Chelsea Margaret Bodnar is made of blood, meat, and bones — the usual suspects. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: The Bennington Review, The Birds We Piled Loosely, Freezeray, Leopardskin & Limes, Menacing Hedge, and NANO Fiction, among others.
Where did the title, Basement Gemini come from?
Aww, you’re going to ruin my mystique here. So, I place approximately zero stock in the zodiac, horoscopes, and the like—they can be fun, though. Anyways, I read an article (or more likely, a Facebook post) about how a huge number of serial killers were geminis, and it kind of stuck with me. Duality, doubling, and the concept of the uncanny is all pretty omnipresent in horror. And, well, basements are creepy, especially in my parents’ house growing up. Black mold and low ceilings, man. Not to mention that basements are underground and hidden. Plus, it’s a better title than, like, Secret Doppelganger or something. Hidden Double. You get where I’m going.
What led you to Hyacinth Girl Press?
Their books are beautiful, the people are lovely, and I haven’t read a thing from them that I didn’t like. I think my personal favorite might be Like Ash in the Air After Something Has Burned, which is themed around saints and gender, or else Vast Necrohol, which is ostensibly orc poetry, which is exactly as cool as it sounds.
Was it a conscious decision to blend two interests like poetry and the horror genre? Or was that just a topic that came naturally to you?
I think that horror is just easy for me—it has great imagery, weird metaphors, and visceral themes. What people are afraid of says a lot about them, and what’s marketed to scare people says a lot about social climate. If a major movie studio stakes money on the idea that a movie is going to successfully frighten people, the horror element’s got to be culturally relevant somehow. So basically, what’s sold to us as scary? A lot of the times, it’s women, mental illness, and the inevitability of death. And in the immortal words of Hollaback Girl, this my shit.
Jaws IV is one of the most notorious sequels ever made. What convinced you to write a poem about that of all Jaws films? (I mean, it's one of my guilty pleasures, but had to ask.)
Because I love it! Something about the hokey romantic subplot, old lady protagonist, and the roaring shark just resonates with me. I think the first line I wrote was “Brodys! Brodys in banana boats and floaties,” and I laughed at my own joke for way too long. The funniest Jaws IV-specific bit, though, has to be “she doesn’t need a bigger boat / she’s got a new man—Hoagie. / she’s Ellen fucking Brody, bitch / she’s Ellen fucking Brody.” Idk, sometimes you have to make your own comedy, I guess? Plus, Michael Caine’s character is named Hoagie. What’s not to love?
You've mentioned in another interview that you work on your poems on the bus. Are the other passengers ever distracting to you or are you able to hone in? Have you ever missed your stop due to being in the zone?
Other passengers are always distracting. I spend a lot of time on the bus and the train, so I’ve seen and heard some weird stuff. I’ve seen an alarming number of old people reading large print erotic fiction on their tablets. Most of the time, I’ve got headphones on & I’m either listening to music or pretending to listen to music. When I’m doing poetry stuff on the bus, it’s usually editing, which I spend an obscene amount of time doing.
Do you ever listen to music when you write?
No! I couldn’t. I’m a relatively decent multitasker, but I have issues with auditory stuff. If I hear something, I listen. I can’t even do white noise generators.
As an atheist with an interest in supernatural fiction, are you able to be frightened by anything of that nature?
Well, even though I’m a pretty adamant skeptic, the world would be exponentially cooler with ghosts in it, so I’m holding out hope that I’m wrong. As for being afraid of the supernatural, I’ve been terribly desensitized to all of that, but if the storytelling is compelling and immersive enough, I could probably be convinced to feel a little bit of fear. I’m not ruling anything out. When I was a kid, my primary fear was bigfoot, though, and a similar South American cryptid, the mapinguary, which is allegedly a giant carnivorous sloth. I saw it on the discovery channel or something and it scared the hell out of me.
What was your worst experience at a reading?
Cop-out answer—my worst experience at a reading was not being able to attend a reading. When I was in high school, I won the poetry category of the Ralph Munn Creative Writing contest, which is sponsored by the Carnegie Library for student writers. I made the questionable life decision to follow my high school boyfriend to WVU my first year of college, and a mandatory orientation was scheduled on the same date as the reading and award presentation for the contest. I ended up sitting in the basketball stadium in Morgantown crying to Country Roads instead of reading my poem, which was about feeling sad/underwhelmed at the homecoming dance. It was all painfully metaphorical.
