DoT EP104: Author Matt Moore on Personal Apocalypse, Brevity, and Brain Chemistry, plus New Music from Steve Poltz

This is the third and final interview I recorded at NECON 2019, which I have previously described as a mashup of a horror writers conference and summer camp with adult beverages. I attended NECON for the first time in 2018, and this week’s guest, Matt Moore, was my roommate. Lucky for me, he is also a fine and thoughtful writer. His debut book is It’s Not the End (and Other Lies), a collection of short stories about what Moore calls personal apocalypses. What Moore means by that is that these stories aren’t necessarily about the apocalypse writ large with zombies or the annihilation of the human race, although it doesn’t exclude those possibilities. They are more about a moment when a character is facing the end of their life as they have known it so far. There are elements of sci-fi, horror, and what has come to be known as speculative fiction. I would highly recommend picking it up. It is on the Toronto-based Chizine Publications, which has featured the work of some wonderful authors, including Gemma Files, Helen Marshall, Bracken Macleod, David Demchuk, Christopher Golden, Stephen Graham Jones, Paul Tremblay, Ed Kurtz, and many more.

Moore and I took a deep dive on a few of the stories in It’s Not the End, and also the craft of writing short stories. It’s a magical art all its own, different from writing novels. Moore found a great quote for it, which he says in the conversation, “Short stories writers are like someone who knows how to make one cookie.” The stories in this book are concise, and they stop at exactly the moment the story is over. Which sounds obvious, but is a difficult thing to navigate in writing. Moore had another great quote for that he heard recently. “Perfection isn’t when you can’t add anything more, perfection is when you can’t take anything more away.” Moore is currently working on a new novel, and I’m looking forward to see how he applies that to a longer work.

I was happy to have gotten to read Moore’s work and to have gotten to speak with him at NECON. You can hear a bit of the conference going on in the background. When we started the conversation, we were in an out-of-the-way spot where people weren’t gathering. But there are giant bags of books that each attendee gets with their admission price, and people were scavenging the leftover bags behind us at one point. So you get a little bit of a feel for the festive and active atmosphere of NECON. Based on the joy of the folks around us, we got into a bit of the psychology of horror writers.

You can find out more about Moore on his website at www.mattmoorewrites.com, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook under @mattmoorewrites. You can find ChiZine Publications on their website at www.chizinepub.com.

Also, if you make short horror films, we’ve got the Daily Horror Film Fest coming up in October, for which I present a new short horror film every day throughout the month. I am currently open for suggestions for your favorite shorts as I put together the 2019 edition. I will write about each one, and interview some of the filmmakers to give a bit more depth.

Our featured track this week is “Windows of Halifax” by Steve Poltz from his new album, Shine On. I caught up with Poltz at Club Passim in Cambridge last week, and he will be the subject of next week’s episode of the Department of Tangents. You will hear a bit about the background of this song in that episode. Poltz can write an earnest song or a write with a sense of humor, two things that can sometimes feel at odds, at least emotionally. There is a wistfulness in this song to start, but then you get to this kind of gonzo middle section, in which two windows are talking about their plight, and the unsavory occupants of their houses. Poltz was born in Halifax, spent a lot of time in California, and now lives in Nashville, and that means sometimes his accent changes in weird ways. You can hear that in the conversation between the windows on this song, and I am fairly sure I will never get the opportunity to write that sentence again. Find out more about Steve Poltz at poltz.com and on Twitter under @stevepoltz.