Monstrous Angels Author Interview: Stacie Turner
A series on the contributors of Monstrous Angels.
Monstrous Angels is set to unleash this November, and in the meantime, I’ve asked the authors to chat a little about their story and themselves. The next in this series is Stacie Turner. Her story After the Grace is a great addition to this collection and today she talks more about what inspired it.
How did you approach the theme of “Monstrous Angels” for your story, and what about the theme interested you?
This story - all 700 or so words of it! - is a distillation of a whole book I drafted during the Covid lockdowns of 2020. The plot was terrible. Truly, utterly cliched, but I loved the character of the angel and pretty much brain-dumped the flash from their perspective in one long breath.
What inspired this piece, or were there any media/literary influences you’d like to talk about?
I had the immense good fortune as a child to have a babysitter who was not only a retired librarian, but one who had loved science fiction and fantasy more than any other genre, who had a room in her house filled with boxes of old mass market paperbacks, and who let me read any of them I wanted (probably because a child reading is an easy child to supervise). Because of this, I read a whole bunch of things very young that I absolutely did not understand, and I have this very strange foundation of half-remembered SFF that range from the greats of the genre to books that barely rose to the level of pulp. One of those books started with a child talking about ‘when his parents had the angels in them.’ Now, these parents had flown bombers in a war, and as an adult I’m fairly sure this was more of a ‘nation that started world war three used religion as a justification’ thing than a ‘god put angels into people’ situation, but I was a very literal child (*cough* undiagnosed ‘tism *cough*) and I was very taken by the (probably misunderstood) idea that God could make you an angel for the short term. I wanted to poke at that idea, and more specifically, I wanted to poke at what happened afterward when you weren’t divine anymore.
And THAT tied into my (sadly unimpressive) history as a medievalist and my vague understanding that Julian of Norwich received one set of divine visions and spent the rest of her life trying to write out what that was and cope with it, and I thought, yes, direct contact with a god would take a lot of processing, and HOW MUCH MORE processing would it take to cope with the trauma of having been a temporary angel. God exists, yep. But he rejected you. Personally. You think getting ghosted by a guy after two dates is bad? That’s just peanuts to space. I mean, uh, divine rejection.
As spoiler-free as you can manage, what is your favorite part of your story?
I love the first line, but I’m also partial to the Midsummer Night’s Dream reference I managed to work in. I have an obnoxious habit of trying to make my English degree everyone else’s problem by dropping as many allusions to other texts as I can. It’s pretentious. I’m not going to stop.
Where else can people find you? Do you have any other projects you want to give a shout-out to?
My website is www.stacieturner.com.
I have short stories coming out this year in Drabblecast and Small Wonders, and maybe something larger sometime in the future I have to be vague about.
Is there anything else you’d like to mention?
I’m super thrilled this anthology is going to support the Avian Haven Wildlife Rehab Center because I love birds (and have a wistful fantasy where the road not taken leads to falcons. Lots and lots of falcons.)
Stacie Turner’s short fiction has appeared online and in anthology collections. Before going all-in on writing, she worked in professional theater, exhibited her photography nationwide, taught Latin and English, had children, and spun yarn with a drop spindle. Now she lives in Connecticut. You can find her online at www.stacieturner.com
Monstrous Angels is an anthology that will explore one of the most enduring questions of religious horror–why are angels so compelling as anti-heroes and/or villains? All proceeds will be donated to the Avian Haven Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in Freedom Maine.
This is the last interview before Monstrous Angels goes live!
You can pre-order here.
Thank you for taking this journey with me and getting to know all the wonderful authors of this collection. I can’t state enough how proud of these stories I am.
