12 November 2024
Zahra Linsky (ZL): [laugh] Hi, everyone! My name is Zahra Linsky. I’m a Senior Editor for Pitch: A Journal of Arts and Literature, and today I’m here with my Junior Editor Hannah Medina and the horror author Cassandra Khaw.
Cassandra Khaw (CK): Hi! Really happy to be here. Where it’s warm.
ZL: Yes, we have our radiator on. Um, I guess I’ll start with—if you [Hannah] didn’t want to say anything, introduce yourself.
Hannah Medina (HM): Hello.
CK, ZL, and HM all laugh.
ZL: Okay, well. We were really interested in how many different kinds of writing you do, with game writing and poetry and novellas and novels and all sorts. And so we were wondering like, what is the difference between writing a game and writing a book?
CK: Oh that’s—oh, I love this question so much, honestly. So, for most forms of traditional media—like if we’re talking about books, if we’re talking about movies, podcasts, radio plays—there’s almost this covenant between the creator and the audience. And the covenant says, “Dear audience, follow me along this path and this narrative to the end.” You’re not obligated to stay for the length of it, but there is a route. It is very guided, all the beats are known, all the paths are known. It’s a very cultivated experience.
Video games, on the other hand, are a magic trick. Regardless of whether you’re talking about an open world RPG story, even like one of the old point-and-click adventure games like, you know, Secret Monkey Island and all of that. Video games kind of lie to the player. They say, “Here’s this entire world you can explore. It is glorious. It is beautiful. It is as real as our own. But the most interesting thing is right here, and you’re going to join us on this path because you know it’s the most interesting and you j—” Now video games kinda sidle—you can’t see this, but I’m physically making a motion right now. You kind of sidle the audience along. You tell them they have infinite choice, every choice in the world. But at the same time, they’re going to make this choice specifically because it’s the most fun. And it’s a mixture of departments working to accomplish this magic trick, so it’s… a lot different.
ZL: That’s so interesting. I thun—eh… Sorry. To trans—so, Hannah. Sorry, I—I can edit all of this, and I plan to cut out me stumbling.
CK: I feel like you’re just processing my answer [unintelligible]
ZL: No, I was just thinking—Hannah brought up specifically, how you’re [Hannah’s] curious like… writing the video game characters?
HM: Mhm. We were talking about, going along with what Zahra said, do you pull inspiration from your games into your literary worlds?
CK: I wish I could say I do, but everything that I do for video games belongs to the IP, belongs to the company, so I think I would get sued horribly if I ever tried to do that.
ZL: That makes sense. What is it like writing these video game characters that do have IP versus like—and you’re more likely to collaborate with people versus writing your own works that are just your name or maybe like one other author’s name?
CK: They’re a lot of fun. I’m just putting that out there. And it’s kind of… I think it’s invigorating. Like, if you’re writing a novel, it’s an incredibly solitary experience. You’re sitting there for about six to nine months, typing away, hoping to God your editor does not hate what you’ve presented them. But when you’re writing a quest line or you’re writing a character or anything for video games, you spend every single day working with some of the most brilliant minds out there. You’re going up to the artist, you’re going up to the level designer, quest designer, area designing, going like, “So, I had this idea for this character. Do you think it works? Can we do this? Can we do that?” And slowly, through that communication between departments, an entire world fleshes itself—a three-dimensional idea of everything. And you don’t do it alone because very often area designers—and I don’t think area designers and level designers get enough credit—they’re the ones who go, “This is a really neat idea, but it’s a little bit flat.” Because as writers, we still tend to think in terms of very standard narrative. We think in terms of books and movies and poems and all of that. Whereas the area designers are constantly thinking about, “What is the juiciest experience that a player can have?” And then they’re like, “What if we did this?” And you’re like, “Oh my word, I didn’t think about that.” And you get to see that initial idea just flourish and grow. And it’s amazing. Although I will say that, if you’re precious about your ideas, it can become a little bit difficult. I’ve seen that happen for some people. But for the majority of writers in video games, that’s how it works. It’s really exciting.
ZL: That sounds so cool. I guess that answers the other subquestion.
CK and ZL laugh.
CK, laughing: ‘Do I like my job?’
ZL: No, I mean like, what it’s like to write with other people, but you kinda answered that.
