Interview with Paula D. Ashe: Body Horror, Weird Fiction, and Fkd Up Family

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5vay5XYuaRRaJTeQRGY8SP?si=d5fd318ca9f2434c

Bio

Paula D. Ashe is an educator and an award-winning writer of dark fiction. She lives in the Midwest with her family. Her collection, We Are Here to Hurt Each Other, was nominated for the Bram Stoker award for ‘superior achievement in a fiction collection’.

Introduction

CMR: Hello! Welcome back to Eldritch Girl, and today we’ve got Paula D. Ashe with us. I am so excited. So Paula! Can you introduce yourself for us, please.

PDA: Sure. Yeah, Thank you so much again for having me. My name is Paula D. Ashe. I’m the author of the short story collection We are Here to Hurt Each Other, which came out in February of 2022 from Nictitating Books, and it was recently nominated for a Bram Stoker award for a superior achievement in a fiction collection. That phrase is so surreal to me. But I mean I got to say it. So. Yeah. But thank you. Thank you so much for having me, CM. This is exciting.

CMR: Yeah, this is. It was well deserved, I think! I’m really excited for you yes. I love that collection. And yes, it did fuck me up quite a lot.

PDA: That’s what it does. That’s my lane, apparently. That’s… yeah, and it’s funny, because, you know, I think, you know, anyone, like, which is true for a lot of writers… Most of us live pretty normal… Quote unquote “normal”, you know, lives, and so when I tell people I’m a writer, and I say, I want, you know, a horror writer, and I like oh, cool like Stephen King, and I’m just like… No. Mm-mm. No, no, and they’re like, oh like what? And I’m like, I don’t know if you should read it because you won’t talk to me anymore. But it – you know, it works out okay, but it’s pretty extreme stuff for sure.

CMR: No, I did really enjoy it, though, and I’m excited because you’re going to read an extract from one of the stories in the collection. Would you like to introduce that and kind of give it a little bit of context for it?

PDA: Yeah, absolutely. So this story the excerpts is from a story called Jacqueline Laughs Last in the Gaslight, and it is the only historical piece in the collection. And I actually wrote this story because, I mean I’m sure as you can tell I’m in the United States, I’m American for better or for worse, and so I wrote this story after visiting London, and specifically the Whitechapel district. And that’s kind of what this, what this story is about, and this is the opening paragraph.

And so yeah, so I’m gonna read it. And just be aware, as with you know, a lot of my stuff, it’s pretty… not all of my stuff, but this excerpt in particular, is a little racy, let’s say, and it has some language. So yeah, so that’s it.

Alright, so I’m gonna go ahead and read.

Extract from ‘Jacqueline Laughs Last in the Gaslight’

Early July 1888.

The young bride and her handsome Deacon, her hand like painted porcelain nestled delicate and safe in the sanctuary of his forearm. In Whitechapel’s rookery of wastrels the fine pair is as prominent as a hanged man’s prick. Spectacles of health in a garden of steaming grime.

They walk the Flower and Dean, mouths stiff but smiling as cutthroats and pickpockets threaten the woman with rape. Slatterns with pickled brains emphatically offer the Anglican a variety of slick and tight delights, flipping their ragged skirts at the pass of his shadow to give him a glimpse of their puckered and pestilent holes.

This is their honeymoon.

Interview Transcript

CMR: Wow, yeah.

PDA: It’s racy.

CMR: Yeah, it’s yes, it’s just … grimy.

PDA: Yes, no it really is! I always forget sometimes when I read that part. I’m just like, That’s so… yucky. On various levels, you know what I mean? I’m like, yeah, ew!

CMR: Yeah, it reminds me, because you use like a lot of that kind of body horror, and that you do a lot of body horror in your work. And it kind of reminds me of the Rotting Man, I think it is.

PDA: The Rotting Man is in the story All the Hellish Cruelty of Heaven. Yeah, that that character is from that story. Yeah.

CMR: Yes, and you’ve got this real talent for creating very visceral but also a weirdly beautiful imagery at the same time. And there’s something about that, like the beauty and the grotesque. And then it’s great, because it kind of crosses that line into ‘no that is just revolting’, and then back again into oh, oh, that’s… *approving sound* Yeah, I love that about your prose. That’s one of the reasons I was excited to chat about it with you.

Paula D. Ashe on Body Horror

So how central is body horror to your work? And what drew you as a writer, to focus on the body as a site of horror in some of your stories?

PDA: it’s funny because somebody… there were a lot of people in the book first came out, a lot of folks were were saying… They were comparing it to David Cronenberg, which was super flattering to me because I love both Cronenbergs’ work at this point, but I grew up on, you know, Cronenberg the the elder, and so that was really flattering to me. I didn’t realize that what I was doing was body horror. It just kind of came natural to the way that I tell a story, and I didn’t… it never… I mean, again, like it didn’t strike me until the collection came out, and people started to respond to it, that’s what they were seeing, and that’s kind of what I was doing. I mean. I guess it’s central, because I think for me the reason why I feel so drawn to body horror… I feel drawn to body horror for several reasons.

One of them is I’m just not scared of supernatural stuff in literature. Just doesn’t often scare me. That’s not to say that I don’t like it, or that I think it’s not valid or anything like that. I just, as a writer, I don’t feel like – I don’t know, like that just doesn’t spark my imagination, for whatever the reason is, it just doesn’t, cause I think I think I know me as a writer, and I would use the supernatural as like a ghost in the machine kind of thing, like I would be like, Oh, I don’t know how to end this story, so I’ll just have some ghost show up. You know what I mean, because they can do, and so for me, to make it a challenge that I can tangle with creatively and intellectually, it has to be grounded in reality, and it has to be grounded in the body. So that’s part of it. It’s just so stupid. And again, it’s like, you say that I don’t write about supernatural stuff – I have, and I’m sure that I will in the future. But for this collection in particular, me and the editor, Shawn Thompson, talked a lot about the body horror aspect of it, and how it’s like you said after the the excerpt. It’s grimy. It’s meant to be. It’s a grimy kind of embodied focus.

I think also as far as my work goes, I choose a lot of body horror because I feel like as a marginalized subjects on a lot of different levels, that women are kind of conscripted to the body. Like that’s that whole binary, that duality thing, like you know, men have the intellect, and women have the body, and so I think just that kind of – not saying that that’s true. But just… A lot of my background is in a lot of feminist theory study, and I just think that’s really interesting. I’m familiar with the work of Julia Kristeva and Monique Wittig and all of these feminine theorists who talk a lot about the body and embodiment, and so that’s also a big part of it, too. I really am fascinated by Julia Kristeva’s work on objection, and how like you know, the body as the site of both life, but also death and decay. And you know the undeniable kind of corporeal reality of our bodies, that’s just really interesting to me. I like to play around with that. because I also just find bodies gross like, let’s just… I mean like, being an embodied subject, sometimes it’s gross, and that’s a side [of it that] I think – we have a lot of anxiety for people for a lot of reasons, and I think that my work kind of plays around with that as well.

CMR: Yeah, definitely, I think like that’s… the corporeality of the horror makes it so much harder to deny, as well. And you have to then face up to things like, not just mortality, but also changes that you can’t control within yourself and the outward expression of those changes. And that can be incredibly frightening on multiple levels, whether or not there’s a supernatural element to it, because the cause at that point is kind of by the by, it’s what’s actually physically happening to you that you have to reckon with, particularly if it’s irreversible, or it appears to be irreversible in the moment.

PDA: Sure.

CMR: I’m thinking about the one story that actually maybe stop reading for the longest time. I had to pause the whole collection because I couldn’t carry on [laughs] – was the Carcosa one. which is – for anyone who hasn’t read it – it’s told via email. So it’s kind of epistolary which I love.