Since you have many untitled poems, is it hard for you to identify them in your head? Are they, "The one about the ___"? Or do you identify them with a line from within the text?
I usually identify them with a line. I just really suck at titling. It feels… grandiose or something? Even though it’s totally not.
How do you organize your chapbooks? Do you see them as more of a concept album or a greatest hits collection in terms of organization?
Concept albums, for sure. I go through thematic phases that are pretty distinctive, and usually the form I write in is also unique to the theme. I have way too many documents on my computer with different versions of chapbooks I’ve worked on, though. Sometimes I open them & there are poems I don’t remember writing at all.
[Obvious question incoming.] What are you working on right now?
I’m working on a bunch of poetry about interpersonal disappointment, loneliness, and dating apps. It was a chapbook, but it’s somewhere around forty pages now… These poems address my issue with titling by using the icebreaker prompts on OkCupid as titles (e.g. “One thing you should know about me,” “On Friday night, you’ll find me”). I’m also fine-tuning a poem I wrote for the event Free Fucking Poems About Fucking, which is on March 23rd at the Glitterbox Theater. It’s going to be exactly what it sounds like it is.
Thanks a ton to Chelsea for this interview! Please check her out at the following links and buy everything she has available for purchase.
Buy Basement Gemini from Hyacinth Girl Press:
Rhino Poetry review of Basement Gemini:
"lonely deadgirl seeks unkillable love interest" published over at Freezeray Poetry:
"Jaws IV: Thre Revenge, Sonnet II" at Barrelhouse Mag:
Duncan's a cool dude. I've wanted to interview him for a while but I didn't want to exclusively interview horror authors. The truth is, the horror community is the coolest I've ever known. Another anxiety that isn't discussed enough is that of asking an author for an interview. It's kind of like asking a girl out, but "professional." Anyhow, this interview was worth the wait. Really happy with this one. If you don't know who Duncan Ralston is yet, then you fucking should.
What gave you the idea to write about a sex offender colony?
Ooh! A hardball question, right off the bat. Okay, I'll bite.
The idea of a regular guy going undercover in an encampment of sex offenders to take revenge on the man who abused his child was something that clicked with me right away. I'm not a big fan of real-life vigilantism in general (despite my love of the Batman character), but I'm fascinated with themes of obsession and revenge.
I think the initial concept must have come about while re-reading Stephen King's Dolan's Cadillac from Nightmares & Dreamscapes in 2012. It may have been around the same time I watched season three of Dexter, where the eponymous serial killer of evil men says of a pedophile, "In the land of predators, a lion never fears the jackal." And I'd seen a photo of the "We are not monsters" graffiti under the Tuttle Causeway in Miami during the Bookville era around the same time and it intrigued me enough to do some research. All of this came together in a eureka moment and my novella Where the Monsters Live was born.
I'd written a decent draft by the time I saw Jeremy Saulnier's Blue Ruin (his predecessor to Green Room) and that changed everything for me. It's a damn fine revenge thriller, one of the best in my opinion. It's just come out on audiobook and I'm tinkering with adapting this sucker into a screenplay. It might be a hard sell but I think it would be worth it.
Has offering a free e-book (or six) with a subscription to your website worked out well for you? Have you noticed a spike in traffic or anything?
I have noticed a fair amount of new subscribers--and many daily downloads on Amazon--but it's difficult to tell how that translates to people actually reading my other books. How much do people value free ebooks? Do they just amass them in an endlessly growing collection, hoping they'll be able to read them all before they die?
Out of the blue about two months ago I saw a huge spike in downloads for Where the Monsters Live on Amazon. Almost a thousand in a day, and I have no idea what caused it. So I'm hoping a handful of these folks actually read it, and even feel the urge to review it--whether they love it or hate it--and maybe dive into one of my longer books like Salvage or The Method.
I love some of your book covers (particularly Video Nasties). How much say do you like to have in the designs for your covers.
It depends on if I've got any ideas for the cover initially. I love working with a great artist like Peter Frain (who did the covers for my horror collection, Video Nasties, and my crime thriller Dickens adaptation, Ebenezer), as he seems to have an endless supply of ideas and has created some visually stunning covers for other writers (including the "Dark Minds Novella" series from authors such as Rich Hawkins, Laura Mauro and Chad A. Clark). When I don't have an idea, working with someone you don't know or haven't worked with in the past can be more difficult. It's a lot of direction and "does this look right?" and "can we tweak this?"
