 Last week Ginger Nuts of Horror welcomed Matt Blairstone and Alex Woodroe from Tenebrous Press to Ginger Nuts of Horror to discuss their new anthology Your Body is Not Your Body: A New Weird Anthology, an anthology where all proceeds from this anthology go to Equality Texas to combat the attempts of the Texas government to criminalize trans/GNC youth and their families. This week we bring you part two of our interview with the authors featured in this anthology Rose Sable Why did you submit to YB=/=YB? Body horror has been an important aspect of my life for as long as I can remember. I’ve been struggling with writing for a very long time, and this felt like the right opportunity to finally push myself to finish a story while contributing to something important. Tell us what your story is about, and the themes you chose to focus on. My story is about biological engineering, specifically the creation of a sentient weapon using human test subjects. While I think there’s a lot to be said about both the positives and negatives of bioengineering and body modification, I was really thinking about the terror of not being in control of your own body, and to see that struggle through the eyes of an apathetic observer. Ultimately I was aiming for pulp, with all the over-the-top evil caricatures and skin-boiling body horror I could fit into such a short piece. What has your experience as a marginalized writer in the horror community been like? My experience so far has been surprisingly positive, with the huge caveat that this is my first real publishing experience and I tend to only open up in circles where I feel I can fully trust everybody around me. I’ve been very closed-off until pretty recently and have a hard time connecting to people around me because of that. If someone wants to read more of your work, what would you recommend that they check out? Hybrid is the first writing of mine that I’ve shared anywhere, but I’m working on a whole lot of things right now. You can follow me on Twitter @anxietygothic for updates and also listen to my music at rosesable.bandcamp.com.  Rose Sable is a California-based horror/SFF author and experimental musician. You can follow her on Twitter @anxietygothic. Dayna Ingram Why did you submit to YB=/=YB? I saw the call on Twitter (I follow a lot of indie authors and presses), and I immediately knew I wanted to sub something for it. It's super incredible to me how some folks can see atrocities happening, like the anti-trans legislation in Texas and other states, and say, "We need to do something about this," and then just go and friggin do it! I knew I wanted to be a part of that magic. I'd been sitting on this weird little story for a while ("Because My Mother Tells Me So"), and it just felt like fate to submit it for this project. Tell us what your story is about, and the themes you chose to focus on. "Because My Mother Tells Me So" is about a young woman whose trauma manifests as a proselytizing zombie who won't let her leave her house. I can't get enough zombie stories (obviously), and in grad school I read They Shoot Horses, Don't They by Horace McCoy, in which I learned about dance marathons. So my brain naturally said, "you gotta put these two things together." That was the seed of the idea, but writing it, it kind of blossomed into something else, something very visceral but also surreal. But I don't want to say too much; read the story, tell me what themes creep up on you! What has your experience as a marginalized writer in the horror community been like? I can't really speak to the horror community specifically, because I'm just sort of dipping my toe into that pond, but the indie publishing/author scene as a whole has been very welcoming and supportive. Lethe Press has been putting out my work for 10 years (god bless), and through them I've met so many amazing queer talents in this pocket of the publishing industry. Social media, especially Twitter, has opened up just this great space for indie authors, publishers, artists and readers alike to find each other. We all just want to lift each other up, and I think that's awesome. If someone wants to read more of your work, what would you recommend that they check out? If you want more horror, Eat Your Heart Out is my goofy grindhouse contribution to the genre. You can head to daynaingram.com for my complete bibliography, and of course follow me on Twitter @thedingram.  Dayna Ingram is a trans+queer genre fiction writer from Ohio. His book ALL GOOD CHILDREN was chosen by both Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews Indie as one of the best Science Fiction titles of 2016, and was a finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary Awards. THE GOLDEN DAUGHTER, Book One of his bitesize epic fantasy trilogy, EMPIRE OF FLESH AND GOLD, is out now from Lethe Press. More info @ daynaingram.com. Bri Crozier Why did you submit to YB=/=YB? Someone I was in a discord server with shared the call for submissions and I got really excited, especially when I saw it was focused on queer experience, identity, and was going to be benefiting queer youth. I love new weird fiction, especially horror. It’s the crossroads of genre fiction, and as a person of a lot of intersecting identities, I love how that can mimic the complexity of my experiences, that I can take them and twist them into something as beautiful as it is horrific. We’re living in strange and hostile times, and I think horror, especially strange and absurd horror, can help us to make sense of it in a really round about way. Tell us what your story is about, and the themes you choose to focus on My story is a dialogue between a vulture and the deer it’s about to eat. I wanted to focus on the idea that, no matter what you are, something has to give its life for you to live. Even if you’re vegan or a vegetarian, the plants you eat are alive and deserve respect, not to mention the humans who work to collect and produce it for you. I wanted to viscerally confront this idea, to bring understanding to that cycle we often don’t think about. I didn’t want the horror to be about the act of consumption though, because it’s natural, it’s part of life. For me, the horror comes from the disrespect and the lack of understanding about what consumption means, and how that ignorance can destroy us. If someone wants to read more of your work, what would you recommend they check out? This is my first time publishing something other than comics, but if you’re looking for more new weird horror, I actually have a new weird horror webcomic coming out in the beginning of April. You can find it on my website, bricrozierart.com along with some of my other comics.  