 Hi everyone, I'm Brittany Norwood, and I'm a commons librarian here at Hodges Library. I'm the organizer of the Women in Horror program, and I'm the moderator for this event. So please join me in welcoming the absolutely fabulous Lisa Morton. Lisa is an award-winning writer, including a six-time Ram Stoker award winner. She is a screenwriter, an author of several works of nonfiction, and a bona fide expert in all things spooky and all things about horror. She's written four novels and over 150 short stories, and her newest work, Weird Women, Volume 2, 1840 to 1925, is a follow-up to her and Leslie S. Klinger's prior work, Weird Woman, Classic Supernatural Fiction by Groundbreaking Female Writers, 1852 to 1923. So let's, everybody, let's give Lisa a really warm welcome. Hey! How are you doing, Lisa? You ready to get started? I sure am. Sounds wonderful. So let's get into our first question. You're an expert on Halloween, so let's get your perspective on something. How does Pandemic Halloween 2020 resemble Pandemic Halloween from 1918? What's amazing about this answer is that it is very similar. I got asked this a lot starting last year, of course, and one of the things that I ended up discovering is I did some research into what it was like in 1918, was how similar the two time periods were. In 1918, there was a massive flu epidemic that was raging around the country. It was affecting Halloween in many areas, and just like now, those areas were split between should we go on with our celebration or not. Here in LA, many big events were canceled. They didn't have trick or treat to worry about then, but they had big events like parties and masquerade balls. They canceled all of those in LA, but in other areas of the country, they just said, we're going ahead with everything. There were even jokes about masking at Halloween. It was very much the same kind of, what do we do? This area is different from this area that we have now. That's really interesting. That feels very prescient. It reminds me of when you read some horror novels written 20-some years ago. Robert Armick Hammond's long song comes to mind, and what they've written could easily be taking place today. What are some of your favorite facts about Halloween? Gosh, there are so many. It's such an interesting holiday. One of the reasons that I love talking about it, and one of the reasons it's easy to keep studying, is how often it changes. It really has changed its identity completely. So many times throughout its history, it wouldn't be recognizable really in many respects to somebody from 200 years ago. It would be very different even to somebody from 100 years ago from that epidemic. They would recognize our parties and our big events, but they wouldn't know trick or treating. They would probably ask, hey, where are all the kids playing pranks? Because that was huge in 1921. At that point, the holiday was really about kids playing pranks, and that eventually leads us to trick or treat. That's a fact that I love, is that if you ask people, how old do you think trick or treat is? Most people will come up with something like, oh, it goes back thousands of years to the Druids, or it goes back hundreds of years to English guising. No, it actually really is less than a century old. It goes back to the 30s. It was a way to buy off these kids whose pranks had become very destructive. When they moved into cities, they were setting fires and breaking windows and tripping people. And so a lot of cities got together and came up with this idea of putting these big block long parties together. They were originally called house to house parties, and it ended up morphing into the modern day trick or treat. And we don't get really a mention of trick or treat in a national magazine until 1936, which is kind of a good date to set for the real beginning of trick or treat. So in many respects, there are a lot of misconceptions about Halloween. It's such an interesting holiday to study, and the way it keeps changing. 50 years ago, who knew that the haunted attractions industry was going to be so big? It's now a billion dollar a year industry, and it has just changed the holiday, and the holidays changed it, and it keeps moving forward. That's really fascinating. I love that you describe it as people looking for a way to buy off these pranksters. That is hilarious. I love that. So kind of going on with this idea about talking about the history of Halloween and its origins, I feel like most of us have probably heard about Samhain, or they know that it's one of the holidays that inspired or heavily influenced our modern day Halloween. However, I don't think too many of us have know a lot about it, and we probably even fewer of us have heard about it from an expert. Would you give us a primer on Samhain and how it impacts our archetypal Halloween? Yeah, absolutely. I think of it as the great-granddaddy or great-grandmama of Halloween. It was celebrated by the ancient Irish Celts, and just to explain who the Celts were, they were this sort of loose conglomeration of tribes that were spread all throughout Europe and the British Isles, and the ones that we know the most about are the Irish Celts. We actually don't know what the other Celtic tribes were celebrating. They may have been celebrating it, they may not. We know the Irish Celts did, because Christian missionaries came in and recorded a lot of the Celtic lore. The Celts didn't write down their own history, and so we do know that they had this year's end festival, and it looks like it's spelled Samhain, S-A-M-H-A-I-N. The actual pronunciation is Samhain, and by the way, that is one of the reasons that you'll see movies like Trick or Treat where there's a character named Samhain in it. But anyways, Salon was their year's end festival. The name translates literally to summer's end. It was a time when they thought the year was changing from the warmer summer to the colder winter. They brought their flocks in from the fields. They settled down for that long cold winter, and because it was their New Year's celebration, they thought it was a night when the veil between worlds was at its thinnest. Everything was a border, and that thin veil could be crossed, and they believed in these really malicious little creatures called the Shee. And the Shee were fairies, but not like our concept of fairies being a Disney-ized thing. These Shee were malevolent. They could cross over, and they could burn