Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Loren Rhoads
173 Plays5 years ago
LOREN RHOADS My life changed when I read Dracula at age 10 and then again when I saw Star Wars at 13. Telling true stories came much later, but to me, it’s all interconnected.
My latest book, Tales for the Camp Fire: A Charity Anthology Benefiting Wildfire Relief, came out in May 2019. Northern California’s horror writers came together to raise money for survivors of last year’s devastating wildfire. Contributors include Nancy Etchemendy, Dana Fredsti, Ross Lockwood, Erika Mailman, Gene O’Neill, and more. It was my honor to serve as editor for the project.
199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die guidebook to cemeteries around the world, came out in a gloriously illustrated full-color hardcover from Black Dog & Leventhal Books in October 2017. The UK edition was published in paperback by Sphere Books.
Part cemetery history, part travel memoir Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel collects my essays from Gothic.Net, Morbid Outlook, Eleven Eleven, and Morbid Curiosity magazine, alongside pieces written specifically for the book. The revised second edition was published by Automatism Press in July 2017.
My space opera trilogy In The Wake of the Templars — The Dangerous Type, Kill By Numbers, and No More Heroes — were published by Night Shade Books in 2015. Publishers Weekly said the trilogy brought grimdark to space opera.
Lost Angels, the first book in the As Above, So Below series, is the story of the succubus Lorelei, who pursues the angel Azaziel, only to find herself possessed by a mortal girl’s ghost. That first novel, co-written with Brian Thomas, was originally published by Black Bed Sheet Books under the title As Above, So Below. A revised second edition came out in April 2016 as Lost Angels, published by Automatism Press. A sequel called Angelus Rose is in the works.
Between 1996 and 2006, I edited the cult nonfiction magazine Morbid Curiosity. I still believe curiosity is a radical, transformative trait. Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues: True Stories of the Unsavory, Unwise, Unorthodox, and Unusual a collection of some of my favorite essays drawn from the magazine was published by Scribner in 2009.
My travel essays have appeared on Mental Floss, The Daily Beast, GothicBeauty.com, as well as darkening the pages of Search magazine, two Traveler’s Tales books, and the anthology Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache: Adventures in the First Person (edited by Clint Catalyst and Michelle Tea). I explore graveyards as travel destinations regularly at CemeteryTravel dot com.
My short fiction has been anthologized in Best New Horror #27, Strange California, The Haunted Mansion Project: Year One, Sins of the Sirens: 14 Tales of Dark Desire, and nEvermore!: Tales of Murder, Mystery, and the Macabre. My stories have appeared most recently in the magazines Occult Detective Quarterly, Space & Time, and Weirdbook.
https://lorenrhoads.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Background
00:00:00
Speaker
You are listening to Something Rather Than Nothing, creator and host Ken Vellante, editor and producer Peter Bauer. This is Ken Vellante with Something Rather Than Nothing podcast and happy to welcome Lauren Rhodes and Lauren
00:00:27
Speaker
is an author.
Lauren Rhodes' Literary Journey
00:00:31
Speaker
She's also served as an editor. She has written The Dangerous Type, which is a science fiction book, Wish You Were Here, Adventures in Cemetery Travel, a book that I noticed and really started to look into what Laura was writing, Morbid Curiosity, Cures to Blues, which was a collection from a magazine
00:00:58
Speaker
and also a new collection of stories coming out called Unsafe Words. Lauren Rhodes wanted to welcome you to the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here. Thanks so much for having me. Absolutely, and obviously with some of those titles, there's a few things for us to
00:01:20
Speaker
to chat about. I have a lot of curiosity and enjoyed your writing and your explorations. But first of all, what were you like when you were younger? What were you like as a young human, perennially curious, creating? What were you like? I was a bookworm. My mom would drop me off at the library on Saturday mornings, and then she'd go to the grocery store. And I would just
00:01:46
Speaker
roam and pick things off the shelves at random and just read anything that caught my eye. She encouraged that. She became a librarian while I was in high school. Then I had the pleasure of going to work with her and just going through all the shelves wherever library she was assigned. Books were everything to me as a kid.
