Tell us how “Unclaimed” came about.
It was during the Google Books hearing, when the company had digitized hundreds of thousands of books without any author permissions, and proposed to set up a “book rights registry” to hold any licensing fees obtained for digitized books that didn’t get claimed by their authors. I was writing a nonfiction article about it and started wondering, what the hell would happen if one of these unclaimed books actually started making a ton of money? Anyway, Google was sued by the Author’s Guild, and it looks like their plans to make all these digitized books available online have been foiled. But I think this future is still very plausible. Well, except for the giant squid scorpion, who has the post-structuralist feminist power to destroy binaries with her mind.

You write both fiction and non-fiction; does one feed the other, or are they separate crafts?
Probably my previous answer makes it obvious that they definitely feed into each other. I love science, and both my nonfiction and fiction writing are ways that I try to think through how scientific discoveries will change the world, even in tiny, personal ways.

Talk to us some about i09; it’s such an awesome site, a delicious mashup of fiction and science and well, science fiction! How did it come into being?
I founded the site back in 2008, when Gawker Media invited me to cook up a site about the future. One of the first things I did was hire Charlie Jane Anders, and she and I worked together with our amazing team of writers to make io9 into the suicide soft drink of futuristic topics. I think the key ingredient is probably the bright purple soda.

What’s in your iTunes/Spotify/8-track lately?
The Kills and La Roux and — just for pure guilty pleasure value — Weezer.

What’s your favorite Ray Bradbury book/story?
The Martian Chronicles. It was one of the first science fiction books I ever read, and there are scenes in it that I still think about 25 years later.

Tell us how ” Anuta Fragment’s Private Eyes” came about.
I thought of the name first. I imagined this awesome female wrestler totally crushing people – “fragmenting” them, if you will. Then I pulled in an evil corporation, a few references to a medieval philosopher, lost the wrestling arc, and the rest is history.

If you could take us one place in Ottawa, where would you take us?
The Rideau Falls. They’re totally majestic, and lend themselves to a dreamscape of aquatic ogres living in their shadow, ready to snatch up tour boat leftovers.

What’s the best book you’ve read lately?
Everything by Joe Abercrombie. I find most medieval fantasy to be very cheesy (even when I enjoy it), but Abercrombie defuses the absurdity that mars a lot of epic and heroic fantasy by making a lot of extremely hilarious jokes. I literally read Joe Abercrombie for the LOLs.

What’s in your iTunes/Spotify/8-track lately?
The “Opus Eponymous” and “Infestissumam” albums by the Swedish band Ghost. Imagine if the Pope worshipped Satan and joined a rock band; that’s Ghost!

What’s your favorite Ray Bradbury book/story?
To be honest, I’ve only read “The Martian Chronicles.” And it was really good. But, yes, I fully realize I am making a shameful display of being a speculative fiction writer.

Tell us how “The Story of Anna Walden” came about.
I was toying with a story about a child bargaining with fate for months before I left on an extended trip to China, but the tale just would not “flow.” Then the night before I departed, unable to sleep with excitement, I turned my attention back to the story. Yes, the story was about Anna, but what if she had a psychologist? Then, what if the story was told by a third narrator? What if the narrator was bombastic and overly dramatic? I kept playing with it until dawn and then abandoned it for ten months until I returned to America. When I got back, I was really startled by what I’d written!

You are an artist and a writer; does one pursuit feed the other?
I would love to say there’s synergy between my writing and art, however it’s exactly the opposite–they’re like two bickering boyfriends vying for my attention in obnoxious ways. Sometimes I just have to ignore them both.

What’s the best book you’ve read lately?
I read a lot of non-fiction these days and lately my attention has turned to the crazy workings of the brain. If you ever are in need of a good scary story when a copy of Shimmer isn’t handy, check the psychology aisle.  I’ve loved all of V.S. Ramachandran’s books, but his latest, The Tell-Tale Brain is a masterpiece.

What’s in your iTunes/Spotify/8-track lately?
I’ve put together a Spotify playlist about working hard, making money, and achieving goals. There are some joke songs thrown in, but man, what a great way to self-motivate. “Work” by Iggy Azalea, “F–k Sleep” by Kid Ink, and “T.H.E. (The Hardest Ever)” by Will.i.am—complete with Mick Jagger cameo–are my favorites.

