{"id":46840,"date":"2025-03-28T00:01:37","date_gmt":"2025-03-28T04:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=46840"},"modified":"2025-03-19T22:52:20","modified_gmt":"2025-03-20T02:52:20","slug":"first-word-on-horrors-elizabeth-hand-interview-women-in-horror-month-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/28\/first-word-on-horrors-elizabeth-hand-interview-women-in-horror-month-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"First Word on Horror’s Elizabeth Hand Interview [Women in Horror Month 2025]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Meet Elizabeth Hand:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Please introduce yourself:<\/strong>
\nI\u2019m Elizabeth Hand. I\u2019ve been publishing fiction, book reviews and other non-fiction since 1987, as well as teaching at writing workshops around the world and at the Stonecoast MFA Program in Maine. I grew up in NY State, lived in Washington D.C. for 13 years before moving to Maine, and for the last 28 years I\u2019ve divided my time between the Maine coast and North London.<\/p>\n

What is horror to you, what makes a work of art one in the horror genre?<\/strong>
\nI tend not to think of genre in terms of reading or writing, but I think a sense of the uncanny, deep unease or outright terror can all be part of what gives a reader that particular frisson we get from dark fiction. As for what makes a work of art, I think that dark fiction, film, visual art, music \u2026 it all fits under a pretty big tent. A movie like Coppola\u2019s \u201cThe Conversation\u201d has as frightening an ending, in its way, as that of \u201cThe Wicker Man.\u201d<\/p>\n

What made you want to work in horror?<\/strong>
\nI don\u2019t really think of genre when I sit down to write something \u2014 I write across a wide spectrum (noir, historical, horror, contemporary fantasy, science fiction, mimetic fiction) but I think most of what I do skews dark. I\u2019m not sure why. But ever since I was a kid, I loved ghost stories and monster movies, and I decided very early on, that\u2019s what I wanted to do \u2014 write ghost stories.<\/p>\n

Where do you get your inspiration?<\/strong>
\nWell, since we\u2019re talking horror, I don\u2019t think we have to look too far these days to find it \u2026 everywhere. Still, I\u2019m mostly inspired by landscape and architecture. I love beautiful bleak places.<\/p>\n

What would you like your legacy to be in the genre (or elsewhere)?<\/strong>
\nI never set out to be a teacher, but I ended up leading writer\u2019s workshops in the early 90s and found I loved it. And then I\u2019ve been teaching at an MFA program for 17 years, not to mention doing various workshops with elementary and high school students. I couldn\u2019t tell you how many students I\u2019ve worked with over the years \u2014 it could be a few hundred. I\u2019d like to think that I was able to pass the torch to a few of them, sharing my love of reading as much as writing.<\/p>\n

What is Women in Horror Month to you and why is it still important this many years later?<\/strong>
\nFor so many years, women writers were marginalized \u2014 I started attending conventions in the late 1980s, and I remember panels where the talking point was, \u201cCan women write science fiction\/horror\/etc.?\u201d (I am not making this up.) I have no idea how women are represented in horror now, but I\u2019ve read the work of a lot of emerging women writers (many of them now well-established) and I do think \u2014 I certainly hope! \u2014 that there are a lot more of them than there used to be.<\/p>\n

And bear in mind, there were always women writing and publishing horror \u2014 their work just too often got sidelined.<\/p>\n

Who are some of the Women in Horror who you look up to and who do you want to bring attention to in your field or others?<\/strong>
\nI grew up reading Shirley Jackson, Daphne Du Maurier, Angela Carter, Flannery O\u2019Conner. Also the ghost stories of Vernon Lee, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Mary Perkins Freeman. I loved Anne Rice\u2019s first three Vampire novels and The Witching Hour. They all shaped me when I first started writing seriously in my 20s. Since then I\u2019ve been inspired by people like Mariana Enriquez, Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link. Tananarive Due\u2019s The Reformatory was one of the best novels, hands-down, that I\u2019ve read in years. Carina Bissett writes terrific short fiction. I recently reviewed Lucy Rose\u2019s debut, The Lamb, which is fantastic and very, very dark. Sarah Moss is great.<\/p>\n

What are you currently working on that you can tell us about?<\/strong>
\nI\u2019m completing a novel called Unspeakable Things, very loosely inspired by Du Maurier\u2019s Rebecca, in which two queer teenager girls in 1920s London go on a killing spree.<\/p>\n

Where can readers keep up with you?\u00a0<\/strong>
\nI\u2019m @elizabethhand.bsky.social on Bluesky, always happy to hear from folks! Thanks for the chance to talk about books!<\/p>\n

Check out First Word on Horror on Substack now!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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