27 March 2024

Zahra Linsky (ZL): Hi, welcome! My name is Zahra Linsky, and today I’m here with my colleague, Mackenzie Gregory. And today we will be interviewing award-winning author Carmen Maria Machado. We wanted to know, um, what is it about non-traditional horror that draws you in?

Carmen Maria Machado (CMM): I mean, I think horror is a genre that I’ve always really enjoyed. When I was a— And it’s— When I say that, it’s from the perspective of a true and blue scaredy-cat. Like, when I, as a child— I am a deeply anxious person, and as a child I read a lot of horror and would be up all night hysterically sobbing and my mother— I wouldn’t let her turn the lights off, and she’d be like, “What have you been reading?” And she would find these horror novels that I had read, that I had like snuck away like pornography. And she would be like, “Wha— Why are you reading this? You’re never going to sleep.” And it was just this over and over again. And I think that people… That’s actually pretty common, and I think that like horror as a way of almost creating a safe kind of adrenaline rush for— It’s like a rollercoaster. It’s like you’re, you know, in a situation where you’re ultimately safe, like the text you’re reading can’t harm you in a meaningful way, um, but you’re able to explore emotional extremes and have this interesting experience. And horror is a genre that historically has been subversive in a lot of interesting ways, and so I just feel like I don’t know. It’s a genre I have always been drawn to in film and in literature, and I just can’t imagine— It’s funny because I feel like I used to describe my work more broadly, and I have drawn a lot of traditions and a lot of things, but I think horror is always my first love. Like horror is the genre that like really speaks to me and has always really spoken to me in like every way, in every moment of my life. So, yeah…

ZL: I really like what you said about, um, hiding away the horror and being afraid of those. I remember when I was younger—I think I was eleven—I was terrified Jeff the Killer would come through my window and kill me.

CMM: Who’s Jeff the Killer?

ZL: Jeff the Killer— He’s a— he’s a creepypasta.

CMM: Ohhh so this is like a generational thing. I didn’t know who Jeff the Killer is. [laughs]

(ZL shows CMM a Google search of Jeff the Killer.)

CMM: Oh god! I hate him. I would have also been very afraid.

ZL: My friends thought he was hot, so… uh…

CMM: Well, this is actually a great, an interesting segue because I think that—I do think that horror does dovetail with the erotic in a lot of ways. And I think of that sensation of like being pushed to an extreme emotional state is actually very—can be very sexual, so I think that it also extends to me that like, that you being like, “I was scared but still interested, and my friends thought that this very horrifying character was kinda sexy”—that makes sense to me. Like it’s all those things are very close in like the brain, so it’s kinda like, yeah, you’re being pushed to an extreme state of like emotional… like an emotional height and I think that like, yeah, the erotic and horror are like extremely closely linked and like not that different from each other, so it makes sense that you—that that would all be tangled together, do you know what I mean? That makes sense to me.

ZL: Yes. Yes. That makes complete sense.

CMM: That guy is so spooky. I’ve never seen that before, and I’m like, “Woah! God.”

ZL: There’s a whole bunch of “creepypasta” characters that my friends all were obsessed with. So…

CMM: Is that like—and like Slenderman?

Mackenzie Gregory (MG) and ZL: Yes.

CMM: I know like Slenderman. I know some of it. I just didn’t know about that exact one.

ZL: Yeah. This was very… 2014, 2015.

MG: This was like that 2012 Tumblr era.

CMM: Got it, got it. For me, it was more—it was a combination of things like Goosebumps. It was like sort of horror, literature for young people when I was a kid, which would have been like… like early nineties. So mid-nineties. So like, Christopher Pike and like R. L. Stein, and I was also reading a lot of, like I remember reading this book called The Hot Zone [by Richard Pretson]. Do you— Do you— Are you familiar?

MG: No.

CMM: Hot Zone was this like, like— I thought it was a novel. I got it at a yard sale for like five cents, and then—or like a quarter. And then I read it, and then I remember I finished reading it. I turned it over, and I realized the cover said, “The terrifying true story.” But essentially it’s a novelized nonfiction account of the big Ebola outbreak that happened in the… And there was just this horrifying scene of this man on an airplane vomiting blood. It’s just this really— And it was just so scary. And I remember also the book had a blurb from Bill Clinton on it. Like it was like, “‘The scariest book I’ve ever read!’ – Bill Clinton.” And I was like, “Cool. That’s the president. Oh my god!” And I was so— My mother found me, and I was hysterical. I was like actually crying and weeping. So it was a combination of books that were actually horror books and books that were other things that could have pushed me to an extreme emotional state, like a book about Ebola, which I was so freaked out by. Anyway.

(CMM, MG, and ZL laugh.)

ZL: Kind of—kind of around this topic: Are there any other writers and books that have influenced you towards this path of like nontraditional horror?

