Nora Shalaway Carpenter and Rob Costello met during their MFA program over a decade ago. Now both creative writing educators, they have collaborated on a number of projects, including Shalaway Carpenter’s acclaimed anthology Rural Voices: 15 Authors Challenge Stereotypes About Small-Town America, and have a joint anthology centering different types of platonic friendship in the works. Here, Shalaway Carpenter interviews Costello about his debut story collection, The Dancing Bears: Queer Fables for the End Times.

Nora Shalaway Carpenter: One passion you and I share is a love for short fiction (although we both write novels too). What makes you gravitate toward the form?

Rob Costello: I can hold an entire story in my head in a way that’s much harder to do with a novel. For me, that makes the challenge of writing a story less organizational and more fundamentally creative. Half the battle with a novel is simply keeping track of the various parts and figuring out where they belong. But with a story, which I can often sit down and draft in a day or two, there is a clarity to the writing that I find deeply satisfying. Poe talked about the “unity of effect” that short stories achieve for readers, because they are designed to be read in a single sitting. But I find they have that same unifying effect on me as I write, since they can be drafted in a single sitting too. It’s just a completely different undertaking, requiring a different set of storytelling tools and a much narrower scope.

I also love what short stories can do. If the journey of a novel contains all the highs and lows of a season spent hiking the Appalachian Trail, reading a good short story is one glorious night at Studio 54. Everything about the experience is sharper, heightened, more concentrated, and intense. It’s a single, focused encounter with a specific mood or idea, rather than a curated series of events, characters, and themes that—after years of work—hopefully coheres in a meaningful catharsis for the reader.

The urgency of a short story is its greatest asset. It’s what I love most about the form.

NSC: One of your writing strengths is the multiple ways you employ setting in your work. The lush, forbidden setting in “The Hole of Dark Kill Hollow,” for example, is undeniably a character itself as well as a driving force of the entire piece. But even in pieces where setting isn’t as obviously a story factor, you anchor the reader firmly in place, creating a more visceral reading experience. Does setting aways come first for you?

RC: Some writers begin with the germ of a plot or story problem. Some with a character. Some with a theme or issue they care passionately about. But for me, the way into a story is almost always through the setting. Something about a place will trigger a vibe or feeling within me that demands a response. It could be a new city I’m visiting or a random patch of woods I’m walking through. I long to get to know that place on a deeper, more intimate level (even if I end up fictionalizing it). I long to poke around in its dark corners and sniff out its buried secrets like my own mental game of Myst. When that urge strikes, I need to write about it. 

So, for example, “The Hole of Dark Kill Hollow” came about during a vacation my husband and I took to the Hudson Valley. On our way home, we detoured through the Shawangunk Ridge, a part of New York I had never visited. It was a crisp fall day and the mountains were gorgeous—but also vaguely forbidding. The autumn sun hung low in the sky, casting the long, sinewy shadows of leaf-barren trees across the highway, which twisted through a lonely and meandering series of switchbacks that stretched on for miles. Though it was a perfectly innocuous and uneventful drive, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the wilderness surrounding us held secrets. Once I started to ask myself what those secrets might be, the story slowly revealed itself to me.

That’s how it usually works for me. Something about the energy of a place sparks my imagination, and I begin to ask questions. Then the story idea comes into focus—in this case, a bottomless hole in the belly of a gorge hidden deep within the wilderness that grants wishes, but exacts a terrible price for them. Once I have that much, I can figure out who the story is about. I ask myself what kind of people live in this environment. What is their identity, their history, their class, their religion? Whom do they love, hate, fear? What are their dreams and desires? After I know the answers to these questions, I can start to sort out their relationship to the story problem that I’ve created, and then the rest falls into place.

NSC: Does a short story always start as a short story? Do you know the ending before you begin writing? And what about novels? Do you approach them the same way?

RC: Once I’ve experienced that initial spark of inspiration and asked myself all the pertinent questions, I basically have the shape of the story in my head, with an explicit ending in mind. Then I have to sit down and write it. When I’ve done the proper amount of mental preparation, the first draft goes pretty quickly, although revision can take significantly longer. I often need distance to see what is and isn’t working, so it’s pretty common for me to set aside a piece for months after it’s drafted before I return to it. Maybe then I’ll send it out to a few places to see what kind of a response I get. After a couple of rejections, I usually pull the story back, revise it some more, and send it out again. This cycle typically repeats a few times before I finally publish the story, although sometimes it takes much longer.

