Loren Rhoads's Blog, page 10

April 1, 2022

Death’s Garden Party

No joke!

Tomorrow, Saturday April 2, I’ll be hosting a party on Facebook from Noon to 3:00 PM Pacific to celebrate the successful Kickstarter for Death’s Garden Revisited.

Some of the contributors will stop by to discuss their favorite cemeteries and the stories they added to the book. There will be cemetery-focused prizes and lots of like-minded souls.

Make yourself a cup of tea or pour a glass of cordial and join us at the Cemetery Travel page on Facebook. Here’s the direct link: https://www.facebook.com/events/1416064368811830

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Published on April 01, 2022 09:00

March 30, 2022

Death’s Garden contributor Rena Mason

I’m pretty sure I met Rena Mason at one of the World Horror Conventions back in the day, but I got to know her in 2012 when we both attended the Haunted Mansion Writers Retreat. I was honored to edit one of her incredible horror stories for the Horror Mansion Project: Year Two.

Rena and I both wrote f0r the Horror Writers Association’s monthly newsletter. I wrote about cemeteries, of course, and Rena wrote about her travels. The piece she has in Death’s Garden Revisited is expanded from one of her HWA columns. It’s about the Hill Church Cemetery in Sighisoara, Romania.

Rena Mason is an American horror author of Thai-Chinese descent and the Bram Stoker Award® winning author of The Evolutionist and The Devil’s Throat, as well as a 2014 Stage 32/The Blood List Search for New Blood Quarter-Finalist. She currently resides in the great Pacific Northwest with her family. Learn more about her work at https://www.facebook.com/rena.mason/

Her newest book is Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology, which will be out in July.

What’s your favorite thing to do in a cemetery?

Sit on a bench.

I love that! That plays a large part in your essay. If you have anything to say about it, what would your epitaph be?

I’m to be cremated and my ashes spread in the South Pacific, but I like the quote, “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”― Carl Sagan

Do you have a favorite song about cemeteries or graveyards?

I don’t know if it’s specifically about a graveyard, but I like “The Kill” (Bury Me, Bury Me) by 30 Seconds to Mars.

I added it to the Death’s Garden Revisited playlist on Spotify.

To read Rena’s beautiful essay about Sighisoara, go preorder Death’s Garden Revisited on Kickstarter now. This beautiful book is full of 40 amazing essays about why visiting cemeteries is important. Check it out here — and please consider joining the other backers: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lorenrhoads/deaths-garden-revisited-relationships-with-cemeteries
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Published on March 30, 2022 17:29

March 27, 2022

Death’s Garden contributor Angela Yuriko Smith

I haven’t yet met Angela Yuriko Smith in person, but we keep intersecting online. I interviewed her for this blog four years ago, after her book The Bitter Suites came out. She published my story “The Arms Dealer’s Daughter” in her Space & Time magazine. Both of us write for the Horror Writers Association’s monthly newsletter. Last year we swapped columns for April Fools Day: I wrote about author newsletters and she wrote about Woodlawn Cemetery in Independence, Missouri.

That essay expanded into the lovely, fierce essay “Wedding Vailes” for Death’s Garden Revisited. It’s about the marriage she solemnized for two friends during the pandemic.

Angela Yuriko Smith is a third-generation Uchinanchu-American and an award-winning poet, author, and publisher with 20+ years of experience in newspapers. Publisher of Space & Time magazine (est. 1966), a three-time Bram Stoker Awards® Finalist, and HWA Mentor of the Year for 2020, she offers resources for writers at angelaysmith.com.

What’s your favorite thing to do in a cemetery?

Eat cake, especially if I’m feeling down. Enjoying a treat with those that have passed away reminds me that no matter how big my problems seem at the moment, it’s not the end. I can recover from it. I can still eat cake.

Tell me about your favorite cemetery.

So many cemeteries I love… but my current favorite is Woodlawn Cemetery from my essay. It’s within walking distance from my house, so convenient. It’s a nice mix of history and mystery: there are some tombs with no identifying names. There are a few that glow in the dark—that was a surprise during my first midnight trip! There is a chicken that wanders the edges sometimes and gates that lead nowhere… we assume. But mostly I hope to one day catch a glimpse of lonely Mrs. Vaile, the Grey Lady, looking for friendship.

Is there a cemetery or gravesite you’ve always wanted to visit?

