Uncanny magazine issue 6.., p.17
Uncanny Magazine Issue 60, page 17
She lay face up, like a lioness sleeping,
surf clams resting over raven eyes,
her long tail, fishtail braids of spun glass.
© 2024 Mikal Wix
Mikal Wix is a queer writer from Miami, Florida, where many things go to unravel but end up in knots. Their writing has appeared in journals, such as North American Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, Moss Puppy, Door = Jar, Portland Review, and Gone Lawn. They serve as poetry editor for West Trade Review. All published works here: https://linktr.ee/mikalwix
Interview: Angela Liu
by Caroline M. Yoachim
Angela Liu is a Nebula-, Ignyte-, and Rhysling-nominated writer/poet from NYC who writes about intergenerational trauma and weird things. She formerly researched mixed reality storytelling at Keio University in Japan. Her stories and poetry are published in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, The Dark, Interzone Digital, Lightspeed, khōréō, and Logic(s), among others. Her debut short story collection, Beautiful Ways We Break Each Other Open, will be released in September 2024 with Dark Matter INK. “Another Girl Under the Iron Bell” is her second story (and fifth overall appearance) in Uncanny, an evocative tale that weaves together elements of East Asian folklore, horror, and romance.
Uncanny Magazine: This is a beautifully dark tale of demons and curses. What was your starting point or inspiration?
Angela Liu: A long time ago, a friend was telling me about kodoku—a cursed jar where you throw in several creatures (usually insects, worms, snakes, and scorpions) and have them kill each other so that the one surviving by the end is not only the “strongest” but also imbued with the hatred of all the other creatures that died before it. It’s an idea derived from ancient Chinese gu magic, and one that I’ve always wanted to include in a story.
I also grew up with a lot of Chinese and Japanese folklore and loved the legend of Kiyohime (which is also referenced in the story). Kiyohime is usually painted as a beautiful woman who transforms into a monster after being abandoned, but I wanted to write a story where she didn’t need to die. One that explored what it would be like to live on as a demon created by circumstance, and what love means to those who are told they don’t deserve it.
Uncanny Magazine: The setting for “Another Girl Under the Iron Bell” has a lovely immersive feel. What research did you do for the story?
Angela Liu: I used to lose myself for hours just reading into the history of Yoshiwara and similar areas in Kyoto and Osaka, about the lives of the oiran, studying prints and poems written about the time and its people. I majored in East Asian studies in college and was fascinated by Yoshiwara ever since a Japanese Lit professor called it the “floating world.”
Many of the details throughout the story are based off of things/places I encountered over the years while living/studying in Japan.
The lullaby that the cursed serpent half-sings when it starts transforming is inspired by “Takeda’s Lullaby,” a famous Japanese folksong. Traditional instrumental music has always been a vivid part of my experiences at older Japanese inns, so I listened to live clips of kokyū, shamisen, and koto performances while writing the scenes in the inn with Arata and Kiyo. Music and food are two things I try to put into every story I write.
The cursed blade in the story was inspired by a wonderfully crafted short sword I saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a cicada and snake carved into the handle and scabbard (https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/samurai-splendor/exhibition-objects).
Uncanny Magazine: You write both prose and poetry—what draws you to each form? What is the most challenging aspect of each?
Angela Liu: I’ve always felt like poetry is a distillation of a feeling or a moment, so when I’m feeling strongly about something and don’t have a lot of time, I jot down lines of poetry like taking a verbal photograph. When I want someone else to feel/see something I experienced, I write a poem. When I want to take a journey on my own and have the time to really explore the characters and place, I write prose.
The most challenging thing about poetry for me is the ending line. While the ending is important in prose, that one single line/stanza in poetry can make or break the entire poem and its emotional impact.
The most challenging thing about prose is editing. While the editing process for poetry can feel like a satisfying puzzle (working through the right language choices and images/line-breaks), editing for prose feels more like a nerve-wracking eye exam where the doctor keeps asking you “better or worse?”