down houses. They might kidnap someone and take them back to their world. The Celts had a number of really spooky stories that they told about Salon. We know that that's one way they celebrated. We know they had a feast. Some of the lore describes the feast is going on for three days, and so I am one of the Halloween scholars who believes that that Salon association is really where we get the macabre side of Halloween. There is a little bit of debate on that, by the way, but I fall squarely into the Salon camp. That's really interesting. And why do you feel that people took these elements from Salon and turned them into kind of our modern Halloween? Why the spooky? Well, I think we celebrate fear in interesting ways. It's also at the heart of horror movies, horror literature. We love to frighten ourselves with something that's playful, because it allows us to test our own limits and our own abilities. So the idea of having a holiday that sort of celebrates that, I think, is almost in some ways vital. And the fact that it seems to be continually growing in popularity certainly speaks to that as well. When the Christian missionaries came into Ireland to convert the Celts, they had a doctrine that was very interesting. They had found far more success with co-opting existing religions and ceremonies and so forth instead of trying to stamp them out. So they moved the original date of their Saint celebration. All Saints Day used to be on May 13th, and they moved it to November 1st to co-op Salon. And so that kind of meshing of All Saints Day, which is a somewhat somber holiday, it celebrates the saints, it celebrates your own deceased loved ones. It's not necessarily spooky, it is somber, but then you bring in this element from the Celts of, oh, there are things that are crossing over into our world at night, there are these malicious fairies, there are ghosts, all kinds of things. And it kind of ends up creating that mesh that is our Halloween, I think. And I think we all love the idea of having a day dedicated to spooking ourselves, to testing ourselves in that fun, playful way. I mean, I certainly do, so I agree with you there. What other lesser known holidays or festivals do you feel inspired are modern Halloween? There is an interesting day that happens on November 2nd called All Souls Day, and the Catholic Church instituted this day a few centuries after All Saints Day was moved to November 1st. Part of the reason they probably did that was they hadn't been entirely successful in converting the Celts. So they added a second day right after All Saints Day. Also, it gave them a chance to placate a lot of their parishioners who felt kind of like, hey, why don't we have a day to celebrate dead saints and not our own family members. So All Souls Day very specifically was dedicated to your own loved ones who have passed on, who may be stuck in purgatory. So one of the rituals associated with All Saints Day, All Souls Day rather, becomes praying for your loved ones who may be stuck in purgatory. And then here again, this is a little bit of a macabre idea. The idea of purgatory is a little bit scary and kind of fed into a lot of the Halloween things. Then in the 17th century, we get an interesting holiday coming along in Great Britain called Guy Fox Day, or Bonfire Night, or Bonfire Eve. It has a number of different variant names. It was a celebration of a failed attempt to assassinate King James. And it came about at a time when England was fighting with the Catholic Church, and they actually voted all of the Catholic celebrations out. They banned them. But people still celebrated Guy Fox Day, which is celebrated on November 5th. So in a way, it replaced for a few centuries that celebration of Halloween and All Souls Day. And it was celebrated in some similar ways. People lit bonfires, kids would dress up and paint themselves either as Guy Fox or as beggars. And then they would go out and beg material to build their bonfire with. They had a very specific little rhyme they would offer people, which was a penny for the guy. So that's a little bit like Trick or Treat. And then probably the last one that I'll mention is not necessarily an influence on Halloween, but is weirdly similar to it is Di Dillo Smartos in Mexico. And what's interesting about that holiday is here's what happens if you take those same Catholic missionaries and you send them down to convert people who had been celebrating Aztec and Mayan festivals. And instead of the Celtic influence, we now get some Aztec and Mayan influence coming through. So you get a really interesting sort of variant of Halloween. You get a lot of skull imagery. You get also this more somber recognition of your loved ones who have passed on. You create altars to them. You remember them. You go to the graveyard. You clean their graves. But there's also that little element of, and we're also playfully poking death and going, yeah, you don't scare us. That's good to know. Very interesting. Thanks for letting us know about all that. So what are some of the scariest traditions that you've researched? Scary traditions. Wow. I think, of course, the telling of ghost stories is always interesting. And there is a couple of the old Salon stories are still really scary. There's a very strange one about a Celtic hero who gets sent out on Salon night by the king. And the king tells this guy, hey, there's a corpse that's hanging from the gallows. And no one has been able to tie a loop around the ankle of this corpse. And if you can do it, you'll win all kinds of a claim and so forth. So this hero goes out to the corpse and it's really hard to tie this loop around the ankle of this corpse. But he finally manages to do it. And when he does it, the corpse comes to life. And the corpse says, hey, I died thirsty. Would you get me down from here and take me to go get a drink? So he falls for this. It's like, oh, you can't see anything bad coming from this, right? He takes the corpse to a nearby home where the people living in the house give the corpse a drink and it proceeds to spit the liquid back out into their faces and they all die. So this is, yeah, this is a really still very scary and strange story, even 2000 years probably after it was first told. I love that tradition. I also love the almost brand new tradition of haunted attractions. They've been around really for less in their current form for less than 40 years. They certainly have a history that