Episode 290: Māori Science Fiction and Being Joyously Weird (with Sascha Stronach)
/This week we’re joined by author Sascha Stronach to talk about his debut novel, The Dawnhounds. We chat about spreading Māori science fiction, mushroom cities, and being joyously weird.
Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about or mentions of pandemic, politics, colonization, colorism, racism, violence, mold/decay, sewage, and climate change.
Guest
Sascha Stronach (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Huirapa Rūnaka ki Puketeraki) is a speculative fiction author based out of Wellington, New Zealand. His debut novel The Dawnhounds is equal parts Perdido Street Station and Discworld; Tamsyn Muir called it "a wonderful queer noir fever dream". You can order The Dawnhounds now! Follow him on Twitter @understatesman
Housekeeping
- Live Show: Join us on July 15th in-person in NYC OR stream the show live!
- Recommendation: This week, Amanda recommends Under One Roof by Ali Hazelwood!
- Books: Check out our previous book recommendations, guests’ books, and more at spiritspodcast.com/books
- Call to Action: Check out NEXT STOP: An audio sitcom that explores the turbulent time of your mid-to-late 20s when everyone is changing around you -- and you worry that you might not catch up. Season 1 is out now! Search for NEXT STOP in your podcast app or go to nextstopshow.com
Sponsors
- Inked Gaming is your one-stop-shop for premium gaming goods. Visit inkedgaming.com/spirits and use the code: spirits when you’re ready to checkout!
- BetterHelp is a secure online counseling service. Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/spirits
- Cornbread Hemp is a USDA Organic CBD company based in Kentucky that offers Flower-Only™ full spectrum products. Go to cornbreadhemp.com and use code SPIRITS for 25% off your order.
Find Us Online
If you like Spirits, help us grow by spreading the word! Follow us @SpiritsPodcast on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Goodreads. You can support us on Patreon (http://patreon.com/spiritspodcast) to unlock bonus Your Urban Legends episodes, director’s commentaries, custom recipe cards, and so much more. We also have lists of our book recommendations and previous guests’ books at http://spiritspodcast.com/books.
Transcript
AMANDA: Welcome to Spirits Podcast, a boozy dive into mythology, legends, and folklore. Every week we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world. I'm Amanda.
JULIA: And I'm Julia.
AMANDA: And this is Episode 290 with our fabulous guest, Sascha Stronach. Sasha, welcome to the show.
SASCHA: Hi, lovely to be here.
JULIA: We are so happy to have you I have been carrying around the arc of your book, just like for the past two weeks being like, yes, it's time we're going to read. And I'm so excited that our listeners can right now go and buy the book, which is extremely exciting. So Sascha to kind of get us started off. Can you give us a sort of brief summary or a little teaser of the book to get our audience excited to go break out their wallets and purchase it?
SASCHA: Oh, good. Yeah, I'm the worst at describing my own books. In a sort of [00:54] city, a cop must solve her own murder in order to prevent a bioterrorist attack and it's very gay. It's about gay mushroom warlocks fighting the cops.
JULIA: Every word that just came out of your mouth is like, yes, Sascha, why wouldn't anyone want to buy this book? I don't understand. So-
AMANDA: It's like a random word generator made a book just for Julia. It's so good.
JULIA: Truly, I was like, oh, this one's about mush- oh, it's about so much more than mushrooms. Yes. Excellent. I want to start with kind of the journey of this book. Because I know it has been quite a journey in writing this, and then self-publishing and now releasing a like, I guess, Extended Edition is a good word for it.
SASCHA: It's 30,000 words longer. I don't know how that happened. It didn't feel like it did.
AMANDA: That's a whole book.
JULIA: It's a whole extra book on top of the original book. I love it. So can you kind of tell us like, I guess from the origins of the idea, and then how we got to today?
SASCHA: Yeah. So I was living in Indonesia and a town about two hours south of [1:58]. And I got together with a group of friends. And every week, we would come together and we would give everybody a written 10,000 words. And then we will talk about someone's 10,000 words. And the first draft that came out of that was not very good. I was- I was a fairly young writer, it was my first attempt at a novel. And that was in 2013. And then in 2017, I picked it back up and I had rewritten the first chapter to be about mushrooms. I got really into mycology. And I went Mushroom City, mushroom houses, what does this mean? And everything was trash except that chapter, which was just great. And I went, this is it. And so I rewrote the whole thing from there and I changed the protagonist. It was [2:41] was originally the protagonist of that book and that's why a lot of people love him. He's a lot of people's favorite side character. And it is, I think because I know what he's doing at any one time when he's off screen. Yeah, and I tried to shop that around to traditional publishers for about eight months, kept getting rejected. I gave up and self-published it, and it came out in November 2019. And I had written like a pandemic book, just before a pandemic hit. And so one piece New Zealand science fiction novel 2020 at WorldCon, and after that, it started getting a lot of press. So I interviewed Tamsyn Muir about getting the night for the spin-off, which is a New Zealand magazine that I wrote for sometimes and Tamsin read The Dawnhounds and then we talked about it in an interview and then talked about it at a Con.
AMANDA: Damn.
SASCHA: And lots of attention started coming to it through that. And then what happened was the night of the 2020 US election, I'm not a big drinker. In the US, the timezones would have been different. But in New Zealand, the first half of that day happened over the evening and then you went to bed.
AMANDA: And you hoped and hoped.
SASCHA: Around midnight, it looked certain like Trump was going to win. Like there was no blue wave or we're just fucked. And I got blackout drunk for the first time in about 10 years, and I woke up with an agent. Because of-
AMANDA: Wow.
SASCHA: -what I do. I discovered what sort of drinker I am. I work, which is great professionally. I don't know what it says about my personality.
JULIA: Well, much like a mushroom you network.
SASCHA: Yeah.
