In writing this column, I get to learn about new-to-me authors and I get a chance to see some familiar favorites through the eyes of others whose writing I admire. Additionally, this column and the immensely positive response it’s received has allowed me to connect with newer authors who’ve reached out to share their kind words about this project. Kristina Ten is one such author. Her work has been on my radar for a while, as she’s been gaining momentum in the speculative fiction realms. Over the last few years, Ten has emerged as a writer to watch, particularly when it comes to the short story. With the idea of connecting with a favorite author on the rise, I connected with her for this latest installment.

Kristina Ten is the author of Tell Me Yours, I'll Tell You Mine (2025, Stillhouse Press). Her stories appear in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, We're Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction, The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Nightmare, The Dark, and elsewhere. She has won the McSweeney's Stephen Dixon Award for Short Fiction, the Subjective Chaos Kind of Award, and the F(r)iction Writing Contest, and has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Locus Award. On top of all those accomplishments, Ten is also a graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop and the University of Colorado Boulder's MFA program in fiction, and was a 2024 Ragdale Foundation writer-in-residence. When a newer writer on the scene brings that many bona fides to the table, the question of who their favorite author might be, becomes quite a compelling one.

Who is your favorite author and why?

Mariana Enriquez. As someone who’s invested in the power of dark speculative fiction to document and interrogate societal ills, I turn to Enriquez’s stories time and time again as contemporary examples of layered, from-all-sides horror with an intense social consciousness. Her work sets the supernatural horrors of the haunted house, the ritual sacrifice, and the magical child right alongside the all-too-real horrors of political corruption, gendered violence, and the fear and isolation felt by those living under repressive regimes—an approach informed by her upbringing in Buenos Aires under a military dictatorship, and the continued reverberations of said dictatorship throughout Argentina. Her settings, largely urban, are familiar to begin with, though not comfortingly so: the dilapidated apartment, the dimly lit street, the polluted river that splits the city in two—then evolve toward a heightened discomfort, one not of this world. She’s a master at building the kind of dread you don’t want to wriggle away from, even as it suffocates you. At the same time, her writing is shot through with this incredible biting humor.

I agree with you 100% re: Enriquez’s blending of the more conventional supernatural horrors with those pulled from her own life and background. Could you talk a bit about your own experiences and cultural background and how they have affected your own writing and stories?

I was born in Moscow to a Russian mother and a Russian-Korean father. Then, as a kid, I moved to the U.S., where I’ve been bouncing between the west and east coasts, and spent a few years in between, too. Aside from my parents, my family still lives in Russia or elsewhere outside the States. When I started school in the U.S., I grew distant from my heritage because to be Russian (or “other” in any way) felt at odds with being American, and the wisdom was that you had to work to fit in, be doubly American to make up for not being born here. Especially in grade school, where any difference could be latched onto, picked apart, preyed on.

Later, I felt the weight of being geographically and culturally apart from my family. It was a long, expensive flight to Siberia (of course, with the current war and airspace closures, travel logistics are even more complicated, as are the logistics of speaking openly via apps). By writing stories infused with Russian folklore, I was able to get closer to family, if only on the page. And by writing stories that dropped traditional Russian folklore into modern American circumstances—like the daughter of the fearsome Noon Witch attending a Coachella-coded music festival—I was able to make a little more sense to myself. Now, getting older, and becoming more awake to the horrors of the world, I find myself leaning further into the horror genre.

When were you first made aware of this author and when were you first drawn to their work?

In 2017, when Things We Lost in the Fire was first translated into English by Megan McDowell. That was also around the time I started writing speculative fiction. Though it’d always been my reading material of choice, up to that point I was predominantly writing poetry, not because I was any good at it but because short, raw poems were what I could make time for outside of my all-consuming job at a San Francisco startup. Also because the Bay Area had (and still has) an amazing literary and live poetry scene, and I wanted to be part of it. I was already circling around the same themes I’m circling around today, which I think Enriquez’s work is concerned with as well: collective memory, loneliness, alienation, culpability. But I wasn’t a very skilled or disciplined poet, and I wasn’t getting my point across. Enriquez was one of my guiding lights (back) to speculative fiction. This was also the beginning of Trump’s first term and five years since Putin’s reelection, and the sort of broad, fuzzy leftism I’d been satisfied with when I was younger was sharpening to a point.

I’d love to dig a little deeper here. Through reading Enriquez and then trying your own hand at speculative fiction, have you found or observed any advantages of writing in those genres (in prose) when it comes to synthesizing these themes you mention and reckoning with the political climes of the moment? Why do you feel like speculative prose offered more of a suitable entry point vs. the work you were doing in poetry?