CMM: Oh! Oh, I mean all kinds. This is so funny. Literally on the way here, I was listening to a podcast about Stephen King cuz it’s the fiftieth anniversary of Carrie, his first novel. And I was actually too scared to read Stephen King. My cousin read Stephen King, and when I would visit her, she would like, um, tell me the plots of his novels. So, we would be up all night, and she would just be like, “Okay, so, It. So there’s this clown named Pennywise.” And so she would just be narrating the plot to me. It was so scary. Since then, I have read a ton of Stephen King novels, but back then I was so cared as a child. Um, it was a lot of like, I mean, I guess I was reading some work that was more meant for adults. I read a lot of V. C. Andrews, which was also again—okay, so. It was gothic, it was horror adjacent. So I was reading a lot of V. C. Andrews’s novels, which are obviously not for kids, but like I read them and my mother did not stop me. She didn’t seem to understand—she didn’t seem to know what those books are about, or else she would have definitely stopped me. But I read all of V. C. Andrews’s books, all those little series that would have been out when I was a kid, and then like I also read a lot of spooky books or John Bellairs… Belly-aires? Bellairs? [Bellairs] Who was just this incredible— He wrote a book they made into a movie recently, The House With a Clock in its Wall, it was his really famous novel. He’s been dead for many years, but he wrote like a bunch of extremely creepy, really genuinely very unsettling novels for young people that were horror novels explicitly. So I feel like I was reading a lot of— But the thing about reading a lot of a lot of especially… Well, I guess I can’t speak to now because I haven’t been reading literature for young people like now, but like when I was a kid, there were a lot of genuinely terrifying books that were like— And I feel in the eighties and the nineties we were just a little less stressed out about what people were reading or at least weren’t paying attention. So I was reading very scary books that were very formative for me, or very eerie or unsettling books. There was a novel I really loved that I’m obsessed with that’s called, um, Behind the Attic Wall [by Sylvia Cassedy], which I actually reread over COVID, and I was like, “This novel slaps. This novel is perfect, and it’s actually exactly as I good as I remember it.” Saying this now, as a professional writer into my thirties, I was like, “Oh, this book is amazing.” And that one’s about an orphan who goes and stays with her— Her parents have died. She’s at a girl’s school for— And then she’s so bad she gets kicked out of the girl’s school, and then she goes to live with a distant—these two distant aunts who are like sisters and then their eccentric bother in this like big old house. And she begins to hear voices speaking to her in the house. And it’s like not… It’s sort of a horror novel, like it involves dolls, but it’s actually really gorgeous and sad and like really distinct, really beautifully written. And very much about grief and like alienation. It’s such a good novel. That was really informative for me. That was written… I can’t remember the author’s name, but Behind the Attic Wall was that book. So, yeah, a lot of anything that had ghosts or monsters or a lot of fantasy, a lot of sci-fi. A lot of Ray Bradbury, who people think of as sci-fi, but he was writing a lot of sci-fi horror. So, I feel like I was just reading a lot of— If it had a dark, creepy cover, I was like, “Alright. We’ll see.” I read a lot of mysteries. I read a lot of Nancy Drew, like there was a novel series—not like the originals, like I remember those, too, but I read a lot of the Nancy Drew spin-off series.

ZL: We’re set in the Lehigh Valley, and we’re near the Pocanos. And because of that, I got to thinking about “The Resident” in Her Body and Other Parties. And I was wondering, like, how did the Lehigh Valley and the Pocanos inspire it? ‘Cuz I kinda felt like some references to me. And I’m not from here. Neither of us are from here, but like as an outsider reading this while I’m at Cedar Crest, I was like, “This kinda reminds me of like when I was driving through the Pocanos.”

CMM: Yes. So I’m from here. I’m from here. I’m from Allentown. I grew up extremely close to the school. Like, I worked that Wegmans that’s over here. The first job I ever had was at Wegmans. When I was sixteen, I worked as a cashier. I was a very bad cashier. But I worked that job at Wegmans and I went to Trexler Park. I grew up just really— We are steps from where I grew up. So, and it’s funny because I think for many years, I never thought of myself as— Some writers are very place-based writers. Some writers, I think, either the place they’re from or the place that they live now or places that are important to them, like they write in these spaces. And I’ve never felt like I’ve been that kind of writer. But definitely the Lehigh Valley pops up in all kinds of interesting ways. So, like, certainly the Pocanos show up in “The Resident” because I was a Girl Scout as a child, and I went to Girl Scout camp in the Pocanos. And so, when I was drawing on this, I sort of knew this was a plot like I wanted to have in the story. I was like, “Oh, I could just set it in the Pocanos. Like a place where I— This place I used to go as a kid, and I definitely have— What else… Like I used to work at the Lehigh Valley Mall in various capacities. So there’s this story of mine set in a mall, which is partially based on a mall on a city where I was in grad school but partially based on working at the mall—the Lehigh Valley Mall. Um, what other Allentown little things there are… Not a ton, because truly I don’t— And I think in some ways it’s like the East Coast is the place that’s like very familiar to me. It’s very in my blood. Like, when I’ve lived in other parts of the country, I mean, I’ve lived kinda all over. But at some point I lived on the West Coast. I lived in California, and I was like, “I don’t like this.” Like something was wrong with the nature. Like, I was like, “This is not where I actually think I belong.” Like, I feel like I ultimately belong in some place like Pennsylvania or something like akin to it. I was born in this general area, so it’s what makes the most sense to my, like, body. Um, but yeah. It definitely pops up occasionally. I mean, you know I have a horror— I have a graphic novel In the Low, Low Woods, which is set in, like, central PA, but like a fictional version of Centralia in Pennsylvania. So, like, I’m definitely, like, sort of interested in Pennsylvania. If anywhere, I’m interested in Pennsylvania because it’s like, well, I grew up there. I had like, you know, all kinds of weird, liminal adolescent/childhood experiences in Pennsylvania, so of course, what else would I really be— If I’m going to write about anywhere, it would be here.