AMANDA: That's very good, Julia. But I do the same thing. I need a little bit of liquid courage sometimes to believe in myself enough to ask someone for something.
SASCHA: Yeah.
AMANDA: So I definitely feel that.
JULIA: That's incredible. What a wild night for you, huh?
SASCHA: Yeah.
AMANDA: I mean, congrats to you. Maybe you helped the blue wave actually be a thing.
SASCHA: Oh, God, I don't think so. I'm proud of America and I'm not taking that away from you.
AMANDA: Someone needs to be.
JULIA: We appreciate it. There's very few things that we feel like we can be proud of. So-
AMANDA: Yeah, it's very limited.
SASCHA: But yeah, and so when I had originally self published, I went long trying to sell this to Americans, and it's a very New Zealand book, and this was in 2019. And there was no audience for that. So I cut a lot of the New Zealand myths, and then in September 2019, that was when I gave up and when I'm gonna self publish it. And a week later Gideon the Ninth came out and blew the doors off. And so I said to my agent, you know, I want to put the stuff back in and Tamsyn and was like, "You can't let them- you can't let them cut this shit. This matters."
AMANDA: Wow.
SASCHA: And I went back and I put in a lot of New Zealand culture, and I put in a lot of Tiki-Maori that I had cut, and that that ended up being the bulk of the 30,000 words is world building. It felt like the thing that it needed it was a little bit thin on the ground. It was a little bit kind of plot, plot, plot, plot, plot, plot, I expected when I went to America, I'd have to water it down and instead, it became more itself and I think that's the mark of a really good editor and a really good publisher that they-
AMANDA: Wow.
SASCHA: -kind of let that happen. And I think it's a better book for that.
JULIA: Yeah, I mean, I would agree even like reading the first chapter I'm like, this is like this feels very New Zealand like I don't know like a ton about New Zealand culture other than like the very basics found like this feels right.
SASCHA: Yeah.
JULIA: This feels great. I'm digging this vibe so hard.
SASCHA: I redid the woods at the shanty to have sweet as bro in them.
JULIA: I was gonna say.
SASCHA: Very specifically, because the editors kept getting caught on sweet as they kept thinking it was an error and trying to change it to sweet as pie and sweet as pie is kind of folksy and nice and sweet as is like like a construction worker talking to another construction worker.
JULIA: Yeah.
SASCHA:
It's not like a nasty thing, but it's definitely a bit more police foxy old man who lives in the woods and more guy eaten and meat pie kind of sitting on a street corner.
JULIA:
Ssuits a sailor, certainly.
SASCHA:
The chorus of the song was a place where you can repeat a thing over and over and over again. So it's very clearly intangible because there was already a shanty there and I wasn't super happy with it and I wanted to rework it anyway and that was how I chose to do that.
JULIA:
I mean, this is a perfect time to talk about sea shanties now. Because one, I'm so glad that that that's a thing that came out of the pandemic that everyone got really into sea shanties for a hot second.
SASCHA:
Yeah.
JULIA:
But also I'm quite familiar with sea shanties now because of one that movement into I love pirates a lot, but I was like really excited to see a sea shanty, and one that I didn't recognize and to know now that you like wrote that whole cloth. I love that.
SASCHA:
It's [7:13]. I was like a music and theater kid in high school, but I'm not a good musician. I was never good enough to make music and books is hard. It often comes off really janky and I was just like, there's a format here. There's something I can- I can follow. Yeah, I was. It was also really interesting because the sea shanty thing because The Wellerman is in New Zealand traditional. And like I remember seeing like Weller brothers stuff. So my mum used to work with like museums and stuff a lot and is a nautical Museum in Wellington. There's a whole lot of Weller brothers stuff there. And it was just this moment of connection that I think as a Kiwi, you don't often feel engaging with broader internet culture, which is very Americanized, we do not often get to recognize ourselves. I was on this indigenous science fiction panel at [8:03] a couple of years ago, and I was talking with [8:06] about like, what are some as the Maori science fiction that Americans will know. And it was Thor Ragnarok. That's it. That is like the definitive work of Maori science fiction that a US audience would be familiar with. But it really is Volker three steps down from her ship, and it unfolds. And it's the colors of the Tino Rangatiratanga flag, which is Maori sovereignty, it's about New Zealand, it's about Asgard as this place, that's all pretty and beautiful. But then you smash that thing on the roof. And suddenly, there's this colonial war beneath it. And so yeah, that is that felt like Taika using science fiction to absolutely spill his guts on a lot of very Kiwi stuff and that was very cool. Sorry, I'm going off on a tangent here. But-
JULIA:
No, no, this is great. I love this.
AMANDA:
This is exactly it. Yeah.
JULIA:
Yeah. Also, like taking a probably, I guess, at this point, the largest franchise in the world and being able to do that as well is like such a power move and I appreciate it.
SASCHA:
Yeah.
JULIA:
That's awesome. Well, hopefully, we're gonna get a lot more New Zealand science fiction in the world that people are going to recognize.
SASCHA:
I hope so my intent is to make it a thing, a thing that will sell because I gave a seminar on New Zealand science fiction in 2017, and a winner and asked a bunch of publishers. Can you sell Kiwi science fiction that has recognizable Kiwi elements? And one guy told he just paused and then he laughed for a full 10 seconds. And then he paused again, and went, oh, you're you're serious, mate and I was like, and this was three and a half years ago.
JULIA:
Yeah.
AMANDA:
Is that like anger just fueling the rest of your career? Because if so, that seems like it burns clean. I love that.
SASCHA:
Yeah. It's a good spite. It's a powerful spite.
AMANDA:
Yeah, yeah.
