Mike Thorn's Blog, page 5

Craftwork S1E3: Magic Realism, Intertextuality, & Making it Beautiful w/ William Ping

Check out episode #3 of Craftwork, featuring William Ping. William talks with Mike Thorn and Miriam Richer about historical fiction, hauntology, Animal Crossing, and so much more.

William Ping is a novelist and journalist, born and raised in St. John’s. His debut novel Hollow Bamboo was published by HarperCollins in 2023 and was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the BMO Winterset Award, and the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award as well as being longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. He has previously been published in ‘Us, Now,’ Hard Ticket and Riddle Fence. William is also known for his contributions to CBC News, where he can most often be heard reading the news.

Books mentioned in this episode:

Waiting for Godot; Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable – Samuel Beckett
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Death on the Ice: The Great Newfoundland Sealing Disaster of 1914 – Cassie Brown and Harold Horwood
The King in Yellow – Robert W. Chambers
The Wapshot Chronicle – John Cheever
Trust Exercise – Susan Choi
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Less Than Zero; American Psycho; Imperial Bedrooms – Bret Easton Ellis
The Beautiful and Damned; The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Open – Lisa Moore
Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different – Chuck Palahniuk
Son of a Trickster – Eden Robinson
The Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio – Pu Songling

Craftwork S1E2: Agency, Microtensions, & Mythic Resonance w/ Randy Nikkel Schroeder

In this interview, Randy Nikkel Schroeder talks about noir, character possession, Biblical frisson, and so much more. Listen here.

Randy Nikkel Schroeder is the author of Arctic Smoke (NeWest), Crooked Timber: Seven Suburban Faerie Tales (Green Magpie), and over fifty published short stories. In his spare time, he is professor of English, Languages, and Cultures at Mount Royal University.

Books mentioned in this episode:

Queenpin; The Turnout; You Will Know Me – Megan Abbott
Poetics – Aristotle
Book of Greek Myths – Ingri d’Aulaire & Edgar Parin d’Aulaire
Save the Cat! Writes a Novel – Jessica Brody
Dave Robicheaux novels – James Lee Burke
The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know – Shawn Coyne
Neuromancer – William Gibson
Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing – Douglas Glover
Red Dragon – Thomas Harris
Winter’s Tale – Mark Helprin
The Lottery and Other Stories – Shirley Jackson
Rose Madder – Stephen King
Mystic River – Dennis Lehane
The Magician’s Nephew – C. S. Lewis
Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for Page, Stage, and Screen – Robert McKee
Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different – Chuck Palahniuk
Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
Old Testament – Various authors

Craftwork S1E1: Persona Poems, Metacognition, & Vancouver Island Marmots w/ Meghan Kemp-Gee

On the first episode of Craftwork, guest Meghan Kemp-Gee talks about poetry, screenwriting, comics, and so much more.

Meghan is the author of The Animal in the Room (Coach House Books, 2023), as well as three poetry chapbooks, What I Meant to Ask, Things to Buy in New Brunswick, and More. She also co-created the webcomic Contested Strip, recently adapted as a graphic novel, One More Year. She is a PhD candidate at UNB and currently lives in North Vancouver BC.

Listen here.

Books mentioned in this episode:

The Writing Moment: A Practical Guide to Creating Poems – Daniel Scott Tysdal
Walden – Henry David Thoreau
The Artist’s Way – Julia Cameron
Bird by Bird – Anne Lamott
20th Century Men – Deniz Camp, Stipan Morian, & Aditya Bidikar
The Adversary – Michael Crummey

Coming soon! Craftwork, a podcast by writers for writers (co-hosted by Mike Thorn and Miriam Richer)

First episode coming soon!

Co-hosted by Mike Thorn and Miriam Richer this podcast will feature conversations with writers of all narrative genres about craft, technique, and process. Watch this space for updates. Follow on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Original music by Randy Nikkel Schroeder.

April 2024: Best first reads & viewings

Best first reads

Existence and Existents, by Emmanuel Levinas (1947)
The Craft of Writing, by William Sloane (1979)
Another World, by Pat Barker (1998)
Uzumaki, by Junji Ito (2000)
The Red Tree, by Caitlín R. Kiernan (2009)

Best first viewings

The Quatermass Xperiment (Val Guest, 1955)
Danza Macabra (Antonio Margheriti & Sergio Corbucci, 1964)
Ju-On: The Curse 2 (Takashi Shimizu, 2000)
Reincarnation (Takashi Shimizu, 2005)
Immersion (Takashi Shimizu, 2023)

February & March 2024: Best first reads & viewings

FEBRUARY

Best first reads:

A Room with a View, by E. M. Forster (1908)
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
Let Me Tell You, by Shirley Jackson [edited by Laurence Hyman & Sarah Hyman DeWitt] (2015)

Best first viewings:

Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936)
Wagon Master (John Ford, 1950)
The Tall Target (Anthony Mann, 1951)
The Long Gray Line (John Ford, 1955)
The Big Country (William Wyler, 1958)
The Reluctant Debutante (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)
Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001)
Swimming Pool (François Ozon, 2003)
Australia (Baz Luhrmann, 2008)
Bluebeard (Catherine Breillat, 2009)
Sharp Objects (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2018)
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)

MARCH

Best first reads:

Twice-Told Tales, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1837)
The Witchcraft of Salem Village, by Shirley Jackson (1956)
Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious (1956)
The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, by Tzvetan Todorov (1970)
New England’s Gothic Literature: History and Folklore of the Supernatural from the Seventeenth Through the Twentieth Centuries, by Faye Ringel (1995)
Gothic Metaphysics: From Alchemy to the Anthropocene, by Jodey Castricano (2021)
The Gothic Literature and History of New England: Secrets of the Restless Dead, by Faye Ringel (2022)
The Guest, by Emma Cline (2023)
Agony’s Lodestone, by Laura Keating (2023)

Best first viewings:

The Spiral Staircase (Robert Siodmak, 1946)
Mogambo (John Ford, 1953)
The Last Hurrah (John Ford, 1958)
Burnt Offerings (Dan Curtis, 1976)
The 4th Man (Paul Verhoeven, 1983)
A Cure for Wellness (Gore Verbinski, 2016)
The Staircase (Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, 2018)
I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter (Erin Lee Carr, 2019)
Immaculate (Michael Mohan, 2024)
Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass, 2024)

January 2024: Best first reads & viewings

Reads

The Space of Literature, by Maurice Blanchot (1955)
The Writing of the Disaster, by Maurice Blanchot (1980)
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, by Ruth Franklin (2016)
Daisy Miller, by Henry James (1879)
Something Like an Autobiography, by Akira Kurosawa (1981)
What Are You, by Lindsay Lerman (2022)
The Door, by Magda Szabó (1987)
Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction, by Jeff VanderMeer (2013)
Ghosts, by Edith Wharton (1937)
Strange Seed, by T. M. Wright (1978)

Viewings

Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild’s Revenge (Fritz Lang, 1924)
The Passionate Friends (David Lean, 1949)
Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, 1952)
Summertime (David Lean, 1955)
The Age of the Medici (Roberto Rossellini, 1972)
Messiah of Evil (Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz, 1974)
Watchmen [director’s cut] (Zack Snyder, 2009)
Hemingway (Ken Burns & Lynn Novick, 2021)

"Digital Noir Prophecies in The Canyons and The Counselor"

“The Canyons and The Counselor represent an America unmoored from its own self-aggrandizing mythologies — the capitalist dream as nightmare of anxiety and violence. The films are haunted by symbols rather than subjects, made nowhere clearer than in McCarthy’s naming The Counselor’s title protagonist (played by Michael Fassbender) after his profession — he is a nameless intermediary, a metaphor.”


Read my essay "Digital Noir Prophecies in The Canyons and The Counselor" at In Review Online.

Best first reads, 2023

I read 101 books in 2023. My 20 favorite first reads of the year (chronologically organized; one per author; pre-2023 releases only):

The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851)
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert (1856)
The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins (1860)
Roderick Hudson, by Henry James (1875)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy (1891)
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, by M. R. James (1904)
The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton (1905)
The Listener and Other Stories, by Algernon Blackwood (1907)
The Subjugated Beast, by R. R. Ryan (1938)
Native Son, by Richard Wright (1940)
The Hounds of Tindalos, by Frank Belknap Long (1946)
Gravity and Grace, by Simone Weil (1947)
The Road Through the Wall, by Shirley Jackson (1948)
Giovanni’s Room, by James Baldwin (1956)
The Wapshot Chronicle, by John Cheever (1957)
The Collector, by John Fowles (1963)
Julia, by Peter Straub (1975)
The House Next Door, by Anne Rivers Siddons (1978)
The Ceremonies, by T. E. D. Klein (1984)
Soul/Mate, by Joyce Carol Oates [as Rosamond Smith] (1989)
Paradais, by Fernanda Melchor (2021)

Check out the rest of the list here.

The Edge of the Edge: A Numinous Conversation with Mike Thorn and Kathe Koja

“Over the past few years I’ve had the privilege of enjoying an ongoing dialogue with one of my major creative influences, award-winning writer Kathe Koja. Two years ago, she and I discussed genre and process during the virtual launch for my second short story collection, Peel Back and See. Last year, we discussed our work’s relationship with cinema for In Review Online . While brainstorming about topics for future conversations, we decided to pursue the concept of numinosity: its permutations in literature in film and the role it plays in our own creative projects. This article is the result of our email thread on the subject.”

Read the full article.