IN SOMNIO: A Chat with writer S.E. Zeller

Sara Zeller is an author, editor, and active member & chair of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association. She was a finalist in the 2020 PNWA Unpublished Literary Short Story Contest. She lives in the Greater Seattle area with her husband, two children, and a tiny black cat.

IN SOMNIO editor Alex Woodroe recently spoke with Sara

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AW: Does your story touch on anything personal to you?  

SEZ: The setting of “Wild Thing” is personal. Most days I would prefer to live a little wild, a little more outdoors than is generally accepted. It’s where I’m happiest, and where I think most people are legitimately at their best. I’d say that’s the biggest similarity I have to my main character, Lilibeth, in this story. At least, the biggest similarity I would admit.   

AW: Is the Seattle area writer-friendly? Do your road-trips ever help you write? Does hiking?   

SEZ: The Seattle area is really writer-friendly. Can you think of anywhere else with quite so many coffee shops per capita? There is a large writing community here, and a ton of writing supports in place. 

Road trips and hiking help me immensely with the writing process. Being away from the hustle of the city allows ideas percolating in my brain to bubble to the surface in a more meaningful way.

AW: Do you have any specific formative memories that roped you into Gothic fiction? 

SEZ: I grew up in a house built in the 1890s. There were elements of Gothic setting everywhere, from the remnants of a long-ago fire found beneath layers of faded wallpaper to floorboards that creaked without anyone walking across them. So that “haunted house” vibe is strongly in the background of much of my work.  

I remember the first day we walked around the property, being enthralled with the true root cellar attached to the house at the time. There were ancient shutter doors attached to the house, angling down into the ground, much like you might find in tornado country, but instead here in Washington. At the time it wasn’t even wired for electrical lights and was creepy as all get-out. I’d never seen anything like it.

AW: Did you ever embrace the Goth culture? Carry a parasol? Do you still? If not, what was your teen ‘scene’? 

SEZ: I was an athlete when I was a teenager, and almost single-minded in its pursuit. I did write, but everything took a back-burner to sports then.

There was a time in college when I was stylistically trending in a Gothic direction. But it never was a whole-hog situation. Internally I embrace Goth culture. When I first read Mary Shelley, I was quite taken, and have kept a copy of both Frankenstein and The Last Man handy since. 

AW: Why Horror? Are you and Horror exclusive, and if not, what else do you flirt with? 

SEZ: Horror and I are definitely seeing other people. I write Horror, Thriller/Mystery, Sci-Fi, and Literary fiction. All my work incorporates a certain darkness. I love Horror and dark literature because it speaks to realities of life and death that we’re not always willing to contend with. As it is said, “without darkness there is no light”. We can’t expect to be good people without confronting the darkness within, and without. I try to let that shine through my work.

AW: Where can people see more of your past/upcoming work? 

SEZ: I have a couple stories being held for consideration that I can’t talk about yet (fingers crossed), and I’m working on a thriller, ‘Twice Shy,’ which I hope to bring to publication in the next couple years. Keep up to date with my writing and publishing news, or just come chat with me on Twitter and Instagram.

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IN HER OWN WORDS:

S.E.Zeller reads a selection from her story, “Wild Thing”; watch below, then click here to support the IN SOMNIO campaign on Kickstarter!

IN SOMNIO: A Chat with Writer J.A. Bryson

J.A. Bryson is a writer, teacher, and musician. Her body of work is mostly SFF with the occasional education policy piece, poem, or song. She lives in New York with her wife, kiddo, and three spoiled cats and is a graduate of the Viable Paradise Writing Workshop.

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AW: What inspired “Senescence”?

JAB: I wrote “Senescence” while attending the Viable Paradise writing workshop on Martha’s Vineyard. A discussion of lobster DNA and longevity transpired over lunch (yes, I was eating a lobster roll), and I got to thinking—why should vampires be the definitive sexy immortals?

AW: What music do you play? What do you teach?

JAB: I am a classically trained pianist, Craigslist trained guitarist, and vocal switch-hitter. At present, I write and perform folk music and parodies, and sing contrapuntal pop songs with a women’s a cappella choir.

In dayjob life, I teach English Language Arts and Social Studies to preteens who very much would like to know my pen name—which, I am not telling them.