you can date back longer than that. But the modern haunted attraction really kind of started to appear in the 70s. And it was something that was first practiced mainly by nonprofit organizations who found out it was a great way to raise money. It becomes a huge professional event in the 90s. And now, of course, it is a gigantic industry. And I just love the idea of people spending their Halloween going to these places where they have a very intense physical experience. I mean, I love both of those things too. I grew up listening to my grandmothers and great grandmother's ghost stories from the area. So I know exactly what you mean there. So you have any favorite folklore surrounding the history of Halloween? And would you like to share those stories with us? I know you just shared one that was super interesting. Folklore and Halloween is so interesting because some of the things that we believe to be true about the holiday are folklore. They are urban legends. For example, the idea that there are anonymous psychos putting razor blades into apples is essentially an urban legend. There is almost no evidence to support this. It probably came from a 1964 housewife in a long island who got mad at older kids trick or treating and decided to give them these little ant buttons that were little poisoned ant traps. She was not anonymous. She did not put razor blades into their apples. That all came out of that idea. And then, of course, in the early 70s, there was a man named Ronald O'Brien who tried to poison his own son with a poisoned pixie stick. He actually succeeded. The poor little boy died. It was part of an insurance scheme on the father's part. But again, this man was caught very quickly. There was no anonymous attempt to poison the child's candy. So the whole thing that comes around in the 80s where hospitals are offering to x-ray candy and treats and so forth is largely the result of an urban legend. There just is not a lot of cases. In fact, I don't know of any that support the idea that anonymous psychos were tampering with kids Halloween candy. So that's kind of an interesting modern folklore that goes along with it. In the past, the folklore was much more oriented towards fortune telling. There were a lot of fortune telling games that were played in the 17th, 18th, 19th century at Halloween. And some of those are really interesting. There was a really strange one where you would go out alone to this thing called a lime kiln, which was commonly found on a lot of farms out in the country and so forth. And it was like a big well. And you would throw a ball of yarn down this well, and you'd hold on to the one end. And you would supposedly feel a tug on the other end of the yarn from down in the lime kiln. And you would say, who holds? And you would hear the name of whoever you were going to end up marrying. Now, of course, this was a very easy way to both play pranks on people. There's an infamous story about someone hiding in the lime kiln and grabbing the yarn and saying the devil when they get asked who's holding the ball. But it was also a good way for you to, if you were, for example, a young man in love with a girl, you could go hide in the lime kiln and tell her your name. So those were the kinds of folklore and games that used to be associated with the holiday. That's really cool. Let's see. Oh, we have a question for. Sorry, I misread that, but somebody has bought your book and they are excited to read it this weekend. Oh, that's great. Thank you so much, John. Yeah, so we are going to move away from Halloween for a little bit and talk about your work with the Mary Shelley Scholarship for Women. So what was your reasoning when you helped create the scholarship and what impact have you seen it have so far? Well, this was created back in I think it was 2014. It was created by the Horror Writers Association and at the time I was serving as the organization's vice president. We had a wonderful president, a gentleman by the name of Rocky Wood. And Rocky and I used to talk a lot about the fact that women seem to have a much harder time in the genre than men did. It has changed, I'm pleased to say, a bit since then. But at the time, there were very few opportunities specifically for women. There were a lot of those kind of situations where you would see a publisher's list of new books come out and there would be no female names on the list or no female names in the anthology contents, that kind of thing. And we had recently established a scholarship fund that was a general scholarship fund. And we thought wouldn't it be nice to offer women something in particular that could help us grow this part of the genre that could help the young women who are coming along with their education and create that whole next generation of female writers. And so we established this particular scholarship. At the time, the HWA, the Horror Writers Association, was getting some funds from a new partnership with the Authors Coalition. And so we were able to take some of those funds and put them into these scholarships. And it remains one of my favorite things that I was involved with during my time as an officer at the organization. I actually succeeded Rocky as the president. He passed away, sadly, at the end of 2014. And at that point, I stepped in and I served as the organization's president for the next five years. And that was certainly one of my proud achievements from that time. Thank you for that answer. And we actually do have a question now. An audience member wants to know how do you feel as one of Halloween's icons? Well, I don't think of myself that way. I love being an expert on the field just because I find it so endlessly interesting. But the best part about it is that I get to talk to people like you and Brittany and a lot of the other things. At this time of year, every October, my schedule is crazy. I do dozens and dozens of these kind of podcasts and presentations and lectures and interviews and appearances. And so I love that part because I love talking to people. I love talking about the holiday. That part of it is really fun. Beyond that, like I said, I don't think of myself as an icon or celebrity, which is probably just as well. Well, let me tell you, in my office, we definitely think of you as one. We were very excited to have you join us. Well, that's great. Thank you. And so now let's take a moment to talk about your writing and your inspiration. So why did you