Kwe’ all! Welcome to my not-often-updated blog portion of my website! March was Women in Horror Month, and if you hadn’t been following Mae Murray’s excellent interview series this year, they can be found here!

I loved Mae’s questions and wanted to know what her answers would be, so she graciously agreed to let me interview her using her own format! Here is my interview with Mae. Happy Women in Horror (Every) Month!

1. Introduce yourself. What do you want people to know about you and your work?

My name is Mae Murray. I’m a writer and editor. I’ve recently taken a step back from the latter to focus on my own craft. I’m best known for being the editor of The Book of Queer Saints anthology series; the first volume was nominated for a British Fantasy Award, and one of the stories in it (Morta by James Bennett) won the BFA for short fiction. 

My work focuses on working class queer people—usually in the South—disability, classism, police violence, and the loss of identity that comes with being part of the Indigenous diaspora. 

2. Who or what were your earliest horror influences?

To answer very honestly, I think growing up in poverty, in the Southern Baptist Church, was my earliest and most crucial horror influence. Growing up with a lack of resources in an abusive home, where I learned to be hypervigilant, I got used to fear. I know it’s a cliche to say, but as a child, I think I became fascinated with the genre as a means of survival. I was constantly wondering, “What if X happened? What would I do?” Which is also the fundamental question of most horror plots.

I was that kid who read all the Goosebumps books in my second grade classroom, always had Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark checked out from the library, and booked it home to catch Are You Afraid of the Dark? and Buffy the Vampire Slayer when they were on TV (until my stepmother banned Buffy for being Satanic).  

Horror and queerness walked hand in hand as I was coming of age in Arkansas in the early 2000s. In my early teens, I read Interview With the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice on my grandma’s recommendation, and I think that was a major turning point for me. The prose felt at times indulgent, like chocolate, and the character of Lestat was overtly queer. It was also around this time I started to realize I liked girls and sought out queer media, which was almost always independent, scrappy, and surreal, like Velvet Goldmine.  

3. You’ve recently published your debut novel, I’m Sorry If I Scared You. Can you talk about what inspired it and what it was like to write it?

The book started as a short story for a holiday horror call back in 2021, which is why the book takes place over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday. This was right before Roe v Wade was overturned, so abortion was on the mind. In 2014, I was sexually assaulted, and I remember after it happened, my greatest fear was that I would need an abortion. I had a lot of unresolved feelings about that event when I sat down to write this book almost 10 years later, so the writing became a way to work through those feelings. 

The book was funded by a crowdfunding campaign back in 2022, which raised around $16,000 in preorders. At the time, the book was little more than an outline. I raised the money to help meet my basic needs while writing it, and was hoping to inspire other working-class authors to take a non-traditional approach to publication. I had just left a job as a peer support specialist for children and teens coming out of psychiatric treatment facilities that was paying me very little (just $14/hr) and left me feeling burned out and hopeless every day. It was difficult to find another part time job that understood my needs as a disabled person battling lupus, and it felt like the right time to do what I’ve always wanted to do: write a novel. The support I received from the writing community was incredible, so much more than I could have ever hoped for. It was a positive experience until it wasn’t. 

I put off writing it at times so I could work through the feelings that came up for me about my assault with my therapist. During this time I was also diagnosed with endometriosis and had surgery to remove the lesions. Then my grandmother, who was more like my mother, was diagnosed with colon cancer, and 10 months later she died. 

Things reached a breaking point for me when the novel wasn’t finished within the year promised. Online bullies began to spread rumors that I didn’t work for a living (at the time I was working part-time as an after school teacher) and that the novel was never going to happen and had been a front for stealing money from the horror community. I don’t think these rumors were ever taken very seriously, but it hurt me badly. I started to think I couldn’t finish it, and I went to a very dark place in my mind. The writing of I’m Sorry If I Scared You was fraught, and I almost didn’t survive the ups and downs.

It released in November 2024, and I learned so much from the process, about my resilience, about my ability as a writer, and how there is so much more I would like to explore in my own writing if the time and resources were made available to me. I also learned about the kind of person, friend, partner, writer I want to be moving forward. I learned to be gentle with myself, even when others were being unkind. And I learned that writing a novel within a year might not be something that is ever possible for me, and that’s okay! 

 
4. Take us through a day-in-the-life of Mae Murray. How much of your time is spent writing?

I am perpetually trying and failing to “get my shit together.” I usually wake up at 6 a.m. to one of our two 6-month-old kittens jumping back and forth from the bed to the window sill like she’s at a trampoline park. I get up and feed them, make myself a cup of coffee and breakfast, and sit in the living room half-asleep watching TV until my husband gets up to work from home at around 8:30 a.m. Then I go back to sleep because he’s on kitten duty. 

When I wake up again, I take my meds, answer emails, clean a little around the house, and still generally don’t get as much done as I had planned to. Sometimes I go to a coffee shop to do the email part, squeeze in a little writing, swing by the library, pick up my prescriptions—of which there is a long list.  

I like to watch a little TV to decompress before I go to work, too. I work second shift for a local organization that serves over 1000 children and families in my community. I leave work at around 9:20 p.m., eat dinner, watch a little more TV, and go to bed. 

All that to say, I don’t get a lot of writing done during the week, and even though I might be able to make the time, the truth is I don’t have the energy or mental resources to do it. 

This question was important to me to ask others because I wanted to talk about how much writers, particularly marginalized women, have to juggle in order to carve out space and energy for writing. And I don’t even have kids, unless you count kittens. 

 
5. Imagine you’re standing in front of a crowd of every horror creative—authors, filmmakers, podcasters, journalists, etc. What would you want them to know about your experience as a queer woman of Indigenous descent in the genre?

Because the competition is so great and the resources so few, it doesn’t matter how little you have, there will always be those who believe they deserve it more. They will be angry at you because you exist, because you are taking up space, even if it’s just a small space you’ve painstakingly carved for yourself from nothing, and this is doubly true for those of us with intersecting marginalized identities. It’s happened to me. It’s torn me apart mentally, emotionally, and has even made me physically ill. I didn’t deserve this kind of treatment, and when it happens to you, you probably won’t deserve it either. 

I’m lucky to have built a solid support network of writers and friends who have been able to pick me up when these things happen, but I dream of a world where we are all in collaboration with one another, not in competition. Life is hard. Period. It’s harder for some than it is for others, and we have a wealth of knowledge and experiences to share with one another. I want you to know there is a better way to be with one another, and there are hard conversations, forgiveness, and understanding to be had if we are willing to try.