ZL: Yeah, I definitely agree with you about it—it’s definitely a whole different beast here in terms of the climate. I’m from San Diego, so it’s—

CMM: Oh, yeah. Oh God. San Diego—I spent a summer in San Diego once, and it is— What a specific place, San Diego is. But the weather is extremely, aggresively pleasant. The weather is, like, very nice. But also, I was like, I would go crazy if I lived in this weather 365 days a year. I would go totally nuts.

MG: It’s kind of also the opposite for me. I’m from Long Island, New York. So, I’m like used to the flat land, the beaches everywhere, and like everything close together. So, it’s such— There’s just such a unique presence about Pennsylvania.

CMM: Totally.

MG: It’s so beautiful.

CMM: She’s got a vibe. I will say, when I was living here, my dad tried to talk me into going— He probably tried to talk me into going to Cedar Crest. He was like, “You need to go here. You need to be nearby.” And I was like, “Get me out of here. I don’t want to be here for one more second.” And so— But then at some point I came back, and I was like, “Oh, I love it here.” Like, not the Lehigh Valley specifically, but Pennsylvania. I was like, “Oh, Pennsylvania’s great.”

MG: So, speaking of Her Body and Other Parties, um, one of my favorite short stories in there, that I’m sure many people have asked you about, is “Especially Heinous.” You know, right away, I opened the table of contents, and I’m like, “Oh my God, ‘Especially Heinous.’ It’s like Law & Order: SVU. So, I was curious, like, how did— Because you, you referenced like pretty much the whole show, the different seasons and episodes. How did that process kind of go, of like taking this TV show—like a different medium—and transforming it into kind of your own story? Especially from television to book, like how was the process?