start writing? I've written my whole life. My first piece was published when I was five. It was a poem about my pet turtle. I was an only child and we moved a lot. My dad was this mad genius engineer who was always off and consulting on something or other. And so I think between being an only child and moving a lot, one of the ways I entertained myself was by writing. I was always making up little stories and some of them I wrote down and a lot I didn't. And by the time I was a teenager, I think I was still not quite sure about actually pursuing this for a living. But then I saw one movie when I was 15 and it changed my life forever and that movie was The Exorcist. I saw it when it was first released. My mother was very indulgent in taking me to see it. And it's hard now to explain to people who weren't there because there has not been another movie that's had an impact like that on an audience. But when you saw The Exorcist when it was first released in the 70s, it was insane. People were screaming and running and fainting and vomiting. And I mean, there just was nothing else like that. And I remember the first time I saw it, I spent half of the movie doing this just watching the audience because I had never imagined that you could have that kind of impact on people. And by the time I was out of that movie, it was like, that's what I want to do. So I really horrified all of my school counselors and my parents by saying I want to become a writer because they all thought that I was going to go into the sciences. I tested really well and had a really high aptitude for stuff like that. Unfortunately for them, it didn't happen. That's really interesting. Yeah, my movie was Silence the Lambs, but you see my parents were they thought that they were going to horrify me and that I would never ask to watch a horror movie ever again. That obviously didn't work. And now we basically have a horror movie night together as a family. Oh, that's great. So, you know, it worked out. That's really cool. And I love that it was Silence of the Lambs too, just because there's so much debate about is that movie a horror movie or not. And to me it clearly is, but I feel like it is as well. I definitely think falls into that genre. And, you know, they thought that Clarice Starling wasn't the worst person I could have wanted to be at that point in time. You know, obviously I didn't turn out to be here, but it was my way in. Right. You explained your story about the exorcist and how that impacted you, but were there any other particular reasons why you were drawn to horror as a genre? I always loved it. And I always describe myself as that weird little girl who grew up at Halloween wanting to be a monster and not a princess. And it was just something that my parents also loved, like your parents. Mine, we loved to watch horror movies. I remember my mom and I like staying up until midnight on Saturday nights or something to watch whatever horror movie was coming on. And my dad loved them too. My dad and I would make a little monster models together and things like that. So it was just something I always loved. I think I always loved that sort of rush you would get from the scary parts. But another thing I think I loved as a kid, which is something people don't talk about as much, is sometimes as a kid you would identify with the monster. You know, you would look at the monster and you might think, well, gee, he's actually not so bad. They're just being kind of mean to him. And so there was that aspect, especially in the old movies, the old classic universal horror movies. The monster was often to me a little bit of the hero as well. And I think I saw myself in them as the outsider. I can definitely understand that. I feel like my generation, we really feel that way about Disney villains, especially a lot of us who identify as women. We look at people like Maleficent or the Evil Queen and we think, well, there's a lot of societal things that we're going on in the background that we didn't quite get as kids. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So are there any authors who you feel have influenced your work? Oh, definitely. I started reading at a very young age and I read all the classics as a kid. But in the early 80s, there was one author who I stumbled across a friend gave me a book to read called The Dark Country. And it was a collection of stories by a gentleman named Dennis Etchison. And Dennis was a local Southern California author. And at the time I read that collection, I had still, I was still kind of pursuing mainly screenplay in terms of what writing format I preferred. But I was starting to think about writing short stories. And I read his collection and it just blew my mind. It was like, this is the kind of stuff I would love to write and there is someone else doing it. And this is something I'm going to think a lot more about. And I was very fortunate indeed in that the friend who gave me The Dark Country knew Dennis quite well. And Dennis and I became friends. And I knew him for 40 years. He passed away just a couple of years ago. And I consider him to be one of my mentors. And I am incredibly lucky to have had a mentor who was also my favorite writer. I mean, that's just so rare and was such a gift. And Dennis really did, he was a tremendous teacher, which is one of the reasons that the Horror Writers Association now has a scholarship in his name for young writers, which is great. He would have loved that. That's absolutely wonderful. It's great to hear a story about somebody meeting their mentor, meeting their hero and them being everything that they wanted. That's a really heartwarming thing to hear. Yeah, so how do you find inspiration when you feel like you're stuck in a rut? It's funny you should say that. I was just, I was writing a story just day before yesterday and I just got stuck on it. And I thought, you know, why am I stuck on that? One of the things to me is inspiration is everywhere and is easy to find to start, where it gets a little harder when you try to structure the inspiration. And with this story, I was working on the other day, I realized that I thought it was about one thing and it was really about another. It was a story about a child who has some odd psychic gifts. And I realized halfway through the story, this is not about the child. This is about the child's father. And as soon as I realized that, it flipped it around and I finished it very quickly