This is all different from how I write novels, which is a long and messy process that starts with the bare minimum of information—the setting, maybe a couple of the characters, a vague outline of a plot, and a preliminary sense of the themes I want to tackle. From there, it’s a lot of trial and error as I struggle to figure out what I’m actually trying to say. A first draft can take years to complete since I constantly revise as I go—often barreling down narrative blind alleys that I then need to figure my way out of—until I hopefully reach an ending that satisfies me.

Writing novels for me is painful and exhausting, whereas short stories are typically fun.

As for whether a story always begins life as a story, the answer is no. I’ve written several that started as chunks of novels. For example, in The Dancing Bears, both “Whatever Happened to the Boy Who Fell into the Lake?” and “The Njogel” were written as parts of my first novel, An Ugly World for Beautiful Boys (forthcoming from Lethe Press), which originally had a fantasy element involving selkie folklore that I dropped. Meanwhile, “The Thing with Chains” originated as a chapter in my current novel in progress: a gay, #MeToo, cosmic horror/haunted house thriller set at a fictional Hudson Valley estate in the summer of 1978.

NSC: How did you go about ordering the pieces in The Dancing Bears? Although this isn’t a linked story collection, how does the book take the reader on an overall emotional journey in addition to the individual emotional journeys inspired by each story?

RC: Ha! I’m probably revealing something unflattering by admitting that I didn’t spend much time at all thinking about the story order in The Dancing Bears. I knew I wanted to open the collection with “Whatever Happened to the Boy Who Fell into the Lake?” because it sets the tone for everything that follows. More importantly, I wanted to close with the title story, “The Dancing Bears,” the most humorous (and cynical) piece in the book, and the one that I thought would leave the reader with the clearest sense of the overall theme of the collection—which for me is about the nightmare of disillusionment and the empty promise of desire. In between, the story order came down to the vibes of what felt right going where.

The funny part is that my editor, Steve Berman, believed very strongly that the book should close with a completely different story, “What We Leave Behind Us,” which is probably the most sincere and elegiac piece I’ve ever written. So, that’s what we did, meaning that even my minimal attempt at programming the reader’s experience of the book ended up being thwarted! 

NSC: Would you say this process differed significantly from organizing an anthology (something with which we both have experience)?

RC: Yes, this was all very different from my experience arranging my debut anthology (as contributing editor), We Mostly Come Out at Night. There, I spent a great deal of time planning the story order. It felt much more necessary to do so, since I was trying to create a holistic reading experience out of fifteen very different stories by very different writers. I thought a lot about the theme, style, identity, and (especially) tone of each piece, so that the transition from one to the next would feel intuitive, yet surprising—though hopefully never jarring.

NSC: As someone fascinated with liminal space, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how or if you think the transitions between stories can assist reader engagement?

RC: Hmm. I wonder if maybe this is part of what distinguishes assembling an anthology from a single-author collection. In The Dancing Bears, for example, though the stories are pretty different from each other, they all reflect my ideas, my sensibilities, my worldview. It feels less essential, therefore, that they talk to each other across the spaces between them, since the book as a whole is speaking in one voice—my own.

In an anthology, however, it’s really up to the editor to create a coherent conversation between stories that speak in contrasting voices. One aspect of that work is accomplished in theming the book, another during the editing of the pieces themselves, and yet another when you write your introduction. But I think the story order is probably the final element that ties it all together, and that derives on some level from the editor’s consideration of those liminal spaces. How will a reader’s thoughts and feelings at the conclusion of one piece shape their engagement with the next? You want there to be some kind of a build, a natural progression, a thematic flow that carries the reader along like a river throughout the entire book. How to achieve that effect isn’t always obvious, though. Sometimes, you just have to trust your gut and hope for the best.

NSC: Collaborating with you has given me a greater appreciation of the horror genre and its cathartic capabilities. Can you share a bit of that wisdom here?

RC: I always say I think of horror as the worst-case-scenario genre. The attraction of horror is that it enables readers to safely project themselves into the most terrifying and disturbing scenarios imaginable and live to tell the tale. There’s something cathartic about that, something empowering and exhilarating. Especially for readers who have survived or are enduring real-life trauma, horror offers a vehicle to process their own painful experiences through the protective buffer of fiction. To identify with a character who survives and overcomes the monsters in their life suggests the possibility that you can do so yourself.

