Got this from a friend who's been reading the blog interviews.  I really liked what she has to say about curiosity:

"In other news, I wanted to write and tell you how fabulous the book is. I'm enjoying rereading the articles. I've recently become reacquainted with an old friend of mine and while we are in the midst of playing 20-year catch-up, we agreed that nearly any question was ok to ask. And this is when I discovered what morbid curiosity is to me. Morbid curiosity is the set of five questions you want to know the most, but will never ask. It's so refreshing, so lovely and honest to have those questions answered for everyone to read. If only real life worked that way and you could ask anyone the five questions."

Now I'm waiting to find out what her five questions are.  :-)

Jessica Eisner graduated with Honors from the University of California at San Diego School of Medicine. She has worked and traveled throughout much of Asia, Europe, and Ecuador, where she researched Amazonian culture for a new book. In 2004, Dr. Eisner wrote and directed Muffin Man, a morbid and uncomfortably hilarious mockumentary about the obesity epidemic and social dysfunction that lead to the extinction of the human race.

Q: What does morbid curiosity mean to you?

A: Morbid curiosity is an irresistible and largely insatiable urge not just to know, but to also experience life, especially the less mundane things.

Q: How did you discover Morbid Curiosity magazine?

A: If I recall correctly, I had been slinking around the Castro (in San Francisco) during my internship year and came across a very well-stocked magazine shop that had my favorite underground zine at the time (My Pathetic Life). I discovered this new, unusual magazine: Morbid Curiosity, volume 1.

Q: Did you have more than one piece in the magazine?

A: I contributed two pieces: “Happy Trails in Southeast Asia” (from Morbid Curiosity #3, which appears in Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues) and “The Chronology of Two Carnivores” (from MC#2), co-written with Diego Ruiz, which included some weird histopathology I performed.

Q: How did your “Happy Trails” piece come to be written?

A: I usually get a flash of an idea and sit down and write it before it escapes. The quality is usually inversely proportional to the time I spent writing. I recall writing “Happy Trails” pretty quickly; it was stream of consciousness/memory writing.

Q: Is there anything you’d like to add to that story now?

( The interview continues... )

From Sean at Paxton Gate:

Attn: Collectors, Designers, Hoarders …

 

Paxton Gate is exploring the idea of putting together a book about the design style that is inspired by and utilizes the sort of things we carry.  We are looking for individuals with creative homes, collectors with unusual and/or large collections, and designers who have used these elements in their designs.  All of which have the possibility of being in the book either with credit or anonymously; whichever you prefer.

 

We are interested in all of the areas you see here at Paxton Gate, and more!

• Science – Glassware, specimens in solution, vintage educational posters, lab-ware, etc.
• Botany – not just plants but plant collections and displays, terrariums, Wardian case displays, greenhouses, etc.
• Taxidermy – Big and small, full and partial, skins, pelts, bones, horns, feathers, etc.
• Geology / Archeology – Fossils and minerals in décor and/or large stunning collections
• Entomology – Insects framed and not, as art, collage, mosaic, etc.
• Freaky stuff: deformed specimens, chimeras, etc.
• Natural Science Display – Dioramas big and small, art that mimics these museums, etc.
• Paxton Gate elements used as décor in Kids’ rooms.  Kids rooms that take our aesthetic and combine it with a “children aren’t fragile little creatures” approach to designing their rooms

 

If you’re interested please send images of you and/or your home and collection to design@paxtongate.com.  Feel free to contact us at the same email address if you have questions.  If you do not have images or the capability to produce them please describe what you have by email and we’ll take it from there.  None of these images will be used without your permission.

 

Please forward this email to people who may be interested.  Thank you.

 

Simon Wood is an ex-racecar driver, a licensed pilot, and an occasional private investigator. He’s had over 150 stories and articles published. He’s a frequent contributor to Writer’s Digest and is the Anthony Award-winning author of Working Stiffs, Accidents Waiting to Happen, Paying the Piper, and We All Fall Down. Simon wrote about falling off a mountainside for Morbid Curiosity #8, getting lost in a small plane for #9, and his knee surgery in #10, but I chose his story “The Road of Life,” from issue #7, for Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues.

