2 years ago. My next poetry collection is about 1/4 of the way done. I'm close to finishing a short story collection; the gratification cycle with short stories is more immediate, so it's easier to work on them when I'm hunting that next kick of dopamine.
A few selections from my drafts and outlines:
- Woman tricks a moose into murdering her husband
- One where the outline just says "search party for lost hiker / dendrophile cult tree orgy / childhood imaginary friend made of anti-light"
- Trash Island
- Self-aware send-up of self-aware slasher movie send-ups
***PREORDER ONE HAND TO HOLD, ONE HAND TO CARVE HERE.***