AW: What do you think education should look like in the future? What should it focus more/less on?

JAB: This past year, I taught an entirely remote 5th grade class and—dare I say—loved it. Remote learning isn’t for everyone (don’t get me started on the inequities), but for this particular cohort, the experience was incredible. The way the internet can tap intrinsic motivation and curiosity and even facilitate collaboration is second to none. And while I’ll be happy to return to the classroom come fall, I feel like the future of education must incorporate high-tech learning's highlights and maybe even offer a remote option more broadly for students who thrive outside the four walls of the school building.

AW: Do you have any specific formative memories that roped you into Gothic fiction?

JAB: As a teen, I cut my teeth on Edgar Allen Poe and Dracula, but it was Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith that rocked my literary foundations. I remember talking to a stranger reading it on the subway and thinking—My God, I am so jealous of you reading this for the first time! Its plot twist is that delicious. Not only is Waters’ prose spellbinding, but her books were the first I’d ever read with lesbian protagonists. I fangirl-ed so hard over her early works and the BBC adaptations. I was a little obsessed.

AW: Did you ever embrace the Goth culture? Carry a parasol? Do you still? If not, what was your teen ‘scene’?

JAB: No parasol. I did have a black lipstick though. And I know all the words to Mozart’s Requiem—that counts, right?  I’d say, I dabbled in Goth but was mostly a theater geek.

Now, I parent an 11-year-old emo. That's something.

AW: Why Horror? Are you and Horror exclusive, and if not, what else do you flirt with?

JAB: I suppose my love of Horror is a beauty in darkness thing. I’m no fan of splatter but give me a narrative that bleeds its heart out all over the page, and I’m there for it. Horror and I are not exclusive. These days, I write Science Fiction/Fantasy mostly, but I flirt with satire and poetry too.

AW: Where can people see more of your past/upcoming work?

JAB: Sadly, my past works are no longer in print. I do have several works in progress though, including an aliens and cowgirls short, a vampire novella, and a steampunk fantasy novel inspired by the legendary pirate duo Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

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IN HER OWN WORDS:
J.A. Bryson reads a selection from her story, “Senescence”; watch below, then please support the IN SOMNIO campaign on Kickstarter!

IN SOMNIO: A Chat with writer A.P. Howell

A. P. Howell has worked as an archivist, innkeeper, webmaster and data wrangler. She lives with her spouse, their two kids, and a dog who hates groundhogs. Her short fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Little Blue Marble, Translunar Travelers Lounge, Eighteen: Stories of Mischief & Mayhem, and The NoSleep Podcast.

IN SOMNIO editor Alex Woodroe spoke with A.P. about the ethical treatment of the dead, the cultural histories we’ve lost along the way, and more.

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AW: Does your story touch on anything personal to you?

APH: A number of years ago I watched some TV show that dealt with the inner workings of a body farm. One thing that struck me was the attitude of the academic who served as the primary interview focus. She always referred to “individuals,” never “cadavers” or “subjects” or “bodies.” Even when she walked through a wooded area that temporarily served as a graveyard or opened a barrel to monitor decomposition, the place seemed more peaceful than macabre. What if a ghost found herself haunting such a place?

It’s important to note that there is a very dark side to medical science and physical anthropology; not every cadaver used for scientific discovery was obtained ethically. Henrietta Lacks’s family did not learn about the use of her cells until a quarter century after her death. Human remains from the MOVE bombing were shuttled between the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office and Ivy League institutions for decades. (Treating any artifact in such a cavalier manner makes my archivist’s heart wince; it’s so much worse when you layer on the nature of the artifacts and the circumstances of Tree and Delisha Africa’s deaths.) My story doesn’t grapple with those issues—and because I don’t deal with them fictionally, I feel it’s especially important to note them in this nonfictional space.

AW: What was your favourite thing about your work as an archivist?

APH: I liked the personal stories and oddities you come across. Candid photos, one-off documents, or just the cumulative effect of seeing how a particular person performed their daily work. I don’t think I’d make a good academic historian, because rather than digging into theory or primary sources in multiple relevant languages, I’d get excited by a coffee stain on an instruction manual or try to figure out the identity of a woman who was left at the altar more than a century ago.

