Interview with Author Anj Baker
“Cervidae, Sharp and New” is a story that reads like a weird and fantastical puzzle. A deer speaks ominous prophecies, flesh and bones are transformed, and our narrator Samantha recalls their life—or lives—in a series of overlapping alternate histories and future histories, shifting memories into new possibilities. As the story unfolds, the puzzle pieces begin to fit together, the true horror and tragedy becomes clear. Be sure to read the story before checking out this interview, as a blind read is an experience worth having, and we do talk about spoilers.
Anj Baker was raised in rural Appalachia but now lives in smalltown Illinois, in the USA. They’re an English grad student at Eastern Illinois University, a 2024 graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and a first reader at Fusion Fragment.
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Marissa van Uden: Thank you for sitting down with us today, Anj! This story is one of my favorite kinds because the second read is so rewarding, with the full context giving each detail new (horrifying) meaning. Did you have to rework the first draft many times to achieve the right level of information withheld and revealed, and how useful were your early critiques, if you used them?
Anj Baker: I went through so many drafts! It was originally a flash piece entitled “Like a Threshing Sledge,” and then it grew to over 2000 words, before I pared it back to the length it is now. Early critiques came from two of my fellow 2024 Clarion grads, Darcy L. Wood (work in Thirteen, Gavagai, others) and weegbree (work in Weird Lit Magazine). The story would not look as it does now without their advice.
MVU: Reading this sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole looking up this disease, as I knew very little about it before. It’s terrifying, and learning about it gave me a new appreciation of the horror in the story. What inspired you to write about it?
AB: I’ve spent about four years of my life working as a neuroscience research technician, first in concussions and CTE, and then in Alzheimer’s and epilepsy. So a lot of work in neurodegeneration. While I’ve never worked in Creutzfeldt-Jakobs Disease research, I’ve been fascinated by it since I read Libba Bray’s Going Bovine as a young teenager in maybe 2011. It’s a psychedelic road trip novel from the perspective of a teenager dying of CJD and frankly a huge influence on both my writing and my life.
Also, let it be known that there is currently no proof that chronic wasting disease, the prion disease that affects deer, can cause CJD in humans. However, it is thought possible, as chronic wasting disease has been shown to be transmissable to humanized lab mice.
MVU: Oh wow, I’ve never heard of that novel. Adding to my TBR! In this story, the narrator ends up in the medical system where they are misunderstood, misgendered, and treated like a curiosity to be studied rather than as a patient in need of care. Did this part of the story come from a general frustration with the medical system or was it drawn from personal experiences, if you are okay talking about it?
AB: For sure! I’ve dealt with chronic pain for much of my adult life, and no doctor ever took me seriously, wouldn’t even refer me to a specialist, and then I managed to self-refer to a rheumatologist. Funnily enough, while the rheum did treat me like a logic puzzle, it felt like I was finally being taken seriously. It turned out I didn’t have autoimmune arthritis, as he’d initially suspected, but was actually quite hypermobile instead. He referred me to a medical geneticist who then diagnosed me with a variant of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which is a collagen disorder.
Regarding the misgendering, I fear it’s currently par for the course in the medical system. Given the political climate here in the USA, my gender is one of those things I’m increasingly weird when talking to “authority figures” about. My experiences with, as well as an ongoing fear of, being seen as a “hysterical woman” definitely colored how I wrote the AFAB, female-presenting Samantha’s experience in the hospital.
MVU: Running through the story is another heartbreaking thread where not only is the disease erasing a lived history and possible futures, but Samantha has already lost a wished-for history, identity and possible futures, denied them by their family and society. In a way, the disease is almost gifting those back. “Those are the good histories. I’ll live them one day.” It transforms the horror into something more complex, with a tragic beauty. Could you talk a little more about this other side of the memory erasure and creation?
AB: Thank you so much for catching that! While I’m very pro-medicine as a former biomedical researcher, simultaneously, I am chronically and mentally ill. It feels like the only way to survive in a body and brain hellbent on destroying you is to, well, “imagine Sisyphus happy.” Dialectical behavioral therapy, which I must say is heavily influenced by Buddhist practices, encourages “radical acceptance.” I have to accept that I have an untreatable collagen mutation, that I have a mood disorder, that I have issues socializing and relating to other people. It is what it is, and I wouldn’t trade my life for any other. Samantha isn’t so lucky, but they do see all the lives they could have lived and that brings them some solace. The good histories.
MVU: You’ve produced your own audio dramas, including a series calls Missives from a New Ghost Town, an atmospheric story set in a strange liminal space, told via voice notes left behind on a phone. Could you tell us a bit about this series and the inspiration behind it? Would you like to produce more of your own audiodramas?
AB: So around 2017 I had a beautiful nightmare where I was wandering an infinite hallway full of knickknacks and little portals to all imaginable realities. It was like the wood-between-the-worlds in C. S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew. Now it’d be called the Backrooms! But that’s fine. I love creepypasta.