Q: How did “The Road of Life” come to be written?

A: I attended a Morbid Curiosity Open Mic at the World Horror Convention in Chicago in 2002. I went up to Loren afterward and told her I had a story for the magazine. She said to go ahead and write it. Now that I look back on it, I’m not sure what compelled me to write “The Road of Life.” It’s a part of my life I’m not very proud of, not something I broadcast to the world, but I guess I was swept up in the moment of the late-night reading. I had a story to tell, not particularly heroic or uplifting, but an honest story.

Q: Have you ever participated in the live events?

A: I must admit I feel very exposed by the tale. As much as the incident is behind me and I’m at peace with it, I’m very aware and self-conscious of what I’m sharing. My tale is one of the few that has no comic relief. I’ll be honest, I do feel like I’m being judged by the crowd. I’m surprised no one has cussed me out for what I’m admitting to, but luckily no one has. I am intrigued by what people think of the story and how it makes them feel. It’s a hard tale to tell. I wonder if it is just as hard to listen to.

Q: Have you had other morbid experiences that would make good stories?

A: Plenty. Other morbid experiences include knocking a sniper rifle out of a hit man’s hands, driving through London after a terror attack, learning that a company I worked for was targeted by the IRA, and others. I kind of attract strangeness.

Q: What was your favorite story in the Morbid Curiosity zine that wasn’t your own?

A: “Nicotine Dreams” remains my favorite tale. It’s great to see what coming down off an addiction takes you.

Q: What are you up to these days?

A: I’m still writing stories and novels. A new novella under my Simon Janus pen name just came out. “Road Rash” is featured in a four-story anthology called the Butcher Shop Quartet. The story mixes horror, crime, and Santeria. My fourth novel, Terminated, hits bookshelves next June. It deals with workplace violence. I’ve just finished a novel based on what would have been a Morbid Curiosity piece. It centers on a secret told to me by a racecar driver minutes before he was killed -- a secret I’ve never told his family. Curious people can keep up with me at www.simonwood.net.

George Neville-Neil is a quiet Irish boy trapped in the body of a Jewish anarchist.  For Morbid Curiosity magazine, he wrote about cruising, getting tested for AIDS, and visiting the Communards in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.  His memory of finding his landlord dead -- “Finding Paul” -- was reprinted in Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues.

Q:  What does morbid curiosity mean to you?

A:  Morbid Curiosity published my first non-technical piece of writing and helped me realize that writing essays was something I really enjoyed. Each year I'd try to write something specifically for the magazine, so it gave me a target for my writing.  I always learned something new about my writing or myself by submitting a piece.  The magazine gave me a chance to write on a diversity of subjects too, since I also wrote a few sidebars.  (His explication of the G8 appears in the book as well.)  The readings were always a blast, because then I got to meet and hang out with people whose pieces I’d read.

Q:  How did you discover Morbid Curiosity magazine?

A:  I was already friends with Loren when she started working on the magazine.  When I heard about what she was doing, I immediately wanted to submit a piece.

Q:  Which was your favorite story of your own in the magazine?

A:  I think my favorite is "Finding Paul." Finding his corpse was something that had a profound effect on me, both at the time of the incident and then again when I wrote about it.  That’s also the piece that was tightest from the first draft.  It was a pleasure to write.

Q:  Is there anything you’d like to add to the story now?

A:  No, it's been so long that the written version is now more part of my memory than the event itself.

Q:  What was your favorite story in the zine that wasn’t your own?

A:  “Killing Max.” (Editor’s note:  It was about assisting a friend’s suicide.  It was originally published in Morbid Curiosity #2 and is reprinted in Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues.)

Q:  Do you have a tale to tell about your involvement with the magazine or the book?

A:  When Loren was preparing the collection of these pieces for the book, I realized that I had taken someone I was dating to a reading for the magazine.  I always had a blast reading for MC. In hindsight, it's kind of an odd idea for a date.  We'd been together for about a year at that time.  We're still together, so I figure that a Morbid Curiosity reading is a pretty reasonable acid test for a future partner.

Q:  What are you up to these days?

