What inspired you to start writing?
I began writing in a diary at age ten. Exploring my thoughts at length without the pressure of interacting with someone else appealed to me. Writing gave me a safe medium for exploring my thoughts and interests. In eighth grade, I wrote fiction in English class and found it intensely absorbing.
What inspired you to start writing?
I’ve always wanted to be a writer, from the moment I first learned to read. After I realized I could (and then did, all the time, voraciously), I decided I wanted to write my own stories. I started reading Stephen King at an obscenely young age—it was the 80s; I think there are lots more kids like me who cut our fangs on It and The Tommyknockers—and when he sent me an autographed copy of the Cycle of the Werewolf/Silver Bullet screenplay when I was eight, that was it. I had to be a writer.
What inspired you to start writing?
I grew up in Appalachia in a family where storytelling was highly prized. I can’t count the number of hours I spent hearing relatives and neighbors tell stories, some true, some maybe not so true but entertaining all the same. From a very early age, I wanted to participate in creating and telling stories, and books were the form that I could practice in private.
ROBERT LEVY‘s novel The Glittering World was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award as well as the Lambda Literary Award, while shorter work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nightmare, Black Static, The Dark, Shadows & Tall Trees, Autumn Cthulhu, FOUND: An Anthology of Found Footage Horror Stories, The Best Horror of the Year, The Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, and The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, among others. His debut story collection No One Dies from Love: Dark Tales of Loss and Longing was published by Word Horde in May. A Harvard graduate subsequently trained as a forensic psychologist, he teaches at the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and can be found at TheRobertLevy.com.
Mae Murray is a writer and editor hailing from Arkansas, now living in eerie New England. She contributes essays and criticism to horror-centric websites, including Fangoria and Dread Central. She is the recipient of a 2022 Brave New Weird award for the Superior Achievement in Short Fiction for her story “The Imperfection” (Shortwave Magazine) and has been published in horror fiction anthologies and nonfiction collections. The Book of Queer Saints Volume I was her editing debut. Volume II is set to be released Halloween 2023. Her debut novel I’m Sorry If I Scared You is due Spring 2024. She owns and operates Medusa Publishing Haus. Find her on Twitter and Instagram as @maeisafraid
