WRITING

ORIGIN STORY

I got my first acceptance letter in second grade for an illustrated short story about an apocalypse that causes mechanical moving things (e.g., escalators, cars) to stop working and inanimate objects, like stuffed animals, to come to life. It was inspired by the fact that my parents wouldn’t let me have any pets. I then went on to write “Awake Ugly,” a reversal of Sleeping Beauty. I don’t remember the plot, but I do remember my mom thought it was very, very funny but probably not in the ways I’d intended.

I wrote my first novella in high school. It was about a teenage girl who channels the Greek goddess Hera in order to punish the boyfriend she worries is being unfaithful. It was not at all inspired by my boyfriend at the time. Any resemblance to actual characters and events was most definitely coincidental.

I also wrote my first novel in high school. It was about a female detective trying to catch a serial killer. It was rejected just after graduation.

I studied creative writing in college and graduate school. Since I wasn’t allowed to write horror, I instead wrote stories about characters having big, important realizations while doing mundane things, like blending a daiquiri or buying condiments in bulk at Sam’s Club.

Then I did what a lot of writers do: I made a practical choice. Got a Ph.D. in 19th-century American Literature. Became a professor. Taught students how to write about literature and popular culture for sixteen years.

But one day, not so very long ago, I had a sudden realization—while dicing a carrot, I think—that I no longer wanted to be practical.

So, I “retired.”

REDEMPTION ARC

Now I'm a freelance editor. I’m writing a nonfiction book. I’m writing a novel. When I get a little braver and a lot more sleep, I’m going to launch a crowd-sourced research platform social media thingamajig called HowAboutYou?

Across everything I write, fiction and nonfiction, I return to the same questions: what do the stories we tell reveal about our fears, desires, and assumptions? How do the stories we “read” shape our understanding of ourselves and the world in turn?

My academic work explored these questions through literature, film, and popular culture. In Evil Children in the Popular Imagination, I analyzed how different versions of the “evil child” trope—like the possessed child, the feral child, the antichrist, the changeling—each tackle a different fear about how childhood innocence gets lost. In other articles, I examined how violence is explained in school shooting films, how masculinity is portrayed in ghost-hunting “reality” shows, how aging women are represented in American Horror Story, and how Edgar Allan Poe’s stories influenced serial killer narratives.

My fiction takes up these questions through imagined horrors and speculative worlds—worlds just like ours except for that one creepy thing or worlds that might have been just like ours if not for that one creepy thing. The stories I write are influenced as much by the classic literature I’ve studied as all the popular speculative fiction I’ve consumed. The former taught me the appeal of a unique voice, distinctive style, and hefty themes, the latter that it’s only good manners to give readers a story that moves them, surprises them, and lets them forget about practicalities for a while.