PDA: It’s my favourite.

CMR: I love that form that’s really cool. You’ve got that that distance and the ability to tell that story through sections, but also just the concept of this drug that makes you mutilate yourself in a trance-like way. But, oh, my God, I was like No.

[laughter]

PDA: I’m sorry that you had that experience. But thank you so much for telling me that because that’s so flattering to me as a writer! I’m like Yes, yes, she was repulsed! Hooray!

CMR: Loved it. I think that one is probably the one that still haunts me from there [there = the collection].

PDA: Sure, sure. That one, that particular story messes with a lot of people, and I’m really proud of it, because that, like you were saying, that epistolary format is really hard to nail down. I know we’re talking about body horror, and we’re going to go too far off on a tangent, but it’s so hard, I think, to tell a story in that format well, and I’m just so blessed that worked. I’ll just I’ll leave it at that. But this so, Thank you. But glad that worked out.

CMR: Yeah, definitely. And I think, like that brings us on to the whole, to the other question that I had, which is about the weird fiction elements in your work, because it’s not just about the body horror. And I think there’s a lot more we can dig into with the body horror as well-

PDR: For sure.

CMR: But something that I found was also the uncanny nature of it, and that idea of your body changing, and something familiar becoming very unfamiliar. And that direct reference to The King in Yellow as well, which is the Robert Chambers King in Yellow, play kind of story, reference, playing about with Lovecraftian mythos. And I found there were quite a few other sort of classic Weird fic elements and tales in your work. And so there’s definitely a weird vibe with the uncanny nature of some of them.

Paula D. Ashe on Weird Fiction

So how and when did you get into weird fiction and did that naturally present itself as a vehicle for storytelling for you?

PDA: Yeah, that’s a great question. I don’t know how direct an answer I have for that one. I’ve always been into what in the nineties and early 2000s was called ‘horror/dark fantasy’ like that was its own kind of section. They were combined together, and then they kind of split apart for a bit. I think they’re coming back together for some folks, but for HDF, horror/dark fantasy, was just like my jam, that’s so much of what I read, and I particularly read a lot of Tanith Lee, and so from reading Tanith Lee that led me to… Um? I read a lot of Clive Barker and Tanith Lee and Caitlin R Kiernan, and Poppy Z. Brite, who, you know, currently known as Billy Martin, but used to write as Poppy Z. Brite, and I don’t know when I discovered Thomas Ligotti. It wasn’t… maybe 10 years ago?

But then I started reading it, and that was when, like, I started to recognize the Weird as the Weird, there was a kind of Weird resurgence, particularly in the United States, and we had, you know, writers like Olivia Llewellyn with Furnace, and you know we had, like Matt Cardin and Laird Barron and Matt Bartlett, and Victor LaValle came out with the Ballad of Black Tom, and I was just reading all these things, and just really like digging that that vibe, that uncanny strangeness, but also the philosophical implications.

One of my favorite books of all time is Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, and, like I read that book, and it just made me feel like, oh, like somebody gets it. You know what I mean like. Oh, somebody understands. It’s fine, I mean, obviously it’s kind of a cornerstone of cosmic pessimism, so it’s not the most chipper kind of perspective to have, and it’s certainly a – my perspective just has changed over time. It’s really becoming a parent has changed that for me in a lot of ways.

But you know, reading Ligotti, reading the work of Jon Padgett and reading… the magazine or the Journal of Vastarien… What else? There’s just so much of that stuff that that came out in that group.

You know. Early- to mid-noughts, I guess, was just really like — I just devoured all of that stuff because it seemed to Vibe with me in such a way that it was engaging intellectually to me, but it was also it went beyond just ghosts or vampires, or werewolves. It was the nature of reality and not itself, is malevolent or off. And I just found that to be really, really intriguing. And so I really like to play around with that in my own work, and I particularly like to play around with that in my own work, because I think it resonates in the sense of what they call now kind of like social horror. But I don’t know how much I like that phrase.

But I think if you are again part of any kind of marginalized, historically underrepresented, however you want to put it, you know, oppressed group, you know reality is not always safe for you, so fiction that represents that, that plays around with that, is really engaging for me. I think it also not laundry list of names, and you know, books and stuff.

I also forgot to mention, like, probably, one of the big cornerstones of my own kind of development as a writer was the work of Toni Morrison, who is not known as a horror writer, but her work is absolutely horrific, and it’s structure, and it’s intent, and it’s, you know, deployment. So that was also a big influence, particularly the book, her first novel, The Bluest Eye, which is a story about a young, very dark skinned Black girl in the fifties, who, because all of her life she’s been told that the white eurocentric standard of beauty is the— well, that is it, and because she doesn’t fit it, she is ugly, and she’s been treated horrifically her entire young life, because of that, and it’s one of those books that made me realize, like the perspective that a person has on the world, and where they fit into it, it’s not only influenced by their experiences. It’s also influenced by how the world perceives them as well. So if the world perceives you as a threat, then you’re going to see threats in the world, right? Because that’s like how people respond to you.

And so I just — I don’t know I kind of write. I try to write often from from that perspective I think it makes things more interesting. That was a really long answer. So. [laughs]

Paula D. Ashe on Fucked-Up Family Dynamics & Themes of Intersectional Socialization

CMR: no, yeah, that’s that makes a lot of sense as well like, and it reminded me of one of the stories I think you sent a link to in your newsletter (which everyone should sign up to, by the way, links will be in the transcript), which was a very disturbing kind of weird tale, which is the family dinner and some weird shape that appears between them, and then it kind of takes— and then it it just gets massively, wildly out of control. It didn’t go anywhere I thought it was going to go, but it kind of — yeah that kind of microcosm of threats, and the strange dynamics within a microcosm of a family which I love.

PDA: Yeah, yeah.

CMR: Yeah, so that just reminded me of that. And I was like, No, I can see it. I can see the influences in that story.

PDA: That’s cool that you say that because I never even thought about that. But I think you’re right with that particular story, because I do a lot of stuff on family dynamics and family, families that are fucked up like I — that’s just my — let’s be real. And but yeah, certainly for that one, I also like the idea of a threat that only certain people can see, because that just that creeps me out. You know what I mean like that’s just really upsetting to me. So yeah, I think that’s that’s a big part of it as well, the the threat being a thing that only certain people can see, for whatever reason, I can see how that has some parallels with social horror as well, and being part of a marginalized group, because in those cases, certain context, the threat is only something you can see. I mean that’s what a microaggression is, right. Like. It’s something that only certain people interpret rightfully as aggressive, discriminatory behavior.

CMR: Right.

PDA: But not everybody else sees it that way because it’s not attacking that part of their identity or whatever. So, yeah.

CMR: The more I think about that Thanksgiving story the more I want to go back and re-read it, and see, like, yeah. But also, fucked up families it as it as their own thing is, is a a really interesting theme to play around with, and you can get the microcosm of threat in those dynamics, in the way that different members of that family, and then how relative power dynamics play out. And you can show such a lot about society and such a lot of that anxiety and fear and change, and all of that stuff through that kind of — yeah, is that why you like to write about families or —?

PDA: I mean my therapist probably has a different answer the one I’m going to give, but I’m going to say, [laughs] no, I think it’s because — I mean, I think you’re right, it’s a microcosm, my background is also in sociology, I’m a sociologist, and so you know, I’m very big on socialization, and the processes of socialization, and how we learn how to be human in society, and how we teach people how to be human in society, and the biggest, you know, most powerful influence when it comes to socialization is the family. We learn everything about everything from the family. You cannot escape that, you know, for better or for worse, so those dynamics echo throughout your life. If they’re positive — and again, I’m not trying to say that people are like doomed or anything, but if they’re positive dynamics, then that’s good. You can build on that very strong foundation. But if they’re not, that’s where we — that’s where you know, a lot of trauma comes from, a lot of mental illness, and things like that can come from those sorts of things, and I just. I’m always intrigued by how much power families have and how family dynamics are so — I don’t know, prophetic in a way.

