Posts Tagged ‘Writers Cornered’
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) |
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) |
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) |
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) |
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) |
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) |
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) |
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) |
interview by Vianne Venter
Like a lot of my stories, this one showed up one morning as a fully-formed image: of a man in overalls disintegrating as he’s shuffling down the street. Figuring out who that man was and what was happening to him created the story. |
Issue 18 (Feb 2012) |
interview by Vianne Venter
I’ve worked in three different research labs with rats, mice, pigeons and monkeys. Since quitting that line of work, I’ve done the proverbial one-eighty and am now an animal rights advocate. |
Issue 18 (Feb 2012) |