You’re My Inspiration with Stephanie M. Wytovitch

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 Speculative Chic contributor and Bram Stoker-winning poet Stephanie M. Wytovitch, whose latest collection, The Apocalyptic Mannequin, comes out tomorrow, September 26th, from Raw Dog Screaming Press!

So what exactly inspires and influences a collection that taps so deeply into our very own apocalyptic fears, where the “pages hold the teeth of monsters against the faded photographs of family and friends”? Sit back, and let Stephanie tell you all about it….

Leaving Footprints in the Apocalypse

A few years ago, I wrote a sci-fi/horror poem titled “The Apocalyptic Mannequin.” It’s a post-apocalyptic robotic soliloquy that challenges the definition of body and how it became reinterpreted when the world collapsed. See, after experimenting with memoir and genre in my collection Sheet Music to My Acoustic Nightmare, I wanted to do something completely different and really challenge myself to step out of my comfort zone, so I grabbed my crossbow and axe and headed into my own version of a science-fiction horror story while I contemplated the cause and effects of the apocalypse and then mined the wreckage for scraps of poetry.

Now there are countless books, movies, comics, and pieces of art that have helped to shape my most recent poetry collection, aptly named The Apocalyptic Mannequin, but I’m going to talk about some of the more recent art that has greatly inspired me in my quest to redefine life as we know it once everything has been taken away.

1) My favorite apocalypse novel, hands down, is The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I’ve read the book, listened to the book, watched the movie, and continued to go back for more. It’s heartbreaking, beautiful, terrifying, and it’s one of my favorite examples of how a book can straddle the lines between literary and genre, which is something that I’ve become very passionate about exploring in my poetry. This book specifically was a big influence for some of the more reality-based fears and themes that I discuss in my collection such as: broken families, loneliness, and memories.

2) I don’t think it’s possible to have a discussion about the apocalypse without talking about zombies, which admittedly, I’m a big fan of. Some of you probably know that I’m a big Left for Dead fan, and I actively seek out zombie movies on the regular, but one of them tends to stand out from the rest for me and that is the 2016 film Train to Busan directed by Yeon Sang-ho. I can vividly remember the first time I watched this, and I can also remember intensely sobbing as the movie came to its end. Now these zombies are fast, intense, and the pacing of the movie is something that I tried to emulate in the lines of a handful of my poems. If I came anyone even remotely close to triggering the emotion and sense of panic that this movie worked on me, I’ll consider myself successful.

3) On the opposite side of the spectrum is the 2018 creature-feature film, A Quiet Place directed by John Krasinski. I was so excited for this movie, so much so that I went and saw it alone because I wanted the full experience all by myself. Seeing this in the theater was a real treat because at some point, the fourth wall drops and everyone in the audience becomes an active participant. For instance, during an especially tense scene, someone dropped their popcorn, and I literally almost flew out of my chair to duck and cover. In my collection, silence and breath became working themes that I played with a lot, so this movie particularly was a great teacher when it came creating an atmosphere filled with dread.

4) Over the past few years, I’ve dived deep into horror comics, and honestly, you’d be hard pressed to find me without one these days, but my last big obsession was Jeff Lemire’s post-apocalyptic dystopian series Sweet Tooth. This comic damned near ruined me, and because I tend to read a lot on the treadmill at my local gym, there were more than a few occasions were I was gasping out loud, crying in public, and reading freakishly fast to try to get to the end so I could leave and compose myself in the car. Filled with human-animal hybrids and a fatal plague, this series taught me a great deal about the terrible things that humans can do to each other and to those whom they deem different or a threat.

5) And last but note least, another huge inspiration, both historically and in the media, was the incident that happened at Chernobyl. I’ve been kind of fascinated by it for quite some time, so beyond researching it factually, watching the 2012 horror film Chernobyl Diaries, and catching the episode that touched on it during Netflix’s series Dark Tourist, I was beyond excited to see the 2019 HBO drama miniseries aptly named Chernobyl directed by Johan Renck. To say that this show was exceptional honestly doesn’t do it justice. This was one of the most gripping, intense, and emotionally driven series that I’ve watched in a while, and there was even a handful of scenes that I couldn’t watch — like literally had to leave the room for — and that almost never happens. This show taught me about mass hysteria, about government coverups, about what happens when someone doesn’t want to take blame, and most importantly, the very real fears and effects of nuclear radiation. As someone who was trying to weave science and horror together in a way that was both exaggerated yet still firmly rooted in possibility, this moment in history was influential to some of the body horror themes that I wove throughout the collection.

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