SASCHA:
But I think Gideon also like blew the doors off gor a lot of us. Kiwis have this really strong cultural cringe. We think other people don't like us or our culture. And I think that is informing a lot of that and everybody loves Gideon which has Gideon has a line, [10:03], mate. I'm not going down there. It's bloody chuckers with ghosts. I am amazed that got through an editor.
JULIA: I mean it's a great line.
AMANDA: It is.
JULIA: It's a good solid line.
SASCHA: Yeah, does the word chucker read to you?
AMANDA: No, nothing.
JULIA: I have no idea what that means but I get the vibe and that's what's important.
AMANDA: Like most good slang the sound of it says as much as the meaning of it.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: You know, like it gets you halfway there.
SASCHA: Yeah, I do worry. I went overboard a little bit like I worry about cartoonizing New Zealand but I've tried to pull it back and like negotiate that a little bit gracefully. The other thing is sort of a- I'm [10:40] who my Irie, my tribe, when the Scotts showed up, we saw blue eyes and we liked that a lot. Which is why I have a Scottish surname and blue eyes. But we are the whitest tribe. I show up to Maori meetings because hey, Kāi Tahu is here just immediately, because of how I look, I pushed it away for a really long time. And then in 2014/2015, I was at law school and I was struggling and I joined up with a group of like a Maori students study group and there were a lot of like more melon heated Maori there. Were just like, you [11:13] Maori though, right? Like you have, you have that heritage you have ancestry? Like yeah, like yes, yeah, I'm I'm formally on the tribal roll. Dad's been trying to like encourage me to do this for a really long time and they wouldn't. What do you what are you talking about you're Maori, like-
AMANDA: Oh.
SASCHA: And so you know, the last kind of five or six years, I've been on this journey to reclaim that and that made its way into the book. Like as I was exploring Tichana, I would run into stuff that I felt was really interesting and I would incorporate that. And a lot of it was coming from the law. When you grow up in New Zealand, particularly in the 90s, you were taught that, you know, you have the savage cannibal Maori, and then the English, come along and civilize everything. And studying the Maori traditional Maori legal system, you realize that we were doing stuff that only now Western legal systems are looking at particularly around restorative justice. One of the big things is this acknowledgment that a crime affects the community that what they would sometimes do is they would get the offender, and they would get the victim and everybody else who had been affected by it, and they would all sit in a circle. Now, everybody affected by it would just say, to the offender, this is how you hurt me. And obviously, there are some people who are just going to go, I don't give a shit, I'm happy with what I did and then other measures might need to be taken. But that proved a remarkably effective way of handling, particularly petty crime. Like you, they found people when they understood who they were hurting when they broke into somebody's house and took their food, they will tend to do it less. And then the offender will also be allowed to speak and be allowed to say, hey, you know, I was starving, and I went to these people for food and they turned me away. And like, from a community perspective, you're trying to negotiate a way that everybody can move forward without this happening again. And yeah, so a lot of that more legalistic Tichana made its way into the book, I think I have had to push back a little bit about being called like, an indigenous voice, a Maori voice, I think it is Maori fantasy, you know, I am Maori, but it feels like if I get held up as the indigenous sci fi guy as the Maori sci-fi guy, I'll feel like people are giving me mana like clout that I haven't earned and mana is clout with a spiritual dimension. And- and if you have attained mana, wrongly, deceptively, then that is like a spiritual sickness that will corrupt you. And I sometimes, I feel like I am being given too much mana when I am just on a journey, and that journey has been what's been informing the book.
JULIA: No, I love that. And that, you know, requires a lot of insight, I think. When you're looking at the community that you're a part of, and you know, you are and then being like, but I'm not the pillar of that. Like I'm the I'm not the like one representative that you should all be looking to.
AMANDA: Yeah, and no colonizer and no white person has to be the white person someone knows the colonizer someone knows or the colonizer literature's one person we talk about each decade like that. That just is an unequal burden.
SASCHA: Yeah, I do not want to be that at all. There is a Maori expression which translates to you haven't spent time in the kitchen, you shouldn't stand at the pulpit. And I don't feel like I've spent enough time in the kitchen and you know, everything and I've have a bunch of Maori BETA readers. I have a lot of trusted friends who have been bouncing this off. [14:42] Maori is very much about connectivity. And I think one reviewer one critic of the 2019 edition pointed out that I hadn't noticed that there is a fungal connection with that about networks and about everything being connected sort of ecologically and socially logically and interpersonally, I realized only much later. So I had created a magic system that was built on that. And also, my dad was an electrical engineer who raised me doing circuitry, and it works exactly like electricity. And I did not realize this until the book was out.
JULIA: It's amazing.
SASCHA: That there are conductors and resistors and at one point, there is a big arc storm. My initial there was a scene I don't want to spoil, but there's a particular climactic scene, but the editor is gonna want magically is happening here. This needs to be clear and then we will- it's a lightning rod. They're making a lightning rod and earthing and pulling everything into that. And that was sort of, yeah, it was the running together of this understanding of the wave of the world. And just being really interested in circuits. I have conceptualized the magic system is bioelectricity. I know that's not it's not perfect one-to-one. But that's the way of thinking about it, that it is able to manipulate micro electric charges in organic matter in order to make that matter of do things in a way that's clearly magical, in a way that like you use micro electricity to stimulate neurons and to help release dopamine in brains, just very micro and this is happening at a much more macro scale. But that was sort of the idea.
JULIA: I love that and I think that does come across like the idea that this is this does have like a natural in the world kind of comparison for the magic that you've created. I would love to kind of talk about the mythology and like religious system of the book, because I'm sure you have a lot of thoughts around that. And kind of where you drew inspiration for the various like gods and also myths.
