They might not be raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, but that doesn’t mean that we love them any less. Welcome back to My Favorite Things, the weekly column where we grab someone in speculative circles to gab about the greatest in geek. This week, we sit down with R.J. Joseph, who is a contributor here at Speculative Chic!
What does R.J. love when she’s not exploring Black femininity in the horror genre? Spoiler alert: creating crafts, exploring the dark memories of history, tapping into some old-school storytelling, and unique death requests. Intrigued? Read on to learn more!
Crafting: I suck at most domestic endeavors. I started crafting six years ago when I was a new MFA grad with no job or marriage. I started making wreaths to fill the void of an empty house when the kids went back to school that fall. I burned myself a lot with the glue gun… I still burn myself a lot with the glue gun… and I messed up a lot of materials. After practicing, I moved from door wreaths to table centerpieces to fireplace mantlepieces… to matching family pajama pants for my huge blended family. Domestic enough.
Highgate Cemetery, East Cemetery in London
Old Cemeteries: This one might be a given because I’m a self-professed dark weird girl. These exquisite slumber-lands of the dead are paradoxes of peace and electric energy. If I’m staying somewhere for a few days, I’ll seek out an old cemetery to visit. I abhor plantations and all they stand for, yet I visited one once in Louisiana just for the chance to walk through the tiny, desolate graveyard that lay hidden from the road in the back of the big house. The tiny unmarked stones with no names made more noise than the screams inside my head over the atrocities their residents had experienced.
Old-Time Radio Shows: There’s something about being able to hear the original broadcasts of shows from more than seventy years ago. 
My mother used to tell us about listening to some of them when she was a child, but television had already come onto the scene and was quickly phasing the radio out, except for poor families like hers who couldn’t afford the picture boxes. I imagine what it must have been like to have been introduced to certain tropes and storylines when they were fresh and innovative, before they had become overdone. Shows like Escape, The Whistler, Suspense, X Minus One, and My Favorite Husband tell vivid stories I recognize from recycled movie tropes today but hearing them instead of watching them provides an level of interpretation movies don’t allow.
Physical death shrines: Hear me out on this one. This is a brand new fave I fell in love with the other day as I read an account on social media of a wife whose husband has what she considers to be an unusual death request. After he expires, he’d like his family to keep part of his skeleton and use jewels made from his ashes to adorn the bones. I read this in an advice column and thought, “Okay, and what’s the problem here?” Nothing has reassured me I’m on the right track in my own after death plans as much as reading numerous comments that said pretty much the same thing, despite the equally numerous ones that decried this request as disturbing. I mean, the world is made of two kinds of people: those who can appreciate self-designed death shrines and those who can’t. I’ve always discussed wanting to be cremated but this option has now changed the game.
R.J. Joseph is a Texas based writer and professor who must exorcise the demons of her imagination so they don’t haunt her being. A lifelong horror fan and writer of many things, she has recently discovered the joys of writing in the academic arena about two important aspects of her life: horror and Black femininity.
When R.J. isn’t writing, teaching, or reading voraciously, she can usually be found wrangling one or five of various sprouts and sproutlings from her blended family of 11…which also includes one husband and two furry babies.
R.J. can be found lurking (and occasionally even peeking out) on social media:
Twitter || Facebook || Facebook Official || Instagram || Blog || Email || Amazon Author Page
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