Sumiko Saulson has always been a poet, and has finally been recognized for it in recent years. Her collection The Rat King, A Book of Dark Poetry (Dookie Press, 2022) was nominated for the 2022 Stoker Award for Achievement in Poetry, and now, Melancholia, A Book of Dark Poetry (Bludgeoned Girls Press, 2024) is a finalist for the same award in 2024. The last interview celebrating Horror Poetry Month, Sumiko talks about the ghosts, the history, and about the physical, the emotional and the metaphysical that inspires her poetry.
In addition to her poetry collections, Sumiko has published novels, novelettes, story collections and has had her short fiction featured in dozens of publications. Not to mention zines — published under her own publishing company, Dooky Press. With such a bibliography, she also has been recognized for dozens of awards. Stop by her website, sumikosaulson.com, to see the whole shebang, and maybe to be inspired by her. Tell her I said hi.
“With horror, we can use metaphor to speak to the things that haunt us, from global terrors like war and famine, to very personal topics like mortality and disease that you see a lot in body horror.”
1, What draws you to the horror genre?
My parents were huge horror fans, so I grew up with the genre first in movies and then as a young reader. Horror taps into the primal fears of mankind–: the things we try to suppress and pretend don’t exist with the comforts of the modern world: fear of the dark, fear of death. One of the first movies I remember seeing when I was a little kid was called It’s Alive, and it was a birth body horror film about a terrifying newborn monster that attacked and ate people. There was a lot of ecoterror when I was a kid, like Food of the Gods, a movie where genetically altered food caused animals to grow to enormous sizes. Some of these were quite ridiculous, but TV shows like Twilight Zone and Outer Limits took on a more serious tone. With horror, we can use metaphor to speak to the things that haunt us, from global terrors like war and famine, to very personal topics like mortality and disease that you see a lot in body horror.
2. How does horror blend into poetry for you?
Horror and poetry paired are nothing new. My love affair with the works of Edgar Allan Poe started when I was in the 7th grade, and dark poetry predates Poe. Old English epic poems like Beowulf lean heavily into horror. Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost are all examples of supernatural horror in verse. Dark ancient lore is the root of much of modern horror, and much of that was relayed in verse. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” and Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale” are some examples of tales of what is arguably horror in verse. So, I would say that I feel there is a long-standing and organic relationship between horror and poetry that is too often overlooked.
3. Poetry in general evokes emotions. I’d characterize your poetry as dark, playful, hopeful and nostalgic. Was this intentional, or was there something else?
I have bipolar disorder with psychotic features, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and for me, both poetry in general and horror poetry specifically are forms I use to process a lot of trauma. I also talk about the darkness that’s in the world, often choosing supernatural creatures to create analogies, or more earthly things that inspire horror.
I think that with my being Gen X and having grown up with Outer Limits and Twilight Zone, the idea of using fantastical creatures to tell tales about the darker sides of human nature comes naturally to me. And a lot of the Black horror stories like Tales from the Hood used that same anthology horror formula.
I will also say that I have a great love of body horror. I have endometriosis (in remission now that I’m post menopausal), and it made me have very painful periods, and heavy periods, and a whole slew of bowel issues, and you just don’t talk about these things. So, my early attempts to communicate about it were in some horror comic zines I made. When I started writing body horror, I could talk about those things, menopause, pain related to my ill-fated attempts to conceive, and a lot more.
We had to make sure everything we did elevated the culture, and horror was considered a “low” genre.
4. All of the finalists for the Stoker Poetry award this year are people of color! Do you have advice for people of color getting into writing horror?
When I started writing horror fifteen years ago, I ran into a lot of pushback from people who didn’t think of the genre as one that included people of color, let alone women or gender diverse people of color. At the time, there was a strong feeling among people in the Black community that to be taken seriously as a writer, one needed to write literary fiction and try to be the next Toni Morrison. We had to make sure everything we did elevated the culture, and horror was considered a “low” genre. So, I would say my advice is, give yourself the same permission as white people to write things that aren’t super high-brow masterpieces that are adored by academia. A lot of people of color don’t even get started because of the persistent idea that we have to be ten times as good at anything as white people to be seen as valid.
No one’s first work is perfect, so I would say, give yourself permission to learn through doing. It can also help to find writing groups with other people of color to support you. And I got a lot of support through my local library, local art fairs where I sold books, and neighborhood functions. Having local community support can really help keep you from getting discouraged when you first start out.
5. Melancholia is your second poetry collection nominated; The Rat King was nominated in 2022. It feels much more raw and autobiographical. A poem that really struck me was “Mantra of the Oppressor” about constantly feeling silenced and waiting your turn as a person of color. These lines in particular: “we are post-racial / racism is waning / Trump isn’t really president”. In the world of horror, at least, do you see progress?
My mother passed away in early 2019, and as a result, a lot of the work in The Rat King was crafted during the grieving process. My mother was African American–I am a biracial person who is African American and Ashkenazi Jewish, and I am very much Black identified. After my mother died, I felt very angry about all of the ways in which the world tried to crush her spirit as a Black woman. I also felt very frustrated by how a number of people in my social circles responded.