CK: I mean, I will say, it has—every time I have gotten to work with someone else, it has been an absolute joy. Something I’ve been thinking about recently is—and this is very extential—life is so painfully short. And if you think about everything we do, within a few generations, chances are people won’t remember who we are and what we’ve done. But despite all of that, the ability to communicate with people who are amazing at their own fields—it is the human experience. It is a joy, a connection, that moment of saying, “We know this is not going to last. We know that someone is going to forget about us. And when the internet dies, that’s it. The cloud’s gone. We don’t have it anymore.” But despite all this, it’s a group of people coming together in a room and being very excited about making a thing happen. I think it’s a weird little miracle. It makes me incredibly happy.
ZL: That really does sound… so… awesome. For lack of a better word. I was wondering personally—so I’m a big fan of The Salt Grows Heavy.
CK: Thank you!
ZL: And actually, like, in multiple soc—Discord servers online, people have been like, “Oh, I’m reading this!” And I’m like, “Guess what’s happening tomorrow?” [laughs] And so I’ve been talking about it a lot and thinking about it a lot and about the setting. How it’s this intersection of fantasy—with the mermaids and resurrection—but also real world—with Hippocrates and Judas. What was it like designing this world that was—to me, it feels a lot like a fairy tale. I know that’s kind of the vibe, but like those elements making it feel so much like a fairy tale. What was it like?
CK: I think it felt like coming home in some ways because I grew up in Malaysia, spent my first twenty-five years in Malaysia. And I feel like, in the west, mythology is kind of sectioned-off. You have this mythology, that mythology, this culture, that culture. But in Malaysia, everything used to bleed together. People told each other ghost stories from their own cultures, and everyone knew what a hungry ghost festival was because every August, when the hungry ghost festival happened, they would erect massive stages and performances would be held throughout the night. You could sit—it’s free, it’s a variety show, there’s karaoke, there’s all kinds of fun stuff—but it was the front row seats that no one was allowed to occupy. The shows would continue way into the night. You could walk out—and I did, I think, at one point at four a.m. in the morning, if I remember correctly—and somebody was just shouting excitedly at the empty stage, going, “Are you enjoying yourself?” And it’s because the performances were never meant for the living. Every year, people just throw shows for the dead, with the assumption that the dead would show up. And so, to me, The Salt Grows Heavy felt a little bit like a tribute to that. Because Malaysia was also a place where we all grew up understanding evolution was a thing and the Earth was round. No one ever questioned it. But you could—everyone knew about ghost stories. Everyone knew which houses were haunted. Everyone knew what places were haunted. And being able to blend all of that together, it felt great.
And also snow was incredibly puzzling to me because I grew up in the tropics. To this day, I’m still not used to the idea of snow. This is a bit of a side bar, but I was in Iceland on assignment. I used to work as a journalist. It was the first time I had ever seen large snowflakes. I was maybe twenty-seven, a full grown adult woman. I run out of the hotel excitedly into the middle of a group conversation, stand in the snow, and go, “Oh my god!” I ran back inside and loudly declare, “There’s snow!” And every single person who came from the US and the UK just slowly turned around at me, just like, “… Yes?” I ran outside again, came back, and I announced I was cold. Everyone was like, “What were you expecting?”
But The Salt Grows Heavy also, on top of being a tribute to how Malaysia mixed all the mythologies up, was my personal love and fascination for that weird white stuff that comes trickling from the sky. Listen, it’s exotic, okay?
CK and ZL laugh.
ZL: I’m from San Diego, so like—
CK: You know how I feel.
ZL: I’ve only experienced so far three snowy winters. And yeah, that’s it.
CK: So you know exactly what it’s like. It’s just like, “Woah. For real? Damn.”
ZL: It’s a little incomprehensible.
CK: Yes.
ZL: I know hail better than snow.
CK laughs.
CK: But yeah.
HM: I personally was a fan of Nothing But Blackened Teeth, so I had questions about that one.
CK: Of course.
HM: Specifically, me and another editor, we were talking about Kat and how you touch upon her mental health within the story. So, I was wondering what role do you think mental health plays in your characters’ journeys.
