For ten years, Loren Rhoads was the editor of the cult nonfiction magazine Morbid Curiosity. Before that, she wrote about visiting cemeteries for Gothic.Net. Her short fiction has appeared in Cemetery Dance, City Slab, Not One of Us, etc., and in the chapbooks Ashes & Rust and The Paramental Appreciation Society. She’s written erotica for Unzipped, Sex Toy Tales, and Noirotica 4, with varying degrees of honesty. She likes long walks in the moonlight through urban decay.

More info can be found at HER WEBSITE and HER LIVE JOURNAL

DBJ: You are characterized as writing dark urban and dystopian fiction…quite a change from many of SF’s greats who strove to write about utopian societies, though in the end, there is a certain “dystopian” feel to most of the great utopias of fiction. What is it about the angst of the universe that draws you?

LR: I grew up outside Flint, Michigan. I never knew it as a boomtown but only in the aftermath of the auto industry’s assassination of it. All the while, my dad worked in the accounting office at Buick, so I owe General Motors for funding my education, such as it was. Living near Flint gave me a ringside seat to dystopia in action.

For a long time, I wore a leather jacket painted with the cover of the Throbbing Gristle album “Heathen Earth.” It was captioned, “Can the World be as Sad as It Seems?” The sentiment really rang through me. Occasionally, when I wore the jacket, someone would get seriously offended by the implication that I found the world sad. It took having a child to change my relationship with the world so I could begin to cut it some slack.

Now I live on the ragged edge of San Francisco, near one of the city’s roughest high schools. The week we moved in, I walked through a mugging. (I didn’t realize what was happening until I was a couple of steps past.) Since then, a kid was shot to death on the bus at the stop around the corner from my house. There has been a drive-by at the playground where we play. Twice I’ve watched police chasing cars down our street. That said, the people in our neighborhood are kind to us and gentle with my daughter. Maybe that’s as close to utopian as I can envision.

DBJ: In your story “The Angel’s Lair” you draw on some very Christian archetypes, but drive them deep with an almost painfully erotic tension. What brought these two powerful elements together for you - do you empathize with the angel, or the succubus? Is there a difference, in the end?

LR: I grew up in a dour Protestant church which believed in predestination: some people are meant from birth to go to Heaven and there’s nothing anyone else can do to get in. If the church fathers refused to recognize that love is love, no matter what gender it wears, I knew I wasn’t one of the elect. Once I adjusted to my status among the damned, I made it my goal to be the best possible person I could be, to write as persuasively about love in all its flavors as I am able. So of course I empathize with the succubus, who went on from the story in the Sirens anthology to be the heroine of a pair of books, the first of which is under consideration now. Fingers crossed. I’d love to spread some painful erotic tension around.

DBJ: You have combined a long love of morbid curiosity with a very decadent, intimate prose style. When you set out to write a story, are you purposefully reaching for that spark of curiosity in the reader - trying to draw him/her across taboo lines to look at the possibilities, or is the work more introspective - dead honest portrayals of your own curiosity? Are there any taboos?

LR: The second half of your question is probably more true in my case: I follow my own curiosity, trusting that if something fascinates me it will interest someone else. That’s something publishing Morbid Curiosity taught me: curiosity unites us, as long as the reader finds a mirror at the heart of the story.

Your question about taboos really throws me. I guess I’ve never thought of choosing topics to write about in those terms before. I write as a way to make sense of the world. The people in my stories are people I’ve known or parts of myself I’d like to explore. I don’t go too far afield when it comes to creating characters. Their humanity is what draws me to them.

I don’t know if there’s anything I wouldn’t write about, just things that don’t interest me. Serial killers don’t interest me. Torture porn doesn’t interest me. Still, I have written about a woman who kills large numbers of men in sequence, as well as an erotic torture scene.

Hmm. When I was publishing the magazine, I received an essay from a prison inmate who’d murdered his roommates to impress a girl — who in all likelihood didn’t know he existed until she was called to testify at his trial. In his essay, he lavished details on the amusing sounds his friends made as he stabbed them to death. I was completely and utterly freaked out by the pride he took in boasting to me. After some soul-searching, I discovered that, in good conscience, I could not publish the story. I considered the magazine’s readership friends. I couldn’t subject them to this man’s sickness. So I guess that’s where my boundary lies: I hate to see meanness glorified. There’s enough petty malice in the world without wallowing in it in my work.

