Interview: John Hanley
Q: How do you define the gothic in your work and why? Does your definition of what is gothic change your perception of the world? Why or why not?
A: Generally speaking, “gothic” for me is going to encapsulate any of the following to some degree: oppressive atmospheres, religious undertones, natural settings, haunts, tragedies. However, I don’t like to go by any strict definitions of genre, and in fact, it’s often the opposite. That is to say, I define “gothic” based on a loose set of vibes and themes, but I revel in anything that expands, extends, or subverts those elements.
I wouldn’t say my definition of gothic changes my perception of the world – other than the fact that I don’t believe in strict definitions – but maybe the inverse is true. I’m sure my experience of the world informs my relationship with the gothic and with horror as a whole. Fear is a very personal experience.
Q: How is your definition of gothic related or unrelated to regionalities? For instance, do you consider your engagement with the Gothic to be roughly in line with Southern Gothic, or is it something you reject/avoid?
A: I don’t make any regional distinctions when defining gothic as it pertains to NECKSNAP. However, as a Southern writer myself, Southern Gothic is a personal favorite. The cornerstones of Southern literature — family, nature, religion, food — have the capacity to be just as warm and comforting as they are relentless and oppressive, and I find that tense interplay to be so thematically rich.
I’m happy to read all different interpretations of the gothic genre, though. I just want a strong voice, compelling style, and thoughtful character work.
Q: What about the gothic genre is conducive to making a literary magazine? Does defining a gothic help with curation of submissions? Why do you think people always want to discuss the world this way? Do you think it is more of a genre or worldview?
A: It’s less about defining “gothic” specifically and more about defining an overall aesthetic and thematic direction. NECKSNAP is still in its infancy, but one of my main goals is to create a strong stylistic vision so that writers know exactly what we’re looking for. I love literary magazines that have strong personalities. (These aren’t horror magazines, but Taco Bell Quarterly and Runt Magazine are a couple of my recent favorites in this regard.) I think having a strong personality as a publication helps writers to know what to submit.
For the second part of the question: on the whole, writing horror or dark subject matter can be cathartic, community-building, and empowering. As I touched on earlier, confronting fear is a deeply personal experience, as is fear itself. In that way, I think it’s probably equal parts genre and worldview. Your experiences and perspective will inform which genres you work within and the way you choose to approach them.
Q: Gothic writers, elements, and media that inspire you–what are your touchstones of the genre and why? What is inspiring you right now? From these (and because I myself find this question a bit generic as a writer) what do your Gothic reads contribute to your overall manifestation of the Gothic?
A: I just finished a book by a colleague of mine, Girls With Long Shadows by Tennessee Hill, which sits pretty squarely in the Southern Gothic ethos and is a great example of what I mentioned about the genre above. It’s not definitively a horror story, but that’s another aspect of gothic and Southern Gothic literature that I love: horror can be evoked purely by the coincidences, accidents, tragedies, fractures, and dread that infuse everyday life. I’ll actually be interviewing Tennessee about the novel for NECKSNAP soon.
Some other touchstones for me from graduate school include A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor (perhaps one of the quintessential Southern Gothic works) and A Visitation of Spirits by Randall Kenan. I’d arguably include Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina in the Southern Gothic subgenre, too.
Outside of Southern Gothic, I’m reading a book now called The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich, which I might label as avant-garde gothic or neo-gothic? It’s like Trainspotting meets vampirism meets Lynchian surrealism. I had to set it down for a couple of weeks because of how relentlessly hypnotic it is, but to me, it’s a fantastically refreshing take on gothic aesthetics.
To answer your second question, these books are remarkably disparate. They are all idiosyncratic to their authors and contain their own unique personalities, and yet they all fall, in some form or another, under this large umbrella of “gothic.” It’s that disparateness that I’m after — I want to see how an author makes the genre purely their own.
Q: Shirley Jackson’s writing is imbued with a profound alienation that her adaptors and descendants seem to resist, particularly with that of the family unit. What is your relationship to Gothic and the community?
A: I think this goes back to what I mentioned about Southern Gothic: the genre revolves around the interplay between community and alienation. Family is both comforting and fraught, grounding and confusing, connective and frustrating. To me, exploring that duality is exactly the point of writing within the genre.
Q: WHO are the lovely little ghosts all around your website? I LOVE them. I want to befriend them. I think you have a story there.
A: Haha, the short answer is they were in the free library of images when I looked up “ghost” while designing the website, and I loved them right away. But I gravitated toward them because I felt exactly the same as you! They’re inviting, friendly little folks, and they give me the sense that they’re just walking around forests and abandoned buildings like sprites. I find that delightful.
Q: You are in a gothic story; are you the final person or are you the first haunt? Why or why not?