What’s your favorite Ray Bradbury book/story?
As a child, it was rare for our family to go into a real bookstore (for fear of going broke). So when I was 13, it was a real treat to go to Borders and pick out a brand-new book that I didn’t have to return within two weeks. I think I must have taken more than a half-hour to select one, going through every aisle of the fiction section. I chose “I Sing The Body Electric & Other Stories” by Ray Bradbury, largely for the alluring golden sarcophagus on the cover.  Eventually that book fell apart from hard use.  I loved every story, but the titular work left the most enduring impression.

Tell us how “Psychopomp” came about.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had it in my head to write a story about a guy whose job it is to ferry people between life and the afterlife. This isn’t quite that story, but it’s close.

I’m not entirely sure why this stuff interests me so much, except that I grew up sort of half-immersed in faith, and the notion of an afterlife plays to a lot of my obsessions: the troubling contradictions of a benign god who allows hell to exist, the magical things that happen at the borders between places, the enduring danger of absolutes.

But I didn’t really start “Psychopomp” with an agenda in mind. I’ve tried that before, writing to plan, and it always leads to sickly stories that eventually just sort of keel over. This one started with the first image, a demon in an alleyway holding a soul under a flickering fluorescent light, and went from there.

Apple Maps vs. Google Maps? Dungeons vs. Dragons?
Google Maps, because I enjoy arriving at my destination. Apple Maps does get you very prettily lost, though.

Dungeons and Dragons, of course. You can take the dragon out of the dungeon, but you can’t etc.

What’s the best book you’ve read lately?
Lately it’s The Circle, by Dave Eggers. I distrust how much I love this book, because it plays perfectly to all my paranoid fantasies about ubiquitous internet companies inching their way into every aspect of our lives, and then quietly taking over the world. But I think it really is just a fantastic novel.

The best I’ve read in the last couple of years is Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel. My profound ignorance of history really paid dividends with this one, because almost everything that happens in it was a complete surprise to me. Mantel is a ridiculously talented writer, and her Thomas Cromwell is the most fully-realized character I’ve met in a while.

Another book I absolutely adore is Jeff VanderMeer’s Shriek: An Afterword. It’s a kind of a dual narrative, two people telling the same story at the same time, each piggybacking on and extending the other’s view of their shared history. It’s so absorbing and scary and well-written that you barely notice what an amazing technical feat it is.

But my favorite of all is probably Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. I’ve never read anything that’s drawn so much beauty out of so much tragedy. The novel’s final image still haunts me.

What is currently in your cd player/iTunes/Spotify/8 Track?
Frightened Rabbit, Jonathan Coulton, and Vampire Weekend are my mainstays lately. The Pixies, They Might Be Giants and Springsteen always have a spot on my playlist.

I’m also listening to a lot of terrible 80s music. There was good music floating around in the 80s, but I grew up listening to the crappy stuff, so that’s what I listen to still, helplessly.

What’s your favorite Ray Bradbury book/story?
“The Veldt.” It really holds up. The notion of our technology eating us is even more relevant now than it was in the 50s.

Tell us how “The Birth of the Atomic Age” came about.
I was in a folklore narratives class and we were discussing urban legends and folktales. I was living in Salt Lake City, where the conversations about Downwinders, those affected by fallout from nuclear testing in Nevada, is pretty prevalent. I realized that, though I was from Las Vegas, Nevada, I knew very little about the Test Site and the history of testing. I was also intrigued by the way comic books, particularly superhero stories, and B-movies had taken up the questions of radiation exposure. I began researching more about nuclear testing and reading eyewitness accounts. There were stories of people, particularly in Southern Utah, who had gone out to watch the tests.

My maternal grandfather had a winter wheat farm in Alton, Utah. He’d drive down every summer from Reno, Nevada to harvest the wheat. I decided to ask him if he’d ever seen any of the tests. When he told me he had, I pressed him for a little more information and he described the watching of the tests in such a nonchalant way, almost as if describing going on a picnic with your family. The story was born in many ways from that moment.

Tell us something about Minnesota. If we came to visit, where might you take us?
That is a hard question to answer in some ways since Minnesota is still so new to me. You would fly into Minneapolis, so I would definitely take you to the Mill Ruins Park on the Mississippi. Parts of former mills on the Mississippi have been excavated and revealed and another former mill has been turned into a museum discussing the history of milling in Minnesota. Then we’d go to a deli, Rye, for delicious poutine (fries with cheese curds and gravy – trust me, it is delicious!). We would then drive about an hour and half northwest to St. Cloud, where I currently live, and then over to Collegeville to explore the arboretum and lakes on the campus where I teach. There are lakes everywhere in Minnesota (really!) and to be surrounded by so much water, especially living in the high desert my whole life, is pretty remarkable.

