R. Leigh Hennig gathered many of the amazing authors from Mother: Tales of Love and Terror for a council at the roundtable about writing, mothers, and horror. Join us as we pop in for a brief spotlight on how the stories of Mother, and their makers, worked their horrible magic to create this book.
Author Spotlight: K.M. Veohongs, author of “(sub)Maternal Instincts”
Q: What inspired your story?
A: My poem grew out of my distaste for how, in so many Western fairy tales, women are almost always pitted against other women. I wanted to explore the motivations for the “evil” stepmother’s alleged cruelty and ask how a woman in a society that disempowers women might find her own ways of fighting against it.
Q: Thematically, what was important for you to include?
A: Something that was important for me to include was the question of whether the “happily ever afters” of fairy tales are really all that happy. They so often involve marriage to a man the protagonist barely knows – why is that a desired endpoint? What would that look like in reality?
Q: What was your process for writing this, and did that at all differ from your usual approach?
A: So, I’m not really a poet. This isn’t imposter syndrome – the fact is, I have written very little poetry! But, at the time I first wrote this, I was terribly stuck on the novel I was drafting (which looks at mother-child relationships a whole lot, too) and my short fiction wasn’t going much better, so I needed a low-pressure way to be creative with words. I am fortunate to be friends with some very fine poets, who helped me dig into the first version of this piece and show me how to make it sing.
Q: Have you explored these themes before, and if so, to what depth?
A: The parent-child relationship is one that infuses a lot of my work. There are so many ways to fail and succeed as a parent (and many people can manage both at the same time!) and I’ve always enjoyed digging into the motivations of characters who seem “bad” on the surface.
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