00:02:17
Speaker
once I finally was able to leave the farm and get out into the world, that curiosity has just fed me the rest of my life. So many questions. Yeah, yeah. And well, that's obviously such a great, such a great habit to have somebody help you form. And I know myself,
00:02:40
Speaker
as far as curiosity. I know when I'm in a library, it tends to folks who love books and love libraries. It tends to be kind of a bit of an overwhelming experience and one where you can truly get lost. And it sounds like you probably had that experience from a very young age. I didn't grow up in bookstores. You know, it was unusual for us to have books of our own. My folks had books and
00:03:08
Speaker
We'd get books very occasionally, but this was, you know, back in the day before Borders or Barnes and Noble or, you know, large bookstores. And so the little town I grew up in didn't have a bookstore, still doesn't. And the library just served that function. You know, you get a stack of books on Saturday, read them all week, take them back next Saturday, get another stack of books. It was heaven.
00:03:36
Speaker
Yeah, I love talking about I love talking about books, but a general a general question to follow up from this overall What type of what forms of art do you you know, do you enjoy to consume in in in in create overall?
Impact of the Pandemic on Art Consumption
00:03:53
Speaker
My taste are pretty wide-ranging. I I like superhero movies and operas. I like audiobooks. I like cheese
00:04:05
Speaker
going to see a play, pretty much anything. I read mostly these days, fantasy, science fiction, horror, and book after book about cemeteries, strangely enough. But with the pandemic, I really miss browsing in bookstores and sitting in movie theaters. I mean, those two things. I didn't realize how important they were to me until I couldn't have them anymore.
00:04:37
Speaker
Yeah, I absolutely share that I agree. And it was like, for me, with the pandemic, I even something with the movie, it seemed like I'm a movie buff myself as well. And just when you're sitting around, it's like, Oh, well, I can just leave and go to the movies. And that's when I first realized that, you know, I was like, Oh, gosh, well, that that options cut off for a while. Yeah, just, just what do I do? Let's go catch a movie. And
00:05:03
Speaker
I think there's been a lot of that experience, of course, where it's just, you know, just something you do and then it's just kind of, it's cut out. So in, you know, perusing bookstores in, you know, libraries, the search, right? Like the search for what you don't, you don't know what you're looking for, but you find it.
00:05:24
Speaker
Yeah, Amazon is great if you know what you want, but if you don't know what you want and you want to be surprised by something, there's nothing like just roaming in a bookstore. And so I ask a big question before we get into a little bit more about, you know, me asking specifically about some of the works you've written. I have a big question is, I wonder if you could take a stab at what is art?
00:05:54
Speaker
I love that. Um, for me, I think art is a celebration of the beauty of being human, uh, that it's the, it's a way that we define ourselves and look at our commonalities. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. The, the common, uh,
00:06:21
Speaker
common human experience, I think, with art.
00:06:28
Speaker
Now, let me ask you a question related related to art before we go into, you know, you know, science fiction and stuff.
Women in Science Fiction
00:06:36
Speaker
Science fiction horror has always suffered from a lower estimation. I don't know whether it's been its source as kind of pulp fiction or just not being part, you know, viewed viewed a bit separately from, you know, real fiction.
00:06:53
Speaker
Have you experienced that or do you feel that and do you have any comments around how it seems science fiction horror has always had to try to crawl or claw for respectability? No, I think it's changed a lot. When I first started writing science fiction, it was unusual for women especially to write it.
00:07:21
Speaker
you know, taking a creative writing class or something like that, I'd often be the only genre writer in the class. But I just, I lived in the real world. I didn't want to explore the real world in my imagination. I wanted to extrapolate, you know, what if humans were the minority in the galaxy? What if an angel and a succubus fell in love? You know, there are ways to
00:07:51
Speaker
twist reality a little bit and it means you can see it clearer. It's kind of like using a magnifying glass. Um, you could pick up on nuances that you wouldn't be able to see otherwise. Um, you know, I got bored, bored, bored in creative writing in college where everybody was writing terrible roommate stories because none of us had any life experience and what else were you going to write about? So, you know, I wanted to write about,
Morbid Curiosity Magazine
00:08:20
Speaker
What if your roommate was so awful that you had to kill them to get out of your lease? That was a whole lot more interesting than coming home from the bar, I guess. You know what? I took a creative writing class in college, and I think those same stories were around me. I hesitate to think that they're still writing stories like that.
00:08:49
Speaker
I don't know. Laura, I think they are. I think they are. Oh, I hope not. And so, of course, around your writing, I love and enjoy science fiction. The Dangerous Type is very well executed. You obviously have a deep talent
00:09:16
Speaker
for writing and I enjoy your imagination. Going back to morbid curiosity cures the blues. This is a little bit self-indulgent for me, but I think the listeners would be very interested as well. Can you tell your story connected to getting those stories, putting those stories together, collecting those? Can you just give a little bit of background on that iteration of yourself? Sure.