I tried to turn it into a play because I was in undergrad taking playwriting classes alongside my biology and chemistry requirements, and because my whole life for years was this Shakespeare troupe I was in, so I thought in stagespace at the time. It didn’t work as a play, so I trunked it until the early pandemic audiodrama boom. I’d been into audiodrama since Welcome to Night Vale premiered when I was in high school, but had never thought to write my own until I binged The Magnus Archives during the OG lockdown.
I pitched this idea to my middle school best friend, Darby, who had no formal acting experience but was a great tabletop DM, and she agreed to voice the main character, Indy, a woman who finds herself first in the hallway and then in a village that calls itself a “new ghost town.” From there, the story grew to include various townspeople, as well as Indy’s foster brother Nathaniel, who came looking for her. I’ve written a few short stories in the same world, which are published in various mags, but I’m not sure what I want to do with it next.
The podcast was so much fun to write and direct and produce. I’d love to do more audiodrama, but I’ll have to wait until I get a good idea for the format.
MVU: I hope you do some more! This was such a fun listen. How has your stage-acting work influenced your writing?
AB: I’m immensely concerned with how sentences sound. I can’t listen to music when writing, because I act out the dialogue and narration as I go, which is incredibly, hopelessly theater kid of me, but I am who I am. Additionally, I had a job in college annotating interviews for an oral history project—that was probably the biggest influence on my prose because it got me hyperfamiliar with how people actually speak.
MVU: Your short story "Sit Up With Your Dead" in was published in Dark Blooms: Girls' Coming-of-Age Horrors and also produced by The NoSleep Podcast. Could you share a little about the story and what it was like having it adapted by NoSleep? Did anything surprise you in the production or process?
AB: It’s an Appalachian story, set on a farm in eastern Kentucky around 1920. The premise is, a young man dies, but his family buries him in secret right away, rather than sit up with the corpse for a night in case he might wake up, as people used to do. Naturally, he comes back to haunt them, but there’s a twist!
Having it produced by NoSleep was really, really cool and a huge honor actually as a longtime listener of the show and reader of the subreddit. I was admittedly a little nervous, as I’d written “Sit Up With Your Dead” in the Appalachian dialect, so I wasn’t sure how that would translate to audio production by people who may or may not be familiar with the nuances of how we speak. They did a stellar job though.
Future corn. I grew up in rural Appalachia and it will never leave me.
MVU: What makes you love writing about liminal spaces, and what are some of your other favorite themes to explore?
AB: We come back to The Magician’s Nephew. The wood-between-the-worlds has lived in my head for two decades now. An OG liminal space. It’s about possibility, and I fear we’ve looped right back around to Samantha and their alternate histories. I was very depressed when I had that dream in 2017 about the infinite hallway and all the worlds budding off it. It comforted me until I could build a life worth living.
Other favorite themes: I love ghosts and gender dysphoria and region-specificity.
I’ve written a lot of stories about ghosts—they’re just so comforting. Like that Twilight Zone episode where the little boy could talk to his dead grandmother on the toy telephone—the idea that death isn’t really the end, that there’s an ambiguity there.
Gender dysphoria goes without saying, but I think it does come back to ambiguity. That we’re never wholly one thing or another, and not just with regards to male vs. female.
Many of my stories are set in Appalachia as I lived there for my first eighteen years, but I’m writing more and more about the Midwest of the US, now that I’m based there. I love prairies and how empty they seem, even though they’re actually complex (and endangered!) ecosystems. The book I just finished writing is set on a prairie.
MVU: Amazing! You’re also a submissions reader for Fusion Fragment. What are your favorite things about being a submissions reader, and what have you learned from it?
AB: I’ve learned how to very quickly recognize AI writing for one! But also what I like in a story. When I write now, I can envision myself reading it as slusher. What would catch my attention without “selling out” the story? Fusion Fragment is a great crew, and Cavan’s a great guy and a great editor. They also published me before I started reading for them. I just adore that squad and the mag put out.
MVU: We love to help boost good causes here. Could you share a little about a charity that’s meaningful to you at the moment, and let interested readers know where to find it?
AB: It’s so hard to pick one, but I’m a big fan of local causes, wherever in the world you may be. If you have a local or regional health justice network, donate your time or money or energy to them if you can. (My good buddy Isaac back home received a grant from the Kentucky Health Justice Network which allowed him to afford a gender-affirming surgery.) Same goes for your town’s soup kitchen or Food Not Bombs collective. Oh, and call your lawmakers about any data centers being built in your district!
MVU: Great answer! Thank you so much for taking the time to talk about your work and inspirations. Last question: Do you have any upcoming publications, or exciting projects in the works, that our readers should keep an eye out for?
AB: Thank you for all these great questions! I had so much fun. Right now, I’m revising and querying a novella, or maybe a very short novel, depending on how you slice it. It’s set in a parallel historical Midwest USA. We’ll see if it ever sees print! I also have a novel about dirigibles in the works, but it’s very, very early stages. Additionally, some people from my grad program and I are working to start a lit mag called It’s Fucking Poetry.
Itachi the guinea pig. I've kept guinea pigs since 2020. They're delightfully silly and bizarrely smart little animals.