CMM: So, it’s funny you say that, because that story is the most devisive [sic] story I’ve ever written in my life. And like— The number of times someone has said to me, “I really like your first book, but I do not like that Law & Order story.” Or people will say it in a little review. And I’m like, it’s so funny to me. And actually, for years before the book was published, I kept submitting it to this one prize where you can submit like a manuscript in progress. And every— For two years in a row, I was a runner-up. This prize allowed you to see the judges’ notes anonymously, just to see what the judges had to say. And every year, someone complained about that story. So the third year I submitted it, I submitted the same book, and I just took the Law & Order story out. And I got the grant. I got the money. So then I just put it back in. I think it’s a great story, but it’s definitely a story that creates a lot of big feelings in people. Anyway, but yeah, essentially, I don’t know. It’s kind of a long story. Obviously, I wrote that story in 2011, which is so long ago—I don’t want to think about it. I was in grad school, and so at that point, we were like— It was nearing when— The story has twelve “seasons,” so I feel like it was synched up more or less where we were at at that moment in time. And I wanted to ended it when Ben and Stabler left. That was going to be a neat little— I could have kept writing. But, yeah. Essentially— Okay. When I was— Before I went to grad school, I was really sick. I had swine flu—that was the last pandemic, pre-COVID, in 2009. I got really sick with it. I had a fever for days and days and almost— Well, I think I essentially lost consciousness. I don’t remember whole chunks of it. But while that was happening, it was when Netflix introduced this feature where, instead of you having to click to the next episode, it would just play the next episode. So, when I started feeling sick, I put it on. I was like, “Oh, Law & Order: SVU. I should watch it.” Because I had never seen it in order. I had only seen it on television, kind of randomly. And so I started watching it. I don’t remember days of my life. And then, when I came to, it was still playing. So, I’m pretty sure the emotional route of the story, the fever dream of the story, came from literally watching it when I was really— Or, really not watching it, but it being this ambient thing around me when I was almost dying. And so, then yeah, a couple years later, I was in grad school, and I remember— I think what was happening is that I was trying to describe an episode of the show to somebody, and I was looking up an episode, trying to figure out what episode it was. And I was reading through, you know the IMDB or whatever—the description of the—the capsule descriptions of the episodes. And I was like, “Hm, what a weird genre of writing. Who writes these? How do you determine how one—.” And initially what I did was that I took the existing text— The first eight “episodes” of that show are the story— The descriptions mirror the actual plots of the stories. Like they come from the actual IMDB descriptions. And I was— What I was doing was manipulating them a little bit. I was like, “Okay, so I’m going to use the existing text, and then I’m going to fuck with the ending and see what happens.” But after I did about eight or ten of them, I was like, “Oh, I feel kind of restricted by this.” Like it was too much. So, I was like, “What if I just used the titles as a jumping off point and then I’m just going to write into it?” So, I just… did that. And it was this moment in my writing career—not my career, since I didn’t have a career at that point—in my writing process, that as I was doing it, I could feel that I intuitively understood the structure of it, so I couldn’t have really articulated it out loud. So, I wrote a draft of it. I wrote like half a draft and submitted it to a workshop I was in. And my teacher, who is this really wonderful writer, Kevin Brockmeier, who I love, who if you haven’t read him then you must. He’s wonderful, and he’s a brilliant teacher and a wonderful person. And he loved it. And he was like, “This is wild.” And he was, like, giving me all these suggestions about how to think about the structure of the story that were really helpful. Then, I went back and I finished the second half of it, the last six seasons. And— And then the rest is history. I had this weird thing, and I’m like, “I’m really proud of this wacky thing that I wrote.” And, yeah, it just gave me space to be playful and fun. It gave me this space to explore this text that I’ve always found really interesting. And it always gave me space to, like, you know, kind of meditate on this question of, like. And that was the beginning—obviously, you know, you were talking about being a kid in 2014, so I’m feeling old—but this was this moment when streaming was becoming more available. It was not like that for a while. When I first used Netflix, it was DVDs in the mail. And then, at some point they had all this content online, that’s how I watched it. But the idea that you can binge something. You can swallow it a snake. You could just, like, endless seasons of this show. And what does it mean that we have this show that’s all about sexual violence and is all about violence against children, violence against women, violence against queer people and trans people. What does it mean to have those texts and to be inhaling those texts like there’s no tomorrow? What is one’s ethical obligation to that text or from it? How do you untangle yourself from that text? Like this is a question that was very interesting to me, so it was a space for me to play and a space for me to explore not just form and genre but also this question of what does it mean to be engaging with the text, whatever that text may be. And so… Yeah. I don’t know. The story kind of almost wrote itself, which is crazy to say, ‘cuz at that point it was the longest thing I had ever written by a significant margin. Like I think I had only ever written twenty page stories and that story was like seventy or eighty pages. It was because of the virtue of the conceit, right? But it was really important—I didn’t want to cut out anything. I wanted it to be as long as it could be. I wanted it to be a, you know, eighty page novella, as opposed to trimming the episodes, because it just feels that it needs— What season are they on now?

ZL: Twenty-three seasons.

MG: Twenty-three… Oh wow.

CMM: That is bananas. Okay, so yeah it started in 2001. So, like, that— The sheer behemoth size of that show and the way that the show has had such an outsized impact on culture, on how we talk about sexual violence—it’s so interesting to me. So yeah, it just ended up being this really fun project that, in a way, was almost like me getting to process what it means to write into texts that inform you. Um, which is now something that I do all the time, but at the time it was a little newer to me, conceptually. But it was great, and I’m really proud of that story. I think— Honestly, when people say they like it, I’m like, “You got good taste.”

MG: I love it. I love it.

CMM: I feel like a very specific person likes it or doesn’t like it. When people don’t like it, I’m like, “That’s fine. You don’t have to like anything.” But also…

MG: I just kept turning the page and was like, “Oh my God, there’s more!” It was so great.

CMM: No… I’m really proud of that story. I think it’s one of my best stories ever. I remain exceptionally proud of that story, and… The fact that I wrote it when I was really just beginnning my journey of writing. Like—not writing in general, but in a more professional capacity. It was just amazingly weird.

MG: Yeah, and I know when you say there’s a lot of controversy, I can understand why some people might not like it. Do you think it’s because it is based off of Law & Order and people are kinda like, “Oh, this is just fanfiction.” Are they ever like, “This is not your story”?

CMM: Actually, when people give a reason, people usually say it’s too long, they don’t understand it. I have— People have said to me— People have expressed that— People don’t realize it’s fiction, like they think that I’m just describing the show. And it’s like, “No, no. No, honey. I’m not doing that. I’m not just describing the show.” Like the show doesn’t have demons and ghosts. Like, I wish it did, but it doesn’t. Um, but yeah, anyway. It’s funny because it’s essentially kind of fanfiction, I don’t think that’s even the chief complaint. I think people just generally don’t know what to do with it. I think that some readers like a challenge and some readers don’t like a challenge. And I think that when you engage with that story, it demands a lot of you and you have to really rise to the occasion of the story, and sometimes people just don’t want to do that. Which is fine! Again, totally fine. But it’s like, I think that the story does like reward a certain kind of close reading that people are capable of if they want to be. Um, so.

MG: Yeah, I know Zahra and I had very different experiences reading it, ‘cuz I of course knew SVU and Zahra didn’t.

ZL: I’ve never read it.

