Christi Nogle for Women in Horror Month
1. Introduce yourself. What do you want people to know about you and your work?
Hi! I am a writer with four books out in the world: My novel Beulah and the short fiction collections The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future; Promise: A Collection of Weird Science Fiction; and One Eye Opened in That Other Place. I also co-edited a couple of anthologies: Mother: Tales of Love and Terror with Willow Dawn Becker Wilted Pages: An Anthology of Dark Academia with Ai Jiang.
2. Who or what were your earliest horror influences?
The first horror movie I saw was The Watcher in the Woods, at a fifth-grade sleepover. It haunted me for a long time. The first horror novel I read was definitely Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, but I remember a little earlier being enthralled in English class, running across some dark stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Flannery O’Connor, Ray Bradbury, and Shirley Jackson.
3. Your debut novel Beulah won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. Can you tell us a little about your path to publication with Beulah, and anything about the opportunities, if any, winning the Stoker Award opened for you?
I can’t express how surprised I was when it won. Beulah was also nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award, and though I have published a great deal of short fiction, Beulah is the one that people mention. Quite a few people have said they identified with the main character, Georgie, who experiences dissociation as well as depressive episodes. She’s avoidant, some would say lazy, and in general she is far from what I generally expect from a main character. I identify with her a lot, and so hearing that others did too means a lot to me.
Most of the times I have gotten validation in life it’s been from things I did to conform to (gendered) expectations: losing weight, being nice and quiet and prompt and groomed, doing things for others, making a mean baked good. I’ve always been an artist and writer but never felt so validated for a creative work before or since this, so it was very special to me.
I started writing Beulah as a Codex Writer’s Group project not too long after I started sending stories out for publication, maybe 2017 or 2018, but I didn’t like the first draft. Through 2020 I entirely rewrote it with the help of a novel writing group, which included L.S. Johnson, Cath Schaff-Stump, and Dannie Delisle. I sent it to one agent and got a friendly rejection, but I didn’t keep going with the agent search. I didn’t feel like I knew what I was doing, so I sent it to an open call from the small press Cemetery Gates Media and was happy to have it scheduled to be published in 2022 as the first book in their debut novel series.
I was extremely close to my mother and dedicated the book to her. She read it and knew it was going to be published, but she passed away in mid-2021, so she never got to see it.
4. Take us through a day-in-the-life of Christi Nogle.
Just now I do not have a day job, so it’s some combination of chores, writing, painting, doom-scrolling, taking my dog Moose to the park, and attending various events at a local co-working space where I’ve been doing a residency. I also spend a fair bit of time trying to promote things online, arrange readings and book fairs, etc.
5. Imagine you're standing in front of a crowd of every horror creative—authors, filmmakers, podcasters, journalists, etc. What would you want them to know about your experience as a woman in the genre, both in general and in the year 2025?
I would want to let them know people are right when they say the horror community is filled with some of the best and most accepting people out there. I’ve never felt like I fit in anywhere, and it’s not perfect in this community either, but it’s the closest I’ve had and I am really grateful for that.
For those in a position to promote work, I guess I’d let them know that from my perspective, it seems like we could do more to promote women and other marginalized writers, both newer and established. I’d love to see more attention work that is subtle, difficult, experimental, cross-genre, or what have you, as well as more attention to work in translation and work in English that’s written internationally, as well as areas like poetry, graphic novels, and horror nonfiction. It’s fantastic that horror is so diverse today, but we’re not fully valuing that diversity if the spotlight doesn’t rove around enough to show it off.