It’s important to remember that horror, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. There are certain stylistic elements that are often associated with horror fiction: dark themes, isolated settings, disturbing and grotesque imagery, shocking violence, et cetera. But there’s a persuasive argument to be made that horror isn’t really a genre, but rather an emotional state that infuses all different kinds of fiction. In that sense, Jane Eyre is as much a horror story as A Nightmare on Elm Street.

For me and my work, the horror element is almost always centered on emotional and psychological trauma. I’m much less interested in physical violence, gore, and the somatic manifestations of fear. While there may be monsters in my stories, they’re usually not the things to be the most frightened of. The psychic harm my characters inflict on each other is far more terrifying—at least to me.

NSC: I love the idea of horror being an emotional state more than a genre. Why does that state appeal to you and infuse so many of the stories you’re drawn to tell?

RC: I think I’m drawn to writing horror for the same reason I’m drawn to writing about young people. Like a lot of kids, I had a childhood shaped by mental illness, addiction, family dysfunction, and overlapping traumas. I grew up in an environment of fear, navigating bullies at school and a father with a hair-trigger (and occasionally violent) temper at home. Plus, I came of age during the height of the AIDS epidemic, which, as a closeted gay teen, only crystallized my sense of impending doom. Basically, I learned to be afraid of the world at an early age and never grew out of it. On some level, I think I’m still writing stories to help the kid inside me cope with the anxiety, loneliness, and rage I felt back then but didn’t know how to articulate or process.

NSC: I’m sorry you had to go through that. It’s a powerful thing, though, to be able to process and heal from trauma through the creative process. What’s your pitch for encouraging all writers to engage with horror?

RC: Even today, there’s an unfortunate stigma attached to horror. Too many writers associate it with schlock. But I think once you step back and realize that Toni Morrison wrote horror (Beloved), that Cormac McCarthy wrote horror (Outer Dark, Child of God), that Colson Whitehead wrote horror (Zone One), you begin to realize that that stigma is bullshit. Some of the most interesting and innovative literary fiction authors working today write almost exclusively in the horror genre—people like Stephen Graham Jones, Catriona Ward, Elizabeth Hand, Kathe Koja, Gabino Iglesias, Victor LaValle, and Tananarive Due.

So, my pitch is simple: Don’t be afraid of the genre label.

NORA SHALAWAY CARPENTER holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and serves as faculty for the Highlights Foundation’s Whole Novel Workshop. Her debut novel The Edge of Anything was named “Best of the Year” by Kirkus Reviews (starred) and Bank Street Books, and was North Carolina Humanities’ 2021 selection for the Library of Congress Discover Great Places Through Reading list at the National Book Festival. Her newest novel, Fault Lines, won the 2024 Green Earth Book Award for YA fiction, and her critically acclaimed anthology Rural Voices was an NPR Best Book of the Year. Her work has also won the Whippoorwill Award for authentic rural fiction, the Nautilus Award championing “Better Books for a Better World,” and the Texas Library Association’s prestigious TAYSHAS distinction. A neurodivergent author with an invisible disability, she champions busting stereotypes of all kinds. Find her on Instagram @noracarpenterwrites.

ROB COSTELLO writes contemporary and dark fiction with a queer bent. He’s the contributing editor of We Mostly Come Out at Night: 15 Queer Tales of Monsters, Angels & Other Creatures and author of the story collection The Dancing Bears: Queer Fables for the End Times. His debut novel, An Ugly World for Beautiful Boys, is forthcoming from Lethe Press in 2025. His stories have appeared in The Dark, The NoSleep Podcast, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Hunger Mountain, Stone Canoe, Narrative, and Rural Voices: 15 Authors Challenge Assumptions About Small-Town America. An alumnus of the Millay Colony of the Arts, he holds an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and has served on the faculty of the Highlights Foundation since 2014. He is cofounder (with Lesa Cline-Ransome, Jo Knowles, and Jennifer Richard Jacobson) of the R(ev)ise and Shine! writing community, and he lives in Upstate New York with his husband and their four-legged overlords. Find him on Instagram @cloudbusterpress.