and easily and it turned out pretty well, I think. And so to me, it's the inspiration is easy. It's that structure that sometimes is a little bit harder to find. I can definitely understand that. I do a lot of creative work myself and sometimes you have to step back and just see what you're missing. Look at it from another perspective. Yeah, so we all know that some authors are heavily impacted by the area in which they live, with Stephen King and Maine probably being one of the most accessible and popular examples. And I would follow that personally with Anne Rice and Poppy Z Bright's depictions of Louisiana. And I've seen several reviews of your work that mention how the setting of Southern California impacts and at times permeates your work. And it gives it a unique atmosphere. So for those of us who aren't familiar with SoCal, could you explain how your environment influences your writing? What I love about Southern California is that to I think a much of the rest of the world, it has this sort of sunny upbeat image. People sometimes think of it as being a lot of people who are practicing yoga and worshiping the sun and things like that. To me, it has a really interesting dark history that's very unique. If you go back, you can trace it back to the Tongva people, the original natives of the area, get replaced by the Spanish and Mexican settlers, get replaced by the white settlers, get, I mean it's just, it's this constant people taking over this land. And there was some weird dark folklore mixed in with that. There's a very strange story involving Griffith Park, which is one of my favorite places on earth, being cursed in 1863 by a young Latina who has been denied her ancestral heritage. She's been written out of the will at the last minute and she curses the land and supposedly for the next like 50 years, nothing grows here, nothing works here, the livestock die, there are floods, there are fires. People don't know this site of Southern California. I also think that things like even the movie industry has a very dark side here. It's quite often so much about greed and ambition and drive and of course it has the glamorous side too, but it also has a lot of dark elements and I love tapping into those things. It's also where I've spent almost my entire life. So obviously it's easy for me to write about LA and Southern California, but I'm always trying to find new ways to spin it for people who may not know it as well. Yeah, so I feel like several of us have seen, you know, those comments that state, you know, women can't write horror and I've personally, yeah, and I've personally seen a lot of women's horror beats judged using criteria that are less than fair. I mean, we don't judge male authors or popular who are writing in popular genre fiction as if they're trial stick ins. So we shouldn't be holding women to a comically unfair standard. And while we both know that these comments in the vein of women can't make horror aren't true, we do know that these opinions do have an impact not only on women's mental health, but also their careers. And I mean, I'm not as up to date as I'd like to be on the inner workings of the publishing industry. But I know in the film industry, it's not any sort of secret that several women who have specifically tried to direct horror movies have found themselves questioned for wanting to go into this genre, if they've even been considered for the position at all. For they found themselves struggling to get funding. So what sort of advice, other than to just start writing, would you get to a woman who wants to start writing horror, or even more generally just working in the horror genre? Yeah, it's funny, I have to read you a couple of lines from the beginning of this, which is Weird Women 2. The introduction actually addresses this. Ask any woman who writes fiction meant to shock or disturb about response to her work, and she will no doubt offer up at least one anecdote involving something like, you write that, but you look so nice. It's certainly commonplace among modern female horror writers, and it seems likely that their sisters in the past occasionally endured similar responses. It's hard to say exactly what readers imagine a female horror writer looks like. Yeah, we've all had some of that, which is at least a relatively benign form of sexism. There's plenty of less benign forms as well. As I mentioned earlier, even like 10 years ago, it was sometimes hard to look at a publisher's list of forthcoming horror titles and find women in there. There were many anthologies that you would open up and you would see no female names, or maybe one, or maybe two, and I do believe that it is changing a lot now. I mean, so many fantastic horror writers who happen to identify as women have emerged in the last 10 years. It's been such a joy to behold and to see it happening and to be part of it. It's just been remarkable. I always have one particular piece of advice that I give especially. I mean, it can apply to every writer, but especially to women, which is, and it's two words, be bold. I think as women, we are often trained to step back and let the men take the lead, and you can't do that as a writer. You shouldn't do it either thematically in your work or in your own business presentation. I have many female friends who tell me things like, I'm afraid to submit, or who will say, oh, I could never approach an editor and ask them if they would read my work. These are not uncommon things to hear, and it's something that as I think as a woman, you have to learn to push that away, and it can be very hard to do that because it's so ingrained into us, but you have to get past that and you have to realize that it's a big playing field. There are a lot of people out there who are also in it, and you need to be able to push yourself forward a little bit. Yeah, I love that advice. Thank you so much for that. I think that is something that all of us, whether or not we're wanting to work in this genre or not, should be following, so thank you. And speaking of weird women, both volumes talk about different horror writers who were active in the Victorian period to the early 1900s, and who might once have been considered obscure or forgotten, and once again, you've recently finished Weird Woman Vol 2. So can you tell us more about this work and what inspired you to write two volumes? And I'm really interested in how you track down these different authors as