SASCHA: Yeah, one thing that I want to make clear is I'm fascinated by this idea that history is not like a set of static facts that are objectively true. That history is, you know, a thing that is constructed and explored. And faith and history are intertwined quite strongly, which is to say, people are lying to you, and not all of them know that they're lying to you. I created this mythology that also existed sociologically that social forces doing a kind of push-pull and saying, well, we this is not what we want to talk about anymore. This is not what our society values anymore, but it's still there. I wrote a short story, which I will never publish anymore because of the game Hades, which is about Zagreus. There's a lot of theory that Zagreus and Dionysus have the same god, that there was this transformation because Dionysus was not the god of the wine, he was the god of the wild. And wine made him like beasts. So that was the connection. And as Greece became, you know, it became more and more developed and kind of spread out and the danger of the forests became less pressing, or the danger of the wild became this pressing, he became this kind of jolly old fat man. But even in the later Greek stories about Dionysus, there's often an edge to him the fact that his followers ripped me into shreds with their bare hands is always there. And so the way that God's changed due to social forces but still there was that weird core was really fascinating to me. And I wanted to have like a pantheon on the way out and a pantheon on the way in and I can't go too deeply into what monkey and crane etc are or without spoiling later books. I don't know if it's obvious that horror is also a pretty large part of my background. You are being lied to by basically everybody.
AMANDA: That is a great way to describe horror. Yeah.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: Your senses the environment people you thought you could trust. I love that.
SASCHA: One thing that is hinted at and Book 1 and I feel okay about talking about explicitly is that everybody who is here in Crane is not actually here in Crane. Everybody was hearing that voice is filtering it through their own neuroses through their own damage. I think there was a read of Crane we're like you know, this eldritch God is able to just reach into your head and pluck out your damage and hit you with it but I did want it to be sort of clear that's not actually what's happening that there is a voice that is coming through and yet is coming through her damage and that's how it's reaching her and so that isn't a lie. But it's not the truth either. There is I like to think if you read every time Crane speaks and you understand every character who's hearing her you can start to puzzle out what she's actually saying.
JULIA: Just leaving us little puzzle pieces.
AMANDA: That's very enigmatic.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: Very good job.
JULIA: I love that I feel very much like that very terrible horror movie. The I left you all the clues detective a little bit. Which I can't raise the snowman was that the name of it? Terrible.
SASCHA: Snowman. Yeah.
JULIA: Truly terrible.
SASCHA: Snow is going to be a thing in the later books. So maybe- maybe I will write about [20:08] will show up and be unable to find all of the clothes.
JULIA: Well, let's talk a little bit more about horror stuff. But first, we're gonna really quickly grab a refill.
AMANDA: Let's do it.
[midroll]
AMANDA: Hey Julia, welcome to the midroll.
JULIA: Oh, hey, Amanda, how's it going?
AMANDA: Pretty good, pretty good. Just chillin’.
JULIA: I know, it's like it's a chill day today. And I feel like it's nice to have a chill day when we have a guest episode. And also like, I feel like I should be breaking out some cozy beverages and snacks for our conspirators in the refill.
AMANDA: Absolutely. And of course, we got to make sure that we stock the favored Bevies of our newest patrons, Bethany, Kerri, Halsey, and Angela, thank you so very much for giving us your hard-earned human dollars you join the ranks of the hundreds of people who make it a priority every month to support Spirits which like blows my mind and I'm so grateful for including our supporting producer level patrons, Uhleeseeuh, Anne, Daisy, Froody Chick, Hannah, Jack Marie, Jane, Jessica Kinser, Jessica Stewart, Kneazlekins, Lily, Little Vomit Spiders Running Around, Megan Moon, Phil Fresh, Captain Jonathan MAL-uh-kye Cosmos, Sarah, Scott, and Zazi and our legend level patrons, Arianna, Audra, Bex, Clara, Iron Havoc, Morgan, Mother of Vikings, Sarah, & Bea Me Up Scotty.
JULIA: Recently, Amanda, Jake has been listening to Spirits episodes, the backlog on his drive to and from work. And he's like, Well, a lot of those people that you mentioned as your patrons, they've been around for a while. I'm like, yeah, because we have the best patrons in the world. And it's so nice to like, see the same names over and over again each week. It really truly is. It's like having friends stop by.
AMANDA: Exactly. You're like your favorite cousin makes it to the reunion and you're like, Oh, thank goodness. That's how I feel whenever I see these familiar names. And if you would like to get the rewards that we have been cranking out for the last six odd years and making this podcast go to patreon.com/spiritspodcast. With every month that passes the deal gets better and better because there's more and more for you to enjoy from the past. So seriously, it's a great day to do it.
JULIA: Now, Amanda, I love kind of cuddling up with a nice book or watching a nice TV show on rainy days like today, what have you been enjoying on your rainy day?
AMANDA: I have been inhaling a new novella from one of my very favorite contemporary romance writers, Ali Hazelwood, she writes all about women in STEM. And I've recommended her books before I love romance novels where a- characters like career and friends and family and life is just as big if not a bigger part of the plot than the sort of inconvenient appearance of love and that is totally how her books feel. This one is titled Under One Roof. It was published in February of 2022. And there will be more in the series is going to be a trilogy of novellas so it's only on my e-reader it was like 300 pages. So it's you know, definitely something that you can read in a shorter period of time than you perhaps used to, but it still felt really substantial where you know, you got to know the characters, you got to know why it is that classic forced proximity which I love, which is a scientist was given from her mentor ownership of a house that she then shows up and realizes is currently occupied by the woman's nephew who is a lawyer who works for big oil and she works for the EPA.
JULIA: Oh no.
AMANDA: So it is a great setup. I really enjoyed it, I can see myself going back to enjoy it again in the future too.
JULIA: I hope it ends with him quitting his terrible job. Anyway, that sounds incredible Amanda, I'm definitely going to check it out. And I hope that our listeners check out our live show whether you're in New York City on July 15 or you can participate in the live stream that's happening or the video on demand after the fact check it out it Caveat in New York City and it is going to be incredible it has been so long since the three of us have been in the same room together and I think the energy in the magic is going to be off the charts.
