Loren Rhoads's Blog, page 70
October 12, 2013
Watching people grieve
So I’m going to out myself and admit that I’m a Glee fan. I grew up in a competitive choir in high school. I knew a lot of the characters that appear on the show. It’s been a nostalgia hour for me.
Glee’s not the best show on TV, but then I don’t watch a lot of TV. I started watching Glee with the episode Joss Whedon directed, guest starring Neil Patrick Harris. I love the performance numbers, the costume changes, the weird instrumentation, and the harmonies. Most of all, I love the voices.
Finn Hudson wasn’t my favorite character. The blank-faced quarterback seemed a little too close to parody, but when Cory Monteith ODed over the summer, that struck home. I have a friend I adore that I almost lost to the needle. I didn’t mourn an actor I don’t know, but I did think about youth and fame and addiction.
I watched Glee’s “Farewell to Finn” episode last night. It was brutal, in a way I haven’t felt since Buffy’s mom died. However, I knew at that time that Joyce Summers was played by an actress who only pretended to be dead. Finn didn’t appear at all in the episode last night. He was already dead and buried, according to the story line. I don’t know, but I suspect the episode was hastily cobbled together after Monteith’s death to explain how he vanishes from the stories his character was in the middle of.
Last night I knew I wasn’t watching actors pretending to cry. I was watching people really mourn someone they’d worked with, someone they’d toured with, someone they’d sang with. I don’t know if they were really friends with Monteith in real life, but it’s not a stretch to believe. It would be harder to believe that they weren’t friends. In the case of Lea Michele, I knew she was crying over someone she’d loved. It felt intrusive to watch the actors grieve. I feel like they were exploited in a way that I haven’t seen on TV before.
I still don’t know how I feel about the experience. I feel like grief is often hidden in America. The bereaved feel they need to be strong and those around them are embarrassed when that strength fails. Personally, I don’t feel that anyone needs to be ashamed to grieve. But I’ve never had an opportunity to examine people mourning before, to watch the slow trickle of a tear or the trembling lips or a cloud of pain come into someone’s eyes.
It was awful to watch. I don’t feel good about myself for not turning away.
October 11, 2013
Guest Post: Lauren Rhoads
Reblogged from Armand Rosamilia:
In 2010, twelve writers and artists joined hostess Rain Graves and a team of ghost hunters for a long weekend at a haunted historical mansion in Northern California. The first Haunted Mansion Retreat was so inspiring—and so scary—that most of us jumped at the chance to do it again in September 2012. Some new blood was added to the mix and all of us looked forward to four days together in the haunted house.
I dropped by Armand Rosamilia's blog yesterday to talk about the Haunted Mansion Retreat.
(Weird that Wordpress puts the new comments at the end of the reblogged piece...)
October 10, 2013
Horror writers show their Morbid Curiosity
Because I was hosting the Morbid Curiosity Open Mics at the World Horror Conventions, I had the opportunity to meet a whole bunch of horror writers. I was surprised how easy it was to get them up on a stage, baring their real lives in front of an audience.
In fact, Brian Keene opened Morbid Curiosity #7 with a story that he’d rocked at the Open Mic in Chicago. ”Kick ‘em Where it Counts” is one of my favorite stories that I was ever lucky enough to publish. It’s about an industrial accident that nearly took Keene’s manhood and his life. I wasn’t able to reprint it in Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues, but you can still wince along in sympathy (even I did) by picking up the magazine.
Rain Graves told the story of her awakening to the powers of Ancient Egypt at work in her life, which added a mystical touch to the Open Mic. I mentioned yesterday stories by Michael Arnzen and Mason Winfield, two more writers I met through the Open Mics.
Those live events were really great, because I never knew what I was going to get.
Another writer who blew me away was Simon Wood, who contributed “The Road of Life” to #7. He wrote about running into a bicyclist with his car — and he’s read it several times for Morbid Curiosity events. The story is just chilling, especially if you don’t know what’s coming next. (Sorry to have just spoiled it for you.)
Here’s the whole list of contents in issue #7:
Amityville
Art from blood
Art from bones
Body fluids
Car accident
Childbirth
Congenital abnormalities
Dead witches
Egyptian gods
Graveyards
Halloween shoppers
Hitchhiking in Oklahoma
Industrial sailing
Invasive medicine
Lyme disease
Malaysia
Miscarriage
Office voodoo
Nicotine dreams
Nursing
Rabies
Shamans
Serial killers
Silent spring
Surfing
Television stardom
Terminal cancer
Testicular injury
Torture instruments
October 9, 2013
Too close to killers
Another theme that developed in Morbid Curiosity #7 revolved around serial killers.
