The annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference is one of our favorite events of the year! Our team is headed to Portland March 27-30 for the conference Bookfair (T10029), and we’re excited to share some of our authors’ onsite panels and offsite events.

Author Signing Times • Table T10029

• Thursday, 3/28 at 4:30-5 Charlie J. Eskew signing Tales of the Astonishing Black Spark

• Friday, 3/29 at 1:30-2:30 Andrew Katz signing The Vampire Gideon’s Suicide Hotline and Halfway House for Orphaned Girls

• Saturday, 3/30 at 12-1 Anca Szilágyi signing Daughters of the Air

• Saturday, 3/30 at 1:30-2:30 Carmen Maria Machado signing Carmilla

Our Authors in Portland

Charlie J. Eskew

Charlie J. Eskew is a writer from Columbus, Ohio. He is a professional comic book shop lurker and tenured Black dude in America. Please satisfy your unnatural obsession with him via Twitter @CJEskew or his website, www.askeweskew.com.

• Thursday, 4:30-5: Signing at Lanternfish Press booth (T10029)

• Friday, 3-4:15: Monsters, Marvels, & Melanin: A Discussion of Black Speculative Fiction panel in room F149

• Saturday, 1:30-3:30: The Sixth Annual Rock and Roll Reading at Mississippi Studios (RSVP on Facebook)

Anca L. Szilágyi

Anca L. Szilágyi grew up in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, Gastronomica, and Fairy Tale Review, among other publications. She is the recipient of the inaugural Artist Trust/Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award, a Made at Hugo House fellowship, and awards from the Vermont Studio Center, 4Culture, the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, and the Jack Straw Cultural Center. The Stranger hailed Anca as one of the "fresh new faces in Seattle fiction." She lives in Seattle with her husband.

• Thursday, 6:30-9: The Second Annual Strange Theater, A Fabulist Reading at Lucky Labrador Brewing Company (RSVP on Facebook)

• Saturday, 12-1: Signing at Lanternfish Press booth (T10029)

Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado's debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, LA Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the World Fantasy Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century."

Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Tin House, VQR, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the CINTAS Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

• Saturday, 1:30-2:30: Signing at the Lanternfish Press booth (T10029)

Andrew Katz

Andrew Katz, when not reading and writing fiction, enjoys puppers and doggos, black coffee, hiking, and writing bios that read like poorly made dating profiles. He is also the proud owner of several paintings that he painted himself and now hides from the world because they’re bad. He lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.

• Friday, 1:30-2:30: Signing at the Lanternfish Press booth (T10029)

In the house on the hill, there lives a vampire. But not of the sexy, mysterious, or sparkling kind. The vampire Gideon prefers to drink nearly expired blood from the local morgue while watching over the humans around him—humans he calls “children,” because when you’re as old as he is, everyone else does seem like a child. And so many of these children are prepared to throw their lives away over problems that, in Gideon’s view, appear rather trivial.

He sets about trying to fix them by means of an unofficial, do-it-yourself suicide hotline. He's sure that he's making a difference, maybe even righting the mistakes of his past. Then one day a troubled young girl calls, and his (undead) life gets turned upside down. Before he knows it, he’s got a surly, tech-addicted teenage roommate—and, at long last, he begins to grow up.

Andrew Katz’s The Vampire Gideon’s Suicide Hotline and Halfway House for Orphaned Girls is a darkly funny take on vampires that Crawford Fantasy Award-winning author Stephanie Feldman calls “Alternately provocative and tender… a ghastly undead specimen with wisdom to share."

With only a few weeks left before Vampire Gideon releases into the wild, we sat down with Andrew to talk about his work, his influences, and Gideon.

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Thanks for taking some time to chat with us before Vampire Gideon comes out next month. To start off, tell us a bit about yourself.

Ugh, this is always one of my least favorite questions to answer, as I’m not the best at talking about myself. I guess one of the most pertinent things in my life is a battle with somewhat severe A.D.D. which I used to think of as a type of curse but has actually become a huge boon to my productivity in a weird way. It has allowed me to pick up a bunch of cool hobbies, i.e. carpentry, painting, disc golf (the silliest most satisfying game in the world).

Because of the distracted nature of my brain bouncing from thing to thing helps me to never get too bored, which David Foster Wallace thought was all you needed to succeed in America—an immunity to boredom, that is. When I’m writing, I’ll be in and out of my backyard, playing with my perfect dog, Zora, making benches, or whatever other random act takes my fancy. By staying active I stay productive.

