TOD 028 Gwendolyn Kiste: Quaffing Your Fear Like Fine Wine

January 25, 2018
9 mins to read

In this podcast Scott Nicolay interviews Gwendolyn Kiste, author of And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe and Pretty Marys All in a Row.

The Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird is a unique immersive one-day event featuring approximately 12 hours of panels, readings, signings and social activities centered around contemporary Weird and speculative fiction. The second annual event will be held at the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, CA, one of the Weirdest Places in the U.S. Limited to 75 attendees. Buy your memberships here.

Show Notes

Gwendolyn Kiste, author of the novella Pretty Marys All in a Row (Broken Eye Books) and the debut collection And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe (JournalStone), featured on the preliminary 2018 Bram Stoker Awards ballot, joins Scott to talk about her work including shared resonances with Desirina Boskovich’s Never Now Always (which preceded her in Broken Eye’s novella series), a hypothetical secret connection between the CIA and the Weird Renaissance via James Tiptree Jr., her recent H-Word column ‘W is for Witch’ (Nightmare Magazine), polarizing stores and confronting rape culture, the satisfaction of the unexplained in Weird fiction and the Star Wars galaxy, resistance, the genesis of the collection, de-normalizing through fiction, the excitement and sadness of groundbreaking work by women and women of color, Angela Carter and Shirley Jackson, the grossness of Norman Mailer, genre-boundary-shifting and speculative fiction as an umbrella term, her new story ‘40 Ways to Leave Your Monster Lover’ in the Hardened Hearts anthology, writing in second person, tying together folk tales and urban legends in Pretty Marys, storytelling via literature versus film, trusting your reader, and ghost protagonists. (1:24:00) Kiste then reads from Pretty Marys, discusses creating at different lengths and the ‘magic’ of writing a novella, teases her upcoming debut novel The Rust Maidens (Trepidatio/JournalStone) and other new works, and shares her recommended editors Scott Gable (Broken Eye) and Jess Landry (T/JS) and her recommended writers Eden Royce and Farah Rose Smith.