Culture
Safe Places: On Writing Books for Teens about Teen Issues
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I moved ten times before I turned seventeen. That number doesn’t count temporary moves while waiting for housing, like the time we lived in a hotel on Waikiki for two months. Or the many short stints in apartments, often with no furniture other than the bench seat from our minivan, a television, and some air…
From Broadway Musicals to Thrilling Mysteries: A Writing Life in Two Acts
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I’ve always been a tremendous fan of thrillers, especially of the psychological variety. Whether on the page or on the screen, they rank amongst my favorite thing ever. (I can practically recite the entirety of Rear Window verbatim, with a convincing Grace Kelly, Jimmy Stewart or Thelma Ritter impersonation, depending on the delivery.) I adore…
Black Horror Fiction Has Always Been Here. What’s Changed Is The Attitudes of Gatekeepers.
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2023 has, so far, been a year full of innovative and mind-bending anthologies, and Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror is one of the best. With an incredible list of contributors, and Jordan Peele as editor, this collection is meant to be savored and celebrated. I asked contributors to the anthology to answer a…
Jesse Q. Sutanto on Toxic Friendships, Shrinking Attention Spans, and Finding the Muse
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As one of the terminally online, I really enjoyed the recent “how often men think about the Roman Empire” discourse on Twitter. One response that went viral claimed that the female equivalent of thinking about the Roman Empire is thinking about your ex-best friend, and after a recent friendship breakup and also tearing through Jesse…
The Western Meets Weird Fiction: A Roundtable Discussion
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Once a narrowly defined genre—set in the American frontier of the 19th Century—the definition of Western has expanded with contemporary takes from such authors as Cormac McCarthy, Ivy Pochoda, Alma Katsu, Jim Harrison and Louise Erdrich. And now, along comes HOT IRON AND COLD BLOOD: An Anthology of the Weird West (September 26, 2023; Dead Sky Publishing),…
How a Trip to a Museum Turned into the Perfect Start to a Mystery
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School field trips. Exhibitions. Guided tours. It might be easy to dismiss museums as stuffy or even boring, but they are far from that—especially to an aspiring crime writer looking to write her first murder mystery. The idea for my debut historical mystery, A Traitor in Whitehall, came to me while standing in the middle…
A Country Road, in the Dead of Night: On The Historical Hauntings of Irish Folklore
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First published in 1936, On Another Man’s Wound was written by Earnán Ó Máille and recounts his time as a guerrilla fighter during the Irish War of Independence in the nineteen twenties. It is generally considered to be the one bona-fide piece of literature to arise from that conflict. No dry military memoir, Ó Máille…