A:  From 2004 until 2008, I lived and worked in Tokyo and toured and taught throughout Asia and Europe.  I now speak, read, and write Japanese with some fluency, as well as having a smattering of other languages, including French and Dutch. At the moment, all of my writing is technical, since I'm a computer nerd.  I co-wrote a computer science textbook called The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System.  You can find my monthly columns here:

http://queue.acm.org/listing.cfm?typefilter=Kodevicious&sort=publication_date&order=desc&qc_type=Kodevicious&article_type=&item_topic=all&filter_type=topic&page_title=Kode%20Vicious&filter=all

I remain morbidly curious, but then I don't think one ever gives that up.



The usual subjects at Borderlands Books, after the reading for Morbid Curiosity #5:  George is the man in white.  The whole lineup is Shira B., Brian Thomas, Dana Fredsti, Claudius Reich (on floor), me, George Neville-Neil, Dalton Graham, M. Parfitt.

Mary Ann Stein has been writing since 2001, when she first took a course at the Writing Salon. Every day she blogs about theater in San Francisco, traveling, writing, and occasionally baseball at www.nomorecommasperiod@blogspot.com. She had one piece in Morbid Curiosity magazine, which I’ve invited her to read over and over. She still works retail to pay the bills: you can find her either out at the Legion of Honor or at the DeYoung Museum stores, where there are no bats or witches (to her knowledge).

Q: What does morbid curiosity mean to you?

A: That little dark and secret something that you wonder if anyone else has ever seen/felt/experienced.

Q: How did you discover Morbid Curiosity magazine?

A: I met Loren at the Writing Salon in 2001 in a personal essay class we were taking. Loren was the first person who ever wanted anything that I had written. I couldn't believe it. It made me want to keep writing.

Q: Did you have more than one piece in the magazine?

A: No, “Halloween Hell” in Morbid Curiosity #7 was my only piece.

Q: Is there anything you’d like to add to that story?

A: I might add a few more details, but basically I'm happy with the story now.

Q: Do you have a tale to tell about your involvement with the magazine or the book?

A: Reading in public has been a fabulous experience for me, both with the zine and the book. The audience is always a delight! When I read at Borders last month, it was essentially a reunion party because I used to work there. I was flattered that so many people showed up.

Q: What was your favorite story in the zine, one that wasn’t your own?

A: I remember the woman who went to the porn photo shoot ~ very funny! (Editor’s note: “Imagining Porn” by Gravity Goldberg, Morbid Curiosity #5.)

Q: Have you had another morbid experience that would make a good story?

A: Hm, I bet if I really thought about it I would.

Q: What are you up to these days?

A: Still working retail. Currently taking a fiction writing class.

Darren Mckeeman’s writing career started with winning the first prize at the Georgia Prison Writers Association Contest in 1991.  He is the editor of The Best of Gothic.Net: 1997 to 2001 and the author of City of Apocrypha.  The experience he called “Tracking the Zodiac” brightened the pages of Morbid Curiosity #4 before being reprinted in Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues.

Darren was my boss when I wrote about cemeteries for Gothic.Net.  We met at one of the World Horror Conventions, where he told me about getting carjacked while visiting the Zodiac Killer’s murder sites.  He’s read the story for me at the Open Mics at World Horror, at Morbid Curiosity events at SpookyCon, and last night at Pegasus Books in Berkeley.

 

Q:  Have you had another morbid experience that would make a good story?

A:  I had to handle a dead body about two months ago. My next-door neighbor committed suicide and his Japanese girlfriend didn't know what to do. As a matter of fact, she forgot the minimal English she knew and was just screaming, "help, help" at me in Japanese. I guess she knocked on my door because I was the only person in the building that ever talked to her. She led me into the room where he hanged himself and I helped get him down and onto the bed. It was way too late, but she was hysterical and it was taking a while for 911 to get there. He was so obviously dead that we probably shouldn't have cut him down.

I went to therapy for it a week later, because I started having vivid nightmares. I still think about it -- and her -- a lot.  She's gone and someone new has moved into the apartment. I've seen lots of dead bodies, but I've never touched one. The bodies were never my next-door neighbor that I saw at least once a week.

 

Q:  What are you up to these days?