CMM: I’d like to think you don’t have to have seen the show to have to enjoy the story, but…

ZL: I definitely appreciate it. It was just like, I kinda felt like, hm, if I had watched even an episode I’d probably appreciate it more, ‘cuz I have just never seen any of it. Um, so I felt like, “Oh, I really like it.” I just feel like if I watched anything, I’d like it more.

MG: I think especially having these close ties to these characters, espcially like Stabler and Benson, like watching the show and being with them for years, and reading them in this scenario that you wrote them in, I think it’s a very different emotional impact than, like, what someone who maybe doesn’t know the show.

CMM: Initially, early drafts had other characters from the show in it, so all the— like— the only characters from the show that are named in the story are Benson and Stabler. All the other characters are invented. Um, there is a DA who’s not named who is sort of like an amalgamation of like— she’s sort of one DA, she’s kind of another, like it’s sort of of like a little bit. But initially I actually did have like Munch, and I did have like other characters appear and actually one of Kevin’s edits or suggestions in my workshop was he was like, I feel like it gets a little muddled if you— it requires too much knowledge of the reader, like if you just stick with Benson and Stabler, it’s like they become these distinct characters that are known even to a reader who has not seen the show at all, like they become very clear in the writing if the show, so.

ZL: I definitely could see that. Like, I was able to get to know how you interpreted these characters even though I’ve never heard of them, and I googled them.

(CMM and MG laugh.)

CMM: I will say, I rewatched the first season— I watched early SVU over many, many times. The early seasons of SVU are actually, amazing. Like they’re actually really good. They are deeply problematic. Like I cannot emphasize how out of step politically it feels. Like they use a lot of words that I would not even say like out loud, like just stuff that you’d be like woah. But, they’re really good. Like the writing is really good, and they’re really sharp, and very intense, and very— you could see— and like I— I mean, that show has gone on for way too long, that show is not— like I haven’t watched it in many, many seasons, because it’s just been kind of bad, but like it is honestly like some really sharp kind of like political, kind of legal drama writing in the beginning. Um, so it like makes sense that I responded to— especially like rewatching those early seasons, because I’m like oh this show actually was good for a second, and did a lot to— kind of interesting ideas that it was trying to chew on, and I think it’s partially what I was responding to was just like taking that and kind of running with it.

MG: Yeah. So I guess, um, moving on the In The Dream House, so in the story you kind of combine your own experiences with that of other stories and cases of other victims of queer domestic abuse. How was research process like?

CMM: Um, it was hard for a few reasons, I think part of it was that I am not an academic, like I did not get— I got my MFA in writing, I did not get like a Ph.D or anything. So doing that kind of like concerted research and— and like kind of having to make it into prose, is actually like quite hard and I felt like I was learning how to do it as I was doing it. So— and also the content, as you obviously can see is like very intense, so I feel like I was doing a lot of just like reading a lot of really intense stuff all at once and doing a lot of tracking text place to place, and like I had a— like I actually had a— I was working at Penn at the time, and I had an assistant graduate— or an undergrad assistant who was like looking through the program that they had where like and she— she did much of the work. She like went into this archive, did a bunch of research and brought back all this material from like this queer archive that she went to. So I was just like digging through like all this paper and all this material, and just really trying to like… Yeah, I don’t know, like make sense of it, and like the thing that was so interesting is like— and because, I think this is the thing that academic researchers experience all the time, but at like some point I had read enough that I felt like I understood sort of the historical context of what I was looking at. Like I was like I understand— and it’s like it makes— it’s like how people are not— like no one is a specialist in like, the Civil War, there a specialist in like one side of a war, from like one year to one year— it’s like this very niche— so much information, right? So it’s like you can’t understand the whole thing, you can understand like— you’re going to have areas of focus. So I feel like for me, at some point I was able to really clearly understand and see like okay, so the lesbian movement in the United States between the years like 1980 and like 2010. I like— like I understand how that conversation about domestic violence went and I can sort of see the— I can sort of trace the path of this conversation. And it was like— it was— it felt like it all clicked into place, like i understood something, which is essentially what I was trying to do, was like pursue this question and like, was trying to find like what is— like where do I exist in this context. Which I think is like, you know, for me, was one of the biggest questions I had… In this conversation, you know, when you look for things— look for like narrative reference and you can’t find it, what do you do with that? Like how do you, how do you manage that question? Um, and, for me it was sort of like right, where do I fit in this process and like at the end, like I don’t know if I can necessarily answer that question but like moving towards that answer, and like sort of understood, like the forces that existed before my birth that like, kind of ended up with me in this like really specific place, and… Yeah, so it was like, tough, it was intense, but it was interesting, you know it was interesting to learn how to do that kind of research, and learning also how to turn it into prose, which is also really hard, like— and like readable prose like— I mean, because you can write a paper and you can…eh, whatever, but like I was— like, it has to be like good, like it has to be as good as like the personal material that like I’m writing that’s coming to me, enters the sentence very easily, because it’s just like— I know how to do that. But like turning like research, where I’m trying to like trying to contextualize a bunch of stuff, where do I put it? Where do I write it in, like where do I— like how do I switch between— you know, whatever. Where do I put a footnote, you know, where do I— and like, figuring out how to like make those— that feel like smooth, and so the reader can have that experience. So, yeah, it was like a really intense process, but interesting, but a lot. Um, I felt very despairing when I was working on it, like it was really sad, it was— there was just a lot of stuff that I read that I was just sad, and I just felt like very overwhelmed, kind of emotionally by it, and… Didn’t really know what to do with it, and you know also listen to why— like trying to hunt down this one person, eventually I kind of gave up, because I don’t know if she was dead, or if she was— didn’t want to be found, or like wasn’t clear, but like also just thinking about like… I don’t know, people whose lives have been lost, or like whose lives have been completely derailed by this experience, and— it was just— just like yeah, it was like really intense. I don’t know if I could do it again, it was a lot, it was really, yeah.