What’s the best book you’ve read lately?
Kathryn Davis’s Duplex, a novel out from Graywolf Press. Davis deftly balances formal experimentation and story in an intriguing way. The book is also full of magic and other strangenesses, but constructed so that these things, while remarked upon in the book, are also accepted by the reader as very much part of the world.

What is currently in your cd player/iTunes/Spotify/8 Track?
I’ve been listening to a lot of Nick Drake lately, as well as The Organ.

What’s your favorite Ray Bradbury book/story?
(I don’t feel I can answer this question, as I haven’t read enough Ray Bradbury to really give a favorite.)

Tell us how “In the Broken City” came about.
“In the Broken City” is set in a world I made a few years ago now. ‘Cause I never name anything, someone online, I’m not sure who now, called the Red Sun world, and it sorta stuck. I think it’s the fifth, maybe sixth of them – a handful of them are being reprinted in my collection, Dead Americans, in March.

The basic idea of the Red Sun world is that everyone in it is living in a end of world time in a vague, steampunk, weird science scenario. There’s environmental decline, social and moral decline, and a remapping of professions. In an odd way, the doctors of the Broken City are still faithful to the original idea of their profession, but of course, they work in a giant underground hospital that may or may not also be functioning as an ark that will provide them with survival when everything above goes real bad.

I’d had the idea of the doctors for a while, but hadn’t really had a story to fit into it until I was reading about xenomelia, or body integrity identity disorder, which is an mental illness wherein a person feels that a limb on their body is not their own, and go to extraordinary lengths to remove it. One of the controversial ways of dealing with it is to organise an amputation through the person’s limb, and there are recorded cases of men and women who are healthy after that. Naturally, I thought I should use that as a starting point for my story – and so “In the Broken City” begins with a man who, after his leg has been removed, is in the happiest place he’s ever been.

Honestly, now, how could you not write a story about that?

You write both short stories and novel-length works; do you prefer one over the other? Does one come easier?
Truthfully, these days, novels seem to be easier to write.

I don’t honestly have a preference: both require different attention to different details, and both require different strengths, but whereas a decade ago I could write a short story in a week, lately it takes around a month, and has become harder. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day I just stop writing them, really.

It puzzles me a bit, y’know. I remember coming across the short fiction of Peter Carey years ago, and thinking it was superb, at its best equal to the best of his novels, but by then, he’d stopped writing them. In a Paris Review interview, he said that he had become addicted to the dangers and pleasures of the novel, but he said that in the early 2000s. Maybe twenty five years ago before that he wrote a letter in which he said, “And who the fuck wants to read short stories anyway? Who does? Who reads them- two thousand academics and people who work in publishing houses? What’s the point?” Both probably exist as reasons in the great strand of life – it is hard to imagine that a short story Carey wrote now would struggle for an audience, but it is easy to see a younger author struggling to find an audience and a life looking to the form he was writing and blaming it for its failure to be commercially viable.

I think for a lot of authors that experience rings true, but I found it a bit unsatisfactory to explain myself. There are different dangers and different pleasures for both, and I’ve had no one read both a short piece and a novel of mine, because I’m lucky like that, I guess. Instead, what I have started to think that the skillset for writing a novel is a bit like a costume, much like the skillset for writing a short story is another, somewhat similar costume. But because it takes me roughly a year to write a novel, I wear that costume a lot longer, and I’m a lot more comfortable in it, and when it comes to a short piece, I suddenly find myself confused on how to strip down and change.

Tell us something about Sydney. If we came to visit, where might you take us?
There’s this cool vegetarian place in Sydney called Mother Chu’s. Mother Chu – if she is indeed Mother Chu – is this tiny little old asian lady who sits in the back corner of it, wrapped in blankets, and who smiles and waves as you come in and go, and they make some sweet food there. I’m not vegetarian or anything, but good food is good food, and its pretty cheap, and still has that worn out feel I like in asian places, so I’d take you there, before I abandoned you in the main hub of Sydney with its one way streets, confusing back alleys, and abandoned monorail.