AMANDA: I cannot wait it's going to be professionally live streamed from two angles. So whether you come to your city or you watch the live stream or the video on demand, check it out spiritspodcast.com/live is where you can get those tickets. And Julia Do you know what days like this really sort of invite me to do?
JULIA: I don't know, Amanda, tell me what.
AMANDA: It's sink into a universe sink into a story whether that's listening to a podcast like this reading a great book or listening to perhaps an audio sitcom by Multitude you should check out Next Stop. This is a show that Julia and I and Brandon Grugle and Eric Silver worked on red written and created by Eric Directed and Edited by Brandon Julia was the assistant director and casting director and I executive produced it it is all about that time in your mid to late 20s When people are changing around you and you're a little bit worried that you might not catch up.
JULIA: If you like us, enjoy like kind of sinking into a fun like classic sitcom but you've rewatched you know all the basics a million times check out Next Stop. It is like a solidly 21st-century sitcom that gives the audience something to laugh about without punching down and Season one, all 10 episodes are out now search for Next Stop in your podcast app or go to nextstopshow.com.
AMANDA: Julia, we are sponsored this week by our friends at Inked Gaming who we truly love and if you are planning on doing some shopping for some gaming gear to add to your collection, perhaps gifts for people perhaps you're going on a road trip or renting a cabin or just having a little staycation at home and having a new special you know, notebook or set of dice or you know, accessories to do your gaming with can make things feel so special plus they can customize tons of items so you can have an inside joke from your campaign or your initials or your house crest or logo immortalized on an actual gift run by an excellent small business that we love partnering with.
JULIA: Yeah, and as a sponsor for Spirits Inked Gaming is gifting us a really nice perk that we're happy to offer to you are conspirators How does a 10% off discount sound? Because all you have to do is visit inkedgaming.com/spirits and use the code Spirits when you're ready to check out that is 10% off by going to inkedgaming.com/spirits and using the code Spirits when you're ready to purchase your stuff.
AMANDA: Thanks, Inked Gaming.
JULIA: Now, Amanda, I know you have talked to me a lot about how you truly can't fall asleep without CBD nowadays.
AMANDA: Yeah, I've been using CBD oil to help me sleep for a few years now and it's really become essential. I also have you know, like muscle spasms and back and neck problems from time to time and I have really come to rely on CBD products to help me with that. It's genuinely something I really love. And I sought out a CBD sponsor that I will be really excited to talk to you all about just because it has made such a big impact on my life. And I'm really excited to share it with you our partnership with Cornbread Hemp. This is a CBD company based in Kentucky they have a trademark on the phrase, Flower-Only™, which is what they make their products out of that means no seeds or stems are included in their products and it's USDA certified organic. These are the sweetest people, the classic-like friends who are really passionate about a thing and made a business out of it. And they are family owned and crowdfunded with all their products grown and made in Kentucky.
JULIA: Also, if you're vegan, a lot of their products are vegan friendly, including both their CBD oils and their gummies. And you can go to cornbreadhemp.com and use the promo code Spirits to get 25% off your order.
AMANDA: If CBD is something new to you, and you're not really sure what the deal is, or like what you should try, they do a great job of walking you through the options. They also have independent labs certify all of their products and publish those reports on their website, which is a great thing to look out for no matter where you are buying your products. So check it out, go to cornbreadhemp.com and use code Spirits for 25% off your order.
JULIA: So now, Amanda, a word from our sponsor BetterHelp. Listen, I've been trying to remind myself that I have to prioritize myself. And what helps me all the time is talking to someone who can help me figure out what is causing stress in my life and how we can kind of counteract it and balance my life out a little bit more, especially when I'm experiencing burnout.
AMANDA: it is totally true. And that cannot just be work related. It can be about life, about caregiving, about friendships about just like surviving in the environment that we're in right now. And that is totally legitimate. And BetterHelp wanted us to use this ad space to remind you to prioritize yourself that can look like a lot of things for a lot of different people. For me, one of the ways that shows up is doing therapy every day of the week, whether I feel like it or not, because I know it is good for me and I do my therapy through BetterHelp because it is convenient, it is cheap. And I was able to find a therapist really quickly even though waiting lists around me even here in Brooklyn in New York City were so long, and I really wanted support right away. BetterHelp is customized online therapy that offers video, phone, and even live chat sessions with your therapist. So you don't have to see anybody on camera if you don't want to. It is much more affordable than in-person therapy and you can be matched with a therapist in under 48 hours.
JULIA: And our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com/spirits. That's better H E L P.com/spirits.
AMANDA: And now let's get back to the show.
JULIA: Sascha, I have to ask since you're here on the show, and you already talked about drinking on the show already. What's your favorite cocktail?
SASCHA: Yeah, I don't drink a lot of cocktails, a dark and stormy a Moscow Mule and old-fashioned like, like I tend to stick with the classics. There is a bar in Wellington that I'm struggling to find the names of the nightshade lounge. It's the most pretentious thing I will allow myself when I'm feeling flush. But you just go in there and you describe a vibe.
JULIA: Yes.
SASCHA: And the barman will mix you a cocktail.
JULIA: Those are my favorite kinds of bars and be like, what's your mood today?
SASCHA: Yeah.
JULIA: I'm like, I'm feeling sassy. Alright, here you go.
SASCHA: And it's like they don't make they don't use anything from more recently than 1930. And so you see people in there sort of saying, Well, I want to sort of you know, worldwide and I just I go in there and I'm feeling goblin pirate can you do me like a sexy goblin pirate?
AMANDA: Yeah!
SASCHA: I don't know whether the guy hates me or not.
AMANDA: I don't know if I were them, that sounds really fun.