Michael Arnzen wrote about growing up in Amityville, near the house where Ronald DeFeo killed his family. Andrew Henderson unknowingly parked on “Lovers’ Lane” while the Hooker Murderer was on the loose. Claudius Reich caught a ride through Oklahoma was a self-proclaimed Crazy Mofo, who took him to an abandoned barn before letting him go. Mason Winfield unwittingly lived with the .22-Caliber Killer. And Leon Marcello’s “Torture at the Tropicana” dissected institutional violence on a grander level.
I’m not a fan of torture porn. I don’t read serial killer books. Still, I was amazed by the convergence of all these stories where men brushed against violent characters. They all escaped, but none was left unchanged.
The authors asked themselves the same questions that women are often forced to ask: What drew him to me? What did I do that sparked his violence or spared me from it? How can I live differently in the future in order to be safe?
It was a dark issue for me to assemble, since I wrote the sidebars about all of these killers. I found it fascinating, as if the knowledge I gained would somehow protect me as well as those who told their cautionary tales.
Morbid Curiosity #7 and some of the other back issues are still available, should you want to innoculate yourself as well. Here’s the link.
October 8, 2013
The Birth of Morbid Curiosity #7
Putting issue #7 together was rough emotionally. My younger brother died suddenly in July 2002. A month later, I developed a goiter and survived the first needle biopsy of my throat. In September, my dad underwent a second round of open-heart surgery. It seemed Death was all around, nibbling at my family.
Themes often spontaneously developed as I assembled each issue of Morbid Curiosity. This time, as I wrestled with the knowledge that my (hypothetical as yet) child would never know her uncle — and might not know my father — I received a flood of essays on human reproduction.
Alison Renner received the diagnosis that she had a double uterus, which she helpfully illustrated with her own medical photo. Mark Hodgetts supported his wife through a spontaneous miscarriage. Beth Touchette-Laughlin, whom I’d just met in a writing class, wrote about delivering her son after four days of labor. Stephanie Rose decided she wasn’t cut out for motherhood and took the necessary steps at age 29, against all medical advice. She also included a photo of her insides.
As I edited the issue, I worried that I would never be able to get pregnant. Once I did, my blood pressure skyrocketed and there were questions about whether I could keep the pregnancy, whether my daughter would be normal. I struggled through morning sickness when we did the release party in May 2003. By August, not even a year after my goiter, I was hospitalized, put on bed rest, and my daughter was delivered seven and a half weeks early.
While I lay in the hospital, awaiting her birth, I read submissions for Morbid Curiosity #8: because that’s kind of morbid woman I am.
You can still order a copy of #7 here. #8, unfortunately, has gone out of print.
October 7, 2013
Haunted Mansion Project reading in San Francisco
Welcome!
In Autumn 2012, 20 horror writers returned to a haunted house in Marin for a second writing retreat with ghosts. Contributors to the book The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two will read short stories and memoirs documenting the four days they spent together getting frightened and inspired. Readers will include Rain Graves (The Four Elements), S.G. Browne (Lucky Bastard & Big Egos), Fran Friel (Mama’s Boy), and Loren Rhoads, formerly of Morbid Curiosity magazine.
November 3 at 3 p.m. FREE
Borderlands Cafe
870 Valencia Street (Between 19th and 20th)
San Francisco, CA 94110
Cafe phone #: 415-970-6698
Website: http://http://hauntedmansionwriters.blogspot.com/
October 6, 2013
My Dream Round-the-World Itinerary
Reblogged from Cemetery Travel: Adventures in Graveyards Around the World:
Usually when I travel, it’s a case of finding a graveyard wherever I’ll be. When my parents decided they wanted to show my daughter Niagara Falls this summer, I did some research to find out what cemeteries I could visit in the area. I did the same last summer when they took us to Stratford, Canada’s Shakespeare Festival. When my family visited Wm.
This originally appeared on my Cemetery Travel blog, but I'm really pleased with how the post turned out. Where would you travel around the world?
October 5, 2013
Morbid Curiosity #6
It’s been 11 years since the publication of Morbid Curiosity‘s 6th issue. It’s one of my favorite issues, careening wildly from the political to the supernatural, with stops at the witchcraft shop, the HR office, and the backwoods.