DBJ: You are an editor, author, publisher, photographer - are there lines between these, or do you see the creative process as blending into a single “art” that you express in a variety of ways, but perceive in only one? What is your preferred method of expression, and how do you determine which will suit a project more perfectly?

LR: I don’t actually think of myself as an artist. I was trained as a journalist. For all the joy I take in writing/editing/publishing/what-have-you, I think of them as work. Craft, not art. I think an artist would be more tortured than I am. That’s meant to be a joke.

In fact, I picture all the items on your list as wedges on the same pie chart. My first love is fiction, where I would love to spent most of my time, but until recently I found it easier to find publishers for the nonfiction I wrote. In the process of learning to write nonfiction, I learned how to edit. When I’m doing it, editing feels as if it physically uses a different part of my brain. I loved editing others — assisting people to bring their visions to their clearest expressions — and someday I’d like to find paying work as an editor. I love putting books and magazines together. They’re like big conceptual puzzles.

I stumbled into publishing as a starry-eyed innocent. When my husband and I moved to San Francisco, we worked for Re/Search Publications the year MODERN PRIMITIVES came out. AJ and Vale made publishing look so easy… Insert insane laughter here, please.

For the moment, I’ve given up on publishing. I loved the creative side of it much more than the grind of shaking down distributors. With the demise of Tower, I lost my second biggest distributor. I was never very savvy about the business, but even I could see that the costs were going to outweigh the income if I continued to publish. It’s a shame. I miss my printer’s rep, who was a blessing. She always read everything I sent her cover to cover, a true fan.

Photography, as much as I love it, gets short shrift these days. I am primarily attracted to beauty and ruins — or beauty in ruins — and with a small child in tow, I don’t have as much opportunity to seek that out as I would like. By the time I pick up my camera again, I’ll have forgotten everything I know about f-stops.

DBJ: Final, standard question. You have one day to come up with the inspiration for a new novel / story / project. You can have a day in a library with access to all the published work of the world - a day in a studio with all the world’s music - or a car to take you for the day to any one place in the world. Which do you choose, and why?

LR: I started out as a travel writer, writing graveyard essays for Gothic.Net. My first inclination is to take the car, spend the day in Hong Kong or Angkor Wat or poking around the tombs in the Taj Mahal. As a travel writer, I know you can’t grasp the essence of a place in a day. So I guess I’ll take the library.

One of the perks of publishing the magazine was that I had access to the Research Library at 20^th Century Fox. I can’t tell you how many marvelous days I spent researching sidebars for Morbid Curiosity. Of course, a movie studio’s library leans toward costumes, weapons, and historical periods featured in their big budget movies. I managed to squeeze enough juice out of my hours there that I’m still writing stories out of them.

I would love to have the same freedom to research at the library of the British Museum. Imagine the treasures you could unearth! Or the Vatican Library, with an escort who wasn’t afraid of a little blasphemy… Or the Library at Alexandria, with a translator to read to me… I don’t think a day would be long enough. Perhaps you’d accept a bargain?

DBJ: The Sirens get the extra sixth question…anything else you’d like to talk about?

LR: I’d like to mention that last year I had seven short pieces published in places ranging from City Slab to Instant City to Not One of Us. That last story, called “The Fox and the Foreigner,” was just long-listed for the British Science Fiction Association Award, alongside stories by Gene Wolf, Pat Cadigan, and Lucius Shepard. I’m very excited about being in that company.

Toward the end of last year, I roughed out two new novels. One involves Alondra DeCourval, the magical detective featured in Sins of the Sirens in the story “Last-Born.” The other is a Hong Kong-style revenge story, done as space opera. I’m looking forward to polishing those up soon and shopping them around.

In the meantime, my novel AS ABOVE, SO BELOW, spun from “The Angel’s Lair” (which also appears in Sirens), is out at a small press now. The proposal for an “editor’s choice” anthology from the ten issues of Morbid Curiosity is with an agent. I’m eager to see those become realities as 2008 progresses.

This is an exciting time for me as a writer and editor. I can hardly wait to see what happens next.