What is your story about?
“If I Am to Earn My Tether” is a horror short story about sand piracy, colonialism, and living with the choices our ancestors made. It features the Malaysian myth of the polong, a tiny homunculus born from the blood of a murder victim, and her pet grasshopper, the pelesit. It was published in Silk and Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror from the Asian Diaspora by Bad Hand Books in May this year. The collection is edited by Kristy Park Kulski and includes short fiction and poetry by Ai Jiang, Nadia Bulkin, Christina Sng, Rena Mason, Lee Murray, J.A.W. McCarthy, Bryan Thao Worra, Ayida Shonibar, Yi Izzy Yu, Angela Yuriko Smith, Kanishk Tantia, Robert Nazar Arjoyan, Christopher Hann, Audrey Zhou, Seoung Kim, Rowan Cardosa, Gabriela Lee, Shawna Yang Ryan, Priya Sridhar, Jess Cho, and Saheli Khastagir. The foreword is by Bram Stoker Award-winning author Monika Kim.
What are you looking to express to readers with your work?
Horror helps me to write myself into existence. I discover who I am and how I make sense of things with each story that I put down on the page. The themes I return to over and again are generational trauma, Asian diaspora, feminism, and psychological horror.
Why choose horror?
Horror is an honest genre that explores the light and dark in the world. It acknowledges that bad things do happen, and shows how we can still continue anyway. I live with anxiety as a constant hum at the back of my mind so I tend to see the possibility of terror and tragedy at every juncture. Horror is a way for me to wrest back some control and to relieve the pressure valve on that hum now and then.
Geneve Flynn is a speculative fiction editor, author, and poet. Winner of two Bram Stoker Awards, and the Shirley Jackson and Aurealis Awards; recipient of the 2022 Queensland Writers Fellowship. Her work has been short/longlisted for the British Fantasy, Locus, Carl Brandon Parallax, Australian Shadows, and Elgin Awards. Co-editor of Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women, the dark fiction anthology which launched the grassroots movement in Asian women’s horror writing. Her work has been published by Weird Tales, PS Publishing, Flame Tree Publishing, PseudoPod, among others. She is Chinese, born in Malaysia, and now calls Australia home. Read more at www.geneveflynn.com.au.
You can find Silk and Sinew HERE.
