Interviews With Authors Series

A monthly talk with authors of interest

This week I have the pleasure of welcoming Cassondra Windwalker, whose novel, What Hides In The Cupboards is due out next week. (Unnerving Books)

Ceramic artist Hesper Dunn flees to the desert to escape tragedy, only to find her new home haunted by spirits far more dangerous than the ghost she brought with her. A perfect read for those content to sleep with the lights on.

Cassondra, first of all congratulations on the new book, your seventh novel and good luck with the launch!

Thank you so much! Book launches are so weirdly hard. It’s like making it to mile 13.1 in a marathon. Part of you says stop here, celebrate and eat cake, and the bigger part of you says don’t you dare, there’s so much farther to go. Working in the arts means the goalposts are forever moving, mostly because we ourselves are wrenching them out of the ground and hurling them out of reach.

You write gothic horror stories, and this one promises to be chilling. How did you first become interested in this genre?

Gothic horror to me is a natural extension of the exploration of the human condition. People are defined by two things: what they love and what they fear. Understanding these motivators reveals almost everything about a person. Gore is not very interesting to me, neither intriguing nor frightening. The human mind is a carnival of terrors, and that’s where gothic horror tends to dwell. Even my writing that is not horror is all about what is found in the human spirit.

You are quite a prolific writer, this being your seventh novel. What’s your process like? Do you write quickly?

Every book has its own timeline, and it never shares that with me ahead of time. Some books take months and months, and others only weeks. LOVE LIKE A CEPHALOPOD took forever, for instance. Every word required anguish, and I couldn’t see how my protagonist was going to get herself out of her predicament. In the end, of course, I realized that had never been what was important to her, and that she had her own way of triumph. WHAT HIDES IN THE CUPBOARDS fairly flew off the keyboard. As long as I was willing to scare myself, the pages filled up with words. 

As far as my process goes, that’s easier to answer. I’m engaged in the writing process every day. I do write most days - actually, since the war in Ukraine broke out, I have at least been writing one poem a day on that conflict - but writing is not the whole of that engagement. The most important part of writing is the listening. I spend a lot of time in nature, and I spend a lot of time eavesdropping, whether on people or birds or lichens. The stories are all out there. Learning the plots and understanding the motivators is fundamental to putting the words on paper.

Are there any recurring themes, images or characters in your work as a whole?

I mentioned earlier that people are the sum of what they love and what they fear, so everything I write in one way or another is about love and death and the human interactions with those forces. Often, though certainly not always, my narrators are unreliable. I’m also fascinated by the role chance and chaos play in our lives, and what real truths about humanity can be found in those intersections. I like to examine the things we take for granted and pick them apart.

You participate regularly on Twitter/X in #vss365. What are your thoughts on these 50-word stories, and the whole Very Short Story phenomenon?

I absolutely love #vss365. It was one of the first communities I found when I (very reluctantly) came to Twitter. There is so much good to say about it. For any writer at any stage of their craft, it hones and sharpens our storytelling skills. It forces us to strip away everything extraneous and ensure that every single word carries an essential element of story. That our choices evoke real emotion from a chance scroller, in a handful of words. That we create breathing characters who walk out into the world off the screen and continue far beyond us.

That’s its value to writers. But its value to readers is just as rich. Taking the time every day to read through all these little galaxies created by strangers across a screen is pure magic. We are introduced to all sorts of wonderful characters and stories, surprises and wonders, tragedies, and comedies, that pull us out of the grit of the day and give us the gumption to keep going. It introduces us to the skill of authors whose works we might never have otherwise known existed and then have to go seek out, to fill our bookshelves and the public libraries. It creates points of connection and makes friends of profile names, and sometimes even saves a life.

You also have several chapbooks of poetry. How does writing poetry fit into your writerly process? Does it compete or co-exist harmoniously with your other output?

I’ve always been a poet first, since I was a child. I move through the world as a poet, and my prose is written as a poet. Even though poetry is much harder to find a publisher (or readers) for these days, it will always be my primary form. Unlike some other writers, I can only work on one novel at a time, but poetry exists for me outside and above everything else. Poetry is distillation. Prose is filling the glass.

Aside from your poetry, you write in the Science Fiction & Fantasy, and Mystery genres. Do you have any special preferences among them, and which did you start with?