SASCHA: He does some fun things with it with my terrible ideas.
JULIA: I mean next time I'm gonna say goblin pirate when they asked me how I'm feeling so I dig it.
AMANDA: We have to compare notes on what you get a different place.
JULIA: Yeah, we'll be like, Alright, so this place in Boston, this is what I got after saying goblin pirate, and let's see what they do at the next one. We were talking about horror before we took our break. Is there like a horror that kind of got you into horror? Like when did you start getting into horror and then like, what stories did you really like latch on to.
SASCHA: So the one that really hit me was when I was like, I can't remember how old I was. It would have been six or seven. My parents came home from existence, and they could not stop talking about it for weeks. Neither of my parents a huge horror people. And Cronenberg was a piv- this was like the first horror movie either of them had watched in years. And if you've never seen existence, even for Cronenberg, it's it's a lot. And so like I watched existence, you know, as a teenager years and years later, but I think Cronenberg rooted in my psyche very early. I mean, I feel like a kind of a basic bitch with horror like I Stephen, I read Stephen King a lot when I was a teenager. The last great horror book that really got me was Cass Khaw's Hammers on Bone, which is that title, Hammers on Bone. I went- look, you can't put you can't make a title like that. It's too much. The book cannot justify that title and then it kind of did. And it got under my skin.
AMANDA: How dare.
SASCHA: I had mixed feelings about nothing but black and T but I think Cass Khaw would generally let has this real talent for a really nasty horror descriptions. There's a line in a song for quiet about someone's face melting like fat and a good skillet.
AMANDA: Oh, damn.
JULIA: Sometimes horror writers just write lines and you're like, oh, that's gonna stick with me for the rest of my life.
SASCHA: Yeah.
JULIA: Cool, I guess. Yeah.
AMANDA: I mean, I don't know the experience of having a body is so fundamentally horrifying so often.
SASCHA: Yeah.
AMANDA: That I think only horror gets bodies really right.
SASCHA: Yeah.
AMANDA: And oh, it's so good.
SASCHA: Yeah, I don't know whether I'm a horror writer. I don't feel like I kind of I think there would be people who had won the horror awards and stuff who would sort of shaking their heads at what I do. But the genre is weird and fluffy.
JULIA: Yeah.
SASCHA: I think I'm a science fiction writer who brings in horror elements more than anything else. But I love good horror and it is it, particularly the thing I wanted to bring was that embodi-ness. I think fight scenes and action in science fiction can often feel a little bit floaty. And I think if you bring it down to a body level, you can make really crunchy interesting stuff that lives more in that space.
AMANDA: Yeah, that's why particularly fungal horror really, really gets me going because there's something about the I don't know, like, damp. That feels like my lived reality of just like having a body like shower shoes at school. I just like I don't know that the creeping awareness of mold has been one of the undercurrents of my adult life.
SASCHA: Yeah.
AMANDA: Being like, oh, do I really need to clean my shower that often? Wow. And it just there's something about it of like the unseen that is slowly gaining power.
SASCHA: Yeah, I mean, I saw New Zealand has a real problem with damp and badly constructed homes. And I lived for about five years in a home that was like, just ruined with black mold. And it's just permanently messed up my respiratory system. That was a horrible house that was falling apart. And it is the place where the only real horror things have happened to me but I think that influenced the writing a lot. And there was a moment where so what happened was a tree root broke through the old clay drainage pipe that will the gray water from the house was going through and it swelled up and it blocked it and I had an ensuite on the bottom floor and the kitchen was on the top floor. And so the shower starts like filling up and I'm trying to, you know, plunger it and fix this, you get that moment where you're plundering real I've done it you feel the pressure, pull the plunger up, and tiny bongs and black water and border logs skin just flooded this whole thing. And it turned out to be food waste. Somebody had put a rotisserie chicken-
JULIA: Oh, no. Oh god.
SASCHA: -through the thing.
AMANDA: Oh, no.
SASCHA: Which had caused a problem. things falling apart like that. That problem took probably about four years to come to fruition and then it all happened at once.
AMANDA: Yeah.
SASCHA: And that can happen in bodies too.
AMANDA: Yeah.
JULIA: Oh, yeah.
SASCHA: That house I think has connected that quite strongly to my sense of embodiment and my sense of horror, that that place was like slowly eating me from the inside out. And it looked fine until suddenly, very suddenly, it didn't
JULIA: That's the most Gothic Horror shit I've ever heard in my entire life. So-
AMANDA: Poe could never, Poe wishes.
SASCHA: It was surreal. Do you want the funny coda to it?
JULIA: Yes.
AMANDA: Yes.
SASCHA: So I was at grad school when this happened. And so I had to call a plumber, the bathroom was flooding and I put towels down. I spent I did not sleep the whole night.
AMANDA: Oh, man.
SASCHA: And I'm piling towels and towels and towels and the plumber gets there late, at like 11 AM and I've missed class. I've had to quote like, you know, contact my supervisor and go, I'll be late because of this thing. Alright, but I rushed down after the plumber gets in. And you know, we're already done she's like, Oh, come back, come back at 1. And so I went to get lunch, and I stink of sewage and I haven't slept. I haven't eaten and I went to a Malaysian place and I got Roti canai and I'm sitting there eating it like with this massive enthusiasm, shoveling this this shit into my face, and I look up as the most New Zealand stores most New Zealand thing that's ever happened to me, sitting across from me at the next table is Jemaine Clement. [giggles] And he's just he's got this 1000 yards stick and I am not unconvinced that that is going to make its way into an episode of Wellington paranormal.
JULIA: We'll see.
SASCHA: Because it is the worst day of looked in my entire life the closest to goblin- that is goblin mode, like actual hardcore goblin mode, and Jemaine fucking Clement is just staring me.
AMANDA: Damn.
