My Interview with Gina Henning
Technically, it’s the other way around – it’s Gina’s interview with me – but the title just looks better this way. Without further fuss, my awesome friend and talented writer Gina and me:
Gina: Both Into the Blind and “About the Dark,” center around the theme of the loss of sight, if you had to choose which of your five senses that you would lose first what would it be?
Helen: Smell. You can live without it. In fact, owls do live without it, which allows them to eat skunks. Yes, I realize you probably didn’t need to know that. 
Gina: “Girls Are Good for Drowning” is a great piece of Flash Fiction, please give us some insight as to how this story came about?
Helen: Killing off young women in fiction for esthetical pleasure has unfortunately been a long-standing tradition in Western culture. In 1846, Edgar Allan Poe infamously opined that “the death of a beautiful woman [was], unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” So, quite predictably, there were very few female survivors in his fiction. And he was far from alone in his views on the Great Poetical. The literary canon is brimming with dead and dying women. Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, Vladimir Nabokov—they all thought it was esthetically pleasing to kill off their female characters. So, I wrote a short story about Ophelia who did not actually die in Hamlet. Instead of drowning, she went on swimming for ages before finally getting out of water in the early 21st century where she found…well, you’d have to read the story to discover what she found.
Gina: The cover for Into the Blind is fantastic, I like the details of the map, have you ever been lost without a map or any other form of GPS device?
Helen: Plenty of times. More than that, I’ve been known to get lost WITH a map. I remember one time in particular. I was trying to find a book fair, and I had a map of how to get there, and after some driving, I arrived at the right street and found the house with the right number, only it wasn’t the book fair! Completely flabbergasted, I drove up and down that street for half an hour before discovering that the street changed its name in the middle. Yes, from North King Street to South King Street, and each half had its own house number 476. Thank you, North Virginia.
Gina: On your author bio, you mention a collection of green bottles, which one is your favorite?
Helen: Probably the one with a stomach. Yes, I have a bottle that has a bubble in its middle that’s meant for ice to cool whatever liquid you put in the bottle. My daughter called that bubble the bottle’s stomach, and so it stuck.
Gina: In “About the Dark,” Ever and her friends play a very dangerous game, are there any moments from your youth that as a mother you now look back on and gasp?
Helen: Yes, when I was a kid, the town where I lived decided to build a school not far from my house. It obviously began with a massive construction site full of nails, pits, and cinder blocks. My friends and I played there all the time, and I’m still surprised none of us died there.