It’s a cool place, though. Lot of variety, lot of different people, cultures, etc. It’s a real shame that the new government wants to get behind that argument that the Multiculturalism Experiment has failed. I mean, seriously? It was an experiment? The world is multicultural, and you live in the world. But no, they want to push that it’s some kind of social failure, that the grand old man of Western culture is struggling to draw breath, that people aren’t learning good, christian values – so you ought to probably come visit before that sort of ideology sinks its claws in over here, and see a large, multicultural city and country with nice, clean empty skies and sun that feels different to a lot of visitors.

Tell us about the best book you’ve read lately.
The best book I read last year was Coetzee’s DISGRACE. I thought that was a superbly done book, excellently structured. I recommend it entirely. I’m currently reading Forster’s A PASSAGE TO INDIA, which has some amazing writing in it, really. I also totally loved the latest issue of SHAOLIN COWBOY. Few people give you four issues of one man, two chainsaws, and a pole against an endless horde of zombies, but if the few people who do are going to number Geof Darrow, then fuck it, man, just hook the tube to my arm and leave me be in my high.

What’s your favorite Ray Bradbury book/story?
I don’t really like Bradbury at all, I’m afraid. There’s something in the writing – just the way he does it, that turns me off. It’s just taste, for the largest part, but I also think Bradbury has to get you before you’re too cynical and disillusioned, when you’re young, and for me, it just didn’t happen. But such is life.

Tell us how the story came to be.
The story began as a flash piece for a competition in which you have only a weekend to write 750 words or less.  I went back to look for the prompts to figure out which one I used but I have absolutely  no idea.  None of them seem to fit which I guess indicates I tend to be belligerent regarding rules in general (an excellent trait for a lawyer to have!).

What I do know is I came up with the title first.  I have a particular fetish for long titles and often strive to come up with something which will have a different meaning at the beginning and the end of the piece.  I also have a particular fascination with second person direct address and started writing the story as soon as I had the narrator’s voice in hand.  The rest was fleshed out over time as I borrowed from various hurricane and other childhood experiences.

You write both prose and poetry. Do you see a difference between the two, or do you feel they’re related?
One is more often than not longer than the other? I get frustrated when people call a story a ‘prose poem’ since they usually do so when they feel that the language used within the prose is poetic.  A prose poem on the other hand is a distinct form of poetry in which, to borrow the words of one of my professors, ‘the poet resists the rhythm of the line’.  The best example I can give is ‘A Story About the Body’ by Robert Hass in which the author is sparing and sharp in his word choices.  The effect is a frictionless sentence and you find yourself constantly running into periods.  Yes, there is a rhythm to it but it’s not the same as the rhythm of line breaks. Then again a lot of people disagree on definitions in general, but my feeling is that you need to keep the two separate otherwise there’s no point in calling one one thing and the other another thing.

I like words and poetry and image and rhythm–I would be lying if I said the one discipline did not inform the other but they are very different disciplines.  A poem can travel from the body to the room to the other side of India to the migratory pattern of bees with less effort because a poem does not have the same expectations of form and structure attached.  At the same time, you are allowed fewer reversals.  The poem must have a thesis which builds and builds and each image and leap must support this thesis.  It’s very difficult for characters to change in poetry unless it’s very linear.

Then again, there are many different types of poems: the confessional, the narrative, the language, the imagist… I divide poetry and prose in ways that make sense to me, but these divisions are hardly universal.  In fact one thing I think genre fiction could borrow is the concept of the School.  How interesting could it be to create competing and overlapping manifestos–perhaps even full scale battles could be waged at conventions.  I should probably come up with a name first… Or a particularly long title.

On your blog, you talk about going to Lafayette Cemetery #1 in New Orelans, and you point out that fantastic lime green tomb. When I visited, I never for one minute felt alone; that place feels occupied. What feeling did you come away with? Did the location inspire anything in your writing?
Mostly feeling like I wanted a Plum St snowball because it gets dreadfully hot in New Orleans in July…

On a more serious note, I think the dead are a presence in New Orleans and the South in a way they are not in other cities.  Since I’m originally from there it never seemed strange to me that we use above-ground tombs, but more than that, in my family we frequently talk about the dead as if they’re still here.  The other night at dinner my Aunt told a story of my great-grandmother’s funeral: because she was too cheap to buy new underwear, but she’d shrunk considerably in her old age, my grandmother and aunts had to stuff her bra.  Apparently she’d been a very busty woman since later, sitting in the front row of the funeral parlor, you could see two round peaks just over the lid of the casket.