00:09:45
Speaker
Well, I grew up on a farm. So when I went away to college, I met my husband at the University of Michigan and he had gone to school in Davis, California, which is north of San Francisco. And all he said through the whole time we were in school was as soon as he graduated, he was going back to California. And I thought, well, you know, I've never been to California. Why not? That sounds like fun. So, you know, we came out here. I didn't know a soul.
00:10:15
Speaker
We ended up sort of by accident working for research publications. And that was back in 1988. In 1989, their book, Modern Primitives, came out. And that was the book that started making tattoos, mainstream tattoos and body piercings and tribal design and all of that.
00:10:44
Speaker
all dates back to modern primitives. And I was straight off the farm right in the middle of all of that. And it was a huge education. Here were two people that were basically running a publishing industry out of their apartment. And I thought, wow, if it's that easy, I'm going to publish things too. And so I got to thinking, well, what would I want to read? What would I want
00:11:15
Speaker
to publish. And I never had any question in my head, the magazine was going to be called Morbid Curiosity. And it took kind of a couple of issues for it to settle in to be true first person, confessional essays, people telling stories about the worst things that ever happened to them, or the most amazing things that ever happened to them, or they had some
00:11:45
Speaker
terrible medical mystery that they had to solve, or they saw a ghost, or were visited by a UFO, all kinds of crazy things. And I just, I left it real open ended, you know, tell me a story from your own life, and use kind of the tropes and the tools of fiction, I want to see dialogue, I want to see description, characterization and all of that. But it has to be true.
00:12:12
Speaker
I just got the most amazing stories, the most incredible things. And she's the highlight of the whole experience for me was every May, when the new issue came out, I would get the local contributors together. And we do like an afternoon long event where they get up and read their stories in front of an audience. And
00:12:37
Speaker
you know, the events would be huge, we'd have 100 people or 150 people jammed into a bookstore, you know, shoulder to shoulder sitting on the floor for hours just listening to these confessional stories. It was amazing. But it got to the point where that was pretty much all I was doing, you know, one year to the next, it would take me a whole year to put an issue together. And
00:13:05
Speaker
you know, I was getting tons of stories and I, you know, decisions were really hard. And it's hard when you, when you ask people for their deepest darkest secrets, and then you have to say, you know, I'm sorry, I, I got six stories about suicide attempts, this issue, and I just can't publish yours. I mean, you know, those people are fragile, right? But you, you can't accept all those stories. So it got to the point where I just couldn't put the magazine out anymore.
00:13:35
Speaker
And I approached a publisher and I said, you know, how about kind of the highlight, some of my favorite stories from the issues of the magazine? And they said, sure. So that was how More Big Curiosity, Curious the Blues came about. Long story short. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I'm and I'm and I'm sure
00:13:57
Speaker
Well, could you could you let can you let the listeners know maybe if there's a particular story or like maybe a type of story that's something that's just kind of sticks out, you know, for you that that you tended to enjoy or just super curious. I should turn that around. Do you have a favorite in the book? Oh, my goodness. Because, you know, it's like picking out my favorite child. Right. So well, you know, I, you know,
00:14:25
Speaker
Here's the thing. Here's the thing I would say, um, at least topically, uh, and I guess I'm going to be more general than anything. Topically, I would say that there's something about living in Oregon and haven't spent time in Southern Oregon and to see people are pretty tuned into curious, uh, strange things, right? UFO sightings in Southern Oregon, like particular Hills.
00:14:55
Speaker
Do you have Bigfoot there too? Bigfoot, a huge cultural sensitivity towards the possibility of very strange things. So like my, you know, I'm from the East coast, but I know out here I can have, I can pretty generally have an extended conversation about Bigfoot, UFO, and definitely ghosts. Ghosts are a little more universal, but here,
00:15:23
Speaker
than most any other place. And particularly in Southern Oregon with the UFOs, I really enjoyed within the book anything related to ghosts and anything along the lines with aliens. I love those stories. And I love them as much as I badmouth the real world, some of the
00:15:47
Speaker
really simple reality based stories. There's one by Dana Fretzde about dancing in a bikini bar. And, you know, she goes into it thinking, you know, I like to dance and I like to do a flamenco and stuff like that. But then at her experiences, as the evenings go on and getting up on stage, you know, it's not what she thought she was
00:16:14
Speaker
getting into. And, you know, some of the women do that as a job, they're putting themselves through school, but she was just kind of doing it as a lark. And it wasn't as fun as she thought it was going to be. And there's another piece in there by gravity Goldberg about going to a black mass in Oakland. And, you know, it's the same sort of thing where she just kind of curious about, you know, this was going on, and she'll go check it out. And
00:16:42
Speaker
wasn't exactly what she was expecting. Exactly. Hey, um, so let me before before we get before before we move on a tiny bit. Um, so tell me and I've been curious about this ever since I saw the book title, like the title of what you're doing drew me in. So the title is extremely successful, right? So I looked at it and said, I've always had a deep curiosity morbid curiosity around
00:17:11
Speaker
around these stories. So I was an easy target for that work. But what do you think as far as the psychology that you point into it?