There’s something comforting about working with the materials of the dead. You know how the story ends—part of it, anyway—and in some ways that makes it easier to piece together the contextual details. You get to tell stories about the people who created their collections—or the people who didn’t create collections, the women and the people of color and the poor people and the queer people and the otherwise non-elites, the people who exist around the margins of the primary sources we have. Picking out their stories (and, as an archivist, highlighting that sort of information for researchers) is fascinating.

It’s work that I miss. I think it’s valuable, but it’s not well-funded in general and the past few years have been particularly unkind to cultural heritage institutions in the United States.

AW: Do you have any specific formative memories that roped you into Gothic fiction?

APH: There’s not one particular moment—I sort of backed into it from other genres. An early short favorite, Clarke’s “The Star,” is science fiction, but there’s an undercurrent of cosmic horror (albeit without the expected tentacles). The same goes for a story like Tanith Lee’s “Venus Rising on Water” and movies like Alien—the unknowable, threatening thing has an explanation that is ostensibly scientific rather than supernatural, but the emotions are the same. Those feelings of being trapped by something beyond your ken, inhabiting a place where you fundamentally do not belong, are very effective and very Gothic. I approach genres as adjectives rather than boxes, so whatever the work’s primary marketing genre, the word “Gothic” means it’s probably going to deliver those tantalizing shivers.

AW: Did you ever embrace the Goth culture? Carry a parasol? Do you still? If not, what was your teen ‘scene’?

APH: I was very much a jeans-and-tee-shirt nerd in high school, though that didn’t feel much like a scene. (Quite a few of those tee-shirts were from colleges I toured. I was neither traumatized nor friendless, but I was still much less interested in experiencing high school than in getting out of high school.) In college, I was surprised to learn that cyberpunk was a subculture, not just a subgenre I enjoyed reading. I had similar revelations about Goths and Steampunks later on, though at that point it wasn’t a surprise. This sort of social obliviousness comes from living in your own head, I guess. Not growing up with the web probably had something to do with it, too, particularly in a rural area.

AW: Why Horror? Are you and Horror exclusive, and if not, what else do you flirt with?

APH: The world can be a horrifying place, so my mind often goes to dark places. I like making my characters react to unexpected pressures, and I tend to spend a lot of time in their heads. Horror is a great genre for doing that.

I don’t write Horror exclusively, but I’m pretty firmly in the speculative camp: science fiction, fantasy, and Horror. I like realism where I can remove—or at least bend—the shackles of reality.  

AW: Where can people see more of your past/upcoming work?

APH: Perhaps of most interest to IN SOMNIO readers, I have work published and upcoming in Underland Arcana. Mark Teppo (the editor and publisher at Underland Press) has played around with other tarot-themed publications. I have a story in his anthology from last year, XVIII: Stories of Mischief & Mayhem, based on the Moon card.

 I have some eco-themed work in Martian Magazine and Little Blue Marble, a story of an audiovisual archivist and a haunted VHS tape in Translunar Travelers Lounge, and a few other stories in webzines, anthologies, and on podcasts.

I’ll add an obligatory plug for my website, where I have links to my published work.

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IN HER OWN WORDS:

A.P. Howell reads a selection from her story, “Always an After”; watch below, then please support the IN SOMNIO campaign on Kickstarter!

IN SOMNIO: A Chat with writer M. Lopes da Silva

M. Lopes da Silva is a bisexual poet, author and artist from Los Angeles. Their work has been published or is forthcoming from Ghost Orchid Press's Cosmos, Neon Horror Zine, and Nightscript. Unnerving Magazine recently published their novella Hooker: a pro-queer, pro-sex work, feminist retrowave pulp thriller.

IN SOMNIO editor Alex Woodroe spoke with da Silva about the sensory stimulation of soapmaking, the importance of restoring and revitalizing our identity, and the promising future frontiers of Queer Horror.

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AW: Does your story touch on anything personal to you? Alternatively, does it touch on any current events, world fears, philosophy, morality, moods, trends? 

MLdS: In the past I have been partnered in very toxic relationships, and part of the cost of those relationships were pieces of my identity. It takes a lot of work to actually realize the value of your identity, and back then I did not have the support network or mental healthcare to stand up for myself. So this story is about the erasure of the self. Cultural erasure. The erasure of sexuality and queerness. The things we should not forfeit but are often persuaded to do so for the comfort of others. 

