why am i doing this?
a belated welcome note to fuck, marry, kill
I had the craziest dream last night. I was in Afghanistan, and my dad was abandoning some weird top secret work station and trying to set this hamster free. I went to rescue it because it was tame and thought it might die in the wild. It was some strange, rare hamster that had eyes in the front of its head, kind of like how a scorpion’s are placed, rather than at the side. And afterwards I kept trying to talk to people in what broken Quranic Arabic I knew (that is to say, not much) while they all kept trying to talk about (I think?? I can only assume) the US pulling troops out of Afghanistan.
This dream feels like a hub of things in my brain right now. Like all these disparate life elements were yoked together into one spot: I recently started talking to my dad again after not talking to him for about two and a half years; I am obsessed with the hamster I bought for my daughter which, subsequently, became my hamster, because I’m the responsible person in the house and I just want that hamster to be happy (they need a surprising amount of room, and care. I really feel for the hamsters of the 1990s, when we knew so little about them and kept them in tiny cages!!); I also have been thinking about fucked up U.S. foreign policy and how little room for nuance or empathy people hold for religious difference; I’ve been thinking about my religious past, some parts of which feel like a life I just don’t know anymore — like when I was muslim in my twenties for four years and studied the Quran twice a week and did daily prayers — I have forgotten, basically, all the Quranic Arabic I ever knew, which I’d studied mostly to understand hadiths and surahs and dua better, but it’s been so long that I can’t really recall it without lots of effort; and lastly, a few weeks ago, my pet scorpion whom I lovingly called My Wife, died. They have short lives, as such, but it’s been a few weeks now and I miss the little sounds I would hear at night of her burrowing around in her enclosure.
Anyway. My dream was this weird hub of all the things I’ve been thinking about lately. And that got me thinking that I’d never properly said why I decided to come to Substack — which I hope will become a similar (though more grounded and less random) sort of hub of all the things I’ve been thinking about, but also all of the things I like to do. In a more fine-tuned way. Like, about literature.
For those who don’t know, I left Patreon to come to Substack. A big reason for this is that I want to keep discussing craft, thinking about fiction, and building community for people who want to create more emotional depth and/or explore the beautiful brutal in their work. I do this with the book club, craft talks, running Witch Craft Magazine, and interviewing/chatting with friends and other authors. I wanted all of it in one hub, rather than spread out over five different apps, graciously depending on views from a dying algorithm which no longer favors outside links.
It’s been a really fun month! Witch Craft Magazine is almost a decade old now. It’s alive and publishing once a week, and I’ve been able to pay contributors for the first time since the magazine’s inception thanks to my paid subscribers. I really cannot thank you enough. I’ve never been able to do it. We shifted away from print partly because I moved overseas and during the last print run, so many issues got lost in customs hell or never made it, which was so stressful. I hate disappointing people! And overseas shipping has been so costly. Bringing Witch Craft Magazine to Substack means more people get a chance to read the work contributors have worked on so hard, as much as I love the tactile feeling of a hard copy magazine. The response has been incredible so far! The most recent piece, this short story by Fox Henry Frazier, explores the different ways rage is experienced between a husband and a wife.
More good news is that I’m in the process of getting all of the backstock up online, as well, as e-books and as print-on-demand books, so they should be available everywhere, at some point, hopefully soon.
Goth Book Club, also, has pretty much been a light in my life. The archive is all on Substack now, except for this one, sadly EPIC, chat with Charlene Elsby that I need to somehow re-record and upload because I lost the original file. I started the book club because, well, I wanted to force myself to read the curated reading lists I kept building for myself. But it was also because so many book clubs focus heavily on mainstream fiction, especially books I would classify as “wine mom” books. I love a good wine, I love a good mom, but I really want to read, and talk about, and show other people that there are complicated books out there, especially ones that come from small presses — presses that, quite often, are literally run by just a person who does it because they love it, too. (11:11, Amphetamine Sulphate, and Feral Dove are just a couple of examples).
The next book club meeting is this Sunday. I like to say that even if you haven’t finished or read the whole book, it’s still fun to come along. In the early days, sometimes I wasn’t able to finish the whole book, either, even as the host. Life is busy. But showing up encourages me to try and to think about what I like about what I read, or what moves me, and it also enlightens me to what other people see and think and experience. It’s always expansive and it’s fun to chat for a little bit with other people who like darker fiction.
I have long been in love with the grotesque to the questionable to the sublime. And I long to think about and explore these elements in literature. If you aren’t familiar, I’ve published two novels, most recently, Deliver Me, about a woman who will stop at nothing to become a mother; a collection of short stories, Nudes, that explores queer and working class lives, and a short novel (is the word novella cringe again or no? a novel is a novel), Gag Reflex, in the format of a Livejournal.
I’m also an editor at The Creative Independent, which is a resilient resource about how creatives do their work; I’ve interviewed authors from the likes of Gordon Lish and his son Atticus, to legendary visual artists like Penny Goring and Sasha Grey. I love talking to creative people and figuring out how they do what they do, and you’ll see some of that on the Substack here as well, framed around these themes of rage or disgust or whatever it is that pushes fiction just a little bit further afield. I’m currently pursuing a doctorate at the University in Glasgow focusing on female rage in literature, too, so in part, I’m going to be obsessed with this for a while. I’d love it if you obsessed with me, too.
P.S. I’ll be teaching a slew of one-off workshops this summer with brilliant collaborators like
and , as well as a workshop on how to DIY your own book publicity. I also work one-on-one with people for manuscript consultations or book coaching, so if that interests you, please feel free to get in touch by responding to this email (or sending me a DM!). I talked a little bit about my process in this interview with Chris Zeischegg here.I think that’s my “why.” My major why. Build community. Keep obsessing about shit. Find people who are just as obsessed as I am. And put it all together, somehow. The dream!
:~)
love,
elle
That hamster was a predator. That's what forward-facing eyes evolved for.