I mean again, I’m not trying to say — I know that people don’t like to hear, particularly for people who come from, you know, like abusive backgrounds, that you know, that’s all that they’ll ever be. That’s not what I’m saying, but what I’m saying is, it is difficult to view the world as a safe place when your first experience of the world was was one where you weren’t safe, right?

So that’s kind of the thing that I find really. really fascinating, and I come back to over and over again. And to be fair, I grew up in a relatively, in a comparatively safe household, I think, certainly less safe than some others, but I think it’s all kind of — you know, it all kind of just depends. But, for me, I think I was very acutely aware of that when I was young. I don’t know why, I just always have been kind of aware of that.

And I think one thing that I’ve also noticed, as I’ve, you know, like I’m a parent, is realizing how difficult it is to keep, you know, to protect your family, to protect yourself, to protect your children from like the forces outside of your home, whether it’s like, you know, economic chaos or social strife, or, you know, like even interpersonal stuff. But you have to compartmentalize that for your family, and that’s really hard, and it just makes me kind of think about how difficult it is to maintain those kinds of structures and keep all that stuff in place, you know, while at the same time, like being a productive number of society and all of that other stuff. So it’s a lot to deal with, I think.

CMR: Yeah, and I think — you kind of said, the generational cycles as well,

PDA: Yes, mm-hm.

CMR: I think that’s what you were alluding to there,

PDA: Yeah, yeah.

CMR: -They’re really, really hard to break out of, and it’s really hard to be a cycle-breaker,

PDA: Yes, for sure.

CMR: especially when you’re the first person to do that, and you have no kind of reference. You have no—

PDR: —You have no model. You’re just doing it all on your own, and it’s so easy to make those same mistakes. I think you start to realize that a lot of times people, you know, it’s because there’s no model. There’s no frame of reference, like you said, it’s so easy to go back on that, you know, those past generational traumas, because, it’s all, even if it’s terrible. It’s almost like it’s easier to do that, because it’s familiar, than it is to strike out into the unknown. So yeah, I think that’s a big part of it too, as well, I think, yeah.

CMR: yeah, and that kind of brings us interestingly back to body horror Doesn’t it?

PDA: It does!

Paula D. Ashe on the Interplay between Internal Suffering and Physical Deconstruction with Reference to Religious Horror

CMR: Cause like, yeah, families inscribe themselves on you in that kind of way. You can’t help but look like the people you’re related to you, you literally carry their DNA around, you literally embody them, and you embody that cycle, and there’s all sorts of yeah, studies on how trauma literally changes your DNA and changes your brain and all of that. And I was really interested, looking at your brand of body horror — I don’t know if you have a brand, but the kind of body horror that you like to write — and there seems to be a really strong connection, especially in the collection, between internal pain and physical deconstruction. And again, I’m thinking about the Carcosa story in particular. But yeah, just because that’s just in my brain like a brainworm.

PDA: [laughs]

CMR: But how do you see that relationship manifesting in your work and the connections between those two themes?

PDA: Between like, internal pain, and then —

CMR: Yeah, between internal pain and physical deconstruction, and how does that go together?

PDA: So okay. So I’m gonna try to think of how to explain this in a way that doesn’t make me sound like a complete lunatic. I probably disappointed you already. I mean, I think there’s certainly a connection there. I think so. I keep talking about ‘my background is in… blah blah blah’, and it sounds like I have like 17 different majors, but I studied a lot of stuff. I’ve been in school for quite some time. So another thing I studied was abnormal psychology, and I was really fascinated by that. And so I am really interested and intrigued by – there’s no way to talk about this without sounding weird, but this is the Eldritch Girl podcast, I’m guessing ‘weird’ is what people are here for, so!

CMR: Yeah…

PDA: I’m really fascinated by self mutilation. Whether it’s for religious reasons, whether it’s for what we might call pathological reasons, whether it’s, for, you know, I like to call it self-expression, whether it’s piercing or branding, or like the hooks that –? Like meathooks, basically?

CMR: Yeah yeah yeah, the hooks people like to hang themselves from, meathooks, yeah.

PDA: And I’m so fascinated by that and why people do that. (Also I have to have an aside and talk about, yes I am obsessed with Hellraiser, how did you know?) I’m really intrigued by that. I think that as somebody who was also raised in a very evangelical household, there’s so much — There’s a lot of physical suffering in Christian theology, right, like there’s just…. that’s just name of the game, and I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of transubstantiation and transformation, and then, like transfiguration, and how you can change yourself, like so kind of, I think kind of similarly to what what you were saying, CM, about the way that you carry your family in your body, like you wear the face of people who came before you that you’re related to. What if you don’t like that? What if you want to change it?

And so one of the ways you can do that is by — You know, what we would call mutilation of the face, or, you know, piercings or tattoos, or you know, branding or scoring, or what have you. And I’m always, I’m interested in that, because one, I think it’s a really fascinating way to look at expression and trying to break some generational curses or generational trauma. But then I also think it’s really interesting in a more spiritual sense, like you defining who you are, and also you having agency over your flesh in a way that you like, I can’t change my DNA, but if I look like somebody in my family, or you know, whatever the situation is, I can alter myself, you know I can alter myself physically. I can alter myself externally, and maybe I can’t change myself internally, but I can change.

I can alter myself externally, and if I get to see that in the mirror, and be reminded of myself, and my own choices, and my own power, rather than looking in the mirror and be reminded of the people who came before me, that can do something to help shift my perspective toward some kind of actualization of some sort, or some kind of like, you know, a sense of agency, some kind of sense of an internal locus of control.That’s the one thing I can control, right, I can control – to an extent – how I look. And I think for a lot of people, and I’ve studied a great deal — I have plans for a novel that plays around this idea, in a much kind of bigger way – uh-oh [laughs at CMR’s excitement while on mute] You’re like ye–eeessss. [laughs] Thank you, thank you so much.

CMR: Literally sitting here like yeee-ess. [laughter] Yesss, excellent.

PDA: Bless you, thank you so much. But, um, that plays around with these ideas of mutilation and apotheosis. Like I don’t know, I know it’s weird –

CMR: Yeah.

PDA: I can’t really explain it, I think in a linear way, because it’s not linear, it’s, you know, I mean at least particularly within, like the Christian faith, like that’s – you know, the way that salvation works, not the only way but one of the clear ways that we tend to celebrate is through suffering. And so I mean, I don’t know, that’s kind of what we’re given to work with in a lot of ways, and I think that’s really interesting.

CMR: Yes, yeah, definitely. I’m a medievalist. That’s my background. I was also raised in a a a Welsh Baptist context, via Greek Orthodoxy with a little bit of — [laughs] So I grew up partially on some of the Greek islands. So I, yeah. So I had quite a lot of the iconography of suffering. But also I find Greek Orthodoxy as much more also about the expression of joy. But it’s more the aesthetic of the small churches, the very gloomy, no natural light except candle light… And Papa Petros, who used to pick me up so I could like candles because I was too small, you know, like that. He was just this like pillar of black. I would look up, and there’d just be this black cloth and then a beard up there somewhere, so you know. And so I kind of remember those sorts of things. And then coming back into a coming back to the UK and growing up in the UK, in a very Welsh Baptist context, and hearing about that that emphasis on suffering and also personal suffering, and that the idea that Christ came to suffer and to be lonely and to be mortal and experience that, and I had that real kind of… that resonated a lot with me, I think.