A:  I'm currently doing two things with my life: I own a movie production company and I am the CEO of a company that builds Facebook applications, called Stealth Applications. Movies take lots of time; Facebook applications do not. It's an odd combination.



After the reading for Morbid Curiosity #4:  (back row) Joe Donohoe, Geoff Walker, Darren Mckeeman, George Neville-Neil, Brian Thomas, M. Parffit, Winter Laake.  (front row) Dalton Graham, me, Dana Fredsti.



Darren reading in October 2009.  Photo by Mary Ann Stein.

Dean Estes is a longtime resident of San Francisco. He contributed a few stories, sidebars, and one illustration to Morbid Curiosity magazine. His topics have included the phenomenon of sleep paralysis and "night terrors" and an experience of small-town prejudice on the Fourth of July. His interests include contemporary political intrigue, scientific approaches to cooking, and vinyl Japanese monster toys. “Gilding the Afterlife: My Pubescence in the Bathtub of the Dead” was his first story for the magazine and was its most-requested reprint. He read it last night at Books Inc.

Q: What does morbid curiosity mean to you?

A: I used to think of it as rubbernecking. I've come to think of it as perfectly natural human curiosity. I sometimes use the phrase to justify unusual interests, because of the wonderfully colorful connotation of mortality. 

Q: How did you discover Morbid Curiosity magazine?

A: Loren has been a friend for longer than she's been producing the magazine, so it was only natural that I knew of it once the project was under way. The real discovery was in just how great the material sent to Loren by potential contributors turned out to be.

Q: How did the piece you have in the book come to be written?

A: I had been thinking about my Mormon childhood and my adulthood distance from it, and considered that the novel experience of having been inside one of the church's temples might make for an interesting descriptive piece. Morbid Curiosity offered an opportunity to give the idea some form, which I hope was both funnier and more poignant than mere description.

Q: Is there anything you’d like to add to that story now?

A: If I were to write a corollary or afterword, it would probably be a story unto itself. When my stepfather died, the bishop who'd pulled the psych stunt in the story presided over the service. It was the first time since that incident that we had seen one another. For over twenty years, I had thought that this was the one person in my life whom it would be appropriate for me to read the riot act to and tell off, but of course one doesn't behave that way at a funeral, if ever at all. The decorum of the circumstance prevented the conflicted thoughts in my head from being expressed and I had to reconcile with the conflict once again. Perhaps there's some material to expand on in that. 

Q: Did you have more than one piece in the magazine?

The first Morbid Curiosity reading in the basement at Borderlands Books...

Vince Furia, M. Parfitt, Claudius Reich, Gravity Goldberg, Jeff Dauber, Dean Estes, George Neville-Neil, and me in front in the blue.

Dean reading at the new Borderlands Books...

Apparently tomorrow is National Bookstore Day, at least according to the Red Room.  They're quoting Publishers Weekly.  It's as good a reason to celebrate as any.

You won't be surprised what my favorite bookstore is:

I don’t know how I got up the nerve.  I guess it was that Borderlands Books was so comfortable, three small rooms filled floor to ceiling with books.  Fantasy and science fiction jammed the largest room.  The sunny front room was crammed with horror.  The entry room, which also housed the cash register, contained all the new hard covers the store had to offer, along with a wall lined with collectibles.

Claud introduced me to the proprietor as the publisher of Morbid Curiosity.  Behind the counter, Alan Beatts, the owner, grew visibly enthused, going on at length about how much he enjoyed reading the magazine’s first two issues and how much he would like to carry them in the store.

That was better news than I’d hoped, but I didn’t stop there.  The words came out of my mouth without a conscious intention behind them:  “I don’t know if you’d be interested, but I think it would be fun to have a reading of stories from the magazine.”

Alan waved at the copy I’d placed on the counter.  “Do you think people would admit in public to doing this stuff?”

“Claud’s already said he would read.”  I smiled at him.  “I should be able to collect up two or three other victims.”

“I’ve been wanting to do events,” Alan said.  “The basement is quite large.  If I can get it dried out, we could fill it with chairs.  It’s got a dungeon atmosphere that would be perfect for your magazine.”

