Where’s Jackson?

Saturday, October 21 @ 11 AM: I’ll be on a panel with HWA CT co-conspirator John Opalenik asking, “Why Do Readers and Writers Choose to be Unsettled by Horror Writing?” It’s part of the Woodbury Public Library’s literary festival, A Confluence of Readers and Writers.

Saturday, October 21 in the PM: I’ll be at StoryFest 2023 at the Westport Public Library. StoryFest is Connecticut’s biggest literary festival, and I’ll be manning the table with my fellow HWA CT members selling and signing books.

Monday, October 30 @ 6 PM: I’m leading a Gothic fiction writing workshop titled “What We Write in the Shadows” at the Mystic and Noank Library. Participants will learn about the history of Gothic literature and leave the 90-minute workshop with a finished piece of flash fiction. Space is still available!

Saturday, November 4 @ 10 AM: I’ll be hustling books at the Norwalk Local Author Festival at the Norwalk Public Library. Come meet me and a bunch of other local authors and maybe pick up a book or three.

Saturday, December 9 @ 1–4 PM: I will be at Rule of 3 Brewing in East Hampton reading, signing books, and hanging out with other great authors. Grab a beer and a new book.

Write a Ghost Story With Me

This October I’ll be leading a 90-minute workshop on gothic fiction at the Mystic and Noank Library in Mystic, Connecticut.

The gothic is the past returning to haunt us in the present. Yet like vampires and werewolves, gothic stories can assume different shapes and forms: Bram Stoker’s Dracula involves a supernatural evil unleashed in contemporary England, while the narrator of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is haunted simply by his own guilt. In this workshop, join author and freelance writer Jackson Kuhl for an evening investigating the dark art of gothic fiction writing. We’ll look at some examples of classic gothic literature to inspire us, then brainstorm ideas, sketch a brief outline, and craft a piece of gothic flash fiction to take home.

Interested in attending? You can register at the library’s website. There’s no charge but it’s expected to fill up fast.

Branford Book Festival

Ransack the sofa and bring your spare change to downtown Branford, Connecticut this Saturday, May 6, where me and about 40 other authors will be hawking our wares as part of the first annual Branford Book Festival.

We’ll be posted outside local stores along Main Street selling, signing, and talking to readers. I will be at the corner of Main and Ivy outside Elements Massage, at the northern end of the festival. Drop by, buy a book, and then buy a gift card for that special someone. Remember — Mother’s Day is only a week away.

Many of the merchants have donated prizes for the raffle to be held at the Blackstone Memorial Library from 3 pm to 5 pm. The process to enter the raffle is a lot of fun: you need to acquire 20 signatures from authors in your festival passport, which you can pick up at any of the authors’ tables.

However, to encourage foot traffic throughout the downtown area, four signatures are mandatory for the passport — and because my table is at the northern periphery, I’m one of them. In order for you to enter the raffle, I’m a boss battle.

Don’t worry, just hit left-right-O-X and I’ll jot my name down. I will also be happy to sign a copy of Samuel Smedley, Connecticut Privateer or A Season of Whispers for you.

The Branford Book Festival is Saturday, May 6 from 10 am to 3 pm, with the raffle to follow.

Hear Me on Woodbury Writes

Recently I had the honor of being interviewed by Sandy Carlson, host of the Woodbury Writes podcast. We talked about Samuel Smedley, transcendentalist utopias, and the real-life inspiration behind my gothic (or is it eco-gothic?) novel, A Season of Whispers.

I’ve been interviewed before but this was the first time for a podcast. Sandy asked great questions and, being a history enthusiast herself, clearly enjoyed discussing the particulars of privateering during the American Revolution and the tenets of the transcendentalist movement. It wound up being a recorded conversation rather than an examination, which to my ear always makes for the best podcasts.

Around the same time when I recorded the podcast, I was interviewed separately by another person for a different venue. That interview didn’t go as well. The interviewer was disinterested in my work and instead asked me a number of personal questions which made me uncomfortable, questions about my wife and sons and other census tabulations — I was surprised she didn’t ask me for my social-security number and mother’s maiden name. I stayed polite but it was irritating at best, icky at worst. I don’t think the interview has run publicly and fingers crossed it never does.

Yet the contrast of the two experiences gave me insight. I’ve conducted hundreds of interviews throughout my career and I’d never before realized what constitutes a good interview. It’s simply this: professionals — artists and creatives in particular — will wax rhapsodic for hours about their work, but they hate to talk about themselves. They want to talk about what they do, not about who they are.

I had, unknowingly, been practicing this methodology for years. It never occurred to me while interviewing any of the dozens of archaeologists I’ve spoken to, to ask them about their home lives or frankly anything not germane to their research. What business is it of mine to nose around, asking questions about their spouses or partners or how they spend their downtime? Nobody cares, or at least they shouldn’t. What matters is what they’ve discovered or learned, what their theories and ideas are.

Being on the other end of the microphone made me realize that, as an author, I crave to be asked questions about the stories and inspirations, both historical and personal, that go into my books. That’s what excites me and that’s what made the Woodbury Writes podcast so great. What I don’t want is to be interrogated about how old my kids are or what time I wake up in the morning.

Suddenly I feel sympathy toward celebrities who always seem a bit disgruntled or surly in interviews. Now I understand how eagerly they want to discuss their latest performance yet instead they’re bombarded with questions about who they’re schtupping and what kind of sandwich they ate after the schtupping. I get it.

My half-hour interview with Sandy about my work and what goes into it is available on Spotify, Anchor.fm, and Google Podcasts.

AMA on r/Fantasy

On Friday, April 9, several Aurelia Leo authors and I will be available for an AMA on the Fantasy subreddit. You can find me on Reddit as KoolMoDaddy-O (don’t laugh! it’s my gamer handle for Minecrafting with my kids!).

Feel free to ask me anything writing related — about A Season of Whispers, Emerson and the transcendentalists, the last book I read, or my favorite coffee (Café du Monde). And if you don’t want to talk to me, you can quiz my fellow Aurelia Leo authors, including publisher Zelda Knight, instead.

Do Something

Nobody can do everything, but everybody should do something. Here’s what I’ve been doing:

  • I’ve written to my congressman asking him to support HR 7085, a bill that would end qualified immunity for police.
  • I’ve written to my senators asking them to end the war on drugs, which disproportionately affects black Americans (34 percent of our prisoners, for example, are black even though black Americans constitute about 13 percent of the general population). I specifically cited the murder of Breonna Taylor and asked them to legalize schedule I and II substances, defund and eliminate the Drug Enforcement Agency, invest funds into treatment and healthcare, and introduce legislation matching HR 7085 to end qualified immunity for police.
  • I’ve donated to the NAACP. I’ve also seen a lot of people donating to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which is a separate organization. Mrs. Kuhl has given to the Black Visions Collective based in Minneapolis.
  • I’ve been volunteering four days a week at our local food pantry, which has transitioned to a drive-thru service due to covid-19. Forty percent of homeless people are black.

It’s not much but it’s something. Maybe you’ve already done something too. If you haven’t, maybe you should.