somebody who has done a process similar to this before for her own research. Yeah, it was such a pleasure to work on these two books. It was originally suggested really by my editing point. Les was someone who had done a lot of annotated volumes. We had done one earlier anthology that was a collection of classic ghost stories. And when he approached me one day and said, hey, what do you think about doing a book dedicated to the early female horror writers? And we'll call it Weird Women. He actually already had the title and everything. And I was like, all over that. I love the idea instantly. We approach the research and the finding the material from a number of different avenues. One is that we read critical studies of the genre and we read old critical studies. We both have nice libraries, fortunately, of things to draw from already. But also you can find things like there is a remarkable, I think it's 1910 study of supernatural literature by a woman that names a lot of these things. You can look at supernatural horror and literature by Lovecraft and find some of these women. And many other studies later on. So we read a lot of those studies. We made list of women, we tracked them down. And then also I would start just, you might, for example, one of those might send you to a particular anthology. And it might be like an old 1920s, 1930s anthology of ghost stories. I would read not only the story that they had recommended in the critical analysis, but I'd look at the table of contents and find other women in there as well. I also, by the way, I have a secret weapon in these things too, which is my day job. I'm a used bookseller at a store in North Hollywood. It's a very, very active store. There's constantly new material coming in. A lot of it is very old. And so sometimes I would pick up these things that had just come into my day job and I'd find some story in there that was incredible. And one of the most interesting stories appeared in the first volume of Weird Women. It was a piece called The Swine Gods. And it was by a writer named Regina Miriam Block. This is the first time Block has been reprinted in more than a century. And we found her mentioned in critical studies. It turned out her books had not been at the time. One of them has since, but at the time they hadn't even been digitized or scanned and put on display on the internet. And I tracked them down. The University of Riverside Special Eaton collection happened to have two of her books. She did two collections. They had them. So I made an appointment. I drove out there. I actually took the time to photograph every page of both books. And we found a story we liked and used in the first volume. So it was a particular honor to be able to reprint someone who had been out of the public eye for a century. And it's a real pleasure to put these books together. And I hope we get to keep going after volume two. Yeah, I hope you do too. That's absolutely fabulous. And your story talking about how your editor already had in mind the title that reminds me when I was writing my master's paper on women horror writers, my master's papers advisor already had the idea of content collections as the title. He says you have to do a funny title first of all. You know, he liked campy things as well. That's why we got along. So going out of the archives a bit and talking about your podcast, you now have a podcast called Spine Tinglers with Lisa Morton, and what celebrity readers narrate your writing. So what's been the most exciting part of this experience? And is there anything interesting in the upcoming episodes that you'd like to share? It's been an interesting experience because it is a weekly podcast. It's all new material. We actually started working on it well over a year ago. And the people who produced the show also produced another podcast called Ghost Magnet with Bridget Marquardt. And I had been working with them on that show for a long time. I'm like a special guest reporter who comes in every week and gives them a little two or three minute chunk of history on whatever the topic is that week that Bridget is talking about with her guest. And they had said to me at one point, hey, would you like to do your own podcast? And I said yes, but I think it would be fun to do fiction. And I immediately volunteered myself for a whatever crazy reason to write a new short story every week. The good news is that because we started working on this a year ago, we collected a pretty good chunk of material before we even started recording. We only started really seriously recording, probably at the beginning of this year. And so there are new short stories from me being read every week by some incredible people. We've had Naomi Grossman from American Horror Story, Dean Haglin from The X Files, Richard Grove from Army of Darkness, Ella Smith from The Nevers. They're really fun. And I don't have anything to do with getting the readers for the most part. I might suggest somebody if they ask or whatever, but it's always fun to hear what the readers have come up with and their performance of these stories. They're all incredible. And it's been on now for a few months and people seem to be enjoying it. So it's really fun. And I am still writing, trying to spit out new stories every week forward. I think I have written about 40 now. Oh, you are certainly a hard worker. No one can deny that. That is quite a feat, right? I am extremely impressed. So you work quite a bit in stage and film as well, including in the horror genre. Can you tell us about some of your experience working in this industry? And did you ever feel like you had any pushback yourself because you identify as a woman? Yeah, it was screenwriting. It's funny because that's what I always thought I wanted to do, until I actually had some success at it. And then I realized maybe this is not for me. I had six feature film screenplays produced. My response to them runs the gamut of, well, that was kind of fun too. Oh my God, I can't believe my name is on this crap. And three of them, I think, are the kind of movies that would run at like 3am on the sci-fi channel. They're pretty dreadful. The first one I did is still my favorite. It was back in the late 80s. I did a movie called Meet the Hollow Heads with my friend and partner, Tom Berman. Tom directed it. We co-wrote the screenplay. I was also an associate producer. It was an interesting film. It had a great cast. It was the first