Oh, also I work in environmental remediation and go to grad school, which are both pretty neat and again, add to my never-ending to-do list that I’ve been keeping for the past year now.

“A vampire who runs a suicide hotline” was a concept that grabbed us immediately. Where did the seed of the story come from?

So I was in a stage with my writing in which I became upsetting with the ironic flipping of ideas. Mental health has always been something of interest to me because of family history and my mother’s career as a social worker. I got to thinking what an interesting way to write about mental health would be, and came up with a dead guy running a suicide hotline, because there’s no other way to have an expert opinion on death. I thought maybe I’d do a zombie, but I’m really not into zombies, and then I was like, “Oh! Vampires are fun and something I could critique in terms of mental health and imagination, let’s do that.” It really just spiraled from there. Also, huge thanks to Lanternfish’s Christine Neulieb for helping to make this story a lot more fun and cohesive.

Gideon was born near a hundred years ago. Did you experience any challenges writing the voice of a character from such a different era?

Such a challenge. The formality was really fun to write, especially in contrast to the hyper-vulgar character of Margie, who incidentally became my favorite as she unfolded. The biggest challenge with Gideon’s voice was the anachronisms and trying to keep everything consistent and plausible. Because Gideon is a character in the current world, I think I was able to get away with a little bit of that when giving antiquated views of culture and the discourses with Margie, but it was hard to eliminate the references and phrases that didn’t fit his character. It was a good time splicing in jokes of him not understanding other characters based on his age, though.

Gideon has a few different repeat callers whose stories readers become familiar with throughout the novel. Do you have a favorite among the callers?

Margie Margie Margie.

Who are some of the authors who have influenced your work?

I tried to give shoutouts to a lot of them in the novel itself, a la Jane Austen, Robert Heinlein, Dostoyevsky, and the various filmmakers who are mentioned among many, many more. I’m a really eclectic reader and have almost certainly absorbed a ton more from authors who didn’t get mentioned by name but are definitely deserving of huge praise (shout outs to Ray Bradbury, Kelly Link, Thomas Pynchon, and Kazuo Ishiguro). Also, as far as narrative storytelling goes, I think that Dave Chappelle’s work is absolute genius, as well as his former Chappelle’s Show writing partner, Neal Brennan, whose “3 Mics” special is one of the most poignant mental health narratives I’ve interacted with in a long time. 

Thank you again for taking some time to speak with us! Where can readers follow your work online?

So I don’t participate in social media, not as any sort of statement or anything, I’m just terrified of becoming a phone addict. I can so easily see myself as someone glued to my phone reading Twitter and obsessively checking Instagram that I don’t even take that risk, as I think it would put a monstrous hole in my productivity.

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Andrew Katz, when not reading and writing fiction, enjoys puppers and doggos, black coffee, hiking and writing bios that read like poorly made dating profiles. He is also the proud owner of several paintings he did himself and hides from the world because they’re bad. He lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The Vampire Gideon's Suicide Hotline and Halfway House for Orphaned Girls is available for preorder on our website, via your favorite independent retailer, at Barnes & Noble, and via other book retailers.

Clever, beautiful—and hopelessly violent.

Diagnosed with a rare psychiatric condition and accused of murder in childhood, sisters Addie and Dorian have spent most of their lives in a locked ward under the supervision of eccentric researcher Dr. Lark. Now on the cusp of adulthood, Addie has a plan: start a new family, to replace the one she lost. Dorian struggles to quell her violent tendencies in time to help raise her sister’s child. But Dr. Lark sees these patients as key to the completion of his revolutionary cure, and he will not allow the sisters' aims for their own lives get in his way.

Barbara Barrow's debut novel is harrowing, bittersweet, and at times claustrophobic. While we look forward to sharing The Quelling with the world in just a few weeks, we sat down with Barbara to learn more about the stories—and the person—behind the upcoming book.

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Thank you for taking some time to speak with us! Please introduce yourself and your work to our readers.

I grew up in Atlanta and lived in Germany, New York, and St. Louis before moving to Pittsburgh five years ago. My father was a taxi driver and used to take me out in his cab to pick up passengers, and I used to meet a lot of interesting characters and see the city this way. I have a lifelong obsession with books and I especially love Gothic literature and surrealism. Currently, I’m an English professor at Point Park University. I specialize in Victorian lit, but I love teaching courses like Detective Fiction and Mad Science & Lit as well as more contemporary novelists like Zadie Smith. In my spare time I like to explore the city and I also volunteer at a meal ministry on Pittsburgh’s North Side.

