The Tale of an Animal Bridegroom

Sandra Kasturi is an award winning poet who recently released her first full-length collection of poetry called The Animal Bridegroom. Releasing your first book is always exciting, but even more exciting is the fact that Neil Gaiman wrote the introduction. Read on to hear what Sandra has to say about Neil Gaiman's introduction and to learn more about The Animal Bridegroom.

Tell us about The Animal Bridegroom?
The Animal Bridegroom is my first official full-length collection of poetry. I've had 3 chapbooks published before, and various things in magazines and anthologies, but this is my first real solo book. It has poems that span maybe...15 years Something like that. Anyway, a few years ago I was lucky enough to get a grant from the Toronto Arts Council to work on this book, and then got even luckier when Halli Villegas and Tightrope Books picked it up. On top of that, Neil Gaiman very very kindly wrote me a wonderful introduction, which I'm tremendously grateful for. I'm hoping to slide into at least mild notoriety on his famous coattails. Seriously though, having Neil say kind things about my poetry was one of the best things ever--I just love his work and hope I can someday write in as many genres and forms as he has. Everyone should go out and buy everything he's ever written. Go now! Especially American Gods. What a wonderful book--and of course it deals with a lot of things I'm interested in, like gods and monsters.

What inspired The Animal Bridegroom?
Well, as my former English professor Bill Keith once asked me after reading some of my stuff years ago: "Were you exposed to Grimm's Fairy Tales at an unusually impressionable young age?" And the answer to that is of course, yes, probably! I grew up on fairy tales, various mythologies, fables and so on, and then graduated around age 8 or so to science fiction, fantasy and horror, both for kids and adults. I think by now I've read Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia about 30 times each. (Of course I had no religious upbringing whatsoever so I entirely missed all the Christian symbolism.) Wait. Where was I? Right--early exposure to fairy tales. Well, the thing with those old stories is that they're all quite dark, especially the original tales, before Disney sanitized a lot of them. I can't tell you how annoyed I was by their version of The Little Mermaid. I mean, with the Andersen fairy tale (and the original animated version), she DIES at the end. And there's Cinderella's stepsisters hacking off parts of their feet to fit into the glass slipper... Horrible things and a much darker vision. So I think if you're reading all these Grimm/grim stories as a child, it kind of affects your world view...though maybe not as much as parents tend to think. I think children understand, on a very visceral level, the darkness that's lurking out in the world--or under your bed. And I always had a WAY overactive imagination as a child. So all those paths through the deep wood have stayed with me I guess. Oh--and about 20 years ago I saw Neil Jordan's film, "In the Company of Wolves" which was based on the Angela Carter story. Wonderful movie--it was, sadly, marketed as a hoky werewolf movie, which it absolutely isn't. So I got fascinated all over again by all the fairy tales set in the mysterious woods, and in the idea of stories within stories, and unreliable narrators, and men who are beasts and vice versa. Angela Lansbury has a simply hilarious and wonderful line in that film: "The worst kind of wolves are the ones that are hairy on the inside!" They're all cautionary tales of course. But I loved the idea of the animal bridegroom--of people or creatures that aren't quite what they appear to be. Which is a very long-winded way of saying that I probably read too much odd stuff as a child, and maybe that's where this book sprang from. Maybe too, from this painting in my great-aunt and great-uncle's house; it was a scene of these mysterious piny woods--I always wanted to walk into that picture.