major role for Juliette Lewis. It had Anne Ramsey in her last role. It had these wonderful character actors like John Glover and Richard Portnale. It was a really interesting learning experience for me. And the film bears about a 70 to 80 percent resemblance to what we intended it to be, which is way higher than most of my later ones. In terms of pushback being a woman, I can tell you one story was that I once was part of a very high-level television project, which unfortunately did not get off the ground, but was pitched to major people all over the industry. We were pitching directly to the higher-ups, and I was frequently the one doing the pitching. And we had a major agent at the time representing this project, and he saw me in action as a pitch person and said, who's repping you? And I said, no one right now. And he said, well, I am. So I thought, hey, this is great. This guy is going to, you know, this huge agent is going to rep me as a writer. This is my dream thing. This is so cool. It took me a few months of working with him to realize that he really genuinely had no interest in representing me as a writer. He wanted to set me up for dates with his older divorced male clients. Yes, that kind of thing does happen. So that was my worst experience in terms of anything that was overtly sexist. Beyond that, you know, it's always, you can never know for sure how much is your own failing and how much is due to your gender. Yeah, so horror is also known as a genre to be pretty heavily influenced by socio-cultural fears at the time. Well, at the time in which it's made. So this is particularly true when how monsters are depicted. And what ways do you believe that the genre will adapt to address the current social climate? And do you predict any trends in monsters we might see in upcoming horror works? It's funny that we were just talking about this this morning, my partner Ricky and I were talking about how we have recently seen a number of films about dementia. My mother suffers from dementia. I've been her live-in caregiver. And so I always feel like I have kind of a personal relationship to these films. But the last one we saw, which was the Manor by Axel Carolyn, who is a female writer and director of horror, was my favorite because the elderly person was not portrayed as the monster. They were the protagonist of the piece. And it dealt with age. It dealt with family relationships and family watching these things happen. And it was a really good, solid screenplay. And in terms of where the genre is going, it is nice to see more and more people of color, more women getting involved behind the camera. My favorite movie of the last 10 years was probably Get Out, which was just so smart and so funny and so creepy. And I turned me into a Jordan Peele fanatic. And I also loved us. And I can't wait to see everything he does. And it's exciting to be around at a time when we are expanding in those directions. Yeah. So one creature who I've never really been able to attach a particular time or type of commentary to outside of the obvious bit about transformation are werewolves. Now, I know there have been a couple of works created about them in the past five or so years that have been pretty well received and they're pretty good. But I feel like they're generally underappreciated and not well represented in the genre. Do you associate werewolves with any particular social issue that we see depicted in horror? And do you think they might finally get their moment? I think you are absolutely onto something there, Brittany, because I have often wondered why aren't there? Where's the Great Werewolf movie of the last 20 years? Certainly, we can go back to the 30s and 40s for some Great Werewolf movies. And there have been some since then. I certainly enjoyed Ginger Snaps, for example. And there were a few that I was not as in love with as everyone else seemed to be. I will just let those remain nameless. But yeah, it seems like the time is so right for a Great Werewolf story, whether it's a book or a movie. The Werewolf is all about, I think, our rage or how we have to keep it clamped in and what would happen if one night a month we let that rage out. And it certainly seems like we live in a time that's filled with a lot of rage. And there is a Great Werewolf story that's still waiting to be told. Yeah, I absolutely agree with you. And there were several Halloween's prior that there was a particular Werewolf movie that everyone kept telling me that because I didn't like it I had to be doing something wrong. And so I rewatched this movie that I hated for, I think, about five years trying to finally like it. No, I am so ready for a good modern Werewolf movie. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, so is there any other type of monster or for Glork creature that you feel has been underrepresented and deserve some recognition? So for me, a modern favorite was the Babadook because I love banshees. And I think that there's so much more we could do with them. Yeah, banshees are a great choice. I was also going to say that although it would be hard to reimagine fairies back into their roots, but the original fairies were not the Disney-ized tinkerbell kind of things. They were badass and very scary. They would cross over on sound night, burn down palaces and bring corpses to life as we were talking about. It seems like something like that is waiting to happen, that sort of other dimensional thing that lives right on the other side of a veil that we can't break unless they cross over to us and wreak all kinds of havoc. That's always one that I think would be interesting to explore much more. Definitely. I feel like also there's a great basis for that right now. I've seen a couple of movies and a couple of shorts that delve into this sort of idea. So there was a relatively recent movie called The Hole in the Ground, which was about changeling mythology, which was super interesting. But yeah, I feel like that could be a really great topic recently, especially with kind of the uptick and more gothic themes. Yeah, definitely. So we have only a few minutes left, so let's take some time to talk about Calling the Spirits, which is one of your newer books recently. It's one of history of seances. So out of all the rituals and techniques that you researched for calling the Spirits, which did you feel was the most interesting or unique? And can you describe it for those of us who haven't