Now that is a tough question. I’ve actually written in just about every genre excluding comedy, but since BURY THE LEAD is satire as well as a psychological thriller, it technically fits that category (although it’s anything but funny.) I think my first short stories as a child were fantasy, or at least mythologically based. My first novel, PARABLE OF PRONOUNS, was an erotic mythological fairytale recounting the reincarnations of Adam, Eve, and Lilith through several thousand years and across a few continents, but the second book was that psychological thriller. The characters tell me what sort of story they’re living, and I just go with that. The book I’m currently shopping around, THE GARDENER’S WIFE’S MISTRESS, is a literary upmarket novel, without a single speculative element. So I hardly know myself.

You grew up in Oklahoma City, but now make your home in Alaska. Does where you live have any bearing on your writing?

It definitely does. I try to learn and absorb from wherever I am. We are all shaped by our geography. Something as simple as access to water makes the difference between marginal survival and luxuriant indulgence. Wherever I go, I do my best to listen. And then to recount what I have heard. We can’t underestimate the extent to which our perceptions of reality and our worldview are dictated by the elements chance has allowed us to take for granted. Travel forces us to shift those perceptions and see a tiny bit more of the whole reality than would otherwise be possible. And that is the role of art: to share those shifts so that even someone who never leaves their bed can get a little glimpse into the universe.

What was it like growing up in a Plains city? Do you like living in Alaska?

Oklahoma is a fascinating blend of the South and the West. Oklahoma City in particular, where I grew up, is a military base, and at the time I was growing up, was a favorite spot for Asian immigrants who had initially landed in California and then moved farther inland. This meant I was lucky enough to have friends who had both been born abroad and who had traveled abroad. And of course, in Oklahoma, unlike the eastern south, the painful intersections between the indigenous people and the white settlers was still very immediate. The football team of the university I attended are the Sooners, which is a celebratory reference to the settlers who not only participated in the land grab from the native people but who actually crossed the line early to steal the best plots for themselves. So everywhere you turn in Oklahoma City, one perception of the world is forced to engage with another.

Alaska (I’m moving to Colorado in two days) has been a fascinating and supremely unique experience. There is no other place like it. Alaska is entirely, unapologetically herself, and she keeps herself. There are very, very few roads here. Even at her most lush and abundant, she is wonderfully hostile. She opposes humankind at every turn. She is not to be mastered or understood. I wrote a book of poetry, TIDE TABLES AND TEA WITH GOD, entirely about her intersections with human griefs and fears and joys.

On your Goodreads profile you say: “If my life were more interesting, I probably wouldn't spend so much time writing about other people!” That’s funny because I feel like the opposite is sometimes true as well. People find themselves living inside what seems like a movie, and think, God, I’ve got to get this down on paper!

I have never been the most interesting person in the room, and I don’t want to be. My least favorite question is that old icebreaker, tell us something interesting/ weird/ embarrassing/ funny about yourself. I used to be a reporter, and I’m pretty good at identifying those questions or phrases that will lead someone else to fill up all the talking space for me—especially in Alaska, where I’ve found more than any place I’ve ever lived, that people love to talk about themselves. I can often spend an entire evening with someone without telling them hardly anything, and they probably won’t even notice.

I have been fortunate enough to travel to many magical places and be on the set of many of those movies, but what I observe there is far more fascinating, I think, than anything I do.

Are you working on anything new?

Always! I actually just came tearing out of the bath the other night with the opening page to a new novel in my head, so once we get settled in Colorado, that will be my only reality for a while. And of course I’m always hunting for new homes for the novels and short stories and poetry collections already completed, so that is a never-ending exercise in futility and self-flagellation. Rejection is good for the soul, right? Or at least good for the whisky sales.

Selected VSS:

She was a ballerina who couldn't stand en pointe, a writer with more rejections than words, a soldier boy who refused to fight, a lover of peace who fell into furies at injustice. She failed up, every damn day, and I wish I were more like her. All except the end. #rise365

The wood witch mourned when the listening ears of the forest brought her the whispered promises & stolen adoration of her lover and his temptress. Mourned, but did not hesitate. Now their bed of desire is a bed of mushrooms, fed with blood and flesh. #vsshorror

hail heaped in corners 
tattered leaves and torn flowers 
snails trundle, serene 
#vssnature #haiku

Follow the monk? Perhaps? I will follow the #intellectual path of ants through rotten wood, the path of dew drops over rose petals, of moonlight on snowflakes.
I will climb the mountain that is the valley shadowed by your lashes over my cheek.
#vss365

What Hides In The Cupboard | 196 pages, Kindle Edition | Expected publication January 30, 2024

Follow Cassondra on: Twitter/x, Goodreads

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Preorder here.