00:17:26
Speaker
the satisfaction or the feeling better or dropping into dark, strange stories in how that can be helpful. I mean, you must have some thoughts about that. I was wondering because for me, it was intuitive, the title, right? And I don't think it'd be intuitive for everybody that more big curiosity cures the blues or helps you along. What are you thoughts just on the title itself and what reading stories like that does for the reader?
00:17:56
Speaker
I think there's a lot to be said for catharsis, right? And for schadenfreude, you know, that, you know, these terrible things happen to these people and they survived, you know, that going in, right? Because it's a first person story, but wow, are you glad that has not happened to you in your life? You know, as bad as things have been, at least you didn't end up dancing in a bikini bar, right? Um,
00:18:24
Speaker
And it was it was something I saw over and over again when we were doing the events is There's a story in the book that was in one of the early issues about assisting a friend suicide the friend was dying of AIDS and You know there there was not going to be any cure. There was no way out of the situation but the the men that were involved in nursing him at the end and
00:18:53
Speaker
you know, kept finding things funny, kept finding these these black humor situations. And when the author read that piece live for the first time, you know, the audience was super uncomfortable because it was funny. And he had to stop at one point and say, look, no, it's OK. We laughed at the time. You can laugh now. And it was it was like a dam broke. People had so
00:19:23
Speaker
such a good time during that reading, you know, even though it's this horrible, dark situation that, you know, you'd hope that never be in, the way it's told was really funny. And that kept coming up again and again in the magazine and then in the book where, you know, you have to laugh, right? Because otherwise you're going to cry and that won't do you any good. You know, you have to survive the situation. And so I think that came up with
00:19:52
Speaker
with the title, too, is that, you know, it helps, it really helps sometimes to acknowledge that yes, there's a lot of pain and darkness in the world, but you know, then the sunny days come along, and there's really nothing better than, you know, birdsong and smelling the flowers and, you know, looking at the blue sky. You know, I really feel and it's, it's kind of a thread through all my work is that
00:20:20
Speaker
every day above ground is a good day. It doesn't matter how bleak and how dark it is. You're still alive and there's still hope and you know, things must get better. Yeah, yeah. Well put and thank you for your answer on that because I believe it's, I don't know, I've always, like I said, I've always been attracted to the wonderful title and my experience of this too and just to
00:20:49
Speaker
to mention is that those type of stories I encountered them actively the only time in my life was within rehabilitation from alcohol addiction, right? So like I go to rehab and those stories are just so like, they're they're darkly like funny and wild and in sad of like just
00:21:12
Speaker
wild behavior, you know, related to addiction. And then like, you know, you know, the person who's telling the story starts laughing because it's so crazy, the situation, everybody starts laughing and gosh, we all felt better. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, at that point, you've survived, it's been horrific, but you're on the other side of it. And, you know, there's there's a real power to being able to tell your story. I don't think that's encouraged enough, you know, to just be
00:21:42
Speaker
completely honest and tell your truth. Because that's the way that we see each other, right? That's the way we recognize ourselves and somebody else by hearing what's happened to them.
00:21:55
Speaker
I appreciate your comments there. It's actually been something I've been really, really deeply interested about, like the level of honesty and what you share in writing and the level of courage that that really takes.
Cemetery Travel and Inspirations
00:22:08
Speaker
So this is very timely conversation for me. Another piece I wanted to ask you about, Lauren, is I had a guest, Alison C. Meyer,
00:22:21
Speaker
who does some cemetery tours. I love her work. Oh, my gosh, she is just so wonderful. Thank you. Yeah, it's great to have now having both of you on here. But so she does she does that. She I encountered an article that she had written about Egon Shilei, the Austrian painter who had an unfinished painting and him and his family had died during the pandemic like 100 years ago.
