Interviews with Helen

Check out what Helen has to say about her work and the state of genre fiction.

In this podcast David Davis, Helen Marshall and Stephen Graham Jones join Scott Nicolay for a roundtable discussion of the State of the Weird at the beginning of 2018. Also Sonya Taaffe discusses the state of Weird poetry.. 

The Outer Dark podcast: The State of the Weird 2018, A Roundtable Discussion featuring David Davis, Helen Marshall, Stephen Graham Jones, and Sonya Taaffe

In this podcast The Outer Dark presents two panels: ‘Rise of Weird Fiction’ at WorldCon 75 (Helsinki, Finland) featuring Helen Marshall (moderator), Siobhan Carroll, Hal Duncan, Shivaun Hoad, Pete Sutton, and ‘The Weird in Weird Fiction’ from Fantasycon 2017 (Peterborough, UK) featuring Phil Sloman (moderator), Stephen Laws, Tim Major, Helen Marshall, Alistair Rennie, Paul Woodward. Also, Helen Marshall joins Scott to introduce and discuss the panels, conventions, and editing Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 4. The panels were recorded live on Friday August 11 and Sunday October 1. 

The Outer Dark podcast: Two Weird Panels: ‘Rise of Weird Fiction’ at WorldCon 75 and ‘The Weird in Weird Fiction’ at Fantasycon 2017

“There’s a kind of magic to short stories. I love them, I really, genuinely love them. They’re these beautiful, compact worlds that you can explode without consequences.” — feature interview at Nightmare Magazine with Kelly Link

“It’s much easier to take risks in short stories: risks in terms of form, in terms of content, in terms of plot. Short stories are innocuous. No one suspects them of very much – but it’s really the most radical form around. You can do so much in a short story, and you don’t have to justify it, there’s not the same weight of reality.” — feature interview at This Is Horror

“. . . When I was a kid I genuinely thought everyone who wrote books had died a long time ago. Like the dinosaurs. I had never seen a writer. I figured people didn’t write books anymore.”  — Have Fluency in Ecclesiastical Latin, Will Travel, AngelaSlatter.com

“. . . History is the ultimate horror novel. Everyone dies at the end.”  — “Hair Side, Flesh Side”: A Conversation with Helen Marshall, Burnable Books

“Art should scare us. Art should move us. Art should go too far.” — feature interview at Weird Fiction Review with Adam Mills

“. . . Horror is a vast, amorphous, unwieldy sort of genre and lots of writers and doing lots of different things in it. But at the core of horror are many of the same sort of trends or tropes: a desire to punish transgression, the presence of monsters, innocence lost, and a certain culpability in our own downfall.”  — Interview by Michael Keyton, On Fiction Writing

“. . . Art should move us. Art should scare us. Art should go too far.”  — Interview: Helen Marshall and the Weird, Weird Fiction Review

“. . . I like the sense of being off-balance. Of breaking the rules. And horror as a “genre”—as something codified—tends to have a rather concrete set of rules for how to scare someone. But I find when you normalize the strange, then suddenly you can cast a new spotlight on what initially seems normal.”  — Hair Side, Flesh Side: An Interview with Helen Marshall, Lobster & Canary

“. . . I think the macabre in Canadian fiction accomplishes what the macabre accomplishes in all fiction: it gives us a sense of our own mortality, of the body as something that will inevitably die. It reacquaints us with fear, and at the same time it enlivens us.”  — Interview with Helen Marshall, Speculating Canada: Canadian Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy.

“. . . Short fiction is, I think, one of the hardest forms to write because it’s so compressed, so confrontational in many ways.”  — Q&A with Author Helen Marshall, http://www.suzanne-johnson.com