Many poets today write powerfully about political issues: Solmaz Sharif, Ilya Kaminsky, Kaveh Akbar, Sam Sax, Danez Smith, Fatimah Asghar… To begin to list them is to become overwhelmed, because there are so many doing the work, and because immediately I have to examine that term, “political issue.” What, for writers and artists, is not political? Especially if you are someone living in a politicized body. Whether you like it or not, you get tasked with representation, and with saying in every individual work something novel and cogent about “the [insert aspect of your identity] issue.”

I was, and still am, drawn to poetry’s lyricism and playfulness, its keen attention to language and metaphor. It’s also always struck me as a particularly raw, brazen, vulnerable medium. With poetry, readers are more likely to assume the speaker is the voice of the author themself, right? Which isn’t correct by any means, but it’s something I observed happening, and I shied away from it. On the other hand, fiction seemed to guarantee distance—and it was more forgiving in terms of word count, didn’t require poetry’s sharp, bright concision. With speculative fiction, I got even more freedom to make things up. I’ve moved around a lot, and while some of my stories are set in real places where I’ve lived, others are set in invented places that blend, satirize, and reimagine real locations, and this fluidity feels true to my personal experience of home as an ever-moving dot on an ever-changing map. I find it’s easier to talk about difficult topics in these settings, too, and easier to read about them: when the topic is violence, but the violated is a dragon, or a doll, or a ghost.

Is there one particular piece of work from this author that you are especially fond of or that’s had a significant creative impact on you? What is that piece and what makes it so appealing or affecting for you?

“Green Red Orange” (in Things We Lost in the Fire) left a big impression on me. It’s a different kind of ghost story, about Marco, who’s locked himself in his room at his mother’s house, and his ex-girlfriend, who communicates with him via chat while watching him vanish into the depths of the Internet. The title refers to the little dot next to his username, which turns green whenever he’s online. Even as Marco’s behavior becomes more obsessive and unsettling, the narrator continues to try to understand him. This points to a larger truth about Enriquez’s writing: it’s deeply compassionate. Not only toward characters living on the margins, but also toward characters who come face to face with those people, in their times of greatest desperation, and fumble badly. Because of their sense of self-preservation or powerlessness, or simply because they don’t know how to meet, as individuals, so much collective need. I grew up in the era of dial-up, when most households had only one shared computer and the Internet was this thrilling, uncharted landscape—but an approachable one. There was still an illicit magic and mystery to going online.

Lots of others I could mention. “Refrigerator Cemetery” (in A Sunny Place for Shady People) for the claustrophobia that’s got a hold on me still. And “Metamorphosis” (also in Sunny Place) for its unflinching look at uterine fibroids and menopause, both of which aren’t talked about publicly nearly enough and for that reason reside in the realm of otherness, cloakedness, hushedness that makes them ripe for horror. (By the way, a friend recently told me that “Shady” in that title isn’t synonymous with the slang-y “sketchy” or “untrustworthy,” and the closer connotation to the original “sombría” would be something like “gloomy,” “somber,” or “morose.”)

That last bit, especially, is fascinating to me. When we’re reading works in translation, whether from one language to English or English to another language, there is so much that carries over, yes? Good writing is good writing is good writing. But there is also a lot that can be, pardon the pun, lost in translation. So much of your own writing speaks to the immigrant experience, to this kind of bifurcated, “of two worlds or more,” existence. All of which is to say: do you consider a “global” reader when you’re refining and revising your stories? Similarly, as a reader of works in translation, is there an extra layer of consideration, whether conscious or subconscious, that goes on when you’re considering these pieces?

After studying a lot of American and British writers in school, I’ve had to really interrogate who I reflexively think of as my default reader and what information I choose to include or leave out of my work because of this. Six years ago I met my dear, brilliant friend, the writer Isha Karki, at Clarion West. I’d submitted a workshop story that included Russian words that I’d italicized, like I’d seen done with “foreign” words time and time again, and like I’d explicitly been taught to do. She asked me why I decided to do that, and invited me to consider what it means to have English in the default font while non-English is italicized, made other/oddity/deviation on the page. I’m really grateful for that.

In my debut collection, Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine, there’s a story called “The Dizzy Room,” in which the English translations are italicized. I wonder how English-language readers will feel, and if it’ll be alienating in a way that’s productive. In general, I hope readers can be comfortable with not understanding every last thing in a book right away, and with having some things not be “for” them above all others. (Most things are look-up-able now, anyway, and reading isn’t a spectator sport.)