I would love to visit the turtle back tombs of Okinawa. I have family in some of them. Called kameko-baka, they are shaped like a woman’s womb because it’s believed in death we return to where we came from. Once a year, the blood relatives gather at the family tomb to honor the those that have gone before. They eat, drink awamori, and celebrate. Maybe eating cake by a grave is something I inherited with my genetics.

If you have any say in the matter, what would your epitaph be?

Be right back.

Do you have a favorite song about cemeteries or graveyards?

FAVORITE: grandson – Bury Me Face Down. I also like The Wytches – Gravedweller and Dead Moon – Walking on My Grave.

Loren again: I would love it if you’d check out Death’s Garden Revisited, which is on Kickstarter now, available for preorder. This beautiful book will be full of 40 amazing essays about why visiting cemeteries is important. Check it out here — and please consider joining the other backers: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lorenrhoads/deaths-garden-revisited-relationships-with-cemeteries
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Published on March 27, 2022 09:00

March 24, 2022

One Week into the Kickstarter

The last week has been a whirlwind! Death’s Garden Revisited went live on Kickstarter last Thursday morning. It reached its initial funding goal of $1000 eight hours later. Such a relief!

The next day, Kickstarter chose Death’s Garden Revisited as a “Project We Love,” which means it gets recommended to backers other, similar projects. That was unexpected and lovely.

Since then, backers to the campaign have funded the conversion of the black & white interior to full color, added two commissioned essays, additional photographs, and increased the payment to the contributors.

The next stretch goal is to fund a reading from the book by the international contributors. I really hope that funds because I, for one, would really enjoy seeing it.

After that, if the campaign reaches $4000, I’ll finish the sequel to my cemetery memoir, Wish You Were Here — and all backers will get an ebook copy.

There are 22 days left to go, so anything is possible.

In the meantime, I wanted to share some links.

The Fabulist magazine did a really great interview with me, connecting the Death’s Garden project to Morbid Curiosity magazine. Please check it out here.

Jennifer Brozek let me stop by her blog to tell her how I fell in love with cemeteries.

Joanna Penn gave the kickstarter and my cemetery books a lovely shout-out of her Creative Penn podcast. Joanna was the campaign’s first backer!

Image by Lex Vranick. Quote by me.

If you’re collecting the whole set, I interviewed Death’s Garden contributor Sharon Pajka over at my Cemetery Travel blog.

And just now, Lex Vranick of Write and Wine posted an interview with me about cemeteries and the Kickstarter.

If you haven’t checked the kickstarter out yet, you can preorder a copy of Death’s Garden Revisited and check out the other fun things on offer. Just click on the image below or follow this link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lorenrhoads/deaths-garden-revisited-relationships-with-cemeteries/description

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Published on March 24, 2022 11:19

March 22, 2022

Death’s Garden contributor: Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito

I met Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito through the Horror Writers Association during the pandemic. The timeline is hazy in my mind, but her wonderful, compassionate, beautifully described horror stories still haunt my imagination.

When I asked her to write something for Death’s Garden Revisited, Frances responded with an essay about uncovering the unmarked graves of the Chinese and Chinese American pioneers who helped to build Portland.

Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito is a Chinese American writer based in Portland, Oregon. Her writing has appeared in Nailed Magazine, Red Penguin’s Collections, Buckman Journal, Flame Tree Press’s Asian Ghost Stories, Strangehouse’s Chromophobia, and anthologies through Moms Who Write and Not a Pipe Publishing. She can be found at

What’s your favorite thing to do in a cemetery?

Walk through the various plots and look for clusters of families. It’s nice to think of families and friends being able to rest together. I also enjoy looking for unusual structures or plants/trees, especially for historic cemeteries.

Tell me about your favorite cemetery.

My favorite is Lone Fir. There’s so much history.

Is there a cemetery or gravesite you’ve always wanted to visit?

Shirley Jackson’s gravesite.

What would your epitaph be?

Remember me by the words I left behind and the memories of how we took care of each other.

Loren again: I would love it if you’d check out Death’s Garden Revisited, which is on Kickstarter now. The book reached its initial funding goal in 8 hours and is now available for preorder. This beautiful book will be full of 40 amazing essays about why visiting cemeteries is important. Check it out here — and please consider joining the other backers: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lorenrhoads/deaths-garden-revisited-relationships-with-cemeteries
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Published on March 22, 2022 14:29

March 20, 2022

Death’s Garden contributor: Priscilla Bettis

I “met” Priscilla Bettis several years ago when the Horror Writers Association put us in touch. She is a voracious reader whose blog is a fascinating record of her interests and pursuits. Her haunting novella The Hay Bale came out in January.