As the story is being told, others jump in with how appalled my grandmother (who is dead) would be that we’re telling this story at dinner and how my other great-grandmother (also dead, but also not the great-grandmother with the stuffed bra) would find it hilarious.  I’m sure lots of families, particularly writers’ families, have similar tendencies, but since it’s my entire frame of reference, I have no idea how ubiquitous it is.

As for inspiration, I had to give myself a rule a while back that I’m not allowed to write about dead people, dead babies, or kill anyone at the end of the story anymore (what’s strange is I don’t actually write horror or what I consider dark fantasy–it just happens that I have a lot of dead stuff in my work).  The lime green tomb will have to make an appearance somewhere, someday eventually.

What is your favorite Bradbury story/novel?
Something Wicked This Way Comes which is strange because I’m pretty sure I never actually finished reading it–I just always loved the title (it’s so long!).

Do you have a favorite story among your own?
I love all my stories equally!  Which course, like children, is a big lie.  Space Elevator has always been a favorite because of the last line (which I will not share in case people have not read it).  Like titles, last images are often the first thing I come up with.  However finding the correct last line is always more work than I think it should be and I always find it in different ways: writing past the last line, then cutting, or rewriting the ending completely and it comes in a passing fit of inspiration, or sending the story out to multiple markets before I realize the ending is incorrect and try out various things until they work.  Space Elevator had an incorrect last line for a long time, but fortunately I found it in time for submission to Shimmer.  Another favorite currently making the rounds is another pseudo alien invasion story featuring a nun.  Like Space Elevator it deals heavily in the construction and perpetuation of myth in order to navigate situations of upheaval.  Perhaps ‘myth’ will have to be added to the list of ‘do not include’ for my fiction along with dead things.

What’s next for you?
Cake please.

How did “The Haunted Jalopy Races” come to be?
All I remember is that the title popped into my head one day. Haunted conveyances have a long history in folklore and literature — there are ghost ships, ghost trains, and even phantom rickshaws if Rudyard Kipling is to be believed. But I wasn’t aware of any ghostly jalopies. I loved the image, and so I decided to figure out a story to go along with it

Of course, I didn’t know anything about jalopies, so I spent a long time on the Internet trying to learn as much as I could about the history of hot rodding. One of my favorite things about historical fiction is that much of the story writes itself during research. I try not to fudge dates or facts to jam in something that doesn’t belong. Instead, I use whatever is naturally at hand, even if it substantially changes the story I thought I was going to write. For instance, I didn’t know that World War II would figure in this story before I started my research.

Machine of Death seems unstoppable. How is volume two coming along?
My co-editors and I are very excited that the sequel (called This Is How You Die) will be published by Grand Central Publishing in July 2013. The book is terrific — even more diverse in terms of genre, settings, and characters than the first one. If we hadn’t found a publisher, we’d have done it all ourselves again, but having a partner means broader distribution. The only downside is how long it takes to put all that distribution machinery in place. It’s hard being patient!

There are also a few foreign editions of the first book still trickling out. In particular, we’re waiting on the Korean, Hebrew, and Croatian editions… Each new edition has been amazing and beautiful. And weird in the sense that we’re totally disconnected from the publishing and the marketing, and even from the criticism and commentary surrounding the books. Sometimes our fans in other countries will send us a review of Machine of Death in Italian or German. It’s neat that the book has a life of its own like that — but after being so involved in the English edition, it’s a completely different experience to be that removed.

Here’s a link to learn more about the books: http://www.machineofdeath.net

Tell us what your favorite Ray Bradbury story/novel is.
I love all of Ray Bradbury’s “fix-up” novels — the ones that he cobbled together out of previously published and mostly unconnected short stories. He even famously called The Martian Chronicles “a book of short stories pretending to be a novel”. But as wonderful as The Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine are, my favorite of the bunch is Green Shadows, White Whale — a loose (and not always factually accurate) account of the time he spent in Ireland in the 1950s, writing the screenplay for Moby-Dick with director John Huston.