But then, when I so studied medieval expressions of Christianity and medieval traditions, I think one of the things that I was thinking of as you were talking, there was a priest who was concerned that he didn’t really believe in transubstantiation. So he prayed to God to give him the kind of definitive answer. Is this the body of Christ? Am I to believe that these wafers [correction, should be bread not wafers at this stage] are literally You? And he had a dream. As you should do in all good —

PDA: Oh, sure

CMR: you know. So he had this dream about someone performing the Eucharist, and as he lifted the bread to bless it, it was a baby. And then he tore the baby apart.

PDA: [laughs like what the fuck]

CMR: Literally a literal, actual baby, in the dream, and that obviously was Christ, not as a man, but as an infant as the Incarnated. But and that’s so… that’s an incredible visceral… horrible image. I think that’s worse than actually, you know, cannibalizing an actual adult. It’s just lifting up a baby and tearing it.

PDA: Tearing it apart, yeah.

CMR: And then he was like, oh, you’re right, you know what transubstantiation? That’s fine.

PDA: I’m good! I got it! Thanks! I believe you! Hoo boy.

[Laugher]

CMR: Yeah, so the medieval relationship to suffering, a relationship to to bodily suffering and embodied suffering was kind of off the charts. But yeah, so that that made me think of that kind of embodied visceral image and religious imagery. Yeah. So I get that. So it’s —

PDA: Yeah, yeah.

CMR: So coming at it from a slightly different angle to to the spiritual angle of expressing yourself through —

PDA: No, but I think that that’s part [of it]. I mean it — I mean it’s certainly in the sense of like. you know, as far as the Western thought, that’s kind of a big, like the whole idea of bodily suffering that transforms, you know, the spiritual access to grace and salvation through bodily suffering with that, kind of undergirds everything. I mean, particularly like in the United States, you know, the influence of Puritanism, but that’s everywhere like that’s it. It’s everywhere. It’s in everything. That’s just it, you know? it’s everywhere, it’s in everything, and I’m trying to – I’m trying to – because you said you were a Medievalist, because I’m really interested in fascinated by the Convulsionnaires and the sex, in I think it’s fifteenth or sixteenth century France. They were basically like cenobites of that time period. But they were people, and they, and it was again for religious purposes, and they just did so much of the mortification of the flesh. Just reading about it… At first it sounded like just the normal, you know, “normal” flogging, and all that sort of stuff, then they just go into some really wild places that brings us to today, and kind of a lot of the extreme, more extreme body modification practices of today. it just seems like a thing that humans are really — pardon the pun, but it seems like a thing that humans are really hung up on, is that, that — you know, I’m this thinking meat, and it causes me some issues, so I’m going to hurt myself to try and like, transcend it or transform that or something. And I just think that’s — I don’t know it fascinates me that that’s such a common practice across cultures, a common practice across, you know, time periods. No matter how intellectual we get, we still… there’s some pockets of society that still come back to that over and over and over again. And yeah, I mean, I don’t think that necessarily consciously that’s in my work. But I think certainly that’s a big, that’s kind of what’s going on in the back of my head at a lot of times and in those kinds of stories that feature, those those kinds of acts, I think.

CMR: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I can’t wait to see what else you do with those sorts of themes. Like, novels, as well. That’s going to be delicious.

[laughter]

PDA: It’s going to be really awful. Like, I’m saying now, it’s gonna be… [disgusted noise] but you know it’s… but I appreciate that, and I think that’s one thing I kind of have to say, that this was not a question that you asked at all, but the reaction to the collection, for the most part, has been really like affirming, because I think a lot of people have these kinds of questions, or have these kinds of thoughts, or, you know, are intrigued by these sorts of things, and I think that knowing that is really like, oh, okay, that kind of — I don’t know, lets some of the pressure off, I think.

Before the book came out I was really nervous about it’s content, I mean, you know there’s a very long content warning at the beginning of the book, and I was like man. I don’t know, this might be too much for a lot of people, and if it is that’s fine. You know what, that’s okay.

I wasn’t so worried about that. I didn’t you know, not release the book. I didn’t change anything or calm down anything like that. But I think it’s affirming for me that that the book connected with so many people, even though it’s it’s pretty extreme, and it’s themes, and just in the the writing itself. So I have found that to be really lovely.

CMR: Yeah, I think that goes back to what you were saying, it’s like a universal thing that people kind of — you know, not everybody?

PDA: Sure, certainly.

CMR: But like, there’s perhaps a group of us.

PDA: Yes. A small group of us you are, you know, just into that sort of thing. Yeah.

CMR: Yeah! Even if we don’t do it to ourselves,

PDA: Correct.

CMR: it’s a cathartic way, I think, and a safe way of using fiction and expressing things through fiction, and like dealing with personal trauma and stuff,

PDA: Sure.

CMR: -through this kind of physical, this fictional depiction of physical suffering or physical changing or physical something. And I think that’s that is the allure of body horror, isn’t it, for a lot of people.

PDA: Yeah, yeah, I think you’re right. I mean it’s just like you said, it’s a safe way to, you know, to explore some of these anxiety that we have, and some of these, you know, experiences that we have as as human beings that we just can’t really articulate well. But you know we can present it in some kind of visualized way that that resonates, you know.

I was watching Possession a couple of weeks ago, and I’d never seen it before. I had never seen Possession with, you know, Sam Neill and Isabella Adjani. You know everybody talks about that scene where she’s in the the subway, and she’s, yeah. If you haven’t seen Possession, you have to. I think it’s on Shudder now. I don’t know if it’s on like, UK Shudder, but I know it was on Shudder in the US, and I was watching it, and it was just like, you know. Trying to explain to somebody what that movie is about is really, really difficult. But there are parts of that movie where I’m like. I get it exactly. I totally understand what that is meant to to represent. I’ve never done those things in real life, but I emotionally, I completely understand what these characters are going through. And that’s just really fascinating, the fascination with any kind of arts or creativity is that it can make sense on some level that you may not be able to, like, verbally or even textually articulate, but like you get it, it makes sense in some way. So.

What Next?

CMR: Yeah. I think that’s a good place to end it, because that’s all we’ve got time for at the minute. [Laughter] I wish [we could go longer]. But. Before we go, is there anything you would like to plug, anything you’ve got coming out this year [2023], anything you already have that you want to reiterate?

PDA: So I do have a story coming up in this collection called This World Belongs To Us, an anthology of horror stories about bugs. My story is about earwigs, because I think they’re so gross. Yeah, they just gross me out. That collection will drop, I believe, mid to late March, from From Beyond Press. It has a fantastic line up of writers. So please be on the lookout for that.

And then, yeah, I mean the best way to to stay in contact with me or just keep up with me is probably via Twitter. Sadly enough. I’m always on Twitter. But yeah, my twitter handle is just @PaulaDAshe. But yeah, so. But thank you so so very much CM, for having me. This has been a lovely conversation.

CMR: Yes, definitely! It would be lovely to have you back and we can talk more insects and body horror and gooey things!

PDA: Yeah!

[Laughter]

CMR: But thank you so much for coming on the show, it’s been fantastic to have you, and best of luck with everything that you’ve got going on.

PDA: Thanks so much, and to you as well.

[Outro: Waltz Primordial – Kevin McLeod]

Audio Release for Yelen & Yelena Chapter 20: A Mortal Ending

SEASON FINALE. Yelena, Yelen, and Velna must all come to terms with the situations they are in, and face some very difficult decisions.

CW: on page suicide, threatened execution, body horror.