Priscilla contributed an essay called “Not a Tourist Attraction” to Death’s Garden Revisited, a collection I edited of 40 essays about visiting cemeteries around the world. The book reached its funding goal on Kickstarter and is now available for preorders. Treat yourself to a copy here.

Priscilla Bettis read her first horror story — The Exorcist — when she was ten. The Exorcist scared Priscilla silly and she was hooked on horror from that moment on. Priscilla is an excellent swimmer, which is good because vampires are terrible swimmers. Priscilla grew up in Alaska where her essay takes place. Keep up with what she’s been reading — and publishing — at priscillabettisauthor.com.

What’s your favorite thing to do in a cemetery?

Leave flowers for a stranger because strangers need love too.

Tell me about your favorite cemetery.

The Old City Cemetery in Lynchburg, Virginia, is my favorite cemetery. It covers twenty-seven acres and has vibrant antique roses next to somber Civil War graves. The contrast leaves me speechless each time I visit.

Is there a cemetery or gravesite you’ve always wanted to visit?

I think it’d be interesting to visit more small-town cemeteries. There are always historic, little facts to learn. Recently I learned about a terrible gas explosion in the little town of Ranger, Texas, in the early 20th century.

If you had a say in it, what would your epitaph be?

Priscilla doesn’t lie here because she donated her body to science.

Do you have a favorite song about cemeteries or graveyards?

I feel sorry for people whose loved ones simply disappeared due to crime or war or natural disasters. So I choose “Ghost Riders in the Sky” by Johnny Cash for all those whose bodies don’t have a final resting place.

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Published on March 20, 2022 10:49

March 17, 2022

Live on Kickstarter

Death’s Garden Revisited hasn’t quite been live on Kickstarter for an hour — and it’s already a third of the way to its funding goal. That does my heart so much good.

The first backer came through in the first two minutes — and she’s an author who’s been such an inspiration to me! It means the world to me that she would buy into my passion project.

If you would like to check out the campaign, here’s the link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lorenrhoads/deaths-garden-revisited-relationships-with-cemeteries/description

First-day backers can get a discount on both the 8×10 paperback edition and the hardcover coffee table book. This is going to be a beautiful book, full of powerful essays about what it means to visit cemeteries. I cannot wait to bring it to life.

If we surpass our first stretch funding goal — which is a mere $1200 — all the books will be upgraded to full-color photographs. I think there’s a good chance that will happen.

Death’s Garden Revisited is an anthology of cemetery essays from genealogists and geocachers, tour guides and travelers, horror authors, ghost hunters, and pagan priestesses about why they visit cemeteries. Spanning the globe from Iceland to Argentina and from Portland to Prague, Death’s Garden Revisited explores the complex web of relationships between the living and those who have passed before.

Editor Loren Rhoads is the author of 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die and the death-positive memoir This Morbid Life. She was also the editor of the award-winning Morbid Curiosity magazine.

Contributors include horror authors A. M. Muffaz, Angela Yuriko Smith, Christine Sutton, Denise N. Tapscott, E. M. Markoff, Emerian Rich, Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito, Francesca Maria, Greg Roensch, Mary Rajotte, Melodie Bolt, Priscilla Bettis, Rain Graves, Rena Mason, Robert Holt, R. L. Merrill, Saraliza Anzaldua, Stephen Mark Rainey, and Trish Wilson.

 

 

 

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Published on March 17, 2022 10:01

March 9, 2022

Why I’m trying Kickstarter for my next book

Well, funding on Kickstarter in 7 days.

Ever since Automatism Press published the first volume of Death’s Garden: Relationships with Cemeteries in 1995, I have wanted to put together a sequel. I wanted the second book to range farther abroad, to include more diverse voices, to be more beautiful in design and execution.

I also wanted it to be a full-color hardcover with glossy pages.

I knew I could assemble the contributors and pull together some amazing, lovely, powerful text. In order to make the books everything I envision them to be, however, I needed funding.

I’ve been a patron of Kickstarter since 2011, when I funded Mark Ballogg’s glorious hardcover book about Pere Lachaise Cemetery. I’ve backed more than 60 campaigns, mostly books. I’ve learned all I could from the backer side of the site.

Last year I started doing as much research as I could. I took a couple of online courses from people who’d successfully run kickstarter campaigns. I read as many articles as I could find aimed specifically at writers and small presses who wanted to fund their books. I solicited as much advice as I could from people I knew who’d been involved in Kickstarter campaigns from every angle.