Bradbury’s great strengths are his amazing ideas and his use of language. He’s not, however, well-known for creating memorable characters. But the fictionalized John Huston in Green Shadows, White Whale is utterly memorable — a sort of cross between a dictatorial taskmaster and the Cat in the Hat. It makes me wish that Ray Bradbury had immortalized more of his friends and colleagues in books before he passed on. I wonder if he wrote any stories about Ray Harryhausen…

Do you have a favorite story among your own? Why does it stand out?  
My favorite story is usually the one I’m in the middle of writing, since I’m excited and learning and I haven’t had to agonize over the ending yet. But I was very pleased that I was able to sell a story called “The Famous Fabre Fly Caper” to The Journal of Unlikely Entomology recently. It’s the story of two good tree frogs pushed too far who plot to steal a box of flies from the great French naturalist Jean-Henri Fabre.

I wrote the story with no expectation that it would ever be published (the main characters are frogs, after all), but simply because it combined my loves of history, nature, and literature with a long-standing desire to write a heist story. Fabre’s books about bugs are wonderful reading and many of them are freely available, so I also hope readers of my story will be inspired to check them out as well. (I especially recommend The Life of the Fly.)

Best book you’ve read this year?
One of the most exciting books I read this year was Vera Caspary’s Bedelia. It’s a pulp thriller from 1945 (but a very good one) about a man who marries a woman with a murky past who may or may not have murdered a string of prior husbands. Most of the well-known crime writers are men (like Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, to name my two favorites), and I loved getting a different perspective on the genre.

I later discovered that the Feminist Press at City University of New York is reprinting a whole series of pulp and crime novels by women. Some of the classic noir movies of the 1940s and 1950s were based on books by women — including Laura (also by Vera Caspary), Bunny Lake Is Missing, and In a Lonely Place. I always get excited when I discover publishers doing this kind of archival work with genre fiction, and I can’t wait to read more of the books in the series.

What’s coming up next for you?
Hmm. More short stories, I hope! Novels get all the glory, but I suspect that short story writers have more fun.

How did the story come to be?
This one actually had a kind of circuitous path into existence. I’m a big proponent of NaNoWriMo and, in my mind, the best thing about it is the community that surrounds it. The one year I actually completed a novel in a month, I think it had a lot to do with that community.

One thing I especially liked was the challenge threads, where people “dare” you to include various elements in your finished novels and there’s one that I really loved, which challenged you to write a story to a prompt every day of October. “Gemini in the House of Mars,” came from one of those threads with a really crazy list of elements I had to include. That list dictated almost all the content of the first iteration of the story, which was, perhaps not shockingly, a mess. I put it away and kind of forgot about it for a few years and then, a couple of summers ago, I was in Belgium for a few months. As I was on a visitor visa, I wasn’t legally permitted to work, so I decided to focus on my writing, specifically refurbishing old stories. One morning I came across Gemini and decided to clean it up and streamline it a little. Mainly because I think it’s the only legitimately good title for a story that I’ve ever developed, normally I’m terrible at that part of the process.

The prompt really focused on the adultery and murder in this very kind of noir way, but the twins were there as an element. As an only child, I’ve long been really fascinated with sibling and especially twin relationships. Those stories you hear about twin language or twins who are effectively living in their own private universe. That’s a very Narnia-like conceit for me and I think it fits really naturally into speculative fiction. So that’s what I really focused on when I revised it.

How did you celebrate your first fiction sale?
I am almost certain that I ate a really nice grilled cheese sandwich. That’s actually still how I celebrate. I’m a big proponent of all the dairy-based methods of celebrating accomplishments.

Do you have a favorite first line from your published stories?
That’s a great question! I’ve made a study of first lines. When I’m deciding whether to buy a book, I check the first line and the last line. If they aren’t both arresting and interesting, I don’t get the book. Sometimes I think my writing life is an on-going journey to perfect my own first and last lines. There’s a story I published recently in Northwind Magazine called “The Last Day of the Armistice” and it starts with the line “The war was coming in the windows.” I’ve always been proud of that one.