My concept for the cover of my first novel, Salvage, worked out pretty well from the get-go. It was the first cover I'd gotten done professionally (via Booktrope, the original publisher), and it was interesting to see the image I'd imagined as envisioned by someone else. With Video Nasties my idea was to do an old VHS cassette cover. Peter offered a ton of different concepts and images and but I think it was pretty quickly we decided to go the cover-within-a-cover route, since the title story is about a horror videotape that's haunted by its director.
What is your proudest moment as a writer?
I've recently placed in a handful of prestigious screenwriting contests, which was nice. I was also very pleased--initially--to get a book contract from Kindle Press via the now-defunct Kindle Scout contest. And having my first foray into extreme horror published by UK writer/director Matt Shaw was pretty great too!
You've written short stories, novellas, novels, and screenplays. Do you have a favorite?
I like aspects of all three, and I like being able to hop back and forth between them. (I think it was Mickey Knox who said "In this day and age a man has to have a little bit of variety.") I like short stories because they can be much easier to write and they pack a punch in a small amount of time. I like writing novels because you can dive much deeper into character and theme. And writing screenplays is something I've done since my teens--I'd just love to see something with my name on it on the big or small screen someday.
On that note, is there a different approach you take with the different lengths/formats you write in?
With short stories I tend to start with the ending in mind. If I know the that, I can tailor the opening paragraph to encapsulate the story, in a way, and work backwards.
With novels, I tend to underwrite the first draft, overwrite the second draft (deepening characters, adding details in the setting, etc), then refine it in subsequent drafts. Woom was a one-draft book, and it's one of my most well received. The novel I've just finished has taken me two years on and off, with multiple drafts and early attempts at getting the first chapter just right.
With screenplays I've started using a seven-act structure that's helped immensely. I found the classic three-act structure to be too restrictive. At the end of each act there's a big moment that changes the direction of the story, just like in television. I find this method helps with plotting out the story as a whole.
What was it like being a "guest author" for the book, The Devil's Guests? That seems like an interesting process.
My story was a bonus short. I was glad to be a part of it but it wasn't involved in the overarching narrative. It's now available in my collection Video Nasties.
I got a lotta flack growing up for being into horror. Does your family have any issue with you writing horror stories?
My family is very supportive. Horror isn't their preferred genre but they read my stuff, even the books they probably shouldn't. But I also write thrillers and crime, which they do read regularly.
You were included in Bah! Humbug! An anthology of Christmas Horror Stories. What's your favorite Christmas horror movie?
Scrooged. I know it's not technically horror but it has horror elements and I feel like most holiday-themed horror movies are shit. I'm a bit of a snob when it comes to movies.
Do you ever have ideas that are too cinematic for a written story or too literary for a screenplay?
I like to think all of my stories are pretty visual, but there are definitely stories that lend themselves more readily to either screenplays (or series) than to prose. I used to have a difficult time deciding which a story should be but now they're pretty clearly delineated in my mind. Although I have adapted my three of my last four books into screenplays, and am currently working on the fourth.
I see your novella, How to Kill a Celebrity has gotten high praise from the likes of George Orwell, L. Ron Hubbard, and Rod Serling. Would you be intimidated or afraid to have any of your idols read your work?
A handful of well-respected writers in the genre whose work I have much admiration for have read one or two of my books. I was very happy to hear it, and especially that they enjoyed them.
You're the second Ginger Nut of Horror I've interviewed. Can you explain that group for the uninitiated?
Ginger Nuts of Horror is an excellent site for horror news and reviews. Jim McLeod has built up a great community of reviewers over time and has been making a bit of a name for himself in the industry lately. I haven't had much time to review for them lately, and I don't feel like I was much of a reviewer anyhow, not with folks like George Daniel Lea, Tony Jones and George Ilett Anderson to contend with.
Is there anything too disturbing that you've encountered and had to shelve or refused to write about?
The places I fear to tread are the places I most want to take the reader.
If you require evidence, read my stories "Cuttings," "Baby Teeth" or Woom.
[Obvious closer question] What's next for Duncan Ralston!?
I'm sending out queries for my latest novel to agents. While I await the inevitable multi-million-dollar, six-book contract with movie rights and points on the back end, I will be writing a new horror novel, and working on the screenplays adaptations of Where the Monsters Live and The Method.
Some links to find Duncan Ralston at:
His official website (with free books):