Bri ‘Pi’ Crozier is well known for their deep adoration of horrific fiction. A writer and illustrator with a degree in both, Bri is passionate about the natural cycle of decay and death, finding beauty in how it relates to their experiences as a queer and disabled person. When not writing or painting, Bri can be found looking for dead things in Kansas City, where they are pursuing a MFA in creative writing. Charles Maria Tor Why did you submit to YB=/=YB? YB≠YB had me so incredibly excited because I didn’t just want my horror to be read, I wanted it to directly benefit people, trans children doubly so. Tell us what your story is about, and the themes you chose to focus on My story is about an unreliable narrator descending into madness, first knowingly, then much less so, as ze is stalked across the Australian countryside by an inescapable ringing noise. I peppered in my fear of being coerced and hunted by authority figures. Then towards the end, I inseminated the story with my extreme fear of pregnancy. What has your experience as a marginalized writer in the horror community been like? I don’t yet have much of one, but from what little experience I do have, it’s hard to get published as someone just starting out. With so few opportunities for your niche, being overshadowed by incumbent writers who’ve had much more time with the craft is inevitable. If someone wants to read more of your work, what would you recommend that they check out? I’ve got the website charlestor.com, which has a few excerpts from novels I’m working on. This anthology is only my third time being published, the first time being a horror story I’ve reworked so much that I would feel a bit embarrassed linking to the original, and the second time being an autobiographical essay in Butch Is Not a Dirty Word issue 8.  Charles Maria Tor is an insane transexual butch from Warrang (Sydney) in so-called Australia. Born too smart for hirs own good, ze peeled back the layers of modern society and found The Void, before even reaching puberty. Charles Maria hopes to one day earn the title “A Queer Usurper to Vonnegut and Lovecraft's Thrones.” M. Lopes Da Silva Why did you submit to YB=/=YB? After I heard about the rights that Greg Abbott was trying to deprive trans kids of I got very upset, very angry, and channeled my emotions into a few different things: I donated to the Transgender Education Network of Texas, I made soap that I sold in my Etsy store SaltCatSoap to also raise money for TENT, I signed petitions. Small tasks that I knew I could do. When I saw Tenebrous Press’s call for body horror fiction to raise money for this cause, I thought: yes. This was something else I could do. Tell us what your story is about, and the themes you chose to focus on. “The Same Thing That Happened to Sam” is about the horror of gay conversion therapy and trying to find a healthy way to survive it. When the people we love try to change who we are, and despite our best efforts their toxicity slips inside of us, how can we, as queer people, transcend that? That’s a question that doesn’t have one answer or solution, but here I offer a possible one. What has your experience as a marginalized writer in the horror community been like? I’m a non-binary and bisexual author so the horror community that I gravitate towards and seek out is largely queer, indie, and supportive as hell. I like that. We lift each other up whenever we can, whether it’s beta reading or offering consolation about rejections or celebrating the acceptances. That’s incredibly valuable. The friends that I’ve made in this community are so cool it would take me a novel’s worth of words to tell you how amazing they all are. If someone wants to read more of your work, what would you recommend that they check out? I wrote a thriller about a bisexual sex worker who hunts a serial killer through the streets of 1980s Los Angeles called HOOKER – it’s a sex worker-positive novella that makes for a fun, quick read. I also have short fiction coming out soon in Weirdpunk Book’s STORIES OF THE EYE.  M. Lopes da Silva (she/they) is a non-binary and bisexual author, artist, and poet from Los Angeles. They write queer California horror and everything else. Their horror fiction has been published or is forthcoming from In Somnio: A Collection of Modern Gothic Horror, Neon Horror: Queer Horror Anthology, and Nightscript Vol. IV and V. Unnerving Magazine recently published their novella Hooker: a pro-queer, pro-sex work, feminist retrowave pulp thriller about a bisexual sex worker hunting a serial killer in 1980s Los Angeles using hooks as her weapons of choice. L. C. Von Hessen Why did you submit to YB=/=YB? I grew up in the suburbs of Middle America, a closeted nonbinary kid many years before I knew the term existed. And I still remember very clearly the Religious Right denunciations of the "homosexual agenda" both from sitting politicians and filtered into the minds and speech of my conservative Christian classmates: endless debates about whether it "was a choice," with the assumption that one could