Uncanny Magazine: Ryunosuke brings good sake to the brothel as an offering, after first trying “fruits and breads, tasteless offerings to a demon.” If you were a demon, what kind of offerings would you demand?
Angela Liu: I love this question! If I was a demon, I’d ask for charcoal-grilled A5 wagyu beef and the juiciest white peaches. Then when I’m not hungry anymore, I’d love to have someone with a beautiful voice recite poetry to me by moonlight.
Uncanny Magazine: “Another Girl Under the Iron Bell” combines elements of horror, history, fantasy, and even romance. What genre(s) do you like to read? What’s something you read recently and loved?
Angela Liu: I read mostly weird speculative/urban fantasy. Haruki Murakami, David Mitchell, and Ocean Vuong are the authors I always go back to. I researched mixed reality in grad school and adore stories that take real historical events/people/objects and put them into the context of a whole new (speculative) reality. Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell is a great example where he imagines a fictional hit band in what feels like a very real 1960s rock scene with new horror-fantasy aspects (with some fun, fictional conversations with David Bowie and Little Richard).
Horror romance is a recent favorite genre. I loved The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo. As someone who grew up reading a lot of manga, I also love stories that read like old-school manga, and The Dragonfly Gambit by A.D. Sui is one I really enjoyed.
I commute frequently, and short fiction’s been perfect for that. Karen Russell, Isabel Yap, and Isabel J. Kim are long-time favorites. Recent short stories I loved are: “The Clown Watches the Clown” by Sara S. Messenger, “Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” by Rachael K. Jones, and “The Worms that Ate the Universe” by Megan Chee—they all paint wildly imaginative worlds, but I love how every time you go back, you can peel off another layer and discover something new.
Uncanny Magazine: What are you working on next?
Angela Liu: I’m working on two novels now. One is a speculative mystery/thriller about a woman and the strange town she arrives in after dying. It’s a bit of The Good Place meets Death Parade and Alice in Borderlands with a slew of messy characters, and is a continuation of my novelette “The Day We Returned to Sunnytown.” The other is an urban fantasy about people who can summon cursed spirits out of famous paintings. I’m also writing a sci-fi novelette about a death-game tower that takes place in the same world as my story “Imagine: Purple-Haired Girl Shooting Down the Moon.”
Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!
© 2024 Uncanny Magazine
Caroline M. Yoachim is a three-time Hugo and six-time Nebula Award finalist. Her short stories have been translated into several languages and reprinted in multiple best-of anthologies, including four times in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Yoachim’s short story collection Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories and the print chapbook of her novelette The Archronology of Love are available from Fairwood Press. For more, check out her website at carolineyoachim.com.
Interview: M. M. Olivas
by Caroline M. Yoachim
M. Olivas is an alumna of the 2022 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and the 2023 Under the Volcano Writers Residency. She received her bachelor’s degree in creative writing from the University of California Riverside and once worked as an associate editor for Escape Pod magazine. Her short fiction has appeared in several publications, including Uncanny Magazine, Weird Horror Magazine, Apex, and Bourbon Penn. Her short story “If There May Be Ghosts” was on Reactor magazine’s Must-Read Speculative Short Fiction list for July 2022, and her short story “The Prince of Oakland” was featured in Tenebrous Press’ Brave New Weird anthology for 2024. Olivas also made the longlist for the 2021 Samuel R. Delany Fellowship and was a recipient of the 2022 George R. R. Martin Sense of Wonder Scholarship. As a trans, first-generation Chicana horror writer, Olivas explores the intersection of queer and diasporic experiences in her fiction. She currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area, earning her MFA in creative writing at San Jose State University and collecting transforming robots. “¡Sangronas! Un Lista de Terror” is her second appearance in Uncanny, a powerful exploration of community, essentialism, and pushing back against the rules.
Uncanny Magazine: This is a dark and gritty story of trauma and oppression, of banding together and forming connections, some more tenuous than others. What was your starting point or inspiration for the story? What did you know when you started and what did you discover as you were writing?
