And of course they’re inherently haunted. I do! Bodies are terrifying they’re powerful and fragile, bloody and imperfect, uncanny, impressionable vehicles that carry our minds from birth until death. This is true for every artist.ĭo you think the body is a source of horror? Do you think bodies can become haunted? My body, my identity, is a lens through which I can view the world and reflect it back in my work. I think writing is inextricable from the body there’s no such thing as pure reason, pure intellect. How does your identity as queer and Latina affect your writing? This final stage was the push I needed for my own work I realized these were the types of stories that spoke the most intensely to me, and reflected something I wanted to do in my own fiction. As a child, I was drawn to fabulist writing through kid’s lit-fantasy ( A Wrinkle in Time) and science fiction (Ray Bradbury) and horror (Lois Duncan, John Bellairs), cut with metafiction ( Sideways Stories from Wayside School) and absurdism (Roald Dahl).Īs a teenager, I was lucky enough to have a particular teacher who gave me books to read from her personal library, like One Hundred Years of Solitude, which was my first exposure to magical realism.Īnd I had a third, important stage right after I began grad school, and fellow students began recommending writers to me who have since become the backbone of my personal canon: Kelly Link, Karen Russell, George Saunders, Nicholson Baker, Helen Oyeyemi, Alice Sola Kim, Sofia Samatar, Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter. Lyra Kuhn: When did you first become interested in fabulism?Ĭarmen Maria Machado: I think my interest in fabulism has come to me in stages. In Machado’s debut short story collection Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf Press), recently nominated for a National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, she weaves the real with the fantastic until the ordinary becomes sinister and the other way around. Much of Machado’s short fiction centers on the unexpected, the swerve into the night vision of a woman who is really a witch and just remembered to tell you. The world of Carmen Maria Machado is bright and bizarre, full of magic and haunted places. A woman recalls her sexual encounters as a plague consumes the world.

A store clerk realizes there are girls sewn into the dresses she sells. A wife refuses her husband’s request to remove the green ribbon tied eternally around her neck.

Carmen maria machado green ribbon