Music Credits:

Kevin McLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Intro/Outro : Quinn’s Song: The Dance Begins

Soundtrack: Quinn’s Song – A New Man, Bittersweet, Leaving Home, Redletter, Morgana Rides, The Stages of Grief, Midnight Tale, Achaidh Cheide. SCP-x4x, Giant Wyrm.

GET THE COMPLETE AUDIOBOOK – narrative only.

Ko-Fi: £5.99 download: ko-fi.com/s/76d9e16243
Itch: £5.99 download: cmrosens.itch.io/yelen-yelena-audiobook

Itch.io Ultimate Bundle of eBooks and Audiobooks for £15.00: 
itch.io/s/153308/ultimate-bundle

Contents of the Ultimate Bundle:

Pagham-on-Sea
THE CROWS – audiobook narrated by the author
THE DAY WE ATE GRANDAD (eBook)
THE SUSSEX FRETSAW MASSACRE (eBook of the novella on its own)
THE RELUCTANT HUSBAND (eBook)
OVEREXPOSURE (eBook)
THE SOUND OF DARKNESS (eBook)
THE FOLKLORE OF PAGHAM-ON-SEA (vol. 1) (eBook)
THE SUSSEX FRETSAW MASSACRE AND OTHER STORIES (eBook and mp3 files: a collection of Ricky short stories, the novella included, plus audio files from the Eldritch Girl podcast bonus episodes of the novella, narrated by the author, in 3 parts to download and keep as mp3 files).

SFFH
THE SNOW CHILD (eBook)
YELEN & YELENA (eBook)
YELEN & YELENA (audiobook)

Share this:

• Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window)Bluesky
• Click to share on Threads (Opens in new window)Threads
• Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window)Mastodon
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)Tumblr
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)Pinterest
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)Reddit
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Facebook
• Click to share on X (Opens in new window)X

#eldritchGirl #Podcast #yelenAndYelena

Audio Release for Yelen & Yelena Chapter 19: The Embrace

In Chapter 19, the 15th episode of Series 04, Yelena confronts the Mortress and learns what she must do to save her world.

CWs: death, some depictions of bones and impalement.

Music Credits:

Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Intro/Outro: Quinn’s Song: The Dance Begins

Soundtrack: Gregorian Chant, Devastation & Revenge, Morgana Rides

Early access to the full episode and season finale – Chapter 20 – is available here on Ko-Fi:
ko-fi.com/s/91e2d4a4cc

GET THE COMPLETE AUDIOBOOK – narrative only.

Ko-Fi: £5.99 download: ko-fi.com/s/76d9e16243
Itch: £5.99 download: cmrosens.itch.io/yelen-yelena-audiobook

Itch.io Ultimate Bundle of eBooks and Audiobooks for £15.00: itch.io/s/153308/ultimate-bundle

Contents of the Ultimate Bundle:

Pagham-on-Sea
THE CROWS – audiobook narrated by the author
THE DAY WE ATE GRANDAD (eBook)
THE SUSSEX FRETSAW MASSACRE (eBook of the novella on its own)
THE RELUCTANT HUSBAND (eBook)
OVEREXPOSURE (eBook)
THE SOUND OF DARKNESS (eBook)
THE FOLKLORE OF PAGHAM-ON-SEA (vol. 1) (eBook)
THE SUSSEX FRETSAW MASSACRE AND OTHER STORIES (eBook and mp3 files: a collection of Ricky short stories, the novella included, plus audio files from the Eldritch Girl podcast bonus episodes of the novella, narrated by the author, in 3 parts to download and keep as mp3 files).

SFFH
THE SNOW CHILD (eBook)
YELEN & YELENA (eBook)
YELEN & YELENA (audiobook)

Share this:

• Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window)Bluesky
• Click to share on Threads (Opens in new window)Threads
• Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window)Mastodon
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)Tumblr
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)Pinterest
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)Reddit
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Facebook
• Click to share on X (Opens in new window)X

#eldritchGirl #Podcast #yelenAndYelena

Audio Release for Yelen & Yelena Chapter 18: Meeting the Mortress

In this chapter … things go downhill. But not, we hope, for the lovely indie (and trad) authors who have a shout out at the end of the episode! Head over to cmrosens.com to check out my 2025 Author Spotlights and you’ll find a whole host of books awaiting you.

Don’t forget to support the podcast on Ko-Fi!

CWs: loss of bodily autonomy, violence

Music Credits:

Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Intro/Outro: Quinn’s Song: The Dance Begins

Soundtrack: Devastation and Revenge, Final Count, The Stages of Grief, Gregorian Chant, Morgana Rides

Spooky Conference Season

Designing the Mortress’s realm and the worldbuilding I did around this for Yelen & Yelena inspired a workshop that I delivered online in 2024. This was the Designing a Hellscape – Worldbuilding Workshop at the last Romancing the Gothic conference in 2024, Devils & Justified Sinners, which commemorated the 200th anniversary of the publication of James Hogg’s novel, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

My workshop kicked off the 2-day online event, and was entitled: ‘Create a Hellscape: Using Theology in World-Building’.

These are annual events, and the 2025 conference has just been announced!

This year it is celebrating 100 years since the publication of M.R. James’s A Warning to the Curious, and the 2-day online conference will be focused not just on this book, but on ghosts and the supernatural in fiction more generally. There will be an author panel with Nghi Vo, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Suzan Palumbo, so if you want to hear them talking about modern supernatural short fiction, get your Early Bird ticket now!

Dr Sam Hirst: “THE BIG REVEAL! You can now buy tickets for our 2025 online conference ‘A Warning to the Curious: Celebrating 100 years of M R James ‘A Warning to the Curious’ Talks! Workshops! Events! Author roundtable with NGHI VO, SILVIA MORENO-GARCIA and SUZAN PALUMBO! buytickets.at/romancingthe…” — Bluesky

Romancing the Gothic presents its fifth annual online conference over two days – 23rd and 24th August. The conference celebrates 100 years of M. R. James’ A Warning to the Curious and Other Stories with a series of talks, events, workshops, live readings and an author round table with Nghi Vo, Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Suzan Palumbo.

The conference is designed to cover different timezones so the days are long. People are recommended to come for as long as they want. The talks and sessions are recorded so that you don’t miss anything even if you can’t be there in person for specific times/sessions.

Early Bird Tickets, Concessions and Free Tickets

There will be early bird discounts on tickets until 30th June 2025. Concession tickets are for students, the unwaged, retired people or anyone whose economic situation makes it necessary. We also offer a limited number of free tickets for those who cannot pay the ticket price, please email [email protected] for more information. You can donate a ticket for those who are unable to afford to come.

Accessibility

We have live auto-generated captions. We provide slides and, where possible, scripts before the conference with alt-text for images. We have regular breaks and encourage people to take part in ways that are most comfortable for them. There is no forced participation.

If you have any accessibility needs, please get in touch at [email protected] and I will do my best to make sure these accommodations are provided.