Last month, I finally started building my campaign page. There are so many moving parts: from making a video to pricing out reward tiers to calculating postage on a book that won’t exist outside a computer for six more months.

Then the world started to come apart at the seams. What with everything going on in the world right now, I wasn’t sure this was the best time to raise money for a book of essays about visiting cemeteries. I turn to graveyards when I am feeling lost or sad. The green grass, the wind in the trees, the birdsong, and flowers always lift my heart. But would other people feel that way, especially now?

Then Brandon Sanderson began his campaign to fund publication of four new novels. By the end of the first day, he’d raised $15 million. As of today, the campaign is at $26.5 million and still climbing. He’s got 21 more days to go.

The Death’s Garden Revisited campaign isn’t going to raise anything approaching that. I’m grateful to Sanderson for another reason: the success of his crowdfunding campaign showed me that people are still hungry for books. They’re still willing to fund art and stories. So I set the date for Death’s Garden Revisited to go live and the countdown began.

You can click on the image below to be taken to the Death’s Garden Revisited pre-launch page. There you’ll see a button that says “Notify me on launch.” If you click on that, Kickstarter will send you an email on March 17, the day the campaign goes live. 

The direct link is https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lorenrhoads/deaths-garden-revisited-relationships-with-cemeteries.

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Published on March 09, 2022 15:52

February 22, 2022

The Hardest Thing(s)

I’ve been hard at work editing the essays for Death’s Garden Revisited all month. I think the final book will have 45 essays in it, exploring people’s relationships to cemeteries from every angle.

I plan to announce the Table of Contents next month, once I get all the contracts signed. I can hardly wait to share it with readers.

For the first time ever, I am planning to kickstart the book, as a way to expand beyond what Automatism Press could afford to publish on its own. With some crowdfunding, we can publish our first hardcover coffee table book. We can afford full-color photographs. If the funding goes well, I may be able to increase the payment for the contributors or even commission some essays specially for the book.

Since I’ve never done any crowdfunding before, I’m trying to learn as much as I can about the process. The most important thing I’ve internalized: I’ve backed more than 60 projects myself, but some of the things I’ve most wanted to see come to life never funded — or worse, funded and never got off the drawing board. I would hate to do that to my supporters, so Death’s Garden Revisited will be pretty much assembled before the Kickstarter begins.

This morning I made my first Kickstarter video. To be honest, the process was brutal. I rearranged my breakfast nook/office: rehung the art so that it’s all cemetery photos, dragged my favorite cemetery books in to style the bookshelf. I fancied myself up and even put on earrings! I’m confident in my script. But because I am so lame at video editing, I did take after take, trying to convey the right blend of excitement and authority and get the words out in the right order. I’ll never be an actress, which is pretty much why I became an author/editor in the first place. I think the video is ok. Hopefully, people will find my awkwardness charming.

I need to finish filling out the Kickstarter page. I’ve got the reward tiers figured out, but there are so many other details…

Really, this process is equal parts exciting and terrifying. I can’t wait for it to be over and the book to be at the printers, but there’s so much more to do before then.

 

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Published on February 22, 2022 16:37

February 5, 2022

So many books, so little time

To be honest, January passed in a blur. I started the month with nothing on my calendar for the year, beyond the idea of some books I wanted to work on.

Then our shower broke and we suddenly had to have a workman in our only bathroom for a couple of days. I hid in the bedroom with my laptop and got seriously down to work on Death’s Garden Revisited.

The book is coming together so well! It will collect around 40 personal essays about the relationships people form with cemeteries: from visiting family members and famous people to exploring history or leading tours or even doing archaeology. The cemeteries range across the US from California to Virginia and around the world from Paris to Venezuela. I cannot wait for you to see this book!

But of course, putting one book together wasn’t going to take up my whole year, so I pitched a series of anthologies to the Wily Writers collective. Not only were they excited about the idea, we’re putting together 5 books, which will be out later in the year. I’ll be editing the volume called Tales from Nightmare.

And that still isn’t enough to keep me out of trouble. I’ve been talking to agent about a book drawn from my collection of cemetery postcards, so I’m working on finishing that proposal, too.

And I heard from Lynne Hansen that she’s been working on the cover for Jet Lag & Other Blessings, the travel essay sequel to This Morbid Life. So I need to get a move on polishing up those essays, too.

No rest for the morbid, baby!

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Published on February 05, 2022 16:53