Entry Questions
What do you understand by the term “body horror” and what it’s relation to gender and sexuality?
Bio
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the memoir In the Dream House, the comic The Low, Low Woods, and the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has also written numerous essays and short stories. She was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette. She has won the Bard Fiction Prize, and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction for LGBTQ Nonfiction, among others. Her memoir, In the Dream House, won the Folio Prize in 2021. Machado holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has received various fellowships and residencies, including the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence here at Baruch College.
How to Read a Comic
Carmen Maria Machado and Dani on Creating the Comic
On the location
CMM: I grew up in eastern Pennsylvania and spent a lot of time in towns like Shudder-to-Think. I also was obsessed with Centralia—a real-life town in Pennsylvania that’s been on fire for decades and is now abandoned—like every wannabe-goth teen in Pennsylvania. And it was just the perfect setting for the story I wanted to tell.
D: Shudder-To-Think is indeed a strange place and its inhabitants are weird and unique characters. Carmen provided the whole team with a visual guide of a collage of pictures and photos she had found on the internet. It was helpful to get into her brain a bit more and is really interesting because I tend to do the same thing whenever I’m working on new characters and building worlds for a book. My art style is already quite dark with heavy splashes of ink so I just unleashed it on the pages -I had some wonderful material to work on and some amazingly dreamy colors from Tamra Bonvillain on top to complete all the visuals of the book.
On Girlhood/Womanhood and Body Horror
D: The Low, Low Woods is not your average horror book. It has the good qualities of horror, a genre that I absolutely love, but it also has some other characteristics which are really important to me, both as a creator and as a human being. The girls might have been through a really bad and stigmatizing experience, everything is so vague, and they are kind of lost. Discovering the truth with them and taking back their broken pieces is an empowering journey I’m happy to do with them. Also, weird-deerwoman-creature!
CMM: I knew body horror was going to be involved from the first moment. If you’re a teenage girl, your life is body horror. So it only makes sense.
Presentation
Discussion Work
Group One- Bottomless
.What type of body horrors are introduced in the first chapter? What phenomena are happening to the different bodies (including the town’s ecosystem)?
.Analyze the title.
.Pick an image that you feel synthesizes this chapter.
Group Two- Heaven on Earth
.Examine the song the teenagers sing at the party and its relationship to the history of Shudder to Think. How does the fight over staying or leaving town goes beyond the particular needs and interest Vee and El have?
.Analyze the title.
.Pick an image that you feel synthesizes this chapter.
Group Three- The Fruiting Body
.If a sinkhole is a depression or hole in the ground caused by some form of collapse of the surface layer, how do you interpret the notion of women-sinkholes? What do they represent?
.Analyze the title.
.Pick an image that you feel synthesizes this chapter.
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