CK: Um… A lot, honestly. Many of my books are the result of me processing things that have happened in my life, things that have happened to other people. And Nothing But Blackened Teeth, I actually wrote that the year after, well—it’s a little bit of a messy story. But, I think I was thirty-one or so, and I had woken up and my mother had sent me a message. She said, “Is your partner with you?” I was like, That’s not a good thing. That’s never a good thing when someone says that. I was like, “No, but tell me what you need to tell me.” And she was like, “Your dad passed away. He died of a heart attack.” It was not great. I basically spent a year processing all of this and was slowly coming through the other side of my grief when my mother confessed to me. He hadn’t died of a heart attack. He had actually killed himself. And it just struck me, that sense that I had used up other people’s kindness and patience for myself. Something that I understand is not true and something that should not be imposed on anyone because grief doesn’t have a timeline. But I ended up allowing some not great people to take advantage of me simply because I felt a kind of retro-gratitude because they were there. They didn’t abandon me. I was going through a second grief. Nothing But Blackened Teeth was a lot of me processing those feelings. In the same way that The Salt Grows Heavy was a lot of processing the idea that, if you look at a lot of stories, especially of first-generation immigrant moms, very often they’re almost pushed to just be the mother. They’re the ones to give their parents a future. Their own dreams—it doesn’t matter. It’s fine, as long as their progeny survives, it’s okay. And I remember writing the short story for The Salt Grows Heavy and going, “I don’t want that to end here.” Even if it’s a little bit triumphant, her daughters go out to absolutely devour the kingdom of the man who kidnapped her. I didn’t want to leave her holding the window and say, “This is where it stops.” I needed her to have her own adventure. I needed her to figure—well, adventure is a very interesting word I’m choosing for The Salt Grows Heavy. But! It applies. I needed her to have her own life. So, mental health tends to be a really big thing in all of my stories because it carries a lot of my big emotions at the time. That was a downer of an answer. I’m so sorry.
ZL: No, that was interest. It’s just… we were processing that. And actually to continue on Nothing But Blackened Teeth, I kind of guess in a more silly way, your characters are frequently referencing horror movie tropes. And like, well, first of all, it was very fun seeing them be like, “That’s the prince.” And then he dies. That was very fun. But also, how do you see yourself in conversation with the genre?
CK: Hm, that’s an interesting one. A little bit like an outsider, in some ways. The horror community in the west have been wonderful to me. But my origins remain very Asian. Like I grew up in Asia. I then spent ten years nomadic. And it feels sometimes like I’m a tourist in my own genre because I’m carrying pieces of myself from different places, things I’ve learned to understand and internalize in a way. And I’m coming up to folks and going like, “Hello! How do you feel about this thing?” And they’re like, “That’s not how we do this, but it’s fascinating.” And it’s weird to be able to have that conversation constantly. Um, I will say that the one thing I keep butting up against is how different western horror is with eastern horror. I’m struggling to reconcile a lot of it. So, if you have, for example, like Impetigore is one of my favorite horror movies. It’s an Indonesian horror movie. There a lot of critics who are like, “I don’t understand why there’s this mysterious little village that does this specific thing. It was never explained.” But if you grow up in south-east Asia, where everyone has a ghost story of their own, you don’t ask people, “Why is that ghost there in particular? How did it come to be? What does it representative of?” It’s just… there. And so, seeing how everyone in the west needs everything explained because it’s a different lens and a different kind of environment and all of that, and seeing what I contain in myself, it’s an odd balance, I guess? It’s still an ongoing conversation because I don’t think I’ll ever change my storytelling style, but I think it’s going to become slightly different as I continue to work.
HM: More about Nothing But Blackened Teeth, so we were really fascinated by the narrative that the protagonist gave and we were talking about how you find a balance between really fantastical, beautiful language and the casual speech that’s included.
CK: I wish I had a sophisticated answer to that. I don’t. So, here’s an interesting thing. I have synesthesia—lingual-gustatory in particular. I cannot write plainly to save my life because if I write plainly, my brain just tastes saltines. And I’ve tried. And no one wants to eat saltines for nine months straight. That’s all the flavor I have in my mouth. No, done. So, when I write, I need a context of those words. I need the beauty of it. I need the rhythm, the alliteration in my head. And it also comes partially from the fact that English isn’t my first language. So, there is a deep, bright love that I have for the English language, for each and every word that I’ve kind of magpied over the years. The first time that I learned that there was something called a ‘mumuration of starlings,’ I just sat there going, “Oh my god. This is perfect. Who thought of this? Who just sat down there and decided to say that?” So, I don’t have a way of telling you how I balance it. It was very much me writing as I always do, I think for all of my books. Because at the end of the day, I’m finding that I just want to reach people who enjoy my stuff instead of pushing it to markets that might not like me. I’m writing for my own pleasure. If there’s a balance, it’s there.
ZL: That’s good to know. I mean, I love your writing.
HM: Yes, big fan.
ZL: I had a really good time. I first read The Salt Grows Heavy last year. In order to prepare for the interview, I reread it. It was really nice being able to go back and just read your specific word choices. I found them very interesting and like… what’s it… what’s the word… illustrative?
CK: I love words. This is clearly not a question you’re asking, but I’m just diving in like a terrible person, like an absolute diva. But I love words so much. A writer named Robert Macfarlane wrote a book called Landmarks. Do you know him?
