May 27-28, 2023
Queen’s Park Crescent

Queer Little Nightmares

28may11:30 am12:30 pmQueer Little NightmaresWith Anuja Varghese, David Demchuk, Kai Cheng Thom, and Victoria Mbabazi

Speakers for this event

  • Anuja Varghese

    Anuja Varghese

    Author

    ANUJA VARGHESE is a Pushcart-nominated writer based in Hamilton, Ontario. Her work appears in several literary magazines and anthologies including Queer Little Nightmares (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022). Her debut short story collection, titled Chrysalis (House of Anansi Press, 2023), explores South Asian diaspora experience through a feminist, speculative lens.

    URL www.anujavarghese.com

    Author

  • David Demchuk

    David Demchuk

    Moderator

    David Demchuk has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and the Aurora Award, and has won the Sunburst Award. His most recent book, RED X, was published in 2021 by Strange Light. After many years in Toronto, he and his husband now live by the sea in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

    Moderator

  • Victoria Mbabazi

    Victoria Mbabazi

    Author

    Victoria Mbabazi’s work can be found in several literary magazines. “Chapbook” is available with Anstruther Press and “FLIP” is available with Knife Fork Book. Their full length collection “The Siren In the Twelfth House” is coming out in Fall 2024 with Palimpsest Press. They’re currently Canadian in Brooklyn, New York.

    URL https://victoriambabazi.ca/

    Author

Event Details

What does it mean to be a monster? What does it mean to love one? Join Arsenal Pulp anthology contributors as they creep through the shadows of queer horror and desire and reimagine monsters old and new.

Queer Little Nightmares
Aresenal Pulp Press

The fiction and poetry of Queer Little Nightmares reimagines monsters old and new through a queer lens, subverting the horror gaze to celebrate ideas and identities canonically feared in monster lit. Throughout history, monsters have appeared in popular culture as stand-ins for the non-conforming, the marginalized of society. Pushed into the shadows as objects of fear, revulsion, and hostility, these characters have long conjured fascination and self-identification in the LGBTQ+ community, and over time, monsters have become queer icons.

In Queer Little Nightmares, creatures of myth and folklore seek belonging and intimate connection, cryptids challenge their outcast status, and classic movie monsters explore the experience of coming into queerness. The characters in these stories and poems – the Minotaur camouflaged in a crowd of cosplayers, a pubescent werewolf, a Hindu revenant waiting to reunite with her lover, a tender-hearted kaiju, a lagoon creature aching for the swimmers above him, a ghost of Pride past – relish their new sparkle in the spotlight. Pushing against tropes that have historically been used to demonize, the queer creators of this collection instead ask: What does it mean to be (and to love) a monster

Partners

Accessibility Sponsor: Literary Press Group