What is up with Are You Afraid of the Dark? If you were on that show, what would your role be?
I relocated to Los Angeles last year to be with my partner, who was committed to a PhD program here and, for the first few months, I was kind of flailing around. I was just out of undergrad and I was having a hard time getting work and I was sort of anxious and unsettled. A wise friend of mine advised me to use that time to develop my career as a writer, rather than just wringing my hands about my lack of job. He gave me a list of practical things to try and one of them was to update my blog regularly (something I still struggle with, obviously) and to create some sort of “hook” for the blog. Around that same time, I discovered that the entire run of the early nineties Canadian/American kids horror anthology show Are You Afraid of the Dark was on Youtube. I was immediately obsessed because I was all about that show when I was a kid. It was a kind of Night Gallery or Tales from the Dark Side, but for kids. I love anthologies in all their forms, honestly, short stories are by far my preferred form to work in and to read and I’ve always been really into anthology shows, especially anthology horror. AYAotD was probably my earliest exposure to that and I decided to do a mini-series on it, looking at a couple of episodes from each season that I remembered from my childhood. My goal was to see how it stood up to my adult sensibilities and to kind of examine what watching this and loving this might have done, in terms of forming me creatively. I was pleased to discover that, for a 30 minute horror anthology show aimed at tweens and younger, the show is surprisingly good. Inconsistent, as those kinds of shows always are, but usually fairly strong and often actually scary, especially in shockingly existential ways.

I’ve also noticed some amusing trends as I watch the show. For example, the stories almost always feature some sort of odd couple reluctant team up with the popular but troubled kid was a chip on his shoulder and the nerdy, goody two-shoes (almost always wearing age-inappropriate brown slacks) who have to work together to deal with the sinister supernatural threat. I know myself well enough to say that I would almost certainly be donning the Beige Slacks of Nerdom.

What’s your favorite Bradbury story/novel?
Oh man, that’s like picking a favorite baby (it’s this one. Definite best baby.)

There’s a section in From the Dust Returned where the family’s “daughter” of sorts (an insubstantial ghost/presence) decides she wants to explore life amongst the living for one night and she inhabits the body of a young girl preparing to go to a town dance. I read that for the first time when I was about twelve and the aching bitter-sweetness of that scene and the fully realized sensory story, has stuck with me ever since. But I really do find it hard to pick a favorite, so many different stories meant different things to me at different times.

What’s next for you?
I’m at the time in my life where I’m kind of building lots of things in different directions. I’m going to grad school right now and getting into professional ghostwriting, which has been awesome.

Writing-wise, I’m working on completing a penultimate draft of the novel “The Undertaker’s Son” comes from, called “The Witches Knot.” It’s a dynastic fantasy story about five generations of a family of, for lack of a better word, witches. It’s partially a response reading a lot of fantasy about people who discover that they magical abilities and it changes the entire tenor of their life and thrusts them into a magical world, Harry Potter-style. I wanted to write a story about how magical ability might be shaped by the constraints of real life and personality. A person who never discovers they have magical powers has a wholly different experience of them than one who runs away from home and apprentices herself to a magical mentor who has a further different experience from someone who knows about their powers and has information available, but struggles with it because of contradictory religious beliefs. It’s also a bit of a love letter to the kinds of bizarre and baroque family stories that I would hear if I was quiet and patient after Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner about my paster great-great grandfather who founded a church in frontier Michigan in the midst of a diphtheria epidemic or my own freewheeling teenage grandmother. I’m hoping to have it finished before the end of the year. Beyond that, I have a big list of partially finished short stories to complete and a YA series of novellas that I’m really excited about. Essentially, I’m trying to work as much as I can, consume as many stories as I can and be ready to take the opportunities that fetch up on my doorstep.

Tell us how the story came to be.
I think it’s a biological fact that little girls love unicorns. I’ve always wanted to do a unicorn story, but without the traditional princess-in-the-woods approach. One

What authors, if any, have influenced your own writing?
Stephen King’s “On Writing” has been an essential manual for me to improve my style of writing. I am also a huge fan of Caitlin R. Kiernan and Poppy Z Brite.

Are you satisfied with traditional labels for genre fiction? Do words like “speculative,” “slipstream,” and, for that matter, “genre” cover it?
I don’t pay much, if any, attention to the labels for fiction. If an author’s story is convincing and can hold my attention, regardless of the topic, I will devote my time to it.

If you could invite three authors, past or present, to dinner, who would it be, and what would you talk about?
I would absolutely love to sit down with Stephen King, John Green, and Charles Bukowski. Each of them brings something unique and starkly honest to their work. I’d like to think that we’d skip discussing business and get to laughing over drinks instead, though.

What is your favorite Bradbury story/novel?
“There Will Come Soft Rains” is absolutely my favorite. It’s such an ominous ghost story that immerses you immediately.

What’s next for you?
I’m currently working on a story based around the condition folie a deux. So far it’s a surreal kind of horror story, the kind of monsters that you see from the corner of your eye rather than being attacked directly. I can also sometimes be found lurking around WordPress at girlcontraband.wordpress.com.