PROGRAMME

Saturday 23rd August

10.00AM – 10.30AM – Introductions

10.30AM – 11.30AM – Panel 1 – Jamesian Architecture (panel chair: Brontë Schiltz)

Octavia Cade – Opposite Architectures: The Jamesian Well as Inverted Lighthouse

Helen Grant – Stained Glass and ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’

11.30AM – 11.45AM – BREAK

11.45AM – 12.45PM – Keynote – Darryl Jones – A Warning to the Curious: ‘flying Time and all it had taken out of my life’

12.45PM – 1.00PM – BREAK

1.00PM – 2.30PM – Writing Workshop – Mimi Manyin – ‘Summoning the Ghosts in Haunted Objects: A Study of MR James’ Ghost Stories and Crafting Cautionary Tales’

2.30PM – 3.15PM – LUNCH

3.15PM – 5.05PM – Panel 2 – Archives and Archaeology (Panel chair: Rebecca Stone Gordon)

Amy Leblanc – Think about what you don’t get to see: Ghosts, Archives, and Images in Leanne Shapton’s Guestbook: Ghost Stories

Susan Maxwell – A Catalogue of Terrors: Archives, Fiction, and Archival Fiction

Mark P. Williams – Excavating the ()ole Complex: Re-reading M. R. James via Reza Negarestani; Or Chthonic Modernism of ‘Count Magnus’, ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’ and ‘Mister Humphreys and His inheritance’

Tracy Hayes – Codicology releases Demons – The Antiquarian Gothic

5.05PM – 5.15PM – BREAK

5.15PM – 7.00PM – Panel 3 – Victorian and Edwardian Ghost Writers (Han O’Flanagan)

John Hartley – Streamlined with the spears of mysterious forces: anthologies of ghostly, supernatural and weird short fiction in the 1920s and 1930s

Stefanie Tegeler – Antiquarians in Frankenstein’s Footsteps? Reading M. R. James’s Characters as Gothic Mad Scientists

Kellie Miller – The Specter Speaks – the channeling of Feminine Voices in Victorian Ghost Narratives

Sontje Schulenburg – Overshadowed by M. R. James: The Supernatural Fiction of Eleanor Scott

7.00PM – 7.15PM – BREAK

7.15PM – 8.45PM – Panel 4 – Haunting Obligations: Political Ghost Stories (Panel Chair: Wade Newhouse)

Corinne Anderson – “She saw herself domesticated with the Horror”: a Comparative Analysis of Andrea Dworkin’s Right Wing Women and Edith Wharton’s “Afterward”

Beth Kusko – “Alone and Afraid: Hannah Arendt’s Understanding of Loneliness in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House”

Wade Newhouse – “Seeing Dead People: Haunted Spectatorship in Ghost Story and A Ghost Story”

8.45PM – 9.00PM – BREAK
9.00PM – 10.00PM – Cocktail and Mocktail hour with Julia O’Connell (original recipes inspired by M R James stories!)

Sunday 24th August

9.45AM – 10.00AM – Introductions

10.00AM – 11.00AM – Panel 5 – The History Behind the Tale (Panel Chair: Kasey Waite)

Lukasz Haydrych – The dead speak?! The fear of wraiths in early modern Poland

Lily Bentley – Ghosts in the Courtroom: M. R. James’ ‘Martin’s Close’ and supernatural justice in Early Modern England

11.00AM – 11.15AM – BREAK

11.15AM – 12.15PM – Keynote – Zoë Lehmann Imfeld

12.15PM – 12.30PM – BREAK

12.30PM – 2.00PM – Panel 6 – Language and the Ghostly (Panel Chair: Julie Larson)

Jenny Amos – I seen it wive at me: an exploration of dialect representations in M R James’ Suffolk characters

Susan Vanderborg – Porpentine’s Ghosts: Kenning the Bodies, Exhuming the Poems

David Oakey – A corpus-assisted exploration of reticence in The Collected Ghost Stories of M R James

2.00PM – 3.00PM – LUNCH

3.00PM – 4.45PM – Panel 7 – Sound and Senses (Panel Chair: Evan Hayles Gledhill)

Kendra Leonard – Sound and Music in M. R. James’ Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

Jamie Stephenson – ‘A Dead Man’s Eyes’: Rethinking Gendered Tropes of Grammar in the Jamesian Weird Through Sound

Eptisum Laskar – Horror of the Mind, Horror of the Stomach: A Comparative Study of Supernatural Hunger in M. R. James and Bengali Ghost Stories

Allie Pino – You’ve Blown it Now: Who is This Who’s Coming?

4.45PM – 5.00PM – BREAK

5.00PM – 6.15PM – Workshop – ABS – (Title TBC: Theme – Exploring the Weird: Psycho-geographical exploration)

6.15PM – 6.30PM – BREAK

6.30PM – 7.30PM – Author Panel – Supernatural Short Fiction Today

Confirmed Guests: Suzan Palumbo, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Nghi Vo

7.30PM – 8.00PM – BREAK and Final Discussion

8.00PM – 9.00PM – Live Dramatic Readings of M R James with Robert Lloyd Parry

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7PqYPBheidcS9BDC3WDDOLb81tEeFQfg

Share this:

• Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window)Bluesky
• Click to share on Threads (Opens in new window)Threads
• Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window)Mastodon
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)Tumblr
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)Pinterest
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)Reddit
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Facebook
• Click to share on X (Opens in new window)X

#eldritchGirl #eldritchGirlPodcast #Podcast #yelenAndYelena

Audio Release for Yelen & Yelena Chapter 15: A New Arrival

Velna arrives in the castle and meets the monster of the fireside tales, but is she the same woman Yelena knew? Stick around for my Indie Author Spotlights and shout-outs at the end, and head to cmrosens.com/author-spotlight-series to check them all out!

CWs: Loss of agency and autonomy, depression themes – these increase from this chapter onwards.

Music Credits:

Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Intro/Outro: Quinn’s Song: The Dance Begins

Soundtrack: Morgana Rides

Velna Arrives

Being a vessel is not outright possession, it takes a while, and I’m going to play with this vessel idea in later Gothick Fantasia stories, and also introduce a similar concept into the Pagham-on-Sea stories when I get around to writing the Egg and Gwen Mysteries (a spin-off historical fiction series set from WWI through to WWII, and possibly into the early 1950s, before Fairwood House is cursed in 1958).

This is the chapter where you start to see Velna’s possession a little bit, not just in her, but in the way Yelen reacts to her, and little hints in the way she reacts to her surroundings. He’s not very friendly, and his instinct is to retreat into a game with Yelena, while being openly hostile to Velna because he thinks initially she didn’t help when Yelena was ejected from the village.

Some of this is reflecting the way he reacted to Yelena at the start as well, and the fact he’s currently irritable and depressed, and not responding well to his home being invaded again by the outside world.

The cruel Yelen will come out more, the longer Velna-as-vessel stays in close proximity to him, and he has to wrestle with that.

I think the more you see of Yelen’s latent cruelty, the clearer it becomes that if he does transform back into a man at any point, that would mean he’s basically lost the battle to be better.

Enjoy Chapter 15: A New Arrival, in the meantime! If you want to get early access to the next chapters, join one of my Ko-Fi memberships.

#eldritchGirl #Podcast #yelenAndYelena

Audio Release for Yelen & Yelena Chapter 14: Dark Snows

Part 3: The Rot

Velna flees the village after a single act of defiance brings the soldiers down on them, but what is waiting in the forest is worse… Stick around to the end as Worldbuilding Part 3 is at the end of this chapter, and I talk about how I went about constructing my fantasy religions for this novel.

I’ve included the transcript for the Worldbuilding section below in this post.

CWs: eviction, animal death (an owl), mycelial body horror, fear of drowning/freezing to death.

Music Credits:

Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Intro/Outro: Quinn’s Song: The Dance Begins

Soundtrack: SCP-x6x, Giant Wyrm

Worldbuilding (3)

I think when I was trying to come up with fantasy religions and fantasy aspects and spirits and stuff, I think I came up with Yarash first, who has absolutely no role in the book whatsoever now, but that’s just how it goes, isn’t it.

