TOD 045 Playing in the Dirt with Kristi DeMeester

In this podcast Scott Nicolay interviews Kristi DeMeester, author of Beneath (Word Horde) and Everything That’s Underneath (Apex), and a The Outer Dark Symposium 2019 guest. The podcast was recorded on Monday March 18, 2019.

The Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird is a unique immersive one-day event featuring more than 40 program participants and approximately 16 hours of panels, readings, signings and social activities centered around contemporary Weird and speculative fiction. The third annual event will be held March 22-23, 2019 at Silver Scream FX Lab and Hotel Indigo-College Park in Atlanta, GA. Limited to 75 attendees. Buy your memberships here or support the Indiegogo campaign here.

Show Notes

In this podcast Scott Nicolay interviews Kristi DeMeester, author of Beneath (Word Horde) and Everything That’s Underneath (Apex, 2017), and a The Outer Dark Symposium 2019 guest. The conversation begins with ATLWeird Brunches, the behemoth of this year’s symposium, and memories of the first The Outer Dark Symposium in Atlanta in 2017, followed by beta-bonding with Michael Wehunt, successive waves of contemporary Weird fiction, enough sentient Weird-pie for everyone, the pleasure of working with editors Ross E. Lockhart and Michael Kelly, her collection Everything That’s Underneath, the transgressive awesomeness of Roxanne Gay, the uncomfortable genesis of her first novel, not ‘deal[ing] with the monster at your door’, the beauty of raw-edged endings, Sarah Langan, digging to see what’s buried in the dirt, the horror and ‘cognitive dissonance’ of childbirth and bloody women’s bodies. (1:14:40) Kristi reads ‘Stag’, which appeared in the recent anthology Lost Films (Perpetual Motion Machine, 2017). The discussion concludes a sensory back-story scent of that story, recent and upcoming stories, her next novel which takes place partially at Jazzland, and her recommended authors including Julia Elliott (The Wilds), Nalo Hopkinson (Skin Folk), Helen Oyeyemi (White Is For Witching) and Sheryl Monks (Monsters in Appalachia).