ZL: I do, I do know Robert Macfarlane. I don’t know Landmarks, but I really do like their writing.
CK: So, in their introduction of Landmarks, he talks about how, every year new words are introduced into the dictionary. But old words are also removed as they fall out of use. And he considers this such an enormous disaster because most of the words that are being removed are words related to nature because no one talks about the different features and facets of a mountain or a tundra or grassland anymore. If we don’t have the words to describe a thing, if we don’t know the context for anything, it just flattens out and it’s just a mountain. It becomes infinitely easier to absolutely obliterate it because you’re not thinking about what it represents, what are the millions of little things tied to it. And when you have those words, you kind of reenchant the world. It forces you to view everything from a different lens. Like ‘mumuration.’ The word alone invokes that sound, as opposed to, I dunno, ‘a flock of swallows.’ Like, “Eh, sure. Okay.” Firstly, and maybe belatedly, thank you for that. I really appreciate what you said about my writing. I like finding the right words for the right moment, and they are sometimes incredibly baroque words because they make me happy. It’s wonderful to be able to go, “This is specifically the thing that it is. Here you go. Brrp.” I’m hoping it excites people in some ways to wander off to the dictionary or wander off to Google and go, “Ohhh, a gabriola is actually a type of chair. Neat!”
HM: I definitely had to stop a couple times and look words up.
CK: If it’s any consolation, when I was in my teens, I was an incredibly weird kid. I spent three years of my life just reading the dictionary. I essentially just ate it up and swallowed it and never spat it back out.
ZL, laughing: That kind of makes sense. Actually, I have a personal question. It’s technically not on list that we approved in a meeting.
CK: Yes!
ZL: I read this book by Sara Maitland. It’s called Gossip From the Forest: A Search for the Hidden Roots of Our Fairytales. It’s only discussing European fairy tales—that’s her specialty—but it’s discussing about how fairy tales have a root in the forest and how the origin of European fairy tales is, at its core, born of those who lived alongside and within the forest. So, while I was reading The Salt Grows Heavy, I saw a conversation between your work and her studies, as you were exploring these saints and the children they rebirth, deep in the winter woods. And I was wondering about the conversation of nature, how that influences your writing, and if you did research, what kind of things you’re doing—I was very curious, seeing these connections of books I loved.
CK: I adore that. I am obsessed with the Russian tundra. I am obsessed with northern forests because they’re so infinitely different from what I knew. Once again, I grew up in the tropics. I was so used to the rainforest. When I started traveling, I had a nomadic phase in my twenties. I was in a different continent every three months, and stuff like that. It weirded me out how to see how tame nature was, especially in America. You have like nice proper woods. If you go into the deep forest, everything is just lined up. I’m like, “H-how does this? What is this?” Because in Malaysia, if you know anything about a tropical rainforest, it is just strangling figs and banyans and enormous plants. When I saw a pothos in a gardening shop for the first time, I was like, “This is a very weird plant.” They’re like, “It’s native to Malaysia.” “That doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen in Malaysia.” Then they showed it to me, and oh I’ve seen it in the wilderness. But to answer your question more specifically, I’ve always had a relationship with the jungles because it was impossible not to. Every building—even the skyscrapers. Cleaners would come up weakly to scrape off the goddamn vines because the jungle is casually crawling into the cities, trying to devour it. It brought me so much comfort. The first time I heard the Amazon was burning, I burst into tears. A lot of the things that happened, and the ongoing climate crisis had hit me really hard. But the burning of the Amazon, that was the one that really got me. I sobbed for an entire day because growing up, the thing that kept me weirdly sane and sure that everything would be alright was that at some point, humanity, despite what we do, will burn ourselves out. But then the jungles and the forests will come creep over the cities, swallow it all up. Nature will be fine. So, yeah. I’ve had such a deep, intense love for nature but also its hunger, and I think that shows up a lot in The Salt Grows Heavy. That emptiness, the willingness of it to swallow you whole. Yeah, I have a really intense relationship with that. I was very afraid it would eat me, after all. Still am.
ZL: Yeah, but at least not in Pennsylvania here.
CK: Listen, I don’t know.
ZL: Well, this is an arboretum, so we’re required to prune our trees.
CK: Oh! Oh…
ZL: We’re a nationally-recognized arboretum with over one hundred thirty species of trees.
CK: I wish I had more days to— I didn’t mean to interrupt you, but that is just delightful.
ZL: Yes, yes. I’m obsessed with some of the trees on this campus. I spend a lot of time staring at them. Uh, like we have dogwoods over there. Two different species, I think the Korean Dogwood and the Florida Dogwood.
