Women In Horror Month 2024 : An Interview with Yvette Tan
What inspired you to start writing? I started writing the same way a lot of authors do: I couldn’t find stories that I wanted to read, so I had to write them myself. I grew up in a Chinese Filipino Evangelical Christian household and went to a Catholic all-girls school, which means I grew up more repressed than your average lady. I was made fun of for liking to read (a cousin actually laughed at me for spending my summers reading, for example) for wanting to write, and especially for wanting to write horror. It wasn't an easy journey, but it was also fun. I actually didn't know I was writing horror. I had an interest in the paranormal so I wrote what I wanted to write. A friend had to physically take me aside and explain that what I was writing was horror. When my first story was published in a national newspaper, my mom, a devout Christian, told everyone about it without knowing what I had written. Some church people actually read it and complained to my mom that it gave them nightmares. She was horrified that her eldest daughter would shame her in that way, to the point that on the day of the launch of my first book, she said, “Why can’t you write Christian books?” Those were the only words she spoke to me that day. She's proud of me now, sure, but only because everyone else is proud of me and not because she thinks I did anything noteworthy...
This month on Holistic Horrors we take a brief look at the role of poetry in promoting well-being and connectiveness. Numerous studies suggest that this is the case. For example, in their 2018 study examining the value of writing poetry as a “means to help people living with chronic pain to explore and express their narratives in their own unique way”, researchers Hovey, Khayat, and Feig concluded that “to write cathartic poetry means bringing into presence our inner reflective thinking, emotions, and self-empathy to help ourselves and others who suffer alongside us.”