It’s like when my mother was alive, people understood I was Black, but after she died, some people, even ones who were very close to me (who were white), tried to question my identity as a Black person. And it wasn’t just friends: I was on a panel discussion at a convention where a professor who taught at a religious college tried to tell me I wasn’t Black. My parents raised me to think of terms like mulatto as slavery era blood quantum terms, and I certainly didn’t think that an old white dude from a religious college had any business telling me how to be Black.
While I was pushing back against all of this, I had a bunch of people coming at me, and I just responded with more and more poetry. And yes, a lot of these people claimed that because Obama had been elected, we were post-racial: we clearly are not. I think Trump’s second election is making it more obvious that a lot of these people are just racist and never have been particularly progressive, but at that time, not all of the wolves were out of their sheep’s clothing.
Even the imagery of a rat deals with how capitalist society treats homeless people and the deeply impoverished, as though we are pests.
6. I love the imagery in the title poem, “The Rat King”. Can you tell me more about what that poem meant to you when you wrote it? I’d love to see you revisit that metaphor again.
The title poem in The Rat King collection uses the image of the rat king, which is a group of rats stuck together by their tangled-together tails and forced to live, eat, and move as a single group. It’s used as a metaphor for a group of homeless people who freeze to death and haunt the street they used to live on as ghosts.
I’ve experienced brief homelessness several times throughout my life, a situation that is not uncommon for people with bipolar disorder. When you’re homeless, or unstably housed in situations like couch surfing (staying on a friend’s couch temporarily), sleeping in your car, or in a temporary single-room occupancy hotel, you have to leave regularly to avoid becoming a resident, so community with other homeless and marginally housed folks is very important. You rely on one another to survive.
At the same time, there’s a lot of codependency at work, and homeless people often deal with addiction or mental health issues. So, a lot of the imagery deals with being reliant on one another yet trapped together, and moreover with the systems of oppression that keep people at the bottom of the economic pecking order in a capitalist society. Even the imagery of a rat deals with how capitalist society treats homeless people and the deeply impoverished, as though we are pests. And as someone who’s had pet rats before, rats are really sweet creatures, kind of like tiny dogs, very social.
[T]he overarching theme is ghosts. The ghosts of our parents, the ghosts of our culture, and the previous incarnations of ourselves that come back to haunt us as we age.
7. Melancholia feels like a more polished and mature collection. I think it’s also more playful. There is so much I could ask about. I’m Gen X, I’m half-white, I’ve had to sort through a dead parent’s things (my favorite poem in the collection is probably “Mementos of Delirium”). Would you say the collection has an overall message or vibe? What is it?
Melancholia is a haunted work: the overarching theme is ghosts. The ghosts of our parents, the ghosts of our culture, and the previous incarnations of ourselves that come back to haunt us as we age. In many ways, it is a deeply romantic work, about the ways in which we continue to live on and love despite the ways in which time takes things away with us as we grow older.
If Melancholia feels more polished and mature, I think that is because the poetry in it was predominantly created in a single unified period of time, almost all of it between 2022 and 2024 (with the notable exception of “Half and Half”, a poem first published in 1986 when I was only 20 years old). The Rat King contained a decade’s worth of poetry. I think that the flow in Melancholia is a lot better, and I owe a lot of that to Angelique Jordonna over at Bludgeoned Girl’s Press, who was very attentive to making sure that the poems appeared in an order that strengthened them.
“Delirium?” was my friend Beth Johnson’s internet handle on a local cafe network we had in San Francisco called SFNet, so that particular poem wasn’t about my parents, although there is a poem about my parents in the collection, “My Body is a House Made of Ghosts.” I think that losing parents is a very common experience for our generation right now, though. One that came up a lot for me in The Rat King.
Beth was a poet herself, and a very talented one. She was taking care of her father in Barstow and always hoped to return to San Francisco, but when she died, her belongings from before what was supposed to be a temporary move remained up here. So me, her ex-boyfriend Barney, and another friend, Reba, had to sort through everything. It was a painful process. I made a little zine of some of her poetry to give to people at her memorial service.*
8. I love that your poems often rhyme, because I was told that publishers don’t like rhyming poetry (mine all rhyme, I’m a Shakespeare / Romantics poet nerd).
I cut my teeth on Edgar Allan Poe, and of course, they did teach us Shakespearean poetry in school as well. But moreover, a lot of important African American poets like Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes rhyme. And when I read their poetry, I feel that their use of rhyme strengthens the message.
I also love music and I am very influenced by song structure. I have written songs and been a registered songwriter at BMI, and been in a band called Stagefright with my mother and brother Scott, which performed many of my original songs. I think that’s also part of what has inspired my tendency to write rhyming poetry.
I have tried my hand at non-rhyming poetry more often lately, because I know it’s fashionable. I have also tried combining rhyme with free verse, reducing the amount of rhyme I use, and changing where in the structure I place the rhyme.
Both free verse and rhyming poetry have their challenges in my opinion. Freed from the structure of rhyming, the poet can be much more experimental, but because rhyming poetry is taken less seriously, free verse has a tendency to at times take itself too seriously and become very pretentious.
