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 Lilah Wild!
Lilah Wild’s dark fiction is an ongoing search for cauldrons hidden within the modern landscape, exploring the contemporary fantastic and horrific. She is a graduate of Clarion West and her work has appeared in the Kaleidocast, Pseudopod, Fantasy Magazine, Not One of Us, Niteblade, and other venues of quality scrawl. Her current fascinations include bellydance dabbling, synthwave, vintage glamour, neurochemical witchcraft, horror movie interior decorating, 80’s metal, and running away to the beach. She lives in Queens with two cottagecore panthers. She can be found online at http://www.leopardmoon.com and @lilah.wild on Instagram.
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?
The one word I keep hearing over and over to describe my work, is “lush.” Getting to really immerse in an atmosphere, to hear it and inhale it and catch all the little nuances, I have such a good time at the keyboard with my headphones on. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect” – this quote from Anaïs Nin is a lot of how I feel when I’m writing. “I write to find out what I know” – that’s another good one, from Flannery O’Connor.
The skill I really need to improve on is butt-in-chair time, so I’ve created this little world around my laptop. Candles, various mood-enhancing drinks, my cat Pixie parked in her little leopard kitty bed on the chair next to me, all the evocative songs that bring images instantly to mind when I listen to them, all lined up in a playlist like bottles to be uncorked, potions to drink. I feel like I haven’t completely listened to a song until I’ve written a scene to it.
What are your thoughts on the book industry today, or more importantly, about the book community?
I wolf down domestic thrillers like candybars, and I’m stoked about all the woman-centered horror coming out, stories that resonate hard toward my life experience. I love to read on paper and I always have a pencil nearby to underline fantastic epiphanies and turns of phrase to return to later. I love fiction for the artistic freedom to process all kinds of pain, and getting to go back to a brilliant passage to make sense of something. The community feels like a place where we’re all working this stuff out together. Like, “thank you for writing that sentence, it totally changed the way I saw this particular thing.”
Do you feel it is getting harder or easier to make it as an independent author these days?
I think it depends on what you define as “making it.” Do you want to be a bestseller? Yeah, it’s probably harder. Do you want to meet like-minded people who inhabit a similar dark reality and make weird art, whom you could not have found any other way? That’s wonderfully possible. I attended Clarion West in 2007 and there was a show called Metal Mania running on I think Vh1 back then, that played metal videos the way Headbanger’s Ball used to on MTV. My classmates and I would gather in the living room to all watch TV together and some of them had never seen these videos before. It was beyond hilarious to watch the Scorpions’ “Rock You Like a Hurricane” with a bunch of science fiction writers. “Why are they all in those tubes?” “Who are those girls?” “What is the plot of this video?” All those finely-tuned imaginations just going, they had me seeing metal videos as prompt after prompt, lol. Nights like that to me are “making it.”
Tell us about your work. What story are you most proud of?
I describe my stuff as “rock’n’roll witchcraft horror fantasy.” Those are the worlds I play in and those are my genres. Although I’ve done a little magical realism, too.
“Wallflowers,” the short story I wrote about the Limelight. It first appeared in an anthology of New York horror stories, and then made it to the Kaleidocast. I only got to go there once during a goth convention in 2001, but I absolutely loved the mazelike space, all the staircases and alcoves. I researched the club’s history, watched YouTube videos, and wove the facts into what I’d seen while I was there in real life – the mirrorball Christ was real, so was the DJ in the pulpit. I’ve lived in New York City for sixeen years and love it here, and that story is kind of my statement on how much the city has lost. It’s a sort of shadowbox to keep those precious memories safe so I don’t forget them. A lot of my stories are like that, scrapbooks for stuff that’s gone.
What are your upcoming works and plans for the future?
I am working on a second novel about an underground hospital. It’s set in a dystopian city where good healthcare is expensive and scarce. There is a plague of what’s called hexes, a kind of infection where hatred manifests as disease. And the only one who knows how to treat the hexes is a woman in this hospital who used to sing in a doom-metal band. And the only treatment is an herbal grimoire of plants harvested from a polluted riverbank – green knowledge. The other practitioners in the story are all in bands and there’s a whole parallel world of live music going on, her struggle of having to leave her creative work behind to become a healer and save lives. And one of her patients comes in from the red light district to be treated for a hex, and the whole thing goes noir. I’m about a third of the way writing it and still seeing where it’s going to take me, but having a blast listening to Sonic Youth, Swans, Velvet Acid Christ, Sleep Chamber, Skinny Puppy while writing it.
KANDISHA PRESS 
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