Craftwork Episode 18: Ekphrasis, Sinuous Sentences, & the Logic of Sound w/ Sarah Bernstein
In this interview, we chat with Sarah Bernstein about contemplation, finding time for writing, capturing the rush of language, and so much more.
Sarah Bernstein is the author of two novels, The Coming Bad Days and Study for Obedience, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She is from Montreal and lives in the Scottish Highlands.
Books and stories mentioned in this episode:
- Hysteric; Whore – Nelly Arcan
- Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
- The Moonstone; The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
- “A Mown Lawn” – Lydia Davis
- Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life – Ruth Franklin
- The Book of Questions – Edmond Jabès
- The Haunting of Hill House; “The Lottery”; The Sundial; We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson
- The Melancholy of Resistance – László Krasznahorkai
- The Place of Shells – Mai Ishizawa
- In the Wake: On Blackness and Being – Christina Sharpe
- The House Next Door – Anne Rivers Siddons
- The Door – Magda Szabó
- Clean – Alia Trabucco Zerán
Launch discount for The Weird: A Companion (featuring a new Mike Thorn essay)
Order The Weird: A Companion, co-edited by Kristopher Woofter and Carl Sederholm, at a 30% discount using the attached flyer (offer ends May 30, 2025). This collection features contributions from Thomas Ligotti, Eugene Thacker, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, and many others (including a new Mike Thorn essay on Weird conventions in Darkest Hours).
Featuring a comprehensive editors’ introduction to the Weird as a mode engaging with forms of knowledge, transcendence, and resistance, this collection offers a broad-reaching discussion of Weird fiction, film, art, and thought. Its 31 essays explore theoretical and philosophical applications of the Weird, such as Black Metal Theory, and key Weird themes and tropes such as cosmic horror, radical embodiment and sensation, dark ecological speculation, and forms of alterity. Essays are highly varied in period focus and subject matter, ranging from early Weird works by William Hope Hodgson and Conan creator Robert E. Howard, to the surrealist paintings of Leonora Carrington, to more recent works by David Lynch, Octavia Butler, and Yorgos Lanthimos.
WordSpring 2025: Horror-Writing Workshop with Mike Thorn
Mike Thorn is offering a Horror-Writing Workshop for Wordspring 2025 (Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick).
New Mike Thorn story, “Hell is a False Abyss”, included in charity anthology Look At Our Holes: An Anthology of Voids & Orifices (available now)
Enter into a collection rife with orifice-driven horror and transgression! From literal to metaphorical interpretations, every story in here has a hole at its core—holes that bleed, holes that ridicule, holes that perturb to no end. All sales of this book will be donated to the indigenous Cucapa community of Mexicali, B.C., Mexico.
This charity anthology features Mike Thorn’s previously unpublished story, “Hell is a False Abyss”, and stories by Alissa Nutting, Elle Nash, Charlene Elsby, Brendan Vidito, Tom Over, Josh Simmons, Max Booth III, Alexandra Challoner, and others!
Craftwork Episode 17: Worldbuilding, Aha Moments, & Writing for the Stage w/ S. P. Miskowski
In this interview, we chat with S. P. Miskowski about Asian horror cinema, the power of grief, the relentless desire to shape the self, and so much more.
S. P. Miskowski is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, for literature and for drama. Her books have been recognized with four Shirley Jackson Award nominations and two Bram Stoker Award nominations. Her stories have appeared in many anthologies including Haunted Nights, Human Monsters, Looming Low I and II, The Madness of Dr. Caligari, Uncertainties III, October Dreams 2, The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 10, and Darker Companions: 50 Years of Ramsey Campbell, and in magazines including Identity Theory, Black Static, Vastarien, Supernatural Tales, and Cosmic Horror Monthly. Her grunge noir novel I Wish I Was Like You was named This Is Horror Novel of the Year 2017 and is available via Audible. An omnibus of her books set in the weird fictional town of Skillute, WA is forthcoming from Broken Eye Books in 2025.
Books and stories mentioned in this episode:
- The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales – Alfred A. Knopf, pub.
- The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024 – S. A. Cosby, ed.
- D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths – Ingrid & Edgar Parin d’Aulaire
- Go, Dog. Go! – P. D. Eastman
- Rock Paper Scissors – Alice Feeney
- The Haunting of Hill House; “Maybe it Was the Car”; “The Summer People”; We Have Always Lived in the Castle; “The Witch” – Shirley Jackson
- None of This is True – Lisa Jewell
- Audition – Ryū Murakami
- “Bluebeard”; “Cinderella” – Charles Perrault
- “The Black Cat”; “The Cask of Amontillado” – Edgar Allan Poe
- The Last Party – A. R. Torre
- The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023 – Lisa Unger, ed.
Craftwork Episode 16: Dream Journals, Imaginary Conversations, & Work-Life Balance w/ Fawn Parker
In this interview, we chat with Fawn Parker about showing the reader around the room, finding the right tense, protecting your writing time, and so much more.
Fawn Parker is the author of five books including novels What We Both Know (M&S), nominated for the Giller Prize and Hi, It’s Me (M&S), nominated for the Writer’s Trust Atwood Gibson Prize, and the poetry collection Soft Inheritance, which was awarded the JM Abraham Atlantic Book Award and the Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize. Her work has been published in The Walrus, Hazlitt, Literary Review of Canada, and elsewhere. Fawn is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick and the Poet Laureate of Fredericton.
Books and stories mentioned in this episode:
- The Edible Woman – Margaret Atwood
- The Mountain and the Valley – Ernest Buckler
- Libra – Don DeLillo
- The Guest – Emma Cline
- Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing – Douglas Glover
- “Experience” – Tessa Hadley
- Ulysses – James Joyce
- Rejection – Tony Tulathimutte
- This All Happened – Michael Winter
- How Fiction Works – James Wood
- Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
Shelter for the Damned featured in “Nightmares Exist Outside Logic” (Lawrence Library blog)
“Themes of adolescence, rage, toxic masculinity and addiction are portrayed in a terrifying but comprehensible way, and the book manages to succeed in pulling at empathetic heartstrings while simultaneously delivering a very dark, surreal story that will occupy minds for ages.”
Mike Thorn 