You also contributed to in the dark, what excites you about the horror genre and do you prefer to stay with that genre or do you cross over to others?
I love the horror genre, though it's still sadly ghetto-ized, at least in literary world. As are science fiction and fantasy... but if you look at films and the top grossing movies of the last 30 years, what are they? The Star Wars films (though I like to pretend the last three never happened), Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones, E.T., Harry Potter, Spider-Man, etc. These are all speculative fiction. And most of them have elements of horror, though people pretend they don't. And horror movies are a booming business. The Sixth Sense, anyone?? The Exorcist?? I always get so irritated with people who think horror writers are hacks. Or those who think horror fiction is somehow morally repugnant. I mean, horror fiction is the one literature that is very specifically about the fight between good and evil. And, funnily enough, good tends to win more often than not. I mean, that's what Harry Potter (which from Book 4 onward gets very dark) is about too--fighting the good fight, not letting the bad guys win, even though the costs are often unbelievably high. For anyone who sneers at horror, I tell them to go and read Stephen King's Bag of Bones. Then they sneer more, because they think Stephen King's a hack. But Bag of Bones is a beautiful literary novel. Go buy it now! What was the question? Oh yeah... contributing to In the Dark was great fun--I was in good company! I got to indulge my wonky side, but throw in a little bit of creepiness too. And I guess I've always been interested in the duality of people's natures, good vs. evil, man vs. the beast within, that sort of thing. Probably why Batman was always my favourite superhero. The Dark Knight! Yum. I'm also interested in the division between chaos & order, and horror deals a lot with that. The other thing with horror fiction, and also SF&F, (and detective fiction too, another fave of mine) is that works in those genres tend to actually have plots and be plot-driven. Or rather, the really good ones have fantastic characters, but have those characters interacting inside a well-thought-out plot. So much of so-called "literary" fiction seems to be written by people who have no idea how to actually have a plot with a beginning, middle and end. It's like an understandable narrative has gone out of fashion. And if you actually have a narrative, then you're clearly not a literary writer. Most of "literary" fiction bores the snot out of me. Give me a rollicking good yarn any day! Which is not to say that having a plot or being a genre writer should be an excuse for bad writing. Dan Brown, for example, ought to have his wrist slapped and never be allowed near a computer or a publishing house again. Truly, truly appalling writing in his books. But happily there are people on the bestseller list whose prose is absolutely beautiful, who tell good stories and who can break your heart with their words, like Peter Straub or Dan Simmons or Erik Stevenson.

What was it like winning a bram stoker award and can? you tell us about the project involved?
Winning the Stoker Award was great--and surprising. We won for editorial work at the on-line magazine, ChiZine, which is a horror/dark fiction zine. Most of us were surprised as hell to make the nominee ballot, and then to actually win? Wow! I think my hubby, Brett Savory (who's the Editor of ChiZine) said it best when we went up to accept the award: "This fuckin' rocks." Or something to that effect. I think I carried around the Stoker in one hand and a beer in the other for the rest of the night. The Stoker's heavy and pointy, so I was quite tired by the time I went to bed. I also had the world's worst flu--I wasn't even going to go to the Stoker banquet because I was so sick. I was holed up in our hotel room in Seattle (where the World Horror Convention was that year), alternately running to the bathroom to throw up or lying on the bed with a raging temperature, chills and massive and disgusting phlegm. It was so vile! People would come and check on me every few hours to see if I was still breathing. The night of the banquet, writer Sephera Giron came to the room and basically bullied me into showering and getting dressed. I felt better once I put on my feather boa. I wheezed through the whole dinner, but the Stoker win gave me a nice shot of adrenalin. The beer helped too. Heh.

When did you realize you wanted to be a writer and what was your first foray into the Lit world?
I never wanted to be a writer. I'm not sure I want to be one now! It's just something I kind of backed into by accident. I always did well in English, but I hated writing essays and I loathed all the attendant bullshit involved in lit crit and academia, so I thought I would never be a writer. But I was always writing something. Poetry, or, even as a child, little stories, and creating fantasy worlds complete with maps (there's that Tolkien and Lewis influence), and doing my own character illustrations. It was all completely dreadful of course, but I always lived very intensely inside my own head. And I read a simply enormous amount. I used to read something like a book a day, but that's sort of slowed down to maybe 3-5 books a week. Sometimes less depending on how much work I have to do. And whether "So You Think You Can Dance" is on TV. Did I mention I adore television? I know it's terribly bourgeois of me, but I do. An enormous amount of writers hate TV and say it's all crap, to which I respond with Theodore Sturgeon's law (or maybe it's Isaac Asimov's?): "Ninety percent of anything is crap." Ninety percent of the books out there are crap. But it's worth it for the other ten, you know? There's some great stuff on TV--you just have to know where to look for it. And there's frivolous stuff too, but there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, it can't be all "Anna Karenina" all the time. Every now and then you need a nice dose of something silly just to cleanse the palate. But I digress. I'm still not really IN the Lit world, per se. I'm sort of on the fringes. I keep thinking I should try harder and go to more poetry readings, get my name and face out there, but I'm really quite dreadfully lazy about such things. I'd rather have a nice cocktail and read the latest Michael Gruber, you know? But most of my good friends are writers and of course we hang out, so I do venture into the Lit world here and there. And back in 1995 I wanted to start a poetry workshop, and Al Moritz also wanted to start one at the University of Toronto, so we combined forces and that's how the Algonquin Square Table workshop was born. We've actually had a lot of luminaries from there who have gone on to publish books and win awards, people like Myna Wallin, Ray Hsu, Adam Getty, Carleton Wilson, David Clink, Carolyn Clink, Souvankham Thammavongsa...and all kinds of other folks. And Al Moritz of course has been publishing brilliantly forever. I think that's probably my biggest Lit world connection. I think I did a nice bit of name-dropping there too, no?