00:22:50
Speaker
She had, you know, she had published this article, I think it was like last fall. And I happened upon it, obviously, given our current situation and had her on. And she does a lot of, you know, cemetery travel and tours. And I prior to reading like some of her stuff and reading some of your things, it was like if I had been down in, you know, Savannah and graveyards down there and just looking around wondering what I'm doing.
00:23:18
Speaker
And if you walk around in a cemetery and you don't know that it's okay to do, can you tell us, can you tell us about your work there and what type of, you know, like history that people encounter and your interest in cemetery travel? Could you speak to that? Oh my goodness. How long have you got?
00:23:51
Speaker
I started in cemeteries by accident, you know, blundered into it pretty much the way I run my entire life. But when my husband and I went to England the first time, we didn't intend to go to England at all. We were on our way to Spain. And the first Gulf War was kind of unfurling as that happened. And so
00:24:16
Speaker
You know, security was really tight getting into the San Francisco airport. And by the time we got on the first plane, we'd missed the connection to the second plane. So we landed in New York and, you know, had no idea how we were going to get to Spain. And the woman said, oh, there's a plane going to England. You could catch a plane to Spain from there. Run. So we ran through the airport, got jumped on this plane.
00:24:47
Speaker
And, uh, they didn't have any seats for us. So they put us in first class. The only time in my life I've flown first class, it was free. Good for you. Good story. Yeah. And by the time we, um, we're flying across the ocean, the U S started to bomb back dad. So we landed in England. We didn't have any British money or guidebooks or place to stay any plans.
00:25:15
Speaker
But we thought, you know, it's probably safer to stay in a country where we speak the language than to go to Barcelona, where, you know, my husband speaks some Spanish, but we weren't sure how different Catalan would be. So, okay, well, we'll just stay in England. And, you know, I've been reading about England my whole life. Fine, we can find things to do. But one day we were in the bookstore in Victoria station and there was a
00:25:43
Speaker
Collection of photographs just this luminous luminous black and white book of photos of highgate cemetery and highgate Had been it was founded in the Victorian area and so it was At one point, you know very lush and very posh and all of that but after World War one and the first pandemic and
00:26:13
Speaker
Then after World War II, families had died out. There were lots of graves that just weren't being kept up anymore and not much money coming in for new graves for upkeep. And so the cemetery started to fall apart and started to get overgrown and was in worse and worse shape. And let's see, it's Taste the Blood of Dracula was filmed there, one of the Hammer Horror movies.
00:26:42
Speaker
So then there were all these stories about people had seen a figure in black roaming around the cemetery and that led to rumors about ghosts and vampires. And there were two guys who had kind of a magical battle going on who were hunting vampires in the cemetery and breaking open tombs and staking bodies and just thoroughly out of control. And all of this is true, right? I'm not making this up. This is true stuff.
00:27:12
Speaker
So the friends of the cemetery stepped up and took it over, locked the gates, started giving to her, started raising money to restore the cemetery. And that's where this book came in. These were photographs of the cemetery before the restoration had started to take place. And so my husband and I were talking about, well, what are we going to do? We're in England for a few more days. And he decided that, you know,
00:27:42
Speaker
The cemetery is not going to be in this romantic disarray for long. They're going to fix it up. And so it is going to look boring like every other cemetery. We should go and see it now. So we went one January day. We were the only people in the cemetery except one of the gardeners was working and he let us in and, you know, said, well, if you're interested, Karl Marx is buried down this way. I'm not saying you are interested, but if you are interested, that's where he is.
00:28:12
Speaker
and then turned us loose. And we just roamed around in this amazing place that was full of statues of angels. You know, every time we turned around, there'd be another angel and the ivy had grown over her and all you could see was her face or just a hand pointing toward heaven. And it was amazing. I had never been any place like that. And I thought, you know,
00:28:40
Speaker
This is really kind of cool that this is just here. It's, you know, you walk in and look at it and one of the kind pieces of art and, you know, all these stories and these beautiful epitaphs. And even though it was January, there were flowers starting to bloom. You know, it was sad and wonderful and really beautiful. And then the next half of our trip was we went to Paris.
00:29:08
Speaker
where a friend had said, you know, you really need to go see Perliches. So we didn't really know what we were in for. It seemed a little weird to go to a cemetery, but you know, we'd already been to the one in England. Maybe the one in Paris wouldn't be too strange. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Perliches is huge. You know, it's enormous. And somebody had gone through and chalked Jim and an arrow on tombs all over the cemetery.