CK: That’s really cool.
ZL: I can point out on the way to the event.
CK: Yes, please.
HM: It’ll be a little dark.
ZL: Well…
CK: We have flashlights.
ZL: It’s also not a great season for it. They look beautiful in the spring.
CK: I’ll have to come back sometime.
ZL, laughing: Yeah.
HM: Just like a more general question. What would you say you’re looking forward to writing in the future?
CK: Oh, that’s a tough one. I have to think about this for a minute.
CK pauses.
CK: So, I have a novella that I’m slowly working on right now. It’s an expansion of a short story I recently submitted for The Book of Death, which is edited by Jonathan Strahan. I think I mangled his name. I’ve never said it out loud. Sorry, Jonathan. If you hear this podcast, take my apologies. I don’t mean it. And, the novella kind of deals with— So, I just turned forty in August. Not to end the show on a real downer note. Sorry, I’m a horror writer. Everything I say is a little bit depressing. I’ve been suicidally depressive before. When I turned forty, a little voice in my head was like, “You know what, four decades? Everything you’ve done. You got a Bram Stoker award. You traveled the world. You met really lovely people. It seems like a good time to check out, given everything else. What are you looking forward to?” And that bleakness really sank in. I struggled with that for quite a while. But, once again, like we talked earlier about the joy of being able to communicate with other people, being able to work with other people. The intrinsic miracle of humanity creating art despite the fact that we’re all going to be forgotten by the universe quite shortly. That led into a short story about the idea of facing the concept of your own death, imminent as it is or inescapable as it is. Finding joy in the small moments, finding love in it, finding the light and comfort and the knowledge that, even if it ends, even if it feels ultimately futile, it doesn’t mean anything in the specific moment. I’m looking forward to finishing that book because I think it’s the kind of book I really needed during those terrible few weeks.
ZL: I think it’s the kind of book a lot of people are needing.
HM: I will definitely be looking forward to reading it.
ZL: I wanted to read more of your work, but I ran out of time with my classes.
CK: You’re all good.
ZL: We’re very excited to see what you do in the future.
CK: I have the dark academia book that’s coming out next year. I hope people enjoy that one.
ZL: I will definitely be picking that up.
CK: Everyone there is worse than everyone in Nothing But Blackened Teeth somehow. They’re all terrible people. So terrible people.
HM: We were— We really wanted to ask you about that but we were really unsure how to phrase—
CK: Go for it.
HM: —the fact that they are really horrible.
CK: I meant them to be the worst possible people. One of the first people who read it, the moment she was done, I ran up to her: “Who do you hate most?” But that whole book is something that I wanted to explore that, especially as you get older, one thing that I’ve noticed is, we tend to hang onto friendships even when we think the other person has changed for the worst. They’re a little more sexist, they’re a little more violent. They spend a lot of weird time in Reddit looking at Incel subreddits. But you know what? We’ve been friends for twenty years. Surely, it’s still worth something? And truth is, very often those friendships, people change, people fracture, and some people just become horrible human beings. So, in Nothing But Blackened Teeth, I wanted the worst possible people together because they hadn’t realized that. My experiment with them was: what would happen if the worst possible people were in a location where they could do terrible things to each other and have the justification? Which didn’t really answer the semi-question that you asked. But yes, they were meant to be terrible people. They were completely intentional. If you hated all of them, then I did my job right.
ZL: See, that’s what I was telling people, like you’re supposed to hate them.
CK: You’re not supposed to like them. I would be very upset if there were people who liked them.
ZL and CK laugh.
CK: A lot of people like Philip, though. I know a few who do, and I’m always like…
ZL: Hm…
HM: I think I was too sad, hearing about they did to him.
ZL: I dunno. It was kind of funny to me. [laughs] I mean, I dunno. He’s just that kind of guy. It’s a women’s college, so maybe I have less sympathy after being here for four years.
CK laughs.
CK: But they’re also meant to be terrible. Even Kat. They’re people who really need to go to therapy.
ZL: Yeah… Not talk to each other for a while.
CK: Not until they grow up and learn to say sorry about all the things they’ve done to each other.
ZL: Yeah, like killing their friends. Well, that is all time we have, unfortunately. But thank you so much for speaking to us. We were so excited to have you, and we’re so glad to have had this conversation.
HM: It was great to meet you.
CK: Thank you. It was wonderful. I really enjoyed this interview. It was so much fun. And I have hot chocolate! Which I never get in interviews.
HM: Cold hot chocolate.
CK: Listen, it’s the thought that counts.