What is next for sandra?
Well right now I still have my day job at YTV, which is great fun. I've worked in many different places, and it's such a relief to be in a creative atmosphere. I do a bit of writing at work. I also have an animated TV series for kids in production with my writing partner, Jason Taniguchi. We have a whale of a time doing that! Like we're getting paid to amuse ourselves. I'm hoping it becomes hugely successful and we make it to the point of having action figures. That would be a hoot. I'm also thinking about my next book, which will be a collection of sonnets. I started this "sonnet a week" project last year, which actually ended up working out to about one sonnet every two weeks, and I am planning on revamping that, and publishing a book of 52 sonnets. I like the formality of the sonnet, and strangely enough the restrictiveness of the form is actually very freeing. But I like writing about odd subject matter, not classic and high-falutin' ideas like love and death, but funny little things, like honeybees and housecleaning. Sublime and ridiculous at the same time. I'm also trying to write more short stories--I have a dreadful attention span, and poetry tends to be nice and short, so it works for me. But I'm expanding to short fiction and trying to work my way up to a novel. I have no trouble starting things, but I tend to lose interest because I suddenly find all my characters have become tiresome and obnoxious while I wasn't paying attention! I'm also still doing stuff with my imprint, Kelp Queen Press. I started a new line this year called "Loonie Dreadfuls" - a series of flimsies/chapbooks that are like the old penny dreadfuls or dime-store novels. That's a lot of fun. And it gives the writers involved a chance to amuse themselves and indulge all their lurid, over-the-top tendencies without concern! Hilarious stuff. I think we should all amuse ourselves more in the writing & publishing world. The only other thing I have coming up next is moving to a new house. Horrifying prospect--the packing of books alone is enough to make anyone sob uncontrollably. But I'm looking forward to sitting in my new garden and composing more poems. Or at least that is what I shall say I am doing; most likely I will actually be reading something tawdry and sipping daintily at a gin fizz.

About Sandra Kasturi
Sandra Kasturi is a poet, writer and editor. She is currently working on an animated children's TV series, a novel and another poetry collection. In 2005 she won ARC magazine's coveted annual Poem of the Year award for her poem "Old Men, Smoking." She has also received several Toronto Arts Council grants, and a Bram Stoker Award for her editorial work at the on-line magazine, ChiZine. Sandra has three poetry chapbooks published, as well as the well-received SF poetry anthology, The Stars As Seen from this Particular Angle of Night, which she edited. Her poetry has appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including Prairie Fire, On Spec, several of the Tesseracts series, 2001: A Science Fiction Poetry Anthology, and Northern Frights 4. Her cultural essay, "Divine Secrets of the Yaga Sisterhood" appeared in the anthology Girls Who Bite Back: Witches, Slayers, Mutants and Freaks. Sandra is a founding member of the Algonquin Square Table poetry workshop and runs her own imprint, Kelp Queen Press. The Animal Bridegroom is her first full-length poetry collection.

Image courtesy Sandra Katsuri