A: Yeesh, I’m definitely not the final person. I think I’m stubborn enough to get past the first haunt, but I’d probably succumb somewhere in the middle.
Q: You write in your editor’s note about yearning and missed connections, and also about monsters and missed connections in Issue 0. Is your theme of ‘ghosts’ the end of yearning as a running thread through your issues or only the beginning?
A: I started writing a haunted house novel recently, and in the course of doing so, I realized that the majority of the story was actually about a family’s collective reaction to grief. Perhaps it’s an obvious point to make, but to write a ghost story is to explore grief, whether that be the grief of the living or of the ghost themselves. And I think yearning and grief go hand in hand. They are manifestations of each other. So that throughline will surely show up again and again as long as we’re still publishing ghost stories (which we will be).
Q: Produced by the liminality of living spaces and technology… how do we begin to feel like ghosts in machines? How do you think literary magazines represent the ghostly sphere of books right now, the best and worst of technological spaces? Is Gothic sci-fi to you? Does it even matter?
A: This taps into another aspect of what we like at NECKSNAP: lo-fi, grungy, liminal, grainy nightmares. Visual aesthetics like The Backrooms, Skinamarink, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, I Saw the TV Glow. These all feel like reactions to technology’s rapid encroachment on our humanity, and dare I say, a nostalgia for the early aughts when technology was simpler and less ubiquitous. As technology has evolved, the dissonance between our online lives and our real lives has seemed to heighten. That dissonance is rife with haunted energy.
With that in mind, I think we all feel a bit like ghosts in machines right now. That’s why I’m excited about what feels like a resurgence of literary/print magazines – people coalescing around community spaces and print media, and valuing art at a smaller, more intimate scale. People craving something they can sit with for a while, that they can hold in their hands. That sort of thing feels quite literally like an antidote to… whatever you might call this current era.
Of course, NECKSNAP is heavily online and on social media. It feels inescapable, which is a horror in its own right. But small digital communities do hold value! People are nice and they care and they want to be in community! Using the digital landscape with intentionality to build small communities, especially if that pairs with an in-person community, feels like a productive way to navigate the technological quasi-dystopia.
Is gothic sci-fi? Not necessarily, but it could be. Genre schmenre, do whatever you want and call it whatever feels right.
Q: If we consider fear to be the relinquishment of logic, as Shirley Jackson posits during the psychobabble portion of Hill House, what does it mean to embrace that fear?
A: Oh gosh, trying to define this feels like trying to define what it means to “be yourself.” I fear (pun intended) I could spiral into a very convoluted philosophical answer. To keep it tight: fear is an emotion, and to embrace an emotion doesn’t necessarily mean relinquishing one’s rationality as much as it means understanding what that emotion is telling you. In the case of fear, it may be telling you to, say, avoid that spooky clown standing at the edge of the woods.
Q:Something we might be fearful of: Summerween has come with all the gilt of pink skeletons and watermelon pumpkins. Summerween as a portmanteau was coined in the Gravity Falls episode of the same name from 2012, though I think the idea of a spooky summer is older than the hills. I also think there is room for more–such as iced pumpkin spiced lattes by the pool instead! And caramel corn sundaes.
Kidding! But love of toothsome fall foods aside, what are your thoughts on what this means for the literary genre? Is it a[nother] micro-trend? Is it a way to make the summer mermaid and summer-camp adjacent aesthetic a little more screamy? Do you find it chafes against those of us who study and/or celebrate the gothic and macabre all year round? Is it like the Addams Family seeing dollar store decorations in suburbia or is it like the Addams family moving into the heart of Salem? Or… something else?
A: I love it. I think people should do more fun, celebratory things. Joy is radical! Have a costume party in June.
Q: The penultimate question (or the 999th Ghost, if you will, before you are let off this doom buggy…) asks the following:
Please make a list of your favourite ghosts for me, the ones you cannot hold onto but can also never let go (this is a creative question, can even be a micro poem!)
A: Moments of knowing I’m inside a future memory, followed by the memories themselves. They haunt me in different ways. I still remember a fuzzy five seconds of laying on my living room floor at maybe seven years old, staring at the wooden beam on the ceiling and deciding, by force of will, that I would remember that exact snapshot forever. So far, still managing to keep that haunt going.
And finally: Do you have any upcoming writing and/or art-works we can scream about? Any upcoming projects that you are excited to be working on?
A: I am currently awaiting responses for a couple of flash fiction pieces, and have been longlisted for a contest. So nothing to scream about just yet, but my fingers are crossed! I’ve been really enjoying writing flash pieces lately, and will surely be shouting it out to the world if any of it is accepted for publication.
Other than that, Issue Two is the big project for the next couple of months, and I’m excited to crack into it!
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John Hanley is the founder and EIC of Necksnap Magazine.