Playful forms of poetry are often rhyming, and the idea that horror can’t poke fun at itself is very amusing to me.
There are many forms of rhyming poetry that I am not personally familiar with, and I would have to say that honestly, I am at times combining free verse with structured poetry so that it’s less limited.
9. What was your first horror movie? What horror movie or show would you recommend?
The first movie that terrified me was Planet of the Apes. It was on television, and at the end, when they showed the Statue of Liberty, and we found out it took place on Earth, that inspired a full-fledged fear of human extinction in me. I was about 5 years old, and I had a whole lot of nightmares afterward.
The first actual horror movie I remember seeing was the 1974 film It’s Alive when I was 6 years old. I remember being out on the playground at the drive-in and looking up at the monster baby launching into a doctor’s throat and blood gushing out.
After I saw Jaws, I was terrified of sharks and made my parents look for them in the bathtub before I took a bath.
I’m really looking forward to Season Two of The Last of Us, which is coming out on Sunday, April 13 (I am sure it will be out by the time this is published). It features the incredibly talented Pedro Pascal, and in addition to the BIPOC representation, there is so much brilliant and moving LGBTQ representation in Season One.
Ironically, all four of the competing Bram Stoker-nominated horror poetry books have been on my recent reading list, and let me say that I am blown away and very intimidated by the competition.
10. What was the last horror book you read? What horror books and authors would you recommend?
I’m listening to the audiobook of Tananarive Due’s powerful and deeply moving short story collection, The Wishing Pool and Other Stories. She deftly occupies the spaces within, between, and around surrealism, and magical realism in this collection, which bridges genres as varied as horror and science fiction and provides stark and often vividly personal commentary on racism and other societal ills. The many supernatural monsters never overshadow the human monsters. This book is brilliant and comes highly recommended.
Ironically, all four of the competing Bram Stoker-nominated horror poetry books have been on my recent reading list, and let me say that I am blown away and very intimidated by the competition.
Paula Ashe’s We Are Here To Hurt Each Other and RJ Joseph’s Hell Hath No Sorrow Like A Woman Haunted are two brilliant horror short story collections by Black women that I highly recommend. Ashe is queer Black horror author, a master of the genre who deftly handles body horror and existential dread in ways that have earned her comparison to David Cronenberg and Clive Barker. Like Tananarive Due, Paula Ashe is excellent at weaving the human monster into her supernatural narratives.
11. Do you have a favorite cryptid, and if so, what is it?
I live in Oakland, California– – across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco– – and we have our very own cryptid, the Oakness Monster, who lives in Lake Merritt. It’s a smaller, black, spiky version of Nessie, more or less. I mean, it’s only eight feet long, so a lot smaller than the Loch Ness Monster. Sightings date back to the 1940s.
In 2018, I won the Afrosurrealist Writers Award for “A Balm of Brackish Water,” which utilizes the mythology and talks about how historical waterways were polluted and blocked off to build Oakland.
Ironically, I moved out here when I was 19 because I wanted to be a poet. Talk about a dream deferred.
12. How is the horror scene in your town?
The San Francisco Horror Writers Association Chapter is very active, and meets once a month online, or sometimes in person at the Oakland Museum. I’ve read at a lot of really cool local literary events: a Halloween writer’s speakeasy at Martuni’s in San Francisco, Beast Crawl here in Oakland, LitQuake, LitCrawl–, there is just really a lot of opportunity here. I am very fortunate to live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ironically, I moved out here when I was 19 because I wanted to be a poet. Talk about a dream deferred. But I was written up in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1988 as an up and coming neo beat poet.
My favorite bookstore is Marcus Books here in Oakland, the oldest Black owned Bookstore on the West Coast, which carries lots of books by Black authors, including some in the horror genre. I read there in 2020 with Linda Addison and Nisi Shawl.
13. Finally, what are your current and future projects, and is there anything else you want to shout out?
I’ll be at StokerCon in Stamford, Connecticut in June; Clockwork Alchemy here in the Bay Area in June; BayCon here in the San Francisco Bay Area on the Fourth of July weekend; and
WorldCon in Seattle in August.
My current works are the Bram Stoker- and Elgin- Nominatesd book of horror poetry Melancholia: A Book of Dark Poetry (from Bludgeoned Girls Press), and the sequel to the horror romance novel Happiness and Other Diseases, Somnalia: The Metamorphoses of Flynn Keahi (from Mocha Memoirs Press).
My website is http://wwww.SumikoSaulson.com and my social media is SumikoSaulson on Instagram and Discord, and SumikoSka everywhere else: Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, BlueSky.
Footnotes
* Sumiko’s memorial to Beth “Delirium?” Johnson can be found here: https://www.mykeeper.com/BethJohnson1
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Peter Ong Cook
Peter Ong Cook has published stories in 2 HOWLS anthologies so far: HOWLS from the Dark Ages and HOWLS from the Scene of the Crime. His short fiction can also be found in Cosmic Horror Monthly and the anthology Trouble In Paradise. His husky resembles a wolf, the wolf featured in the HOWLS logo, but receives no royalties. The husky would just spend it on the dog-equivalent of booze.