I read and write fiction with strange or offbeat themes and I like stories with multiple narrators. The Quelling is about two sisters who struggle with violent tendencies and decide they want to raise a child together. When the story starts, they are in an institution because they committed a murder when they were just kids, and they are obsessed with watching nature shows, those scenes of animals hunting—Animal Planet, BBC Earth, that sort of thing. A good friend describes it as a “feminist Clockwork Orange,” and I think this phrase captures the weird psychological atmosphere of the novel.

Addie and Dorian, Dorian and Addie – the relationship between the two sisters is central to The Quelling. What inspired you to focus the narrative on not a single protagonist, but on a close-knit sibling pair?

I’ve always been interested in close-knit friendships that are essentially like sisterhoods. In coming-of-age stories the focus is usually on a single character, but I wanted to show how when you’re younger, and when you’re in a close, even claustrophobic friendship like that, it’s almost like at times you don’t have a separate consciousness. Instead, your identity merges with that of the person that you’re close to, the person you’re having all these early formative experiences with, so that their identity becomes yours and vice versa. It can be powerful and tender and frightening at once, and I wanted to show that kind of tense sisterly intimacy.

Photo credit: John Zeller

The sisters have a rare psychiatric condition, which is the reason they’re under Dr. Lark’s care at the start of the novel. Tell our readers a little bit about this condition.

The sisters have been diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder, which means they have difficulties forming emotional bonds with other people. Patients with this condition can act out violently and do things that sabotage or hurt themselves or others. There are many well-respected doctors and institutions that research and raise public awareness about the condition, but there have also been some bizarre and even abusive treatments. One example is the Candace Newmaker case from the early 2000s, which got national media coverage. Her doctors did a violent simulation of the birthing process and suffocated her, which sparked public outrage and some preventative legislation. I read a lot about this case and other abusive treatments when I was conducting research for the novel.

What comes next for you as a writer?

I’m in the very early stages of a second novel that takes place in Atlanta in the mid-nineties, and am finishing up some short stories and academic essays. My partner and I are also collaborating on a graphic novel called Furder, She Wrote. We’re hoping to reach out to some illustrators once we are finished writing and storyboarding.

Where can readers find out more about you and your work online?

I have a website and am also on Facebook and (just recently!) on Twitter @dustyoldbagz.

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Barbara Barrow is a fiction writer and literary critic who adores all things feminist, fabulist, and surreal. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Forge Literary Magazine, Cease, Cows, Folio, Zahir, Nano Fiction, and elsewhere, and her journal articles have appeared in Victorian Poetry, Journal of Victorian Culture, Victorian Periodicals Review, and Nineteenth-Century Contexts. She is Assistant Professor of English at Point Park University in Pittsburgh. Follow her online at barbarabarrow.com or on Twitter and Facebook.

These are the Astonishing Tales of
I'm Gonna Make It after All

In Charlie J. Eskew's Tales of the Astonishing Black Spark, a young man feeling trapped in his Midwestern hometown is endowed with brand-new superhero powers in the aftermath of a lightning strike. It seems all his problems are solved - until he discovers that the new powers have a price tag he may not be able to afford.

With a month to go before Tales of the Astonishing Black Spark comes to newsstands (and book retailers) near you, we sat down with author Charlie J. Eskew to talk about Spark, comic books, and more.

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Let’s start off by telling our readers what Tales of the Astonishing Black Spark is all about.

Tales of the Astonishing Black Spark is the story of Donald McDougal, a mild mannered, not so mildly neurotic nerd from Ohio who is struck by lightning, and is granted superpowers.  It’s a celebration of all those things in pop culture and fiction that discuss a morally uncompromised heroism without the means of achieving it.   Donald in this book is learning what the truth is of acquiring a superhuman ability, or talent, giving him a platform he never expected to have.  His challenge in that is how best to utilize it to not only survive, but thrive in the way that he’d been promised by being one of the smart ones.  I think more than anything though it is a story about compromise, about apathy,  about tokenism, about the Kryptonite that comes in a form not so supernatural for marginalized individuals. 

Oh!  It’s also about punching people in the snoot.

Fans of superhero comics and other superhero media will probably see a lot of familiar elements in Spark. What are some of the superhero stories that influenced you between your childhood and now?