We settled on the weekend of Thanksgiving.  I went home and sent some emails to the contributors, who bowled me over with their excitement over reading their confessions live.  I just needed to figure out how to promote the event…

Fast-forward.  The Saturday after Thanksgiving turned out to be a propitious choice.  The Guardian featured the event in their calendar, encouraging people to ditch their relatives and support the new local zine. Everyone who wasn’t eager to face the Christmas hordes at Union Square turned out at tiny Borderlands Books, ready to be entertained.

The reading started late because Alan had to add more chairs.  The 20 he’d initially set up quickly filled, and the 10 after that.  When he ran out of seating, people sat on the cold cement floor and lined the dank brick walls.

I sucked miserably on a bottle of water.  I hated speaking in public.  I’d never hosted a big reading before.  My previous experiences had been at a tiny horror convention in Denver, where the readers often outnumbered the audience.  I’d made a terrible mistake and now everyone in San Francisco was going to know what an idiot I was.

Alan bounded up to the podium and began the sweetest, funniest, most wholehearted introduction anyone could hope to hear about her brainchild.  Then he smiled at me and turned over the mike.

I thought I was going to die.  I’m sure my heart missed a beat or five.  But there were 50-some people jammed into this dark, chilly basement to see my show, so damned if I wasn’t going to give them one.  I pasted a smile on my face, walked up to the podium, and said, “Thank you all for coming.”

***

That was November 1998. Since then, I've hosted readings and art shows in the basement at the old Borderlands location on Laguna Street, in the new store on Valencia Street, and in the soon-to-be-opened Borderlands cafe.  The staff has been hugely supportive and helpful, to the point that I gratefully acknowledged them in the Morbid Curiosity book.  I've worked at Borderlands behind the counter, filled in at their table at conventions, and made lifelong friends in the shop.  Borderlands Bookstore is the best bookstore in the world

An ex B-movie actress with a background in theatrical sword-fighting, Dana Fredsti works with big cats at an exotic feline conservation center, loves good wine, bad movies, zombies, and surfing. Under the nom de plume Inara LaVey, she’s written stories such as “Succubusted” and a novel called Ripping the Bodice for Ravenous Romance. Under her own name, she had a murder mystery called Murder for Hire: The Peruvian Pigeon published by James A. Rock, Inc. You can keep up with her at www.danafredsti.com.

ETA:  Dana will be reading at the Pegasus Bookstore in downtown Berkeley tomorrow night (11/7) at 7:30.

Q: What does morbid curiosity mean to you?

A: A healthy interest in things other people might consider rather...unhealthy. For instance, natural disasters, diseases, death, cemeteries, the supernatural, ???

Q: How did you discover Morbid Curiosity magazine?

A: Through the editor, Ms. Loren Rhoads, who was (and is) a friend. Her writing also inspired me to take mine more seriously.

Q: Did you have a favorite piece in the magazine?

A: I had over half a dozen essays in Morbid Curiosity magazine and pretty much love all of them. If I had to pick a favorite, it would probably either be “The Skeleton Wore Fishnets” (MC#5), about my experience making a very bad B movie, or “A Day at the Cathouse” (MC#4), which talks about volunteering at the exotic feline breeding facility.

Q: What was your favorite story in the zine that wasn’t one of your own?


Dana speaks at the West Hollywood Book Fair.  Photo by Daniel Malson.
( The interview continues here... )

To celebrate the release of Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues, a new book drawn from the pages of the cult nonfiction magazine Morbid Curiosity, Pegasus Books Downtown hosts a reading November 7 at 7:30 p.m.  All stories guaranteed true!

Featured readers:

* Darren Mckeeman hunts the Zodiac

* A. M. Muffaz witnesses an exorcism

* Allegra Lundyworf dispells ghosts

* Dana Fredsti dances in her underwear

* Emceed by editor Loren Rhoads

Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues:  True Stories of The Unsavory, Unwise, Unorthodox, and Unusual collects 40 tales previously published in Morbid Curiosity. Come cure your blues.

Pegasus Downtown Bookstore is located at 2349 Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley.  Details and directions: call 510-649-1320 or online at http://pegasus.indiebound.com/pegasus-downtown.