JULIA: I mean, congratulations on your inclusion into the What We Do In The Shadows universe, I guess?
SASCHA: I think, I'm gonna live in terror, I can't watch this show, because I'm gonna be in it, it's gonna be off.
JULIA: So if I see anything that resembles that story, I will message you and let you know. If you get watching yourself, someone else has to let you know that that exists in the world now.
AMANDA: That's incredibly good.
JULIA: So I feel like that story kind of embodies my next like, question or like tangent that I want to take you on, which was when you were talking about the book on your website, you call it joyously, weird. And I feel like that statement or that phrase is so evocative and fills me with such a joy, and also makes me feel the way I did when I was reading the book. So like, was that kind of what you were setting out to do when you're writing the book? You're like, I want something weird, but like, proud of its weirdness.
SASCHA: Yeah. I mean, I have really mixed feelings about the term hopepunk.
JULIA: Yeah.
SASCHA: If hopepunk is to be like, I think that is actually punk. It needs to embody the fact Emma Goldman quote, it's not my revolution if I can't dance. And so finding joy in dark places, as a revolutionary act, was something that was like going through me at the time. And particularly with regard to like queer community building, you find a group of people who have been taught by society their entire lives, that they are worth less, and they find joy in each other and their difference, and that can become revolutionary. No, it doesn't. It isn't, I think, inherently revolutionary. You can just have a bunch of friends and hang out in goblin mode. But there is a power in it, that can be leveraged. And that was what I kind of really wanted to hit. And so it is joy and weirdness, and revolution.
AMANDA: Amazing,
JULIA: Honestly, a great combo of all three.
SASCHA: Somebody called Discworld Elysium. I wish I wish I could remember who called it, Discworld Elysium. But that's the nicest thing anyone's said about it and it's stuck in my head.
JULIA: That's so good. I also saw someone describe it as Southeast Asian-inspired. And I know that you spent a lot of time in like Malaysia and Indonesia and Singapore. Was there a moment when you were in those areas that you were like, this is something that I want to expand upon. These are like aspects that I want to include in my own world.
SASCHA: Yeah, when I first flew into Singapore, it was at dusk, and there were so like, I'm in New Zealand is not going a lot of people. New Zealand is the size of an American city. Singapore has, you know, some of the highest population density in the world. And I remember seeing ships in the harbor backed up across the horizon.
AMANDA: Whoa.
SASCHA: And suddenly getting this tremendous sense of scale that I had never had in my life before. And I where I've traveled a bit, went to Europe when I was a teenager. I've spent a bit of time the Pacific Northwest. None of these can hold a candle to an Asian city in terms of how suddenly humanity kind of hits you that you have to survive and stay sane in this space with so many people, and you have to become really, really aware of everyone around you. And you have to act with just, you have to be kind people have to be kind and people have to be smart, and they tend to be. I think there's this portrayal of Asian cities that you see in media a lot, as you know, like chaotic and grimy. And I'm not gonna say that, you know, KL is a perfect city where everything is, like lovely and nice. But I think you come face to face with people a lot more. And that, I think, was the thing that made its way into the book the most that unavoidably if you live in a city, you must be part of this city.
AMANDA: Well said.
SASCHA: And sometimes because I spoke to Nora Jemisin a couple of weeks ago and we were talking about the city we became and you have seen you know, some cities reject you some cities, you try to live there, and they just won't have you. I feel like Singapore bounced me a little bit KL didn't. Yeah, I don't know what it is about them. Where that happened. That this the cityness, I think was the big thing I want to take away because you, you have to be very cognizant of like, I am not Southeast Asian writer and I during rewrites, one of the things they did was try and route it a lot more in New Zealand. And when I incorporated Southeast Asian elements, I tried to incorporate elements that I like I felt like I was very familiar with, I'm pretty connected with the readings at [41:38] from Kuala Lumpur. And like I bounced off a couple of them, just to make sure I was kind of getting everything right. The other shocking thing for me was the way that New Zealand is becoming more and more tropical as climate change kind of gets us that-
AMANDA: It does that.
SASCHA: I'm from the South Island, which generally is one of the colder, grimmer parts of the country. And the weather of the tropics, I think influenced the book a lot. It's so much more dramatic. You haven't heard thunder until you've heard a monsoon thunder. Where I don't know why acoustically it's so different. But it sounds like an animal roaring. Again, it is that sense of scale that really struck me everything feels bigger, even in a way that like you know, Seattle is bigger than basically anywhere in New Zealand. Seattle didn't strike me with that sense of scale. I love it. Seattle just feels like Wellington but bigger. A lot of the time and I love Wellington to bits. The interconnectedness of everything balls you the fuck down-
JULIA: Yeah.
SASCHA: -when you go and live in a big Asian city.
JULIA: Oh, that's, that's awesome. I love that description. And I can see kind of how that feeling of interconnectedness definitely made its way into the book. I feel like this is probably going to be my last question. So if there's anything that we haven't discussed yet that you wanted to touch on, let me know now.
SASCHA: So the big one, which it's not in book one as much, but it's going to be pretty big in Book Two was we grew up with so my grandmother was from Corfu, in Greece, and we grew up with a lot of Greek and Slavic folklore so her family were diplomat. My grandmother was born in the Ottoman Empire, it's something that I still struggle to, to understand because that feels like it's a million years ago.
JULIA: That's wild.
SASCHA: They were- they were these Ottoman diplomats. And so she was from Istanbul, the family from Corfu. She's from Constantinople.