I was playing with ideas to work out — (well apart from literally just now, that’s the only time you see [Yarash], I think). I was playing with ideas to work out how a fantasy religion would have developed, so I ended up doing a tumblr post on this, or a couple of tumblr posts on this, which went my closest to viral on tumblr that I’ve got. Basically, I was talking to my husband about this idea of a god with a necromancy cult and the cults are driven off into the wasteland or something. And that’s how Yarash becomes the spirit of midwinter. And he was like, yeah, that’s not how religions work, though, is it?

And he was right. Religions are not based on a single static event and beliefs. Folk beliefs are not really based on single static events, even though they may claim that they are. A religion is a moving vehicle of many parts and layers, and it’s also a living, breathing thing that changes and shifts over time.

So what sounds more real than some necromancy cult is, OK, a god whose followers wanted to raise the dead at midwinter festivals, right? And they couldn’t do it. So they used puppets instead as representative of the dead. And then as magic progressed, they actually did manage to make the dead reanimate for short periods. And now you have your first major splintering of the adherents of this religion, and a rupture between the conservatives who say puppetry is the only right way to do these rituals because that’s traditional, versus the newer group who say that necromancy was the intention behind the puppets. So therefore you should now switch to necromancy.

And the two factions fight about this internally for a while, probably forever, but it comes down to who is holding secular power at that time, and what they think of the necromancy magic.

So if you have a ruler of some kind who sees the value in necromancy, you’re going to see that religious faction rising above the puppetry one. And this is where you’ll get discourse.

In this case, let’s call it the ‘Old Bones’ discourse, where the puppets are referred to as the Old Bones, the traditional way to conduct these rituals.

And when popular opinion or the political climate shifts, you may see a suppression of necromancy and an uplifting of the puppets as the only true
way to do these rituals. And necromancy might even be banned for a time. But this is like a seesaw, right? It goes back and forth until things settle down. Maybe necromancy is normalised now in other parts of society. And so the rituals go back to puppets to differentiate the religious rites from the more mundane uses of necromancy or the more political uses of necromancy.

And you’ll find signs for like chiropractors having a sign of a puppet hanging over the door because the puppets represent the old bones, and that’s now blended with modern popular understanding, and so you end up with these festivals perhaps divorced completely from their original religious ritual, and maybe nobody even really believes in this god anymore, but they still have puppets as a traditional part of a midwinter festival.

And that’s how you get puppets in midwinter.

And also, that’s where necromancy comes from.

But your protagonist may not know any of that history at all. Because how many people actually know the ins and outs without misinformation, without bits and pieces of folklore getting… mangled horribly and mixed up with mainstream religious ideas?

How many people actually know actual Medieval Christian theology, for example, around the 12 days of Christmas?

How many average people on the street know you know can name 10 saints days in the Christian calendar? If you’re in a Catholic country, or an Orthodox country, yeah I reckon people could do that. If you’re in a different country where things have gotten divorced from their original context, how many people could actually do that, even if they say that they’re a Christian, they come from a Christian background; maybe they’re a lapsed Catholic or something….?

So does your protagonist have any kind of understanding of that?

But you need to know that because it’s just more interesting if you’re going to write about somebody having faith and somebody not having faith you know,
you need to know the ins and outs of it.

Anyway, I think that feels more real and dynamic as a faith system, so you can start to hang other things off it.

And that’s how I approach myth-making. It’s not the only way, it’s not the “right” way, I’m just saying that’s how I approach it, and I always try to represent different levels of faith in these fantasy scenarios, and have different angles on it so that I can kind of make it feel a bit deeper, a bit richer, and a bit more realistic.

So Yelena is incredibly pious and very faithful to her chosen spirit, but she’s not thinking about the afterlife. She’s very focused on finding joy in the here and now. So she picks a spirit that is all about that, and all about finding pleasure and all about giving pleasure to other people, crucially, because Erish is about mutual giving and receiving of things. Not just giving and receiving of orgasm, but giving and receiving of pleasure.

And yes, pleasure is a euphemism in this case for orgasm or for sex in the fantasy culture that I’ve created, or in Yelena’s culture specifically, because there are people who pass through that hostelry who wouldn’t know what Erish worship was. And people in Northport probably don’t know what Erish worship is. Like the sailors, they have no idea that that’s what she’s doing, you know, because they’re all about their pleasure, and they have very firm ideas about what their pleasure entails.

But for Yelena, like, Velna is basically a pillow princess. So she’s not reciprocating. She doesn’t particularly like that, I don’t think. But Yelena gets pleasure in making Velna come, right, so she enjoys that aspect, and so therefore the giving and receiving of pleasure is mutual, she’s just getting that mutual pleasure in a different way. Just because she doesn’t have an orgasm every time doesn’t mean that she isn’t engaging in Erish worship, right, so that’s that’s the whole thing about Erish.

Velna isn’t religious, doesn’t believe in a lot of things, and then has this really disturbing experience in the woods. And not to victim blame with Velna, but I think her agnosticism about spirits has really tripped her up here, because she doesn’t have as strong a faith in something like Yelena does. And so there’s nothing out there to listen to her to begin with. There’s nobody out there who knows her. And so the prayer goes to literally whoever is listening to be ignored, or not, as they please. And so that has knock -on consequences.

Whereas Yelena’s devotion to Erish also has some knock-on consequences, but in slightly different ways.

And so those are kind of elements that I’m playing with, that I’m kind of leaving up to you to intuit, and, you know, like play with in your own kind of… way as readers, I guess, and to think about. And so these are elements of fantasy religion building that I just thought I’d share with you for now, for this chapter, and I’ll save the rest for another time.

If you do want to know anything specific just reach out to me on Bluesky or message me on Ko-Fi; let me know. Drop a comment on cmrosens.com and let me know if there’s anything that you’d like me to maybe write a longer blog post about, or do a special episode on.

In the meantime, you know the drill.
Drop me a tip!
Buy the book!
Join my Ko -Fi!

Don’t forget to check out my author spotlight series and find more amazing books to read by other amazing authors.

See you next time! Bye for now.

Share this:

• Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window)Bluesky
• Click to share on Threads (Opens in new window)Threads
• Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window)Mastodon
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)Tumblr
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)Pinterest
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)Reddit
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Facebook
• Click to share on X (Opens in new window)X

#eldritchGirl #Podcast #yelenAndYelena

Audio Release for Yelen & Yelena Chapter 13: Wind and Water

Chapter 13: Wind and Water

Yelen and Yelena head down to the dungeons and the underground spring to do some blood letting, and Yelen begins to accept personal responsibility for his past. Stick around to the end of this shorter chapter for some behind-the-scenes worldbuilding chat, where I discuss my influences and how I used folklore and Beauty and the Beast adaptations to help shape the world and the characters.

CWs: Depression, and suicide ideation more pronounced here. Blood-letting with antique medical equipment.

Needle/injection description begins at 08:29 – jump to 09:00 to avoid the description of the injection itself.

There is conversation and some character notes from 09:00 while the blood-letting takes place (it’s painful).

This whole sequence from needle in to taken out runs from 08:29–10:00. After 10:00 there is mention of wound cleaning.

Music Credits:

Kevin McLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Quinn’s Song: The Dance Begins

Bittersweet

Quinn’s Song: A New Man

Transcript for Worldbuilding Chat:

00:19:53.200 –> 00:29:08.420
This is a shorter one again, and I wanted to leave it there because we’re now going into part three, The Rot, with chapters 14 to 20. But also I thought I could do world building part two on the end of this shorter episode.

I’m going to talk about some influences for this and also some of the folklore that I used while I was worldbuilding.

So one of the most fun things about the worldbuilding was riffing off the Beauty and the Beast story, where Belle’s father is a merchant who falls on hard times and Belle’s sisters want silks and expensive gifts when he gets back from his latest venture that’s going to turn his fortunes around. But all Belle wants is a rose. One of my favourite live-action versions is the 2014 version with Vincent Cassell as the Beast and Lea… Seydoux, I think I said that right, as Belle, directed by Christophe Gans.