Allegra Lundyworf has been a suburban goth, a freight-hopping squatterpunk, a hardware store soft-butch, a curly-horned rock violinist, a mild-mannered receptionist, a leader of mobs of curious and hungry pedestrians, and a keeper of hundreds of Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches.  She currently helps people all over the world to log in to their porn accounts. 

She’ll be reading at the Morbid Curiosity event this Saturday night at Pegasus Books on Shattuck in Berkeley.

Q:  What does morbid curiosity mean to you?

A:  I always saw it as the sneaking suspicion that under every supposedly normal life, there lurked some hidden weirdness, just waiting to be uncovered.

Q:  How did you discover Morbid Curiosity magazine?

A:  I had become familiar with Loren's own writing about cemeteries through Gothic.Net when I was the site's copyeditor.  I first saw copies of the zine for sale at Borderlands Books, back in the Hayes Valley location.

Q:  What was your favorite story in the zine, one that wasn’t your own?

A:  Probably M. Parfitt's "I Dream of Johnny" (Morbid Curiosity #4), because the author manages to imbue the mundane with very real, and closely imagined, horror.  I love finding out about the little fears that most people hide, the ones that we don't talk about, because the things we fear don't scare anybody else.

Q:  Did you have more than one piece in the magazine?

LGBTQ contributors were the heart of the cult nonfiction magazine Morbid Curiosity. To celebrate the release of a new book drawn from the magazine's pages, Books Inc. on Market hosts a reading on November 6 at 7:30 p.m.

Featured stories:

* Claudius Reich survives a nail bomb on Old Compton Street, London

* Dorian Katz gets attacked in Lower Haight

* Dean Estes grows up gay in the Mormon bathtub of the dead

* JD assists a friend's suicide

* Emceed by editor Loren Rhoads

 

Books Inc. in the Castro is located at 2275 Market Street at 16th Street in San Francisco. Check them out online at http://www.booksinc.net/event/loren-rhoads. Telephone (415) 864-6777.

 

Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues:  True Stories of The Unsavory, Unwise, Unorthodox, and Unusual collects 40 of the editor's favorite tales previously published in Morbid Curiosity magazine.

"Chicken soup for the morbid soul." -- Rue Morgue magazine

"Content that will haunt you for days (and nights)." --San Francisco Bay Guardian

 

Dorian Katz is a visual artist who has shown her work most recently at the Museum of Death in Hollywood and at the Climate Theater in San Francisco. She is in the graduate studio art program at Stanford University. Her artwork appeared in 8 of the 10 issues of the magazine.  Her only story, “This is a Very Old Scar,” appeared in Morbid Curiosity #9 and is reprinted in Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues.

 

Dorian will read "This is a Very Old Scar" at Books Inc. on Market in San Francisco on Friday, November 6, at 7:30 p.m.

 

Q:  What does morbid curiosity mean to you?

A:  Morbid Curiosity is where people got to share their weird experiences and have it be okay.  It's a place for eccentrics, intellectuals, and those who disdain small talk and normativity.

 

Q:  How did you discover Morbid Curiosity magazine?

A:  I met Loren through Gravity Goldberg, who also wrote for Morbid Curiosity.  Loren came to a party at our house and told me about the magazine. 

 

Q:  Did you have more than one piece in the magazine?

A:  Mostly, I drew for Morbid Curiosity.  I don't have a favorite illustration. 

 

Q:  What was your favorite story in the zine, one that wasn’t your own?

A:  That's a toughie.  For illustrations, Loren would send me a few stories and I could choose what I wanted to draw.  Every piece I chose is a story that I didn't just like; it also had a compelling image.  I got to know those stories best.

 

Q:  How did the piece you have in the book come to be written?

A:  Several years before I ever got around to writing the story, I told Loren that I wanted to try to write about being assaulted and my recovery process.  The depression I experienced in the two years after I was assaulted was very severe.  I was afraid that, if I spent time thinking about and writing down the experience, I would grow depressed. When my friend Sally stayed with me for a month, it was easier to get to work.  Sally met me a week after the assault, so we could talk about everything going on in our lives at that time.  Having her there kept me from reliving the depression.

Dorian reads at Ink Spell Books, as captured by Katrina James.