M. Olivas: Hehehe, I got the initial idea during a summer night when I was absolutely stoned out of my mind with my bestie at his apartment listening to Orville Peck. I remember it so perfectly, because he’d called me a sangrona—I forget why—and I was so taken by it because I hadn’t heard the term before. My family’s from a ranching pueblo in Michoacán and his from the northern states of Mexico, and he’d said it was a common slang term up there that meant about the same as calling someone a “leech” or “moocher.” And in that moment, my mind had used the last of my two functioning brain cells to clear the weed-fog and gave me this: Sangronas—Chicana vampire punk teens. Like actually, that’s what I jotted down in my notes app. The previous fall, the Criterion Channel had a seasonal film collection about high school horror, and I’d seen Andrew Fleming’s The Craft for the first time. Sacrilegious for a wanna-be-goth like me, I’m sure. But I think that had been rattling around me for a while too.
The months that passed after that night, I kept thinking “Sangrona” as a term for a vampire story and spent a lot of time drawing characters in my story idea notebook. I do a lot of early drafts in it, as well as poetry, random ideas, exercises—but above all, I draw the images that come to me for my story ideas. I consider this part of the “pre-production” process, much like a film with its concept art, before I get to the production side of making the film’s raw material: the prose story. So I’d drawn my four sangronas, many of them in sapphic scenes, to a playlist I’d made for the story, which was essentially just all my moody shit and anything that reminded me of the song “Glass Vase Cello Case” by Tattle Tale because Why Isn’t It On Spotify??? There was a lot of Chelsea Wolfe, Phoebe Bridgers, Big Thief, John Carpenter, and Orville Peck. Essentially, I am a vibes person first. I figure out my esthetic that calls to me with each story during this process. The thing I just couldn’t figure out was the narrative to this story, what I even wanted to have happen within the pages, in regard to a plot. It really barricaded me from writing more than a page or so at any given moment. I kept trying and retrying to approach this story, eventually deciding that for once, I wouldn’t have something so pertinent on an escalating plot, but a story that would be more aimless and vibes first. That helped give me the sandbox to play in, what would become the emotional core of “Sangronas” came from me finally interrogating my own transness.
Around the time I started writing on “Sangronas” was the same time I’d finally been prescribed my HRT. After about a year of therapy, psychiatric appointments, blood tests, among other things, I’d finally been allowed, through my health insurance, to start taking estrogen. I’d known I was trans for a while before that; I think I started my social transition around 2021, though I was very much still in the closet with my family. I was out to my friends and colleagues in my writing community, but I’d wipe the make-up off, pull all of my spilled-out parts back into the closet as soon as I got home. Finally holding my little HRT bottles meant, to me, that I finally needed to take that last step into fully stepping out of the closet and into my true identity.
Only, I didn’t take my HRT. I held onto the bottle for months, just thinking each morning if today would be the day to start it. I had a lot of internalized shame and transphobia in who I was, and for a long time I’d been avoiding unpacking that, dredging and holding before me those ugly feelings I reserved for only myself. I felt like I wasn’t being “trans” enough, nor would I be “woman” enough—a thing I think a lot of brown women like myself think about in general, given our lack of European features. I’d been spending a lot of time really digging into the concept of gender essentialism, examining those particularity vile parts of the intersections as a way to find out how to uproot it from within myself. I ended up seeing a lot of commonalities with gender essentialism, to specially trans essentialism, and even types of racial essentialism. All my life I had to navigate the discourse of “not being Mexican enough.” Or what made someone a “real” Mexican: fluency in Spanish, cultural knowledge, favorite foods—as if not knowing Spanish suddenly threw you into a different ethnic group. I’d already been dealing with that type of gatekeeping all my life, and once I made those connections to other essentialist fallacies, it was easy to use the tools I already had to dismantle them.
The dismantlement took the form of “Sangronas.” I use my art to work out feelings within myself, and to explore things that I personally am drawn to; that’s where the healing lies with my process. So “Sangronas” really ended up being an exorcism of my own shame in being trans. That’s why the story takes the form of a list, I wanted to show the fallacy of it. Its nuances—how having rules can protect you, find community, help discover yourself—and how its rigidity crumbles at the slightest provocation—who enforces the rules and why, who’s barred out, how no one can ever truly follow each rule. I wanted the list to be so overbearing and present that it became arbitrary. By the end, no one’s even following those rules; their Sangrona essentialism leads to their undoing.
