Category: Interviews & Excerpts

Craft Essay for Haunted Passages: “Standing at a Line in the Sand with a Shiver in Your Heart” by Bones Are Made to Be Broken author Paul Michael Anderson

I want to talk about the limitless possibilities of what horror is and what horror can do. I want to rail against the mainstream critics and dilettantes who deride the genre every time something major comes along—the release of an IT, the premiere of a Walking Dead, the publication of a Let the Right One…
“Monster Family Portraits” for Haunted Passages: 14 Ghost and Monster Movies that Inspired or Influenced Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales by Orrin Grey

My previous collection, Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts, was specifically and self-consciously assembled around an idea of tracing the history of horror cinema through short stories inspired by films from different eras. Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales has no such underlying modus, but movies are a huge part of my mental vocabulary, and monster…
“Rooms Echo Louder without Anything Inside of Them”: Hillary Leftwich Talks to Steven Dunn

Steven Dunn’s second novel, water & power, is published by Tarpaulin Sky and available to order now. Shortlisted for Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, he is the author of Potted Meat (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2016), which was co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize and finalist for a Colorado Book Award. Dunn was…
David James Keaton’s “Gasoline Dreams”: A Definitive, Last-word Inventory of Car-Chase Flicks for Haunted Passages

As I was poking around under the hood of my new collection, Our Pool Party Bus Forever Days: Road Stories, gathering up stories and realizing that a theme had miraculously begun to emerge, I also understood that, at some point, a reader might find the book’s supposed connection to the road a little … abstract…
“The Colossal Beast Strikes a Match in My Brain”: Lee Widener Introduces His Cosmic Horror Collection Under the Shanghai Tunnels to Haunted Passages

It all began for me on a Saturday night when I was eight years old. I had awakened thirsty and crept down the stairs to get a drink of water. As I tiptoed past the living room, careful not to make the slightest sound, since I wasn’t supposed to be up, I heard the most…
“WITH EDGES THAT MOVE. A river. A crisis.”: Carrie Lorig Talks to Meredith Blankinship

In spring 2016 I interviewed Carrie Lorig about her book The Pulp vs. the Throne (Artifice Press), and her now-published chapbook The Book of Repulsive Women (Essay Press). So much has happened since then, but Lorig’s ways of thinking and writing through “poetry / voice / space / life” is still very necessary to hold…
“Playing Catch-Up”: A Conversation with Allison M. Charette on Translating Fiction from Madagascar by Rick Henry

Allison M. Charette translates literary work from the French, with a growing interest in the literature of Madagascar. Her translation of Naivo’s Beyond the Rice Fields was long-listed for the Best Translated Book Award in 2018. Among her many accomplishments: an NEA Fellowship in Literary Translation and a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. She visited SUNY…
“Mythical Magic”: Gay Degani Interviews Tara Campbell

When I first picked up Circe’s Bicycle by Tara Campbell with its clean, stylish cover, I had to remind myself exactly who Circe was in mythology. Here’s the Wikipedia definition: Circe (/ˈsɜːrsiː/; Greek: Κίρκη Kírkē pronounced [kírkɛː]) is a goddess of magic or sometimes a nymph, witch, enchantress or sorceress in Greek mythology. I soon found…
Excerpt: SITU, fiction by Steven Seidenberg

SITU is a hesitant unfolding of demise, a text that occupies the interstices between diegetic, philosophical, and poetic discursive timbres. From this tension—which finds form in an indeterminate subject’s relationship with a bench, his anguished site of rest and motion—the subsequent flux at the center of the narrative voice facilitates a kind of epistemology of…