Claudius Reich describes himself an aging Bohemian who lives in San Francisco. Some of his stranger essays have been published in the books Lend The Eye A Terrible Aspect and Death’s Garden: Relationships with Cemeteries, as well as in five of Morbid Curiosity magazine. He has written about why we OD, hitchhiking on America’s back roads, the graveyard where he grew up, and volunteering at San Francisco’s Needle Exchange.

Claudius will read "Dragon's Teeth," from Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues, at Books Inc. on Market in San Francisco on Friday, November 6, at 7:30 p.m.

Q: What does morbid curiosity mean to you?
A: During one of my exciting periodontal adventures, the doc was supposed to simply open up my gum, plaster some magic stuff on the decayed tooth, and close 'er up again. He anesthetized, sliced, and then told me that that tooth was a goner, and what did I want to do? Did I want to see what he was talking about? He handed me the mirror, I looked at the tooth -- denuded of gum -- and thought, Cool! It goes all the way down! I was telling my sister about this, afterward, and she stopped me halfway through, putting her hands over her ears. But how could you not want to look?

Q:  How did you discover Morbid Curiosity magazine?
A:  Back when I was a frisky young thing, I ended up spending one very long evening with my roommate and a tattooed guy he knew, sitting around in his living room, taping strange music from his collection. The guy's roommates wandered in at one point and I talked with great animation at them as well. That was how I met Loren.

Q:  Did you have more than one piece in the magazine? Which was your favorite?
A:  I had pieces in all the odd-numbered issues. Unintentional, to start with -- two years seemed to be the right percolation time -- but after a while I quite liked it. My favorite is probably the bombing piece in Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues, with the drugs piece ("Why We OD") a close second.

Q:  How did the piece you have in the book come to be written?
A:  After I got home from London, I was telling Loren over dinner about being near a bomb going off while on holiday. She said, in that deceptively mild way she has, that I should write about it. I blew her off. Hey, bombs happen, right? Later, though, I found myself fretting at the memory, obsessively replaying it in my head. Getting it onto paper, I finally managed to pin down the aspects that were about the politics of it, and about my own politics and place in this world, and the very very sharp edges of By Any Means Necessary. It took writing (and rewriting, and rewriting) to nail the sense of complicity I had, of looking into a twisted mirror, which I found far more lastingly upsetting than the bomb itself.

( The interview continues here... )

Over the next little while, I plan to host the contributors to Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues here at my blog.  There are 50 of them in the book, ranging from award-winning mystery writers to people who’ve had a single story published.  They are grandmothers, gay activists, artists, lawyers, hair stylists, union organizers, musicians, electricians, civil servants, filmmakers, shopkeepers, and more -- all of whom had some life-altering experience that they felt compelled to share in Morbid Curiosity magazine.

I asked all of them the same 10 questions. With your kind indulgence, I thought I’d open the exploration by interviewing myself.

Q: What does morbid curiosity mean to you?
A: You can be morbid about anything, from the way your body works to why society functions as it does. To me, morbid curiosity means picking obsessively at something, poking into all its crannies and turning over all its rocks as a method of understanding it. Sometimes you have to disassemble something to figure out how it works. Sometimes, in the process, you burn your fingers or see something you wish you hadn’t.

Q: How did you discover Morbid Curiosity magazine?
A: That question is more for the other contributors.

Q: Did you have more than one piece in the magazine? Which was your favorite?
A: I wrote an introduction to every issue of the magazine, along with most of the sidebars and a lot of the book reviews. Of my essays, my favorite one is maybe the piece about going to the cadaver lab the first time, although I’m very proud of the essay that combined my visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial with the trip I made to the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor. Neither of those stories made the cut into the book, though.

Q: What was your favorite story in the zine, one that wasn’t your own?
( Read more )

Tune in tomorrow for an interview with another of the Morbid Curiosity contributors.

To celebrate the release of a new book drawn from the pages of the cult nonfiction magazine Morbid Curiosity, Dark Carnival Bookstore hosts a reading today, November 1, from 2 to 3 p.m. All stories guaranteed true!

Editor Loren Rhoads will read and discuss Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues: True Stories of The Unsavory, Unwise, Unorthodox, and Unusual. The book collects 40 of her favorite tales previously published in Morbid Curiosity. Come cure your blues.

