“A Hexed House” by Liz Rosen appeared in Issue 34 and can be read here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
My ideas usually come to me as an opening line. In this case, it was “When the wife died, they found the bones in the attic.” I’d been thinking about Tarot cards, so I knew she wasn’t a serial killer, but threw the bones as a divination. The first draft of the story started with this line, but eventually I pushed it further down in the paragraph in favor of the house-being-hexed opening line.
What was the most difficult part in writing this story?
I think finding the balance for the choices I made. I wanted a distant narration without traditional dialogue or plot, but that meant finding some mystery or conflict to keep the reader interested. I doubled-down on that, with both the mystery of the house itself being one and the potential unreliability of the narration – what was being held back? does the narrator know whether the wife is actually a witch? – being the other.
Recommend a book for us that has been published in the last decade.
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Maybe Neil Gaiman or Stephen King? Their minds are fascinating and their story-telling so expert. Talking craft makes me anxious, and I know they’d have lots to talk about besides that.
What are you working on now?
A hybrid short-story cycle with a supernatural element. It’s both the basis for a public art project with an artist friend, and a way for this short story writer to creep closer to writing a novel.
Our thanks to Liz for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “A Hexed House” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/fiction-a-hexed-house.
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Liz Rosen is a short story writer whose work has appeared in Litro, Ascent, Pithead Chapel, The Macguffin, Sanitarium, Best Short Stories of the Saturday Evening Post, and others. Her story “Tracks” was the 2021 first prize winner of the Writer’s Digest Annual Competition in the mainstream/literary category. She is a former: writer for Nickelodeon TV, Associate Producer of primetime news, and academic. Her current obsessions are book art and ghost hunting shows. Previous obsessions include, but are not limited to, hip hop dance tutorials, Victorian fashion, and strange words like “slubberdegullion.” She has an on-going obsession with dogs.