This is Thresholds, a series of conversations with writers about experiences that completely turned them upside down, disoriented them in their lives, changed them, and changed how and why they wanted to write. Hosted by Jordan Kisner, author of the essay collection Thin Places. Thresholds is a co-production between Black Mountain Institute and Literary Hub

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This week, Jordan sits down with the “queen of Latin American gothic horror,” Mariana Enriquez, to talk about the novel manuscript she burned and how it led her to search for a mode of horror writing that actually spoke to her own lived experiences of horror.

Mentioned: Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina’s military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983, gravestones as monuments, Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave.

“I don’t know who said it but someone said that when a writer is born into a family, the family is over. And it’s true. Because [then] you have a spy there forever. The writer is a spy. It’s someone that is listening, that is taking notes, that is curious about things that he shouldn’t be, that thinks everything could be a story. It’s very disrespectful that way.”

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Mariana Enriquez is a writer based in Buenos Aires. She has published in English the novel Our Share of Night and three story collections, A Sunny Place for Shady People, Things We Lost in the Fire, and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, which was a finalist for the International Booker Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction. Her most recent book is a work of nonfiction: Somebody Is Walking On Your Grave.

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For more Thresholds, visit us at thisisthresholds.com. Original music by Lora-Faye Åshuvud.