GREETINGS, BOOKWORMS! I’m Aisha Kandisha, Head Librarian at Kandisha Press. Join me in the dusty stacks of the library I will never leave again as I chat with some of my favorite Women in Horror. Today we feature author Barrington Smith-Seetachitt!
Barrington Smith-Seetachitt’s work has been acquired by several producers and companies, and won prizes like Amazon Studios’ Best Screenplay Award, Screencraft’s Cinematic Short Story Competition Grand Prize, and DreamAgo’s Pen & Pellicule Writing Fellowship. Barrington has also published fiction in literary journals like Sycamore Review, Colorado Review, The Drum and Women of Horror, Volume 3 and also recently co-wrote a well-reviewed episode of Creepshow on AMC’s Shudder Network.
What made you want to become an author? Did you have an “Aha!” moment when you knew you were born to write? Or perhaps a beloved book inspired you?
I don’t think I had an “aha” moment for becoming an author. Even though I was a big reader as a kid, it somehow never occurred to me that the books on the library shelves were created by normal people, and that I could be one of them.
But I felt compelled to write fairly early. At the age of maybe seven, I remember being at a yard sale with an adult, seeing a roll of calculator paper and having a vision—artistic as much as literary— that I should fill this entire scroll with writing.
This was probably among the first many creative projects where my initial ambitions overshot my abilities or attention span. I started out strong, but after a while, each time I wrote, I’d have to unscroll the paper to the blank bit which took longer and longer, and the paper began to get tangled and torn. I moved on to the next thing, possibly the spiral ring notebook where I planned to write everything in Tolkien’s runic.
All of which is to say, I don’t know if I’ve ever said “ I want to become an author,” so much as I’ve said, “I just have to do this one cool thing, and then I’ll figure out what I am,” but enough of those things have involved writing that I’m getting closer to thinking of myself as an author!
What do you believe are your strengths in writing? And when you feel you need to improve on a particular writing skill, how do you go about it?
Ahhh… This is like a job interview question! 😂I’ve always had deep feelings about how words fit together, and have been told my writing has a strong voice. In terms of improvement, I love being a student – perhaps to a fault. I have a couple of writing degrees, and I still sign up for a la carte classes and workshops when time and finances allow. At the moment, I’m sporadically following George Saunders’ class on Substack where he selects a story and discusses an aspect of it. I highly recommend it for anyone with an interest in writing.
What are your thoughts on the book industry today, or more importantly, about the book community? Do you feel it is getting harder or easier to make it as an independent author these days?
I’ll be very interested to see how other writers answer these questions! Because I haven’t gone through the gauntlet with a book, myself, I’m not as familiar as I could be with the book community, or able to compare the environment between the past and now. Most of my experience so far has just been submitting short fiction, which, if it’s helpful for some of your readers, I can talk about… When I’m looking for places to submit stories, I look through collections of stories from authors I like to see where they first published. Very often, I find that those journals are gone, or have closed to open submissions. Sycamore Review, which is where I published my first story in about 2008, just announced it has closed down. A writer coming up today won’t have that journal as a possible outlet. It’s possible my references are becoming dated and there are more outlets being created that I’m not aware of, but it’s definitely a challenge!
I also think about how technology has made things easier at one end of the funnel, but harder at the other. At one end, websites with submission guidelines, computers and writing programs–and now AI, make it easier and more accessible for people who want to make something and send it out into the world. But at the other end, readers – both in editorial departments and in life— have to sort through an unprecedented amount of content, and they can get overwhelmed. I, myself, am overwhelmed with content! As a submitter, I don’t love it when a publication gets a year behind in responding, but I definitely understand how it can happen.
Tell us about your work. What story are you most proud of?
Oh, that’s a hard one! I tend to have a lot of affection for whatever I’ve worked on most recently, which I think you have to, because it takes so much work to push a story out into the world. But that doesn’t always last. Currently, I have a new story that is the longest story I’ve ever written and I spent a lot of time on it. I’m proud of that. But—I think mostly due to the length— it’s been very difficult to place. Even though I tell myself that the market isn’t a reflection of the writing, it’s easy to start questioning my own taste!
It’s easier to feel proud of work that has received external validation and praise, though I have some ambivalence about my tendency to do that. I’m always grateful to Kandisha for liking and publishing “Shell” in Volume 3 of Women of Horror. It subsequently won a monetary award, and continues to garner interest for adaptation to screen. So I definitely feel proud of that. But my acceptance to the Kandisha anthology happened after more than a dozen rejections— I was beginning to question if it was good at all. I wonder now how I’d feel about it if it hadn’t found its way to acceptance and accolades?
What are your upcoming works and plans for the future?
A digital comic series I wrote called Sal Bones will hopefully appear on the Macroverse app later this year! Also a short film I wrote and directed is in the post-production process, and I’ll be submitting it to film festivals in a couple months, so I’m keeping fingers crossed for that. Once I’ve crossed that finish line, I want to dive into writing more stories again. Maybe I’ll finally accrue enough of one type to become a collection. That’s a goal. Meanwhile, I’ve been doing a weekly Substack Newsletter, I worry it might be a distraction from other “big goals” writing, but for the moment, it makes me hit a deadline every week, and I enjoy it.
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