MG: Did you start the research process like before you started writing the book? Or was it kind of like interspersed? Did it like influence how you wrote the story, or the opposite?

CMM: So I sold like a really skeletal version to my publisher that had no research in it at all, it was essentially just my, sort of network material, and what I said to them was like, okay here’s— I was like I know— I know I’m going to do research— basically I was like here’s my pitch, and because it was not my first book— now my first book I could not have done that, you would— you can’t do that for a first book. But I think— they knew me, they already published a book of mine, or were about to publish a book of mine, they actually had not published it yet, it was like I sold the memoir the spring of 2017, which was right before I published Her Body and Other Parties which was fall of 2017. And so, uh, and so yeah I was basically like here’s the material that I have, and like I’m going to do all this stuff, you know do research on the context, like basically, just explain what I was going to do, and they were like great. And so then, yeah and then I just had to like, do it at some point— and I kind of did it all at once actually, like it’s interspersed throughout the book but the research took place kind of in one chunk. Like I had this person do research for me, this archive, and then I had like all these books and all the material, and then I just went to this residency and I spent like, a month just reading everything, and like putting together those chapters and then eventually, you know intersperse it throughout the book, yeah.

ZL: I’m gonna— did you always intend to publish a memoir?

CMM: Um… No, if you’d ask me before I sold it, do you want to write, sell— or write a memoir? I would’ve been like no, what are you talking about? Because I— like I didn’t really— like I was a fiction writer, right, so my experience was just like in fiction, and I had written about, in fiction, I had written about this sort of part of my life in a couple of different ways… And then it was sort of a lot of things happened all at once— like my publisher kind of asked if I had another book, and I was like well, kind of, I have these like very— these like very… Hastily thrown together pages that are not really like much of anything, it’s just sort of like a— it was like not very much material. Um… Yeah, I don’t know, I just like I— it didn’t feel like it was real until it was real. And then at some point I sold it I was like oh I guess I got to write it now.

(MG laughs.)

CMM: But it was a surprise to me, because like I said I never— yeah, like, you know, I had this whole kind of complex where I was like oh essays are really hard, nonfiction is really hard— which it is really hard, but also like, there was something about it that was so… It was like I had to do it, it was like I had to make it happen, so… I don’t know, but I’m never going to do it again. No more for me.

ZL: Um, what was it like ex— like, publishing this kind of experimental queer literature um, with your traditional publisher?

CMM: Graywolf is a very interesting publisher. Graywolf, who published both of these books. They’re an independent publisher, they have published a lot of really interesting, weird, genre-bendy stuff, so that’s kind of their thing, so that— they had no— they were great. They were— it was a really positive— I think that if I had tried to sell the memoir first, I mean I did try to sell the collection to a bunch of publishers and Graywolf was the only one who put— offered for the book. Which is a pretty normal experience, like in publishing you know like you, um, you try to sell it and a lot of people are like nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope— and you’re like— and if you’re like me and you have a spreadsheet and you’re just like oh no, another no in my spreadsheet, and it’s very disheartening and stressful. And then, yeah, and then Graywolf made an offer, because Graywolf is just— the thing about them is that publish a lot of— they publish a lot of work in translation, they publish a lot of work that’s like— and a lot of writers who go one to become very famous because Graywolf kind of believes in these really interesting projects, so a lot of bigger publishers won’t touch. And that’s— that’s common in publishing, like you have like really interesting work happening at like the independent publisher level, and so, so yeah and then, uh, you know but also the memoir would’ve also been a hard sell I think to any other publisher, and I don’t think I would have looked at another publisher because I knew that Graywolf would like… Really have a good grasp on what would be required to publish a book like that, and they did, and they were wonderful and were they like— on every level, editorial publicity, it was really great. And they were really helpful. Um, yeah, it ended up being this like really wonderful, process.