00:29:35
Speaker
And if you followed all the arrows, eventually it led you to Jim Morrison's grave. It was amazing. You know, and again, it was January. We were about the only people in the cemetery and, uh, you know, we managed to stumble across Oscar Wilde's grave and Edith Piaf and Molière and all these wonderful people that are buried there. And, and I got hooked, you know, I'm like, all right, that's it. Now I've seen two cemeteries.
00:30:05
Speaker
Uh, we just had to keep seeing cemeteries, you know, and at first it was like, well, we'd go someplace and we'd kind of run into a cemetery. So, you know, we're in Prague. I guess we should go look at a cemetery here. But then it got to the point where I was like, yeah, all right, go into Portland. Portland has a cemetery. I should go see the cemetery there. Right. Right. And you know, people are buried everywhere. So now it's like, well, what happened? I seen.
00:30:37
Speaker
I've been to Highgate, and it might've been a little bit after, a few years after you were there, I think it was 97, to my recall. Yeah, and I remember- It's still pretty overgrown and crumbling. Yeah, and I remember Marx's grave is very huge. And interesting for philosophers is that, I believe it's Herbert Spencer, I believe I have the first name, right? Spencer was kind of like a social Darwinist
00:31:06
Speaker
opposite of Karl Marx and buried right across from Marx. So there's even this like strange ideological like opposition that is because he's right across from Marx's grave. But and I've always wanted to see Morrison's. I'm a huge doors fan and Jim Morrison and that must have been that must have been fantastic. So I definitely see how you kind of
00:31:31
Speaker
happened upon this type of travel, right? Yeah, well, it's just totally by accident. But, you know, it's gotten to the point now where, you know, once you start to learn a little bit about the history and the iconography and all of that, you can learn a lot just from standing in front of somebody's grave. And I love all the stories that, you know,
00:31:54
Speaker
not just the famous people, but the not famous people whose names would probably be lost except for they have this beautiful gravestone or this wonderfully sad epitaph or something like that. Right. Yeah. And thank you for that. I was actually quite interested in how that developed. And in talking to you, I realized that
00:32:21
Speaker
uh, even though I haven't formalized that type of travel where I've gone, you know, I've been to Prague cemetery and the Jewish cemetery in, in high gate and have found myself strolling along when I had been in, in other areas. So, um, you know, and I, I, I picked up a particular fascination in habit of walking over the last few months since, um,
00:32:44
Speaker
since the pandemic, I've just walked a lot and finding myself more available to be running into places. Right now, a question kind of connected to the work that you do as an artist and things that you create.
The Role of Art During the Pandemic
00:33:02
Speaker
Do you have any thoughts on the role of art now? Amongst the pandemic, just as far as
00:33:14
Speaker
You know, what is the role? I mean, is it more to distract? Is it more to delve some of the social issues that we have? Is art's role generally the same, but you kind of have to consider different questions? Do you have some general thoughts about, you know, the role of art right now in our times, you know, August 2020 within a pandemic? Do you have any thoughts about that?
00:33:42
Speaker
I think it's, art's role is pretty much the same always, you know, just to remind us that beauty is fleeting and therefore it's important to appreciate it when you come across it, to underline the importance of honesty, to encourage us to love. I mean, I really do think that it's easy to like let yourself be overwhelmed by just, you know, the daily day,
00:34:12
Speaker
worrying about work and worrying about rent and worrying about food and you know It fills the days and makes them pass but I don't think that's what's important you know what's important is the way the sunlight comes in through a prism or the smell of the breeze when it blows off the ocean or listening to the birds sing first thing in the morning, you know, what's important is
00:34:41
Speaker
eternal and all this bullshit about daily stuff, cleaning the kitchen and doing the laundry and all of that is not important. It's too easy to waste your time on those things. When it's done well, I think art makes us stop and catch our breath and feel alive.
00:35:10
Speaker
And I think that's more necessary than ever in the midst of all the lockdown and the pandemic. And I've been locked in my house yesterday was 180 days. My kid has a chronic illness and so we have to be really careful not to expose her to anything. And so I've seen one friend in the last six months. I saw him on the street corner because I bought a painting from him for my husband for his birthday and
00:35:40
Speaker
You know, it was wonderful to have a conversation with somebody, even though all I could see were his eyes above his mask. But, you know, we couldn't hug each other or, you know, it really put into perspective what is important and when the world goes back to normal or as normal as it ever goes back to, you know, it's going to be really crucial to, to hug people and to tell them how important they are to you.
