Scott Nicolay

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Tag: Zora Neale Hurston

Craig Laurance Gidney: Writing the Beautiful Mess | The Outer Dark: Episode 14 — OCTOBER 6, 2015

12120007_625217597615975_7812391686514725385_oCraig Laurance Gidney recalls pivotal early experiences at Clarion West 1996 under the tutelage of a blockbuster roster of teachers from Jack Womack to Ellen Datlow, as well as studying under Samuel R. “Chip” Delany in college, remembers recently deceased literary titan Tanith Lee, the transgressive and neodecadant qualities that drew him so passionately to her writing, her courage portraying gay characters and the impact of her work on his own, his most recent anthology, Skin Deep Magic, from Rebel Satori Press, including specific stories such as writing about Richard Bruce Nugent, a gay figure in the Harlem Renaissance, in “Conjuring Shadows” and “Coalrose” which was inspired by Nina Simone, the influence of Aimé Césaire, surrealism and the Négritude movement in skin-deep-magicFrancophone literature, exploring his fascination with lucid dreaming in his latest story The Nectar of Nightmares forthcoming from Dim Shores, writing in the “Beautiful Mess,” engaging with racist imagery, epithets, stereotypes and ideology in stories such as “Lyes,” why he feels it’s okay to like problematic fiction—including HP Lovecraft—as long as you don’t deny the problem, horror as intrinsic to the experience of African Americans, women and other liminal groups versus being about the fear of the other, Toni Morrison‘s Beloved as a horror novel, the current boom of diverse writers in fantastic literature, the often overlooked gay weird, writing from every perspective, why everybody should read Queers Destroy Horror!, ssmhis next novel currently titled Invocations—a contemporary fantasy about a family of outsider artists, and his current reading recommendations including Tom Cardamone, Chesya Burke, Amanda Downum’s Dreams of Shreds and Tatters, and Tanith Lee’s posthumous collection Dancing Through the Fire, which has a theme of coming to peace with death, and A Different City, published just before her passing which he calls “classic top-notch over-the-top gothic goodness” set in Marseilles—“Flaubert if he wrote dark fiction”!

This archival episode will be available again at This Is Horror soon. In the meantime, subscribe at iTunes  or Blubrry to make sure you don’t miss an episode.

bereft_1_full_nameMore Links:

https://www.lethepressbooks.com/

https://www.tinysatchelpress.com/#!__whats-in-the-satchel

https://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/

https://weirdfictionreview.com/2013/04/wandering-spirits-traveling-mary-shelleys-frankenstein/

Next week’s guest: Gemma Files, author of The Worm in Every Heart, We Will All Go Down Together, the Hexslinger series, and the forthcoming novel Experimental Film.

Chesya Burke: Strange Crimes and Dangerous Women | The Outer Dark: Episode 8 — AUGUST 17, 2015

 Strange-Case-or-Little-Africa-187x300Chesya Burke delves deeply into the stories from her first collection Let’s Play White and her new novel The Strange Crimes of Little Africa, forthcoming from Rothco Press this fall (a mystery set in the dynamic cultural milieu of Harlem Renaissance which features Zora Neale Hurston as a character), intersectional feminism in the African-American context with strong female protagonists and supernatural powers as a force of empowerment, growing up with ghost stories in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and reclaiming cultural traditions, open endings and returning characters, why she still loves zombies, reading and enjoying H.P. Lovecraft’s works but not flinching from the critical context of his racism, her doctorate studies in English, diversity and the future of speculative fiction, and her reading recommendations including Kiese Laymon and N.K. Jemisin.

This archival episode will be available again at This Is Horror soon. In the meantime, subscribe at iTunes  or Blubrry to make sure you don’t miss an episode.

NEXT WEEK’S GUEST:  Kate Jonez, author of Ceremony of Flies.

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