Contributors included Morbid Curiosity regulars M. Parfitt, Dana Fredsti, George Neville-Neil, Jeff Dauber, Lilah Wild, and Mason Jones, along with the only essays I published by recurring artists Kimberlee Traub and Suzanne Dechnik. Guest writers ranged from femme fatale Jill Tracy to impressario Roy K. Felps, horror diva Mehitobel Wilson to Vale of RE/Search, Esoterra publisher Chad Hensley to smut peddler M. Christian.
The issue’s horrifying cover image of a mummified cat is a photograph by Chris Legato Orr of Skeletaldropkick (http://www.etsy.com/shop/skeletaldropkick). I love the extreme closeup, which makes it hard to identify the ghostly, eyeless creature. The textured paper lends the image its graininess. The absinthe-green text hints that it might be an infrared image, something emerging from the haunted darkness. I thought it really suited an issue with so many ghost stories.
The first-person nonfiction in this issue spans:
Anarchists in Paris
Big Brother
Buying a gun
California Coast Guard
Channeling spirits
Genoa protesters
Getting mugged
Ghost hunters
Ghosts
Hallucinating naturally
Haunted houses
In the nuthouse
LSD
Medical experiments
Night terrors
NYC subways
Occult shops
Pere Lachaise Cemetery
Police brutality
Prisoners in America
Raccoon invasion
Racism in the family
Skinning road kill
Slaughterhouse skulls
Street violence
Suicidal boyfriends
Suicidal thoughts
Vienna Burial Museum
You can still order copies of only $6, which includes US postage, here.
October 4, 2013
Voices of Morbid Curiosity #6
The readers for Morbid Curiosity #6 in Borderlands Bookstore.
Live events really shaped Morbid Curiosity magazine. After the release of each issue, I hosted a reading at Borderlands Books in San Francisco’s Mission District. These included as many of the contributors as I could squeeze into 2 hours. That’s how I got to hear M. Christian read his searing “Various Assorted Endings.”
I also hosted open mics at the World Horror Conventions, inviting guests to get up and read or tell their true morbid adventures. Often, if a story really spoke to me, I’d encourage the author or storyteller to submit it to the next issue of the magazine.
Which is how I got Willow’s “Childhood Hauntings” for Morbid Curiosity#6. She got up at the Morbid Curiosity Open Mic in Seattle and very quietly told about the ghosts who befriended her when she was a child. I recorded the story and transcribed it, then published it with her permission. Sometimes a story was so good, it didn’t need a writer to write it down.
I heard William Grace telling about volunteering for medical tests at a party. Several years later, Michael Jackson died of the drug that had been tested on William. He read his story at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle, after Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues came out. The experience is that much more terrifying in the light of hindsight.
This ghost story, by Jill Tracy, also comes from Morbid Curiosity #6:
The Keeper of the Shop, part 1:
The Keeper of the Shop, part 2:
Copies of Morbid Curiosity #6 and some of the other back issues are still available here.
October 3, 2013
The Editor’s Children
My favorite essay in Morbid Curiosity #6 doesn’t appear in print anywhere else. Shira B.’s “Talking to Strangers” starts slowly, when a man joins her table at the Borders Cafe near her university. Next thing she knows, he’s showing her photos of babies sitting amidst pig’s blood in Bolivia and regaling her with stories that will give her nightmares. And yet, being the person she is, the author can’t back down or walk away or give any other sign how much this guy is disturbing her.
It’s a powerful metaphor about machisma, the negative side of curiosity, and the central immortality of youth.
One of the other stories that hasn’t been reprinted anywhere else is “Uninvited Guests” by Dean Estes. Dean was regular contributor to Morbid Curiosity, so when I assembled Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues, it was a job to limit myself to one of his essays. I chose his piece about being baptized in the names of the dead, but it could have easily been his story about driving through Texas with his boyfriend or “Uninvited Guests.” Maybe someday he’ll put together a collection of his own work and sell it on Amazon. It will be amazing.
Anyway, daydreams aside, “Uninvited Guests” is about the night terrors Dean suffered when he was a child. They are specifically described, realistic and intense. It was fun to watch him read the piece at Borderlands Books at the release reading for issue #6, because you could see all the audience members hunching forward in their seats, protecting their necks with their shoulders, remembering what it’s like to be young and terrified and knowing that Mom can’t help you — to say nothing of actually believing you.
If you’d like, you can check out these stories and more by snagging yourself a copy of Morbid Curiosity #6 here.
