James Dorr
What’s your favorite autumn treat?
The whole atmosphere that surrounds Halloween. The brightness of colors of the leaves, contrasted with darkness. The laughter of children. The crispness of air that presages the winter’s cold.
Do you celebrate Halloween? If you do, what are some of your favorite traditions or activities?
Last year the Upstart Poets, a local poetry group I’m in, suggested we wear costumes to our October reading. Only a few of us actually did, but I came dressed as a Victorian-era grave digger. Then when the time came to read favorite poems (not necessarily our own works) I read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Conqueror Worm.” I hope that they do it again this year (no promises, but I was in New Orleans this June and brought back a couple of masks from the French Market) and it becomes a tradition. Then, afterwards back home, I and the resident cat Wednesday will plan to stay up and watch horror DVDs.
What’s the sexiest paranormal creature?
Vampires, by a yard. Why? If I may, I’ll quote myself from an introduction I wrote for Telling Tales of Terror: Essays on Writing Horror & Dark Fiction (Damnation Books, 2012). “The nexus of sex and death, birth and rebirth, Eros and Thanatos, vampirism is powerful stuff. Virtually every nation and culture has some variation of the vampire myth. The femme fatale or her male counterpart, attractive yet dangerous. In vampirism is found the temptation we all might admit to, to play with fire. To partake in the beauty, but somehow escape the fatal bite that follows the kiss — or even perhaps to embrace that part too, to share immortality and to become, ourselves, seducers.” Isn’t that what, in a way, we strive for as well as writers?
If the hero or heroine in your latest novel was thrust into a classic horror story, which one would it be and why?
Well, actually The Tears of Isis is a collection, with many stories and diverse heroes, but to take the title story that ends the book, and the character Copper in the excerpt in the Haunted Library, I could see her as Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla. While not herself a vampire as such, Copper, just as La Méduse whose poem begins the book, brings beauty through sculpture but also destruction to those nearest to her. Just as we do as poets and writers, stealing humanity from our characters and trapping it on the page. And just as a vampire does, like Carmilla, offering immortality but with the price being death.
James is the author of The Tears of Isis.
Purchase Link:
Blurb:
What do Medusa and the goddess Isis have in common? Are both creatresses through destruction? And why was Isis often times depicted as weeping?
Herewith are some answers as parts of a journey through art and creation, of sculpture and blood-drinking, crafting musical instruments from bone, revisiting legends of Cinderella and the Golden Fleece, of Sleeping Beauty and Dragons and Snow White — some of these, of course, well disguised. For is not art both the recasting of what is, as well as the invention of what is not?
The Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney spoke of art as “making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature,” so here there be vampires, and ghouls, and insects perhaps from outer space as well as from this Earth, and visions of Saturn and life in the sea, and other wonders “such as never were in nature,” but, above all, Isis. The Weeping Isis. Isis with vulture wings, breasts bare and smeared with blood as in the earliest forms of her myth.
And of course, as well, Medusa.
Read an excerpt from The Tears of Isis at James’ feature at the Haunted Library.
About James:
I’m a short story writer and poet with several earlier collections, Strange Mistresses: Tales of Wonder and Romance and Darker Loves: Tales of Mystery and Regret from Dark Regions Press and the all-poetry Vamps (A Retrospective) from Sam’s Dot/White Cat Publications. My work falls primarily into dark fantasy and horror, although I also write some science fiction and mystery as well as occasional lighter fantasy and even, perhaps, a little romance now and then. I was born in Florida in the US, have lived in New Jersey (across the Hudson River only a few miles from New York City) and the Boston, Massachusetts area, and am currently located in Indiana; have been married; and have worked as a technical writer and editor, an editor on a regional magazine, a full time freelancer, and an office worker in an optometry clinic. In all, I have nearly 400 individual stories or poems published in one place or another from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine to Yellow Bat Review, along with a number of anthologies.
http://jamesdorrwriter.wordpress.com
10 days until Halloween!
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I do enjoy how much the children love Halloween.