 “When you’re strange, no one remembers your name.” So sang The Lizard King, Jim Morrison on The Doors’ “People Are Strange.” He was wrong, however. At least in the case of Farah Rose Smith. Smith is strange. Her writing is strange. Even she herself, in the interview you’re about to read, cites strangeness as a common attribute across her myriad artistic pursuits. But in many ways it is that strangeness which makes Smith’s work stand out among even the most experimental and transgressive creators working in genre fiction today. The strangeness of Smith’s work is one that blurs the line between poetry and prose, between the supernatural and allegorical, the psychological and theological, the sacred and profane. It is a strangeness that defies easy categorization and challenges readers to actively engage with the words on the page instead of passively experience them. Most importantly, Smith’s strangeness is a genuine strangeness, a personal strangeness. It is her strangeness and no one else’s. And it is a strangeness that makes her name more than worth remembering. Following the release of her first collection, Of One Pure Will, and the release of a new anthology she’s edited, Machinations and Mesmerism: Tales Inspired by E.T.A. Hoffmann, Smith sat down with The Ginger Nuts of Horror to talk about her childhood fears on werewolves. My memories of childhood are faint, and often green. I recall summers spent in my grandparents woods with my cousin, and various outings with my mom and grandmother that have remained as the defining moments of earlier years. There was much to be afraid of in the waking hours, as a chronically ill child. I never knew how close I was to death, given the severity of my illnesses, and the unpredictability of their presence. But it would not be illness or its consequences that I feared more than anything else. It would be the consequences of illness, the fear of which would manifest in a peculiar way as I slept. Nights were the place of contemplation for me, both in the moments before sleep and in the density of dreams. I can remember being in bed and thinking hard, trying to remember where I had been before this life, but reaching nothing but a blank wall. I never achieved any momentus epiphanies while awake. In dreams, however, there would be denser stories that spoke to the nature of the horror I was experiencing in life. I cannot recall when I first became aware of werewolves, since my memory forces me to believe that I knew of them before any kind of media exposure. Without some kind of supernatural or weird beliefs to suggest such a thing, I can only count my memory as faulty and prone to elevate the strange. The dreams that recurred the most were those of the robed werewolf on the front porch of my childhood home. Some dark energy would compel me to rush down the stairs, pass through the dining room and living room, and out out creaky front door to the porch. This particular beast would speak, though rarely. I would say “this is a dream!” It would say, “this is not a dream.” I would be unable to leave its presence, locked into some dark magical force-field of evil, though I often woke up at that point, before anything violent would happen. I had a dream in my youngest years, only once, of a beast running through the woods, in black and white. I was not the beast, but I was witnessing the speedy travel through its eyes. It would cut back and forth between that perspective, and me walking down the staircase at night. The culmination of the dream was walking into my kitchen and seeing the werewolf’s face peering in at me through the window. Another recurring dream was always set in my grandparent’s woods. The cliffrock, which serves in waking-life as the den of quite innocent foxes, was in my haunted dreamland, the den of werewolves. In the night, I would be aware of their presence in the yard, and run with all my might to my grandparent’s front door, trying to escape them. I would always get into the house just in time, but they would be on the porch, trying to open the door. I woke up before they did, at least in childhood. In a recent iteration of this dream, as they have chosen to reappear in my life for reasons I cannot fathom, a werewolf got into the house and tore off my grandmother’s scalp. I wonder if this is some manifestation of my horror that she is succumbing to Alzheimer’s. I have made attempts at analyzing my deep fear of werewolves, which was stoked so heavily by these nightmares. It can be argued that the creatures themselves embody a dark metamorphosis. A possession of the body by indefinable, abhorrent conditions. It does not take much to connect this to the dark transformation of a diseased body. But why werewolves? Wolves themselves have always been precious to me. My grandfather brought me a stuffed wolf from Alaska that still sits atop my bookshelf. My parents bought me small statues and blankets, even enrolled me in one of those “adopt a wolf” charity things back in the 90s. The connection between family and wolves was pivotal. They were, to me, a representation of love and being cherished. If this unconditional love were to be threatened, inverted, possessed, it would became monstrosity… it became my ultimate fear. Of the splintering of that which kept me safe amid the horrors of chronic illness. Family. And this thread manifested in my dreams as werewolves. There were other common elements in the dreams. There were always staircases, though I have yet to discover what they may have meant. There were barriers between myself and the werewolves, often in the form of doors and windows. I would cross some threshold in every story, whether it be from one room into the next, or outside, or inside. There is a suggestion of menace lurking outside the home, of “evil” having its eye on me. There are suggestions of decay and infiltration, corruption of the body, monstrous birth, threat and anxiety surrounding the family. I am of the belief that there does not have to be one meaning (or any at all, really), though evidence points to connections between life and horror, in this case. My writing is thick with the materials of having lived a strange life, marked by the power and consistency of disease. I have never written a story about a werewolf, and I have no plans to do so. I have written tales of monstrosity, some of which are included in my collection Of One Pure Will. In The Wytch-Byrd of the Nabryd-keind, there are monstrous birds of unknown origin. In In the Way of Eslan Mendeghast, there are suggestions of possession by some unearthly thing. In The Visitor, a being from another world embodies the figure of a man. In Ash in the Pocket, flying monstrosities known as Uldreds loom down from the dark heavens. In In the Room of Red Night, a beastly subterranean being takes part in a ritual of torment. Through these characters and elements, I have been able to explore the dark regions of fiction, though it is my preference to not delve too far into my own mind for such things. I do not wish to stir the recesses of the mind in such a way, because even though the bodily age of thirty approaches, I cannot conceive of a way that I could contend with these dark manifestations of the night. Farah Rose Smith Childhood Fears: Werewolves OF ONE PURE WILL BY FARAH ROSE SMITH
Read our Review of Of One Pure Will here and read our interview with farah here  Comments are closed.
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