ZL: Yes, I actually heard about it first from my mom, who’s going to be coming tonight, but my mom was the one who introduced me to your work, and, uh, she’s definitely like not the most like experimental reader so like—

CMM: Oh that’s so interesting. Oh I love that. Oh, moms! I will say I feel like a very common experience of mine, it’s like when I’m doing signings and events, then number one person I meet is like young, queer, women. Like that’s— or like queer, queer folks, queer people who are often women. That is like the number one category I meet. The second category are like moms, or like mothers who are like often getting books for their daughters. Like it’s like—

(MG and ZL laugh.)

ZL: Exactly.

CMM: Like literally I cannot count the number of times I have signed books where they’re like oh make it out to my daughter, please, my daughter reads this— and I love it, amazing, like I love it, it makes me so happy.

ZL: That’s exactly what she did. I just like, I got a notification in the mail room one day and I picked it up and was like what is this? And she’s like, this is a book I’d think you’d like, it’s about, like, like, queer female domestic violence and I was like… Cool, I’ll read it—

(CMM and MG laugh.)

CMM: No, but like come on how are you supposed to respond like thanks mom—

(CMM laughs.)

ZL: No, but it’s not the weirdest—

MG: Interesting association, mom.

(MG and ZL laugh.)

ZL: Um, do you have any advice for students who are pursuing publication?

CMM: I mean I think, there are lots of different paths, writing a book, I think that there’s a few things. I think that right now we live in this moment where it is easier than ever to publish a book, and, I don’t know if your audio can pick up the quotes that I’m leaving, there’s a lot of you know— and I don’t— and I’m not— I’m not going to get into like, A.I., and like self-publishing, and they have their purposes— well A.I. less so, I already know it has no purpose. You know, self-publishing has a purpose, um… But I think that people can get really intimidated by like what is required because, like, you know, I wanted to be a writer since I was a child. And I have gone on every single path you could possibly imagine and I like didn’t even major in writing in college, and I tried— and I was always coming back to writing, and was always— but you know, and it was a lot of just like, you know, part of it was just like some amount of luck, and part of it was just like I worked my ass off, and part of it was like— you know whatever, so it was a lot of stuff kind of happening… But I think that people like get very, they’re like, oh, I can just like publish— I can publish something, by just like, putting it online, or like putting it in a thing— and it’s not like there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s like once you’ve done that, you’re like, almost like cheating yourself of all that work, because like after that— I mean, it’s possible that you could like sell it to major publisher, but that’s like very— people talk about those cases but that’s like very rare. That happens occasionally with huge titles, but like it’s just not that common and so, I feel like I’m always like, it’s okay for things to take time. And like, I was writing books when I was a child. Like completely making little books and like stapling them together. I used to mail them to publishers. I used to send things to publishers—

MG and ZL: Aww.

CMM: Like all The Baby-sitters Club books which I read when I was little, I would like— with the address of Scholastic inside, I would write— I don’t know if they do this anymore, you were taught to write letters, in like third grade, so I was like you could write a letter to anybody. I was like drunk with power, I was like oh my God. SO I would send mail to like everybody. If I had an address, I mailed somebody, so I would like write to authors, to publishers, and I would like send chapters of my books to— you know, quotation marks— to like, to like, publishers’ addresses that I would find. You know so I was like so into it— but like, I had a LiveJournal that I kept for years, and I was just always writing and writing and writing and writing, and I just feel like— and some people get like, I wanna publish right now, and it’s like— but it’s okay to like let the thing that you’re making be… Better. And to like let your writing…You know, and like even the book that was my thesis, so like the book that was my MFA thesis was like— and it’s called Her Body and Other Parties, but it actually only has three stories from what would become the final book. And like even that— like I would— I literally remember that I published my thesis, I got my MFA, and I remember going okay, now what do I do, and I looked through the book and I was like, I only like three of these stories, it was like, “Especially Heinous,” “Difficult at Parties,” and “Real Women Have Bodies.” And I was like, I don’t like any others, the others were not good. And they don’t really fit with the other stories. I just got rid of them. I just retired them. I put them in a file. And it’s like it’s okay, I’ll write more stuff, I don’t need to publish those stories, because they’re not good, and like, whatever, it’s fine. And like then I gradually— and then I’d like keep writing, add a new story. When I wrote it and felt like it fit, and I just kept doing that until I had a book. Right, and I— it’s slow, and it’s annoying, and I was working— I literally moved to Philadelphia and was working at Lush at the King of Prussia mall.

(MG and ZL laugh.)