therefore make the "right choice" to be straight; whether queer adults should be allowed to work with or adopt children for fear they'd "seduce" kids into their "lifestyle"; that at least as much tolerance should be extended towards those who believe queer people are repulsive and/or hellbound as towards queer people themselves; that using homophobic insults against one's peers was just "free speech" and anyone who took offense was assumed not to be simply pissed off at the bigotry, but to be a sensitive snowflake who couldn't handle naughty language. Now, 20 years later, I'm seeing the exact same anti-gay strawmen and handwringing regurgitated against trans people. I got out of the region as soon as I could, but I know not all young people can. And to see this same strain of evangelical moral panic fuckery regain traction in this country is honestly disgusting: not just in Texas but Idaho, Florida, etc. One of the states I grew up in is trying to pass a harsh anti-abortion bill that, until recently, including outlawing abortion for ectopic pregnancy, which is inherently unviable. These are all just different facets of the same far-right gender-essentialist horseshit. Tell us what your story is about, and the themes you chose to focus on. It's a very short piece, so I won't say too much. It concerns a search for perverse erotic transcendence through flesh and technology: a mix of Genet and Cronenberg in the long shadow of Clive Barker. It was written entirely to a soundtrack of Coil. What has your experience as a marginalized writer in the horror community been like? Honestly quite good! In the particular milieu I've found, I've actually encountered a pretty sizeable contingent of queer, trans, and/or nonbinary people. I'm aware of a certain reactionary "Old Guard" in horror and weird fiction who believe the genre ought to reflect the fears of straight white cis men, but it seems that they're increasingly being pushed to the margins themselves. It's also worth noting that the first exposure I ever had to sympathetic portrayals of trans, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming people was in genre fiction, up through my discovery of authors like Poppy Z. Brite and Caitlin R. Kiernan in my early teens. If someone wants to read more of your work, what would you recommend that they check out? For more stories involving technology/creation/mad science, there's my short ebook collection Spiritus Ex Machina. For more weird horror with explicitly queer protagonists, there are my recent stories in The Book of Queer Saints, Hymns of Abomination, and Planet Scumm's Snake Eyes issue. Just generally, there are also my stories in two separate volumes each of Vastarien and Nightscript.  LC von Hessen is a writer of horror, weird fiction, and various unpleasantness, as well as a noise musician, occasional actor, and former Morbid Anatomy Museum docent. Their work has previously appeared in such publications as Hymns of Abomination, The Book of Queer Saints, volumes of Nightscript and Vastarien, and the ebook collection Spiritus Ex Machina. An ex-Midwesterner, von Hessen lives in Brooklyn with a talkative orange cat. Max Turner Why did you submit to Your Body is Not Your Body? It's one of those dream projects, where the theme sounds great, the publisher/editors are highly reputable AND it's for a cause close to my heart, so I was thrilled that my story was accepted. Tell us what your story is about, and the themes you chose to focus on. My story, The Simulacrum, is told through recovered written and voice recordings from the 1950s and 60s, detailing human experimentation that goes terribly wrong. It's Mary Shelly's Frankenstein meets 50s B-Movies, with a large helping of trans vengeance. I wanted to focus on the idea of what would happen in an extreme situation when you deny someone's gender. And most importantly, a situation where the trans person has the power. A monstrous power. If someone wants to read more of your work, what would you recommend that they check out? For more trans horror, along side some amazing other uterus-owning writers, I'd definitely recommend Bodies Full of Burning: An Anthology of Menopause-Themed Horror from Sliced Up Press, edited by Nicole M. Wolverton. Which includes my story "This is Yours", about government mandated womb return. I also write spec-fic, sci-fi, queer lit, queer romance and erotica, which you can find out more about on my website https://www.maxturneruk.com/  Max Turner is a gay transgender man based in the United Kingdom. He is also a parent, nerd, intersectional feminist and coffee addict. Max writes speculative and science fiction, urban fantasy, furry fiction, horror, and LGBTQ+ romance and erotica. More often than not, he writes combinations thereof. https://www.maxturneruk.com/ YOUR BODY IS NOT YOUR BODY: A NEW WEIRD ANTHOLOGY This is a preorder item. Book will ship sometime in April...or as soon as we can get it off the presses. All proceeds from this anthology go to Equality Texas to combat the attempts of the Texas government to criminalize trans/GNC youth and their families. EXTREME CONDITIONS DEMAND EXTREME RESPONSES. Twenty-seven writers and eight illustrators from the Trans/Gender Nonconforming communities come together to voice their rage, defiance and fearlessness in the decidedly nontraditional fashion of New Weird Horror that Tenebrous Press excels at! Final Table of Contents coming soon. Featured writers include Hailey Piper, Joe Koch, LC von Hessen, M. Lopes da Silva, Bitter Karella and many more. Cover art by Mx. Morgan G. Robles. Further Reading YOUR BODY IS NOT YOUR BODY: A NEW WEIRD ANTHOLOGY, AN INTERVIEW WITH TENEBROUS PRESS YOUR BODY IS NOT YOUR BODY: AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHORS PART 1 CHECK OUT TODAY'S OTHER ARTICLES ON GINGER NUTS OF HORROR
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