This Is Horror

TOD 028 Gwendolyn Kiste: Quaffing Your Fear Like Fine Wine

In this podcast Scott Nicolay interviews Gwendolyn Kiste, author of And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe and Pretty Marys All in a Row.

The Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird is a unique immersive one-day event featuring approximately 12 hours of panels, readings, signings and social activities centered around contemporary Weird and speculative fiction. The second annual event will be held at the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, CA, one of the Weirdest Places in the U.S. Limited to 75 attendees. Buy your memberships here.

Show Notes

Gwendolyn Kiste, author of the novella Pretty Marys All in a Row (Broken Eye Books) and the debut collection And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe (JournalStone), featured on the preliminary 2018 Bram Stoker Awards ballot, joins Scott to talk about her work including shared resonances with Desirina Boskovich’s Never Now Always (which preceded her in Broken Eye’s novella series), a hypothetical secret connection between the CIA and the Weird Renaissance via James Tiptree Jr., her recent H-Word column ‘W is for Witch’  (Nightmare Magazine), polarizing stores and confronting rape culture, the satisfaction of the unexplained in Weird fiction and the Star Wars galaxy, resistance, the genesis of the collection, de-normalizing through fiction, the excitement and sadness of groundbreaking work by women and women of color, Angela Carter and Shirley Jackson, the grossness of Norman Mailer, genre-boundary-shifting and speculative fiction as an umbrella term, her new story ‘40 Ways to Leave Your Monster Lover’ in the Hardened Hearts anthology, writing in second person, tying together folk tales and urban legends in Pretty Marys, storytelling via literature versus film, trusting your reader, and ghost protagonists. (1:24:00) Kiste then reads from Pretty Marys, discusses creating at different lengths and the ‘magic’ of writing a novella, teases her upcoming debut novel The Rust Maidens (Trepidatio/JournalStone) and other new works, and shares her recommended editors  Scott Gable (Broken Eye) and Jess Landry (T/JS) and her recommended writers Eden Royce and Farah Rose Smith.

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Additional Links

TOD 018 Desirina Boskovich: Walking Reality’s Festering Fault Lines…with a Dog

Up the Walls of the World by James Tiptree Jr.

TOD 024 Nadia Bulkin: Mechanisms of Upheaval

TOD 020 Two Weird Panels: ‘Rise of Weird Fiction” at WorldCon 75 and ‘The Weird in Weird Fiction’ at Fantasycon 2017

Helen Marshall

Weird Fiction Review

Stephen Graham Jones

Sonya Taaffe

Damien Angelica Walters

My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe (excerpt)

Rip Torn vs Norman Mailer: the “infamous” Maidstone brawl

‘The Black Boy (from Harlem) Looks at the White Boy from Brooklyn (Mailer)’ (Classic Esquire)

Stanley Jordan

gawki (cover artist for Pretty Marys All in a Row)

‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’ by Nick Mamatas

Nicole Kornher-Stace

Strange Is the Night by S.P. Miskowski

Unnerving Magazine

Suspended in Dusk II (Grey Matter Press)

Sycorax’s Daughters (Cedar Grove Publishing)

Eviscerator by Farah Rose Smith

2018 New Bizarro Author Series (Eraserhead Press)

Show Credits

Host/Executive Producer: Scott Nicolay

Co-Host, News From the Weird: Justin Steele

Associate Producer/Show Notes: Anya Martin

Logo Design: Nick “The Hat” Gucker

Music: Michael Griffin