Dark Carnival Imaginative Fiction Bookstore is located at 3086 Claremont Avenue in Berkeley. Details and directions at telephone (510) 654-7323.

"Chicken Soup for the Morbid Soul." - Rue Morgue magazine

"A fun if disturbing read for lovers of great nonfiction and the macabre. As promised, the tales will cure your blues." - Library Journal

"Frightening, grotesque, and fascinating! Guaranteed to satisfy anyone's curiosity." - The Fright Site

More info? www.charnel.com/morbidcuriosity

Butcher Bird: A Novel Of The Dominion by Richard Kadrey


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The book started slowly and the characters' hipster snark grated on me enough that I might have put the book down except that it had come so highly recommended. The pace picked up the deeper in I went, to the point that it was hard to put the book down to go to the publisher's party Friday night.

I'm told that Sandman Slim (Kadrey's newest) is even better.

In Butcher Bird, it was refreshing to read about a truly honest, truly compassionate male character who wears his heart on his sleeve. The other characters in the book (including Lucifer and the protagonist's would-be girlfriend) consider him a holy fool, but Spyder seemed like someone I would love to have as a friend. I wonder if there will be another book of his adventures.

View all my reviews >>

Do you blog at the Red Room? You can win a copy of Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues by blogging about Halloween on Redroom.com.

I grew up on a farm, a mile down the road from the farm where my dad lived as a child. My parents knew everyone "on the mile": where they went to church, where they worked, whether they had kids. There were a lot of young families like my parents, who'd bought a couple of acres in the midst of farmland, built a ranch-style house, put down sod and planted trees.

Almost no one decorated for Halloween. The holiday was much less about scares, when I was a kid, and more about community. The emphasis was on giving. One farm wife made popcorn balls: caramelized popcorn shaped bigger than a fist and wrapped in cellophane. Because the apple orchard was farther down the road, homemade candy apples were popular gifts. One neighbor offered a mixing bowl full of pennies and encouraged each child to take a fistful. (This was when you could actually buy two pieces of Bazooka bubblegum for a penny.) Neighbors would invite you in to warm up with a cup of hot chocolate so they could get a good look at your costume.

Halloween seemed magical to me then. The neighborhood was a wonderland of houses with their porch lights on, inviting and friendly. We neighborhood kids traveled in packs, carrying brown paper grocery sacks and pillowcases. Our costumes were homemade and seldom p.c. -- hoboes and cowboys and indian princesses, gypsies and soldiers -- things made by hand by our mothers or pulled together from our parents' closets. There were no racks of shiny rayon costumes at the sole grocery store in town.

Because I have such rosy memories of Halloween -- before the scares of razorblades in apples and tabs of LSD given out as stickers (neither of which I took seriously until it was MY four-year-old going door-to-door) -- it was hard to learn to take my daughter trick-or-treating. We don't know our neighbors beyond the houses immediately adjacent. Porch lights are resolutely switched off in this neighborhood on Halloween, where the neighbors are more likely to celebrate Dia de los Muertoes or Qingming than Halloween. I knew that there were parts of town where parents dumped their kids by the vanload, but I wasn't interested in being run down in the crush.

The first year we trick-or-treated only from the nurses in the hospice where my great aunt lay dying. The year my daughter was three, we only begged from places I shopped at on West Portal Avenue. We tried Potrero Hill the following year, but the neighbors were so besieged that they'd grown surly. Some just left bowls of candy on the steps and retreated, so they didn't have to interact with the children at all.

Last year, we hit the jackpot. The neighbors of St. Francis Wood compete with each other, turning their yards into Oz, complete with Dorothy's house atop the witch, or setting up a lifesized pirate ship, captained by a skeleton. Kids and adults all seemed to have a good time. Lenore was particularly impressed by the man doling out chocolate body parts, who gave her a blue eye because she was "such a pretty princess."

I'm excited about Halloween this year. One of the families in her class is hosting a Halloween party -- Lenore's first -- before the kids go out to trick-or-treat together. This may be the most magical night of her life. I look forward to recapturing the sense of community I felt as a child. It's strange that I have to think beyond our neighborhood to do it.