Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Kathryn Ptacek

Kathryn Ptacek is the editor of the landmark Women of Darkness I and Women of Darkness II, published at a time when most anthologies included few or no women writers. She knew they were out there, though. She has published numerous novels, short stories, articles, reviews, and poetry in various genres. She edits the monthly HWA Newsletter. She is also the recipient of three of HWA’s awards: The Silver Hammer Award, the Mentor of the Year Award, and the Richard Laymon President’s Award. Her books are available on Amazon and from Crossroad Press as e-books. She also sells extra copies…

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Bryan Thao Worra

Bryan Thao Worra is the author of 10+ books. One of the first Lao Americans to arrive in the US in 1973, and the first Lao American to hold a professional membership in the Horror Writers Association. He holds over 20 national and international awards for his writing and community leadership. He served as the president of the International Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association from 2016-2022. He has presented at the Smithsonian and the 2012 London Summer Games on the role of the imagination and memory in creative writing as a poet and prose writer, focusing on the creative…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Nisi Shawl

Nisi Shawl’s debut novel Everfair, an alternate history of Africa’s Congo region, was a Nebula Award finalist. They’re the author of the Otherwise Award-winning story collection Filter House. They edited both volumes of the acclaimed New Suns anthology series, winner of the World Fantasy, Locus, and Ignyte awards. With Cynthia Ward they co-wrote Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, a standard text on inclusivity for over a decade. Recent publications include the horror collections Our Fruiting Bodies and Exploring Dark Short Fiction 3: A Primer to Nisi Shawl, as well as Speculation, a middle grade fantasy novel about redeeming a…

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Tracie McBride

What inspired you to start writing? My origin story is probably a very familiar one to most writers. It started early in childhood with a love of books and a reverence for those who created them. Then, in primary school, praise came from teachers for my early efforts at written storytelling. High school hit, then adulthood, and somewhere along the line, I shelved the childhood dream of becoming a writer. I picked it up again when my first child started school and I undertook online study to earn a Creative Writing Diploma, naively thinking I might have time to devote…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Stephen Gallagher

Stoker and World Fantasy Award nominee, winner of British Fantasy and International Horror Guild Awards for his short fiction, Stephen Gallagher has built a career both as a novelist and as a creator of primetime miniseries and episodic television. In the US he was lead writer on NBC's Crusoe and creator of CBS Television's Eleventh Hour. His fifteen novels include Chimera, Oktober, and Valley of Lights. He's the creator of Sebastian Becker, Special Investigator to the Lord Chancellor's Visitor in Lunacy, in a series of novels that includes The Kingdom of Bones, The Bedlam Detective, and The Authentic William James.…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Terry Dowling

Terry Dowling is author of Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear (International Horror Guild Award winner for Best Collection 2007), An Intimate Knowledge of the Night, Blackwater Days, Amberjack: Tales of Fear & Wonder and The Night Shop: Tales for the Lonely Hours. He has been called “Australia’s finest writer of horror” by Locus magazine, its “premier writer of dark fantasy” by All Hallows and its “most acclaimed writer of the dark fantastic” by Cemetery Dance magazine. The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series featured more horror stories by Terry in its twenty-one year run than any other writer. Terry’s…

Pacific Islander Heritage: Interview with Del Gibson

Del Gibson lives in Wellington, New Zealand. Gibson has had 26 short stories digitally published, as well as several articles and poems. When Gibson isn’t writing, she is researching and reading. She is actively engaged in the writing community by helping other horror authors. She is a Beta and ARC reader, and part of launch teams to promote other authors' work. Gibson runs a popular Facebook group called HORROR CENTRAL, and collaborates with YouTube Podcasts where her short stories are read out by narrators. Gibson is an author of horror, but also reviews horror movies, books and music, on YouTube…

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with L. Chan

L CHAN hails from Singapore. He spends most of his time wrangling a team of two dogs, Mr Luka and Mr Telly. His work has appeared in places like Clarkesworld, Translunar Travellers Lounge, Podcastle, the Dark and he was a finalist for the 2020 Eugie Foster Memorial Award. He tweets inordinately @lchanwrites and can be found on the web at https://lchanwrites.wordpress.com/ What inspired you to start writing? I’ve always been a voracious devourer of stories - books, comics, games, movies. I guess we all start telling ourselves stories in our heads, our own heads. Oddly enough, my writing did get…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Ramsey Campbell

The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Ramsey Campbell as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer,” and the Washington Post sums up his work as “one of the monumental accomplishments of modern popular fiction.” He has received the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild, and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature. The two volumes of Phantasmagorical Stories offer a sixty-year retrospective of…
Nuts & Bolts: Running a Small Press, with Publisher Robert Ottone

Nuts & Bolts: Running a Small Press, with Publisher Robert Ottone

Nuts & Bolts: Running a Small Press, with Publisher Robert Ottone By Tom Joyce In addition to being a publisher, Robert Ottone is a novelist, short-story writer, and Bram Stoker Award nominee. But when it comes to running Spooky House Press, he thinks of himself primarily as a fan—a designation that motivated him to start his small press in the first place and guides all of his business decisions.    In this month’s edition of “Nuts & Bolts”, Robert gives some perspective into where small presses like his fit into the publishing landscape, and what that can mean for aspiring authors.…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Yvonne Navarro

Yvonne Navarro is an award-winning author of twenty-four published novels and a lot of short stories, articles and a reference dictionary. She writes several genres but favors horror or dark fantasy. Her work has won the Bram Stoker and IATW Awards, among others. Her shorter work has appeared in hundreds of anthologies and magazines. Her franchise work includes the Predator, Aliens, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, V-Wars, and more. She lives in Tucson, Arizona and dotes on her rescued dogs, Kyah and Chewbecca, and cranky talking parakeet, BirdZilla. Find her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/yvonne.navarro.001 Did you start out writing or working…