SASCHA: But we had, like a lot of Slavic folklore in the house. I disagree with James Mayhew's Tales of Koshka the cat. And I talked about that on Twitter recently, and James Mayhew showed up in my mentions, and I've been talking to all these like big names, sci-fi writers, and recently I've gotten over, like that rabbit instinct, but with colleagues we can have this conversation, James Mayhew locked me up like a small child being asked to like, order at McDonald's. Like, I was like five years old again. I was like, thank you, Mister. Thank you, that's very nice that I think Russian and Turkish and Greek. And sort of, like South Slavic folklore are things that are in the books, In book one, not as much, but definitely there and going to be a much more prominent part of Book Two. Because we are going to [44:32].
JULIA: Whoa!
AMANDA: You'll have to come back and tell us all about it.
JULIA: Yes, please. So my final question for you. This has been like a almost decade long kind of journey for you going from the first draft to now.
SASCHA: Yeah.
JULIA: What is it that you're most proud of with this book?
SASCHA: People say the book took 10 years and I want to push back on that a little bit. I started writing the first draft 10 years ago, and it's coming out now. There were a lot of breaks. I think the book probably took about a year.
AMANDA: Still a lot of work and time,
JULIA: Right.
SASCHA: I had this moment where you know, you hate your own writing when you're writing it.
JULIA: Yeah.
SASCHA: And so I finished the first self-published like I had the version, I was gonna go shop around to agents. And I left it for a month and I put that I printed it off in Comic Sans, which does this, have you heard that trick. It like rewires your brain a little bit.
SASCHA: And I read it and I cried.
AMANDA AND JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: Oh, my God.
SASCHA: When I read this book, and it felt like someone else had written it hit me like a truck. And I didn't think I was capable of giving anyone that sort of, I didn't believe in this book. Like, even after that I didn't believe into this book until Tamsyn Muir said it was good. And there was like, well, she writes good books, she writes books that are clearly better than mine. So she must be right. I trust her opinion more than my own.
AMANDA: Oh, yeah.
SASCHA: She says the book isn't trash. The book is good. But I did blow myself down when I when I read it, like it was written by someone else. And that moment made me feel like, you know, I've been trying, I've been writing. I've been working on my craft for a decade now. And that made it feel worth it. And that made me immensely proud of myself.
JULIA: That's so awesome.
AMANDA: Incredible. I have no ownership over your success but I'm proud of you.
JULIA: Thank you.
AMANDA: The book is so good and I'm so excited for our listeners to get read up.
JULIA: Absolutely. And that's a great place to tell people hey, where can they find the book and find more of your work and you on the internet?
SASCHA: Right now, because we are recording this in the past, we are time travelers.
AMANDA: We are talking to you from yesterday. We are in Monday you are in Tuesday. So that's pretty cool.
SASCHA: The New Zealand experience with the first place [46:38]?
JULIA: Yeah.
SASCHA: It's going to be in Barnes and Noble. It's going to be in all major retailers. It's currently available for preorder at Barnes and Noble and Amazon. It should be available to pick up by the time you're listening to this. You can find me on Twitter @understatesmen which was a pun I made up when I was working in as a job or in politics, because I was under a statesman. But Kiwis are also very understated. That's the terrible joke and that's also on my website is the understatesmen.com. Yeah, those are the only social media I do I'm, I am grateful that my publisher doesn't require me to go on TikTok. I'm 30.
AMANDA: Yeah.
JULIA: Listen, you're talking to the right people here. Don't worry about it.
SASCHA: I don't have any beef with TikTok, I want to be clear. It's cool. I'm just not cool enough for it.
JULIA: Big mood.
AMANDA: Yeah.
JULIA: Big good.
AMANDA: I talked to some high schoolers last week and I was like about like podcasting and stuff. I was like, oh, yeah, like blah, blah platforms. Facebook, Instagram. TikTok? I was like, you could tell that I'm turning 30 next week because of how I just said the word TikTok. And they were like, yeah, we can, we can.
JULIA: That hurt.
SASCHA: It's important to acknowledge that you're not cool anymore.
AMANDA: Exactly.
JULIA: I refuse to not be cool anymore. I'll go to my grave being cool.
SASCHA: It's easy for me because I was never cool. Like, I was a theater kid.
JULIA: Listen, you're talking to the same folks here.
AMANDA: I'm also- yeah, like queer mushroom nerd theater kids-
SASCHA: Yeah.
AMANDA: -unite.
SASCHA: Queer mushroom, goblin-core theater kids. This is-
JULIA: It's all us. It's us.
AMANDA: Well, we will have all those links and many more in the description of this podcast episode. But Sascha, thank you so much for starting out the day and seeing the sunrise first. I'll let you know how it looks on our end tomorrow and just so appreciate your time.
SASCHA: Oh, yeah. And thank you very much for having me. It's been lovely.
JULIA: It was our pleasure. Thank you for delighting us with all your stories and all of your insight. We really appreciate it.
AMANDA: And remember everybody-
JULIA: Stay creepy.
AMANDA: Stay cool.
[outro]
AMANDA: Spirits was created by Amanda McLoughlin, Julia Schifini, and Eric Schneider with music by Kevin MacLeod and visual design by Alison Wakeman.
JULIA: Keep up with all things creepy and cool by following us @SpiritsPodcast on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. We also have all of our episode transcripts, guest appearances, and merch on our website. As well as a form to send us in your urban legends and your advice from folklore questions at spiritspodcast.com.
AMANDA: Join our member community on Patreon, patreon.com/spiritspodcast, for all kinds of behind-the-scenes goodies. Just $1 gets you access to audio extras with so much more. Like recipe cards with alcoholic and nonalcoholic for every single episode, directors' commentaries, real physical gifts, and more.
JULIA: We are a founding member of Multitude, an independent podcast collective, and production studio. If you like Spirits you will love the other shows that live on our website at multitude.productions.
AMANDA: Above all else, if you liked what you heard today, please text one friend about us. That's the very best way to help keep us growing.
JULIA: Thanks for listening to Spirits. We'll see you next week.
AMANDA: Bye!
Transcriptionist: KM