I would most immediately point toward Spider-Man, sans clones and six arms and that really weird anti-smoking PSA issue.  Specifically though the Maximum Carnage run is where I fell in love with the character.  Anytime I think of it I remember a panel where he webs up his broken ribs and against everything pushes through to do what he knows he can.   

There are of course others, Kyle Rayner, the Emerald Dawn story line of Green Lantern when he picks up the mantel.  I want to say here its tied to the notion of picking up power after heroes have become something less than admirable, but mostly it’s the idea of a struggling artist getting cosmic abilities that resonated with me.

Of course, with a bullet, Milestone Media, and Static more specifically.  The history of their work in bringing narratives to audiences who were often left silent in the 90’s will always be at the heart of what I wanted to do with Spark. 

There are others of course, but I hope casual and more comic-centric readers will pick up on those as they read.

Speaking of influences… Every writer has books and authors who’ve influenced them and their writing style. What are a few of yours?

Well as I’m sure every writer probably responds there are too many to go into without bullet points.  Regarding Spark my biggest influences are writers such as Ralph Ellison, Kurt Vonnegut, Mat Johnson, Dwayne McDuffie and George Schuyler.

While Spark deals with a lot of heavy topics—politics, racial tension and microaggressions, disillusionment—it’s an incredibly funny satire. How did you approach balancing the serious and lighthearted elements of the novel?

Thank you so much for saying that! I feel that in some ways the two go hand in hand.  Satire is all about bringing absurdity to light, but while satire can sometimes pick at wounds a little too fresh I also find parody to be a salve.  While I wanted to discuss issues surrounding race and identity, and how having tangible power doesn’t necessarily exclude you from facing these issues, I also wanted something that people could enjoy in its honesty and humor.

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Charlie J. Eskew is a writer from Columbus, Ohio. He is a professional comic book shop lurker and tenured Black dude in America. Please satisfy your unnatural obsession with him via Twitter @CJEskew or his website, www.askeweskew.com.

Clever, beautiful—and hopelessly violent.

Meet Addie and Dorian, the sisters at the center of Barbara Barrow's debut novel The Quelling, coming to bookstores and online retailers September 25.

Addie and Dorian have always been together. They’re clever, beautiful—and hopelessly violent. Diagnosed with a rare psychiatric condition and accused of murder in childhood, the sisters have spent most of their lives in a locked ward under the supervision of eccentric researcher Dr. Lark. Now on the cusp of adulthood, Addie has a plan: start a new family, to replace the one she lost. Dorian struggles to quell her violent tendencies in time to help raise her sister’s child.

Illustration: "The Bride," Alex Eckman-Lawn
Photography: Jason Chen for Paradigm Gallery
Designer: Michael Norcross

But Dr. Lark sees these patients as key to the completion of his revolutionary cure, and he will not allow Addie’s absurd ideas to get in the way. As his “treatments” become increasingly bizarre, they put Addie and Dorian’s safety at risk. The girls’ only lifeline may be Ellie, a ward nurse with troubles of her own, who’s never felt the need to protect anyone—until now.

"When I think of The Quelling in a visual way, as a series of images rather than words, I think immediately of imprisoned women, bristling with a kinetic animal rage, in a very contained space," said author Barbara Barrow. "I’ve always loved Gothic novels, and I wanted to write something in that spirit of Gothic claustrophobia. Alex Eckman-Lawn's art perfectly conveys that Gothic aesthetic. The arching spines in the foreground, and the snakelike design on the right, both express a sense of coiled, bristling tension. The hollow-socketed skulls at the bottom hint at the novel’s weird psychological atmosphere and also symbolize the figures of the two sisters who both mirror and combat each other. The curtains and draperies suggest the novel’s themes of repressed or hidden secrets, but they also allude, in a more literal way, to one of the more bizarre treatments the girls undergo, one that is at the center of the plot.

"And there, in the middle of it all, is the misty figure of the woman, her face in shadow, her arms reaching out to the sides, with all these currents or filaments gathering around her. I think of the woman as representing the character Addie: vulnerable yet ferocious, contained and refusing her containment, looking outward in a way that strikes me as furtive but also confrontational."

The first 50 preorders of The Quelling through the Lanternfish Press website will come with a bookplate signed by the author. You can also preorder The Quelling from your local independent bookstore, Barnes & Noble, or other online retailers. And don't forget to add the book on Goodreads!