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Maria Dong

Maria Dong is the author of Liar, Dreamer, Thief. Her short fiction, articles, and poetry have been published in dozens of magazines, like the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Lightspeed, Augur, Nightmare, Khoreo, Fantasy, Apex, and Apparition Literary Magazine. She is represented by Amy Bishop at Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. What inspired you to start writing? I was in a car accident about ten years ago, and while I was recovering I was in a house that did not have internet or cable. And I was really bored, and I was bed-bound, so I started writing stories to entertain…

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Dan Rabarts

Dan Rabarts (Ngati Porou) is an award-winning author and editor living in Porirua, Aotearoa New Zealand. He is a four-time recipient of New Zealand’s Sir Julius Vogel Award and three-time winner of the Australian Shadows Award. His short stories have been published worldwide, and he is the author of the steampunk-grimdark-comic fantasy series Children of Bane (Brothers of the Knife, Sons of the Curse, Sisters of Spindrift, Daughters of Dust). Together with Lee Murray, he co-wrote the Path of Ra crime-noir thriller series (Hounds of the Underworld, Teeth of the Wolf, Blood of the Sun) and co-edited the anthologies Baby…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Stefan Dziemianowicz

Stefan Dziemianowicz has edited more than fifty anthologies of horror, fantasy, and science fiction, including the Bram-Stoker Award-winning (thanks, HWA!) Horrors: 365 Scary Stories. He is the author of the story collection Bloody Mary and Other Tales for a Dark Night and co-editor of Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia. He was a founding editor of the British Fantasy Award-winning Necrofile: The Review of Horror Fiction and his reviews and features have appeared in the Washington Post, Locus, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. His fingerprints are all over a lot of genre titles and literary classics in the marketplace…

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Catherine Yu

Catherine Yu writes dark speculative fiction. She was born in Nanjing and is now based in New York. She is a graduate of Odyssey Writing Workshop. Direwood is her debut novel from Page Street Publishing. Helga, a YA Frankenstein reimagining, is coming out in 2024. She can be found at catherineyuwrites.com. What inspired you to start writing? An early love of reading definitely helped. (And honestly, Scooby Doo fanfiction was where I started.) What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it? Horror is a great way to delve into and investigate scary stuff. Monsters are horrifying…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Stuart David Schiff

Stuart got his undergraduate degree from Cornell University (1968) and his D.D.S. from The Columbia School of Dental and Oral Surgery (1972). He spent 8 years in the Army that included time as one of only four dentists in the 82nd Airborne. After he left the Army (1980), he joined a group dental practice in upstate NY and retired in 2012. He has won four World Fantasy Awards, the British Fantasy Award and had two Hugo nominations. In 2014 he was a Guest of honor at the World Fantasy Convention. Did you start out working in the horror field, and…

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Angela Liu

Angela Liu is a Chinese American writer from NYC. She studied East Asian Studies at New York University and researched mixed reality at Keio University’s Graduate School of Media Design in Japan, with a focus on new narrative platforms and tangible interfaces for remote communication. She now works in IT consulting and Japanese-to-English translation while raising a monster-obsessed toddler. Her stories and poetry are published/forthcoming in Strange Horizons, The Dark, Nightmare Magazine, Clarkesworld, Cast of Wonders, Fusion Fragment, and Dark Matter Magazine among others. Check out more of her work at liu-angela.com or find her on Twitter/Instagram: @liu_angela What inspired…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Lucy Taylor

Lucy Taylor is the Stoker Award–winning author of seven novels and five short story collections. Her most recent work includes stories in Body Shocks (Tachyon) Horror Library, Volume 7 (Dark Moon Books), and the Western/horror novella Desolation (Poltergeist Press). Her work has been translated into Italian, German, Czech, Russian, Spanish, and other languages. She lives in the high desert outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, and enjoys ballroom and Latin dancing, Pilates, hiking, swimming, and being a 24/7 concierge, chef, and dispenser-of-treats to her two rescue kitties. Did you start out writing or working in the horror field, and if so…

Asian Heritage in Horror: Interview with Kelsea Yu

Kelsea Yu is a Taiwanese Chinese American writer who is eternally enthusiastic about sharks and appreciates a good ghost story. Her short stories and essays appear in magazines such as Fantasy, PseudoPod, and Reckoning, and in various anthologies. Her novella Bound Feet is published with Cemetery Gates Media, and her debut novel It’s Only a Game is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Children’s in 2024. Kelsea lives with her husband, children, and a pile of art supplies in the Pacific Northwest. Find her on Instagram and Twitter as @anovelescape or visit her website kelseayu.com. What inspired you to start writing? I fell…

Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Nancy Kilpatrick

Nancy Kilpatrick is an Award-winning author and editor. She has published 23 novels, 3 novellas, over 250 short stories, 6 collections, and has edited 15 anthologies. She wrote the non-fiction book The Goth Bible: A Compendium for the Darkly Inclined. Much of her work has been translated into 9 languages. Her most recent project is the six-book novel series Thrones of Blood, the final volume #6 coming soon in print and ebook. The series has been optioned for film and TV. Website: nancykilpatrick.com Facebook: nancy.kilpatrick.31 Twitter: @nancykwriter Occasional Blog: http://nancykilpatrickwriter.blogspot.ca/ Instagram: nancykilpatrickauthor/ Amazon author Page: amazon.com/author/www.nancykilpatrick.com Newsletter subscription (free): nancykilpatrick.com…