AW: Aside from writing, what other artforms grab your attention?

MLdS: There are so many! I love to explore. Currently I really love making comics – they present an opportunity to study concepts in potentially very abstract ways that are unique from writing fiction or even poetry. I love to use my hands to make things, and drawing tends to satisfy that itch, but last year I ventured into soap making, and have found soap to also be an interesting way to tell stories. The senses can be engaged – sight, smell, touch – to convey an actual sense of place. Memories. Or newness created from nostalgic ingredients. I find this to be similar to writing, but distinct. I started an Etsy shop called SaltCatSoap earlier this year and luckily so far people have been very receptive to the soap narratives that I have been telling.

AW: Is LA writer-friendly, and does it ever bleed into your writing?

MLdS: Los Angeles is full of writers, and wonderful places and people for writers to meet. The trick is to get out of your apartment first. I’ve found that Los Angeles ends up in almost all of my fiction in one way or other because I’ve lived here for most of my life. In “A House Without Ghosts” there’s a lot of Malibu in there. Manhattan Beach. Santa Monica.

AW: Do you have any specific formative memories that roped you into Gothic fiction?

MLdS: I remember when I was about nine years old I heard a librarian read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, and that was basically it for me. I remember how vividly I was drawn into the story, to the point where it felt like my heart was racing the narrator to reach the final line. Great stuff.

AW: Did you ever embrace the Goth culture? Carry a parasol? Do you still? If not, what was your teen ‘scene’?

MLdS: I only came out as bisexual in my late twenties, and have only very recently come out as non-binary, so my teen ‘scene’ was incredibly closeted! I wore a lot of random interesting clothing pieces (including a chain mail choker that’s still in my rotation today) and gender neutral items back then, as well as the stuff trending in the nineties. So a lot of terrible decisions i.e. exposed stomach/crop tops going on. Towering wooden clogs. A puffy blue fake fur coat. I actually do own a striped parasol and love a great deal about Goth culture, but I currently wear a lot of California casual that I like to spike with personal things I’ve collected over the years.

AW: Why Horror? Are you and Horror exclusive, and if not, what else do you flirt with?

MLdS: I think that investigating and deconstructing our pain and fears is probably the noblest and most interesting goal an author can have. Horror is a natural fit for these investigations, although whether anything of great depth comes out of the text depends on the author’s willingness to engage with these emotions fully. I try to do my best every time, but sometimes the result is more effective, sometimes less. I don’t like to restrict myself to any one genre, though, and often find it easier to give myself creative “breaks” by writing poetry and speculative fiction in between horror projects. I actually didn’t know what genre “A House Without Ghosts” was going to be when I first started writing it. It was a story that spilled out of me in a coffee shop in Santa Monica. I sat down and wrote the first paragraph and abruptly knew how the story ended – that was it. Because folk and fairy tales frequently influence my work, while I wrote it I thought that “A House Without Ghosts” might end up being speculative fiction. There’s still a lot of spec fic elements that remain in the story as it is, but I feel that in the end it cooled into the horror mold.

AW: Your novella, 'Hooker', tackled some themes that were both brave and incredibly fun and satisfying, marrying retrowave pulp horror-thrillers with feminism and queerness. Are we right to hope that the future of horror, and particularly indie horror, is looking more diverse and exciting than its past?

MLdS: There are so many fantastic queer horror authors out there right now in the indie scene. Hailey Piper, Eric LaRocca, Jessica Guess, Eve Harms and Eric Raglin are some names that come to me off the top of my head. They have strong voices and are doing exciting things with the genre. If readers are bored with mainstream horror and yearning for more queer voices in it, they should definitely start checking out independent authors.

AW: Where can people see more of your past/upcoming work?

MLdS: My novella, Hooker, is available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble online, however it’s probably best to search using my full name—M. Lopes da Silva—because the algorithm is an enigma. My upcoming projects are listed here and I usually make plenty of announcements on Twitter.

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IN THEIR OWN WORDS:

M. Lopes da Silva reads a selection from their story, “A House Without Ghosts”; watch below, then please support the IN SOMNIO campaign on Kickstarter!