been able to read your book yet? The seance itself is amazingly interesting and is unique in terms of its history. If you look back before the seance, which comes around in 1848, by the way, there was nothing like it. In the past, calling up dead spirits was the act of an acromancer or it was something where if you were not a magician and you wanted to do it, you had to learn some sort of magic ritual, which might be as simple as going out to a graveyard and sleeping on the tombstone at night or maybe doing something to provoke a dream in which the spirit would visit you. But then you get to the 1840s and 1850s and suddenly here is this thing, which involves you sit down at a table with a group of friends. And one of you is designated as a medium who is the spirit caller and you bring up these spirits and they come when you call them. And the whole thing, the traditional seance probably was not what most people imagined too. I mean, we think of scenes like the spectacular seance in Penny Dreadful where the woman is possessed and contorting and terrible things are happening. The seances as they were actually practiced in the 19th century were one part spiritualist show, one part revivalist meeting, one part magic show, and one part party. They were like parties. It was a group of a dozen, 12 to 15 friends who would get together. They would sing. They would start the evening with singing and you're holding their hands and you're asking questions of your loved ones who have been returned from beyond just for this one night. And also the medium is showing you amazing sights. You're seeing things floating. You're seeing glowing globs of light. You're smelling things. They even involve very particular smells sometimes and people would leave these evenings just absolutely high. They'd had such a wonderful time and even the skeptics would leave. We have reports of skeptics who would go to these seances and they would come out and say, well, I'm not convinced, but it sure was fun. So the traditional seances just sound marvelous to me and we're a very unique thing up to that point in history. That does sound absolutely marvelous. That would be so much more fun, I feel like, than just sitting around a Ouija board or something. So what are some facts about seances that you feel are most interesting and what are some misconceptions that you think should be cleared up? And maybe touch on what you feel are some major differences between modern day seances and the archetypal ones that we think about from the Victorian era. The sort of classic seance was developed as part of a religion called spiritualism and spiritualism was dedicated both to this notion that you could call up your loved one and communicate with them and that it could be proven scientifically. Now this is where spiritualism went off the rails, frankly, because it was debunked over and over and over, but the spiritualists were true believers and they twisted themselves into incredible logic pretzels trying to explain the debunkings. They would say, for example, well, that medium is always completely authentic, but that one day the spirits were not coming through so they had to fake it, but only that one day. And I mean, you just listen to this stuff now and you just think, wow, you sound really gullible, but the truth is they were just very dedicated to their beliefs. And the methods that the mediums had of pulling the wool over their sitter's eyes was occasionally both very complex and impressive and downright stupid. There was one of my favorite mediums is a young woman named Florence Cook. And Florence Cook claimed to channel a spirit named Katie King. And Florence was investigated by a very famous scientist at the time named William Crooks. And when Florence would go into a trance, she would go into a thing called the spirit cabinet, which might just be a part of the room that was curtain off or might be an actual like cabinet with a closing door. And a few minutes later, Katie King would emerge. Now, Katie King happened to look exactly like Florence wrapped in a white veil. But people bought into this. It's astonishing that people bought into it. For one thing, they had a famous scientist there who was saying, oh no, the spirit is real. And there were photographs of William Crooks arm and arm with the spirit of Katie King. Well, many years later, it was discovered that Crooks was probably having an affair with Florence, which had a lot to do with why he would have continued to invest time and belief in her. But that one of the things that really did perplex me was how much the spiritualist insisted on believing in this. And eventually, I think spiritualism split. It's still around, by the way, it is still a recognized religion, even today, although they've gotten rid of that scientific proof part. But I kind of think the two sides of spiritualism split. One side became our modern superstar psychics. The sort of side of that was more spiritual and more sort of yearning and so forth. And the other side, the scientific side became our modern paranormal investigation. These are the things that we obsess over on television, the ghost hunters and ghost adventures and destination fear. And then just the dozens of shows, reality shows that are on every week on television now. I think that all kind of stems from that science side of spiritualism. Yeah, that is absolutely fascinating. I hadn't thought about it that way before. And it looks like we are right at time. So I just want to thank you so much, Lisa, for joining with us. It's been an absolute pleasure to speak with you. And we appreciate you so much. Everyone listening, be sure to check out Lisa's book, Calling the Spirit, A History of Seances, which is available in our leisure reading section. Although I do believe I saw a colleague running out of the library with it earlier, so you might have to recall it from her. And remember to join us on Wednesday at 6.30 and Hodges Library's auditorium for our screening of the Stylist and our Q&A with director Jill Gavar-Gizian immediately following the screening. Thank you all so much. And Lisa, once again, thank you. You have been absolutely wonderful. I'm so happy to speak with you. Thank you, Brittany. This was great. And by the way, thank you for the whole month of women in horror programming. I wish I was there to see every one of the fabulous movies with you. Thank you. It's been an absolute dream to be working on all this.