In that one she falls in love with him through her dreams of seeing him interacting with his late wife, which is gorgeously French, and she literally just has these dreams of him as a man, and he’s married to the love of his life and she sees them interacting and she’s like yes that is the man that I want to marry myself when she dies.

And then like, when… she’s awake she denies that she cares about him because he’s a beast and he’s also very annoying, very grumpy, and then he lands on top of her during a chase scene and they nearly kiss but they fall through the ice or something like that and then there’s a lot of fantasy elements…

And it’s a lot of fun but there’s also a lot more time given to the family back home and the father’s debts and the consequences and there’s all of these shady gamblers and debtors going on and ruffians and it’s it’s just – oh yeah I just really liked it as a as a film because there’s quite a lot of influence here.

And I wanted to switch it up a bit and have my protagonist already on Hard Times. And I took the merchant idea and I was like, what if it’s a world where merchants run everything? And so it would make sense if my protagonist is not part of that class at all. And I did kind of toy with the idea of making her father a merchant who is now not a merchant. But I kind of like the fact that he never ever got to be and so that shapes Yelena in a different way to a way, you know, where she potentially thought she’s owed something or she feels like she should be part of that class but she isn’t. I kind of wanted her to be completely separated from it and have to sort her own life out and have very little agency and be very aware of the agency that she doesn’t have.

So I knew that was the situation I wanted her to be in and I built that world for her to be at the bottom of the pecking order.

I didn’t know anything about her really but I wanted to kind of see how the world would shape her, how the situation would shape her. And also it’s very difficult to build a Belle character that isn’t like a shell of a person from all of the other stories. So I wanted to make her kind of her own person.

And I also used the Disney animation version. So the songs about Belle being from a poor provincial town as my setting inspiration. I grew up in a very small place, which is not really a town. It’s in the countryside. I couldn’t wait to leave it. And I ended up basically back there as an adult for the longest time. And I know a few people who left and then deliberately came back because they love it so much. And they have many ties to it. And they literally can’t imagine living anywhere else because they love it. Like they go away for university. They go far away. They go to London. They go to like, other cities. They try life out somewhere else. And it’s just not for them. And they come back.

And that’s what I wanted. I wanted to kind of honour that story of someone who loves their village, loves their community, loves all the memories they’ve made there, and then they have it taken away from them piece by piece until there’s nobody left And everyone who is left is so busy fighting for their own survival there that they’ll turn on each other. And it’s kind of like this deconstruction of a community that’s just had its heart and soul ripped out of it, just because everybody’s moved away. A lot of Yelena’s family are all dead. That’s just part of my story and it’s part of communities that I know.

And so I put all of that in there as well because I kind of don’t like the… naivety, I suppose, of oh it’s a poor provincial town and I’m too good for it, and I don’t want to be part of it, and they’re all really narrow-minded here, and they’re all selfish, and they’re all… you know. It’s just such a stereotype and I know that there are also small towns like that, but I don’t know, man. I think a community is what you make it, you know.

And I kind of liked the idea of there being a community there that was worth going back to. And so that was Yelena’s story. And I deliberately didn’t want her to be conventionally beautiful either, because I really don’t see the point of that. And I also deliberately didn’t want Yelen to be a Disney prince, even if he changed back. Because again, I don’t see the point of that either. And I thought, you know, if he changes back, he’s going to be a fat man in his 50s. not some ripped angelic looking 18 year old. And I really like that. So it’s an age gap thing, even if he hadn’t been cursed for 200 years. And I quite like that too.

So that’s why Yelena then became a laundress and a sex worker for fun and profit in her 30s. So she’s still quite young, but she’s also not a kid who doesn’t know the world. She’s had time to build up some adult life experiences. She’s
been beyond the village and come back. And she’s a much better match for Yelen as he is now than a younger girl would be, so…

As for the aesthetics of it, I think a lot of that are influenced by the disney animation which I think sparked my love of the Gothic as a small child, and also of course Jean Cocteau’s 1946 version which I really love, but a lot of the village itself and village life comes from Juraj Hertz’s 1978 Czech New Wave production Panna a Netvor, The Maiden and the Monster or Beauty and the Beast and that’s the one where the beast has a bird head and is a kind of half man half bird and is really weird like I really love that I think that’s probably my favourite film. So that’s where a lot of world building came from and I built it from there.

The Butterfly as souls is a piece of real world folklore. In Ireland, white butterflies were thought to be the souls of departed [or unbaptised] children,
which is where I think I heard it first, and I couldn’t remember the source for it so I looked it up, and it’s everywhere. So, I didn’t know that there are butterfly legends in Mexico as well. It’s an indigenous Mexican myth about butterflies
being the souls of the dead but I haven’t really looked into that, and also it’s in Japan too, and I thought that was really cool so I thought okay. I stuck with it as a piece of folklore because of the European folklore connection, the Irish connection, I kept that in.

The wind was just a random thought because of the way we anthropomorphise the winds and the way the wind is described as having a voice, it whispers, it screams, it cries. So I thought it would be good to give it an actual stream of voices to carry and make it part of the fantasy afterlife and weave it into folk belief and religion. And I thought maybe city people can’t hear those voices because they’re no longer attuned to them. And the provinces are still one of the only places that you can hear the dead voices on the wind properly above the noise of life or what the industrial life and urban life has become. And that might be really fun to explore if I do anything more in this world where the wind could be used to differentiate the city from the country.

I have mentioned As Below, So Above before, and that also takes place in a rural setting, and it’s all set in an alchemy tower. So I won’t be exploring the wind concept there, I don’t think, but we’ll see.

So I thought it would also be nice to have the water carrying something too, and for there to be debate about it. So that kind of… balanced out the wind, I thought we also need something else that’s more kind of grounded, and again water is often anthropomorphized as babbling, chattering, laughing, especially in mid-20th century children’s books that were read to me as a child. Like, the laughing brook, the laughing stream… and I think I just internalized that because that’s what I instinctively think of as an adjective. I think of like, you
know, The Laughing Stream or something, so it made sense to have the water be the laughing element that balances out the bad news of the air.

So I think that’s what I was going for, and that’s sort of how my process went and some influences that got me thinking about the layers I was going to build on, and where some of those ideas began.

I had a lot of fun building up my fantasy religions, as you might have noticed, and the legends in particular, so I may talk more about that in future episodes, but for now. I will leave it there and see you next time. Bye for now.

Share this:

• Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window)Bluesky
• Click to share on Threads (Opens in new window)Threads
• Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window)Mastodon
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)Tumblr
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)Pinterest
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)Reddit
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Facebook
• Click to share on X (Opens in new window)X

#beautyAndTheBeast #beautyAndTheBeastFilms #eldritchGirl #fairyTaleRetelling #fantasy #folklore #Podcast #worldbuilding #yelenAndYelena

PODCAST INTERVIEW - meet @authoreanoble and listen to us chatting about worldbuilding and all sorts! Transcript available in full here. #Worldbuilding #AuthorInterview #EldritchGirl #FantasyBooks

https://cmrosens.com/2025/03/17/worldbuilding-craft-chat-with-multi-genre-author-e-a-noble-on-the-eldritch-girl-podcast/

Ep 04 is up! In this post I talk about my influences on these chapters a bit more, which includes Nicholas Stuart Grey, and his 1961 play Beauty and the Beast! #Podcast #FantasyBooks #EldritchGirl #YelenAndYelena

https://cmrosens.com/2025/03/12/eldritch-girl-s04-yelen-yelena-episode-04-chapters-5-6/