00:36:07
Speaker
I definitely, I definitely know that. And, um, you know, I appreciate your comments there. It's, it's something I think that a lot of, a lot of people are feeling to some, you know, some level in some degree, everybody's experiencing is experiencing that.
00:36:26
Speaker
So during that, during this time, I wanted just to kind of geek out a tiny bit here on, you know, you get a new collection coming now called Unsafe Words.
Upcoming Works and Where to Find Them
00:36:38
Speaker
I love science fiction and horror. I adore Ursula Legan. I love Octavia Butler, probably above everybody else because it's kind of science fiction and horror and
00:36:55
Speaker
pretty darn brilliant. Those are the things I love. She's amazing. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, I'd be happy to hear any comments you have on, you know, any science fiction authors that, you know, influence you. But could you chat a little bit about your collection that's coming out and maybe a little bit about science fiction and horror and what it means to you? Yeah. Yeah. Well, the collection is
00:37:25
Speaker
It's 15 short stories. They vary from straight up horror to some of them are not, they don't have any genre elements in the middle. They're just about real life and how real life can be horrific sometimes. And there's some science fiction, there's a fairy tale, there's a couple of fantasy stories. So it's a little bit of everything.
00:37:56
Speaker
One of the people I asked for a blurb described it as a kaleidoscope, which I thought was a really beautiful image that you turn it and one way you're looking at skulls and then you turn it a little bit more and they're actually flowers. I think the story is comment on each other just because they're from such different traditions, the tradition of science fiction and the tradition of horror.
00:38:25
Speaker
To me, it's like a pond where you skate from one side to another. They're all interlinked and the genres aren't as separate as people would like them to be, I think. Not just in my work, but in the real world. Yeah, I'm really excited to get it out and see what people think of it once it's out there. I mean, they've been published. Most of them have been published before. There's one new story to the collection.
00:38:55
Speaker
You know, they were in cemetery dance and space and time and all kinds of different places. So yeah, it's going to be fun to have it out in the world. And in terms of science fiction, I don't know, have you read Ancillary Mercy and Lucky's? It was the first. I have not. I have not. It's it's brilliant in about six different ways. But one of the things I like about it is
00:39:25
Speaker
They carry basically zombie soldiers around in the ship, in the belly of the ship. And then when they land on a planet, they thaw the soldiers out and the ship can inhabit each of the bodies and shift from person to person to person so that all the soldiers have the same personality, which is the computer on the ship.
00:39:56
Speaker
they see each other and interact with each other and it's just brilliant and you know and horror too at a certain level that these are basically dead people with no consciousness of their own that are being inhabited by this computer and you know so it is science fiction but it's still pretty horrific and I just love that I love to find books like that that you know it
00:40:25
Speaker
looks like space opera, but it's really dark underneath. And, you know, I'm, I'm a big Star Wars nerd. But to me, one of the beauties of Star Wars is that that universe is really dark. There's slavery and, you know, soldiers that are stolen from their families as children, both as, you know, Jedi and as stormtroopers. And
00:40:54
Speaker
raised up in an ideology that they never have an opportunity to question. And that's pretty grim. But you know, then there are lasers and laser swords and, you know, I know, I think you're absolutely right. I think I think there's something just on this point, I think there's sometimes within genres when you see another one kind of
00:41:18
Speaker
Crawl in and become what the movie is, but there's something in your head. You're saying well, it's not that I'll give you an example like for me I was watching the rise of Skywalker and Star Wars and I'm like I think this is a horror movie like, you know, I mean you're at its heart gories right in the revenge of the Sith you're like this overall as far as a dominant motif seems to be a
00:41:43
Speaker
horror. And I think it's interesting, you know, as you know, like where you're kind of moving back and forth in, you know, the where the categories break down or where there's the ambiguity, that's where the a lot of the fun stuff is, right? Yeah, exactly. What I wanted to and so in that unsafe words is that could do you have a date of release date for that one that's coming out?
00:42:09
Speaker
I'm aiming for the end of September. I don't have an actual date yet. It's all kind of attended on the cover, which is in the process now, but I haven't seen it yet. So I can't put the book up for pre order until I have the cover. And that's, that's where we are at the moment. So it's getting very close. Oh, wonderful. That's, that's, that's great to hear. Uh, big, big, big, big question, Lauren. Why is there something rather than nothing? Oh my goodness.
