Interviews
by Vianne Venter
I first heard of phookas when I was a child, watching the Jimmy Stewart movie, Harvey, about a giant playful and invisible phooka. When I read about the phooka of lore, though, I learned it is a darker creature. Though it has a borderline malevolent personality, I wondered what would happen if pushed to the edge. |
Issue 20 (Apr 2012) |
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Posted in Interviews | 
Tags: C.S. Fuqua, Interview, Issue 20, Vianne Venter, Writers Cornered | 
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by Vianne Venter
In my hometown there was an apocalypse. The mills all closed, the work moved elsewhere. People lost their jobs, their homes. Neighborhoods that had once been filled with working families became centers of poverty and drug abuse. People took jobs making less money than they had ever made, (and they were the lucky ones), many more went on public assistance and pride, both personal and civic, crumbled. The neighborhood I described is the neighborhood in which I grew up.. |
Issue 20 (Apr 2012) |
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Posted in Interviews | Tags: Angel Propps, Interview, Issue 20, Vianne Venter, Writers Cornered | Comments Closed
interview by Vianne Venter
This story came out of a love of Lovecraft and Arthur Machen -- especially Machen, in this case. Machen's stories and novels are some of the most wonderful and terrifying out there, I think, but one thing that bothers me in some of them is a sense of female characters as both victims and objects of horror. I wanted to write a story that both paid homage to everything I love about Machen and addressed or turned the tables on this issue a bit. The story also came out of a lot of broader thinking I'd been doing about love and relationships. |
Issue 19 (Mar 2012) |
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Posted in Interviews | Tags: Interview, Issue 19, Nick Scorza, Vianne Venter, Writers Cornered | Comments Closed
by Joe Vaz
Many, many years ago Brandon Auret and I spent most of our days studying drama at Pretoria University of Technology, and most of our nights either rehearsing for plays, performing them or playing guitar and singing covers in bars and restaurants all over Pretoria, sometimes getting paid in pizzas and beer. Hey, what else did we need? |
Issue 19 (Mar 2012) |
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Posted in Interviews, Non-Fiction, Podcasts | Tags: Brandon Auret, Interview, Issue 19, Joe Vaz | 1 Comment »
interview by Vianne Venter
In my first attempt at the story, she wasn't blind. That was okay, I suppose, but I'm always looking for ways to push the stories and ideas just a bit further. There have been an uncountable number of horror stories about a pretty young woman being menaced by a murderous nutjob. You've read it, I've read it, so what's the point in rehashing it? Quite why I settled on her being blind as opposed to anything else, I don't remember now. It made her stand out a little more, gave the story some of the energy I needed to push through it. |
Issue 19 (Mar 2012) |
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Posted in Interviews | Tags: Interview, Issue 19, Peter Damien, Vianne Venter, Writers Cornered | Comments Closed
interview by Vianne Venter
I’m not sure what I believe. I like to think that when we die it is however we think it will be. |
Issue 19 (Mar 2012) |
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Posted in Interviews | Tags: Chris Stevens, Interview, Issue 19, Vianne Venter, Writers Cornered | Comments Closed
interview by Vianne Venter
I think we have it in us, but we have a fair amount of growing up to do first. It would take a concerted, worldwide effort to do so, and we’d need motivation everyone could get behind. In the short term, I don’t know that we could do it out of sheer curiosity or a drive to explore, but a threat to the species might be enough to scare us all into line. |
Issue 19 (Mar 2012) |
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Posted in Interviews | Tags: Interview, Issue 19, RWW Greene, Vianne Venter, Writers Cornered | Comments Closed
interview by Vianne Venter
I was stuck for an hour or two in this really old train station in the middle of nowhere, and had the misfortune of needing to use the bathroom. They were in a little concrete hut. The smell was so bad I couldn't breathe and I had to tip toe in and out because the place was flooded with murky liquid. When I went in, the attendant, who looked at least 80, was mopping up. Only he wasn't doing much more than smudging the dirt around. |
From Issue 18 (Feb 2012) |
Posted in Interviews | Tags: David McCool, Interview, Issue 18, Vianne Venter, Writers Cornered | Comments Closed
interview by Joe Vaz
I always try to remember that the characters in the book should be fully embedded in the future and in the world they’re living in, so for them, what we would regard as amazing technologies are completely prosaic and mundane. They’re not going to be knocked out by some gadget. A spacecraft for them is just a means of getting from A to B and they don’t particularly care how it functions. I try not to get into those boring discussions that you get in bad science fiction about how the engine works… unless it’s central to the story, that’s different. |
From Issue 18 (Feb 2012) |
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interview by Vianne Venter
Watching a news report on 'corrective rape' that outraged me. Although it's seemingly only a small part of the story, it's a central kernel. Other stories spun outwards from that one - and especially once I'd heard MamBhele's voice, while walking along a path in the Silvermine reserve in Cape Town - then, it almost wrote itself. |
Issue 18 (Feb 2012) |
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Posted in Interviews | Tags: Interview, Issue 18, Nick Wood, Vianne Venter, Writers Cornered | Comments Closed