CMM: I hated it so much, I smelt like every product in a Lush store, all at once, it was horrible. And I was making like minimum wage, and I was so pissed, and so annoyed, and I was like I just want to publish, I just want to publish— I was like, you just have to keep— and you— there’s just, you have to keep a kind of persistence and a kind of focus, and unfortunately in this moment it’s easy to like get derailed by like, ways that you feel like you can achieve the thing you want, but you’re not actually achieving it, you’re actually kind of cheating yourself of that time, and just got to like kind of keep going. And again, there’s like a million of independent presses, micro presses, you know poets have their own sort of system of publication that’s like different, and like you could publish in magazines, but like it’s just like… I don’t know, like remind yourself that you could always get better and you have to focus on what you’re doing and you have to just read a ton, you know and like let yourself fall into like the play of it, and the joy of it, and the intensity of it. And it can be intense, but it should be— you should enjoy it on some level, you know, you should just like— but like yeah, like letting yourself, letting that time… Like, I don’t know, even when I publish, like I published that book it was my very— which was 2017, which I would have been… 31. 31, is that right? Yes, 31 when that book came out. And, even then I felt like I was so old. 31 is like not old. 31 is like, so young. Right? And like, one of my favorite novels in the world, Picnic at Hanging Rock, the first and only novel of a 70-year-old woman, um, and she wrote it in like the ’60s, incredible, perfect novel. Super creepy, very good. And there’s a really incredible movie that was made in the ’70s, but the novel is amazing, very queer, delightful, so good. Very eerie. But that was her first novel, she was 70 years old when she published it. She published a perfect, perfect first book. Like, why would you argue with that kind of logic? Do you know what I mean? So yeah, so I feel like it’s just… Let it, let it be what it has to be. And like maybe you take the end of it off, maybe you don’t, maybe you go to Clarion, or— which is like a sci-fi, fantasy writing courses, maybe you don’t, you know, you just kind of got to see what happens and like, let it be. And like find community, it’s also important in whatever you do, whether in an academic setting, or you’re in some kind of other like— find the writing community in the place where you live and, you know, yeah, just find the people who are also going through what you’re going through. Because it can be so hard to be on that journey and not quite where you need to be or you want to be. But like everyone goes through that, you know?

MG: Yeah. So, we have a lot of very passionate and talented writers here at Cedar Crest, and we have a lot of different types of writing classes, and we had a memoir class last semester actually, and this semester we have a creative nonfiction class. So, I know this is something that, like, I struggle with, and I’m sure many other writers do, would— what advice would you have for writers who might be struggling to write about past trauma, especially in that kind of— especially in creative nonfiction?

CMM: Sure, sure, so the first thing I’ll say is the thing I always say when I teach creative nonfiction, which is that you are not your trauma or the worst thing that ever happened to you. And I think, you might be— you guys might be too young to remember this but there was this moment in the early aughts where every single fucking person that you ever met in your life was being paid $100 to write an essay about the worst thing that ever happened to them. And they would put them on the internet, on like xoJane or whatever, and just the worst thing that ever happened to you and like people would rip into it. And it would just be like this ritual of like… Especially, and because it was very common with women especially, so it was like— yeah, we’re just going to like, monetize, and the website would be paying you like— or if you got paid at all, you got paid like 50 bucks, or 100 bucks, which is like nothing, right? And you would just be like, okay great, thanks. And now I’m just going to be like be like mercilessly excoriated on the internet, for like days and days and days, or months, or years. And, now, and now what have I done— and like that’s traumatic in it’s own right. And, like, I think that there’s all kinds of ways to write about your life, and your experiences, and your thoughts inside of you, and like maybe that is talking about, like me, one of the worst things that ever happened to me, or maybe it’s… You’re writing about some other thing that you’re really interested in or that you want to talk about, or something less— yeah, I feel like people who have really like… There’s like a high value placed on trauma, and it’s not necessary. It doesn’t make it more authentic, like I feel like trauma has become this currency. And it’s like— it’s not that it’s like not important or interesting, it can be, but also… It is not the only thing. And like, I would rather read an interesting essay that’s written about, I don’t know someone learning how to bake bread, then like, something that’s clearly been like ripped out of them against their will, about a sexual assault, for example. Right— or just like, why? Like why do we do this? And especially we really do target people for who their trauma is very commodifiable, so it’s like women’s trauma, people of color, queer people, trans— like that’s the kind of trauma that we’re focusing on. So it’s just like, I don’t think that’s right. I don’t. And so when I teach those classes I’m like, if you want to write about your trauma please, by all means, we are going to make a space to do that and talk about that, and I also have a lot of advice about that specific part of it, but also you do not have to do that, and like I’m never going to make you be like, write about the worst— like if you want to write about bread baking all semester, I would love it. Amazing. Great. Or like learning a sport, or like whatever the hell you want to write about, like there’s no value placed in like, getting to the darkest place. Like, I will not value that as a teacher. That’s not— that is inherently against what I value, like how do you talk about it, right? So anyway… Yeah. Yup.

(CMM, MG, and ZL laugh.)

MG: Alright, so to wrap up, um, if you can tell us, what are you working on now?

CMM: Ugh. A lot of things I can’t talk about actually.

MG: Aww.

CMM: On the record, but a lot of exciting things. Um… what can I talk about…

(MG and ZL laugh.)

CMM: I’m working on a lot of stuff right now and I’m extremely busy, I can’t talk about any of it.

(CMM, MG, and ZL laugh.)

CMM: Uh, but I knew— I mean, I have a new book that I’m working on and other exciting things, and yeah, very busy.

MG: Yeah, well we’ll be looking forward to that, thank you.

ZL: Yes, thank you so much.

CMM: Yes, thank you so much, of course.