00:42:39
Speaker
Why is there something I sort of feel like we are an accident of the universe kind of out of its generosity. Here we are and it's pure luck. And that gift is what makes everything wonderful and perfect. You know, the fact that we're alive is amazing.
00:43:07
Speaker
The fact that I was alive and got to see David Bowie on stage there, my life is set. So I think that there's something because we're given this gift and we have to repay it somehow. Does that make sense? It sure does. And I also connect
00:43:29
Speaker
to your Bowie reference. I'm lucky enough. And I mean, we all know it deep down within our heart that that is a special thing to have experience. So I love that. And of course, we're chatting with Lauren Rhodes and towards the end here, Lauren, I wanted to
00:43:52
Speaker
just open it up for you to kind of lay out and guide the listeners because I enjoy the the universe of things that you create and you know whether it's the graveyards or whether it's morbid curiosity or whether it's
00:44:08
Speaker
you know, your science fiction and fiction and horror writing. How do where do people look for your stuff? How do they connect with you? Anything along those lines so our listeners can kind of follow up on a lot of these great threads. Well, my my homepage is Laurenroads.com. And my name is spelled kind of weird. So maybe you can put it in the show notes or something like that. Yeah, yeah. And that's
00:44:36
Speaker
pretty much the heart of everything that links to my Facebook and my Twitter and Instagram and all that jazz. My cemetery work, for the most part, is centered on cemeterytravel.com. And some days I'm better about updating that than others, but it's kind of the record of my fascinations. One of the books I've been working on, sort of long term,
00:45:06
Speaker
is exploring the Bay Area's pioneer cemeteries. Because San Francisco is really a young city, you know, compared to like Rome or London or something like that. We've only been here since 1776. And so even though that isn't a very long span of time, there are these little pocket graveyards everywhere that
00:45:36
Speaker
date back, you know, only to the gold rush or something like that, where, you know, each little town around here had its own industry. And so there's a Portuguese fishermen cemetery and Welsh mining cemetery and loggers in the Santa Cruz mountains. There's a guy who's buried down in San Jose, who ran into a grizzly bear and
00:46:04
Speaker
the bear swiped him across the head and miss shaped his skull. I'm not sure I'm using the word the verb right, but his head was misshapen for the rest of his life. And so he wore a hat and his name was Mountain Charlie. And you know, that wasn't that long ago that they were grizzly bears running around here. But you know, now it's all Silicon Valley and all of that. So anyway, my
00:46:31
Speaker
my cemetery explorations around cemetery travel. And that's where I'm looking and tell these weird little stories of people who are not with us, but should be remembered. Yeah. And, and, and thank you so much for, for sharing that. And I very much look forward to your new book and yeah. And thanks for mentioning San Francisco too. It's a city I love. And obviously like you said, younger, um,
00:46:59
Speaker
Quite complicated and I was I gotta tell you like I love San Francisco. I was super excited I Sold a painting to good friends of mine It's actually gonna be in on hate Street, and I was like wow that's something like really good cred like So I was excited I always you know having some friends down there, and you bringing it up It's nice to connect and I love how you described like you know
00:47:27
Speaker
the wild aspects of San Francisco, because people think about modern wild, right? But I think you point to, you know, those crazy stories of being on the Bay of the exploration of the kind of tough jobs, tough, dangerous jobs. And, you know, that kind of like labor, you know, I'm a labor union guy, if I've worked for a labor union, but like, the history of work in that area, it's a very vibrant area transforming rapidly, as you know,
00:47:56
Speaker
Well, and now transforming again, it's it will be interesting to see you know, what survives the pandemic and You know if rents drop and artists come back this could be a whole different place in another year or two Yeah, I guess like like everything right now. We're gonna kind of stay tuned, right? Right
00:48:25
Speaker
Lauren Rhodes, Lauren, personally, professionally, thank you so much for spending time on the Something Rather Than Nothing podcast. You know, I reached out to you and it was great to be able to collaborate with you.
00:48:42
Speaker
you know, just kind of following and been just so curious and interested for, you know, years about what you write and what you encounter. I just wanted to thank you for the art that you've created and very much looking forward to the new collection in unsafe words. So just wanted to express my deep pleasure in having you on the show, Lauren Rhodes.
00:49:10
Speaker
Thank you so much for this, it was really wonderful. Thank you and appreciate your time and hopefully we'll talk again soon. I'd like that. Alright, bye Lauren. Bye bye. Bye bye. You are listening to Something Rather Than Nothing.