This summer I published a gender horror story called “Octopus vs. Bear” with Lightspeed Magazine. This was the first story I wrote at Clarion. Elements of it had been bouncing around in my head for a while—the strange, sticky trap of the patriarchal bargain that makes being female-bodied in public a dual pleasure and liability; frustrating conversations with well-meaning but misunderstanding male friends; a growing fatigue with rape culture and street harassment—problems that I wanted to solve, and in doing so, rid them of their ability to trouble me.

In wake of the story, I talked with Setsu Uzume at Lightspeed about the Cthulhu patriarchy and how fiction can help destroy rape culture. Read the interview here.