We’re all surrounded by the ways we are told we should be, how women should act, how Mexicans should be, what types of queerness are valid—it’s all bullshit! And in framing the narrative into such a rigid sense of rules, I hope what my audience takes from “Sangronas” is the desire to step out of these confines, to unashamedly spread your wings and fly.
Uncanny Magazine: “¡Sangronas! Un Lista de Terror” is full of descriptive details that give the story an immersive and almost cinematic feel. Do you visualize stories (either as a writer or as a reader)?
M. Olivas: Nah, not at all.
LOL! What EVER gave away that I’m a visual storyteller??? Haha, it’s true though. Like I stated, all my stories start off as drawings in my notebooks trying to capture an emotion or vibe, and growing up I’d wanted to make movies. I’m dyslexic. I didn’t read many books as a child, or even as a teenager; books are too long, and my ADHD brain made it so that literature was a difficult medium for me to really get into. The media I did escape into, quite obsessively, were film and comic books—visual media. I spent so many years of my life going to Blockbuster or the library to watch Godzilla films and other monster movies. If I couldn’t find them there, you know, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me.
BUT anyway, movies were my primary form of escapism. And maybe it was because I was young, and my mother was too busy raising three kids and helping my father who’d been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, to even consider supervising the media I was exposed to. But AMC’s thirty nights of horror is a trip when you’re eight. Narrative, pacing, structure, all of that I learned from film, and I was always drawn to movies with distinct tones and atmosphere—probably why horror stuck out of all the genres—and the older I got, the more my tastes evolved. I started exploring more world cinema in high school and college, and even though I realized that I can better express myself through the craft of writing than that of filmmaking, I still have my love for the medium, and always try to take what I learned from filmmaking, the tools to convey emotion visually, and apply that to prose. I have a huge joy in figuring out what are the written equivalences of a Spielberg oner, or match cuts, or montage, or color theory and composition—all of it I use to make a distinct and cinematic voice for my work. And I believe one of the pitfalls in attempting to write cinematically is just going heavy with descriptions, but that’s only one aspect of a film. A film breathes to life with its editing—its compression of time and space—and prose has its own medium-specific tools to do that. Tools like sensory details that elicit the five senses, non-linearity, diction, stream of consciousness, and interiority. It’s the specific weaving of those aspects that creates the distinct patterns that make up a writer’s voice, and I try to weave mine into composing compelling key frames.
When it came to “Sangronas,” around the same time, I was still thinking what a possible narrative could be, how to string together the storyboards I’d sketched out. I’d watched the film Paris, Texas for the first time. Paris, Texas being a film directed by Wim Wenders that follows an amnesiac Harry Dean Stanton trying to reconnect with his child and search for his wife after spending years wandering alone in the desert in a fugue state. The cinematic techniques in that film became hugely influential for my film—sorry I mean short, prose story. And if you haven’t seen it, go watch it, it’s fucking brilliant; the entire movie takes place throughout the American Southwest, and its visual language is all just pure, distilled Americana, farmed in a way that came off as just so, so gothic to me.
I’d written gothic westerns before—my debut novel, Sundown in San Ojuela is a gothic spaghetti western where a lot of the style and inspiration came from Sergio Leone’s filmmaking techniques, who’d pioneered the genre of spaghetti western. But Paris, Texas was gothic in its decay, its almost satirical display of what once was the height of capitalist, consumerist, excessiveness that was American culture in the mid-twentieth century. Now even. From its long, uninterrupted shots of American landscapes to its mega-highway overpasses, sun-bleached diners, empty properties wasting away, abandoned strip malls, worn-down infrastructures, and massive brutalist parking garages—that was decayed, sun-bleached style of the American West style that I adore, that I’d grown up around, and it was that style that I chose would become the visual language for “Sangronas.”
