You’re My Inspiration with Sara Tantlinger

One of the most common questions authors face is a deceptively difficult one to answer: “Where do you get your ideas?” Yet, the answers to that common question can be almost as interesting as the resulting story. Welcome to You’re My Inspiration, a new column dedicated to discovering what inspires a particular author and their work. Whether it be a lifelong love of mythical creatures, a fascinating bit of history, or a trip to a new and exciting place, You’re My Inspiration is all about those special and sometimes dark things that spark ideas and result in great stories.

This week, we bring you Bram Stoker Award-winning poet Sara Tantlinger, who just won said Stoker for The Devil’s Dreamland: Poetry Inspired by H.H. Holmes, and whose debut novella, To Be Devoured, is out now from Unnerving!

In a review over at Horror Bound, Joe said,

While the story was fantastically and grotesquely perfect, it is not just the plot that has me gushing over this. The language in this novella is both beautiful and disturbing. Tantlinger shows off her mastery of language with incredibly poetic lines throughout the novella. I was in awe of the contrast between the perfection of the words used and the twisted subject matter they described.

How does Sara manage that delicate balance between poetic language and disturbing material? Let her explain….

From Chopin to Carrion: The Inspiration Behind To Be Devoured 

When asked what inspires me, I always have a difficult time answering the question because saying “everything” sounds too vague, but it really is the truth. When it comes to writing horror, inspiration is everywhere: the news, nature, humanity, mythology, the past, the present, and the future… Horror is a reality that I have chosen to propel myself toward rather than flee from its darkness. As such, inspiration constantly hovers around, but it’s up to me to take the muse’s pieces and put the puzzle together. Sometimes the pieces fall into place willingly, and other times I feel like I’m taking a hammer to them just to force a few more into place.

For my debut novella, To Be Devoured, the inspiration was luckily rapid and willing. The ideas tumbled quickly from the puzzle box and insisted on being put together at once. Whether in the form of literature or circling birds, poetry or bright green moths, To Be Devoured stuck in my head like the most haunted melody until her story unfolded on the pages.

Nature: Living in the country is a beautiful place for inspiration; though sometimes you hear a crying bobcat or yipping coyotes in the middle of the night and can’t be entirely sure what is happening out in the dark woods. For me, the two creatures that would sink deep into my subconscious and play important, if not starring roles, in my novella were vultures and Luna moths.

During the winter of last year, I was driving home up my long driveway, which goes through an open field and past where my grandfather’s farm used to be. Turkey vultures circled overhead of the field, and more rested on a tall, naked tree where all the leaves were already dead. As far as we knew, no dead animals were nearby or laying out in the field to attract the vultures, but they stayed for weeks anyway. One time they followed my car the entire way up the driveway until I exited the vehicle and watched them circle overhead. I had been working on some ideas for my novella, but I could not get the birds out of my mind. As such, they became key players in To Be Devoured, torturing the protagonist, Andi, and driving her obsession to understand their secrets, to know what must be hiding in the carrion they so desired…

And then there were the Luna moths — big, bright green, fuzzy creatures that stuck themselves to the brick wall of our garage until they died. I’d leave my house and find their wings wedged between gravel in the driveway. Recently, I was looking through an album of photos I took when I first visited New York in 2012 and visited the American Museum of Natural History. I don’t remember the exact exhibits, but I had taken several photos of artwork in the museum that featured moths, one of them being a Luna moth. I always love when you look back on photos and memories and it ends up being something that stayed in your brain for years and then wiggled its way into your work. The Luna moth is beautiful, but there is something strange about them, too. In To Be Devoured, Andi becomes determined to use their striking wings to create a gift for her girlfriend, Luna. What better gift than something so perfectly named? Well, Luna may have some different thoughts on that, but I won’t spoil anything here.

Between the vultures and moths, the wings are what Andi really focuses on; she craves the dreamy notion that she could create her own wings and find a kind of freedom she never found before. The ability to just spread our wings and fly away — it’s something I find incredibly relatable, but at what cost does this dream come? What consequences stem from this type of obsession? The above inspiration and questions became big focuses in To Be Devoured, but you’ll have to check the book out to see where it goes!

Literature: Like other writers, I find inspiration from reading. I firmly believe you cannot be a strong writer if you are not a reader. Reading different writers, genres, fiction and nonfiction, and so forth is a way to constantly provide inspirational stimulus while also learning from others and seeking out ways to keep improving our craft.

For To Be Devoured, two writers who inspire me a lot kept creeping into my brain: Kate Chopin and William Blake. They may seem like an odd combination to some; after all, they wrote during different time periods, were from opposite sides of the pond, and definitely had different approaches to their art. However, with both creators I’ve found a sense of kinship in, what has always seemed to me, an ache for identity.

Chopin was a Southern darling who experienced tragic losses of several family members throughout her lifetime. Such events would shape her profoundly and how she came to view the society around her. Writing was a form of escapism for her, as evidenced by the journals she kept, and is certainly a theme we see in works like her book The Awakening and short stories like “The Storm” and “The Story of an Hour.” Often her characters are proud women who find themselves lost to nature, to love, to passion…sometimes in deadly or unforgivable ways. These notions have become strong ideas in my own work, especially in To Be Devoured.

Blake, on the other hand, worked a lot with religious themes, but his views and sometimes attacks on conventional religion were often seen as “shocking” during his time period. He even created his own mythology through his work. While it was believed he found peace on his deathbed, his work often showed us that of a tortured man in the midst of a search for something greater in life. Blake’s religion, views, and even his sexuality remain topics of dispute — so how much do we really know of his identity? This idea made me wonder how much can we really know about anyone’s identity, even our loved ones? There are some things we will never intimately know within another’s mind. While writing the character of Andi, I thought a lot about how much of herself she should show to her girlfriend, to her neighbor, and even to the readers.

I reference Blake’s poem “The Tyger” a few times in To Be Devoured. To me, that incredible poem is a great representation of the duality of humankind — how a person could create or represent beauty and innocence but hide a darker nature at the same time. The poem became a kind of anthem in the back of my mind when writing Andi; she was someone capable of producing great and extreme love, but at the same time her craving for freedom, to understand the vultures, represents her darker duality — a “fearful symmetry” as Blake might say. I used this notion as well with the contrast between the carrion birds (the vultures) and the colorful Luna moths, which both attract and fascinate Andi, yet something repulsive remains suspended in the air, unknown until we peel back all the layers of the story.

Both Chopin and Blake, their search for identity in such different ways, is something I constantly come back to, something that has and will continue to inspire my own work within the horror genre.

Thank you so much for reading about the inspirations behind To Be Devoured — it’s a dark novella that touches on many other things that I could go on and on about — the way mental illness can sometimes win even when we don’t want it to; the way love can go too far and push people away from us when we just want to get closer; and of course, the way obsession can take control, how it can drive someone to unimaginable ideas…. I hope you will check out the book and come dine with the vultures.

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