Regarding translations, it must be a remarkable undertaking to preserve not only the meaning of the original text, but also its voice, tone, context, intent, and its various experiments. I remember, in grad school, a professor instructing us to buy a specific translation of Dostoevsky and being horrified when some students picked up the wrong one and didn’t understand why they couldn’t just get by. I’ve always wanted to do a side-by-side reading of two translations of a text. Maybe with the new translation of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We by Bela Shaveyich, which has been called particularly bold.

How often do you revisit that particular favorite piece or the author’s work in general? What lessons have you learned at various times from the work?

I read all her story collections available in English first, then reread them as part of my ongoing mission to convince myself I’m allowed to keep writing story collections despite the industry insisting, in no uncertain terms, that they are very difficult to sell. Then, I read her epic novel, Our Share of Night, while revising my own first novel. It was instructive: how to braid together twisty personal and political narratives, and how to weave magic into all that.

I suppose I am always trying to be a braver person and a braver writer, so beyond the craft aspect, I look to Enriquez as a consistent example of that. It would be uninformed and irresponsible to draw too close a parallel between our circumstances, so I’ll say only that writing about them does demand bravery. Enriquez was born in Argentina in 1973, shortly before the military junta’s takeover, and raised during a period of intense political repression. I was born in the Soviet Union just before its collapse, then raised in capitalist America among the ever-present shadows of Russian totalitarianism, lurking over my family in both countries and taking new shape as “death of democracy,” “authoritarianism,” and “dictatorship” become more frequent search terms here in the States. Enriquez writes about the horrors she experienced firsthand, while I sometimes have the luxury of writing at a remove, trying to be an archivist for my parents, and their parents, and their parents. Still, when Enriquez talks about the atmosphere of silence and paranoia that permeated her childhood, as dissidents were taken from their homes in the night—those sound a lot like the first horror stories I heard as a kid, too. I’m struck by how that early silence has informed her outspokenness today: “I don’t want to be complicit in any kind of silence,” she told The Guardian. “To be timid about horrifying things is dangerous too.”

Are there any pieces in the author’s oeuvre that have not worked as well for you? If yes, which ones and why do you think that connection was not as strong?

I wouldn’t say that some have worked well and others haven’t; rather that some resonated with me more strongly at the time of encounter and continue to rattle around my head to this day. That’s going to happen with any story collection, though, and that’s most of what I’ve read from Enriquez. The beautiful thing? My favorite stories might be the first, fifth, and seventh in the collection, while yours might be the third, eighth, and twelfth. Actually, my favorite stories one day might even be different from my favorite stories another day, just depending on my mood, my taste, and the personal baggage I’m bringing to the page. Of course, the stories that don’t stick with me as hard still have value: they add texture to the whole, or serve as mirrors for other stories to reflect off of—and who can say if my favorite stories would shine as brightly without their mirrors?

One thing I really admire about Enriquez’s short-story collections is the pacing, not so much of the individual stories (though that’s certainly a strength) but of the collection as a whole. There’s a propulsive quality to the selection and arrangement of the stories. You mentioned looking at these collections as inspiration for your own. Could you talk a bit more about that? Was it simply a case of “I can do this, too,” or were you considering things like story length, arrangement, etc.?

I considered the escalation from beginning to end and the smaller movements within, as well as the peaks and valleys of tension, and how the stories were arranged to emphasize certain themes. What I quickly realized, though, is every one of her stories carries this atmosphere of grimness, obsession, and dread that makes an Enriquez story an Enriquez story, and that atmosphere is strong glue. While the stories in Tell Me Yours are thematically linked, they vary across virtually every other axis: genre, shape, length, atmosphere, register, point of view, tense… So I also sought out examples of collections that run this wide gamut and still maintain flow and coherence. Great collections by Isabel Yap, Kim Fu, Brenda Peynado, Kelly Link, Zen Cho, Kij Johnson, Bora Chung, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Ken Liu, and K-Ming Chang, to name a few.

I ordered the stories so the younger protagonists live in the front half, and the older protagonists in the back. I wanted to make sure certain stories were close enough together to reflect one another’s dominant themes, yet far enough apart that nothing felt redundant or same-y. I thought about possible links between neighboring stories (like the days-of-the-week structure, or the Bay Area setting). Also about what readers should know before encountering a particular story, and how to work that in early on.

What writing lessons have you taken, purposefully or accidentally, from your favorite author?

Her stories have this sort of unmediated matter-of-factness—which may or may not stem from her career in journalism, but in any case I find it very effective. I’ve read a lot of fantastical works that employ a more fantastical, stylized register, and I myself sometimes reach for an omniscient, effervescent, fairy-tale affect. Which is all well and good. Only, when a story is written in a fantastical register, every word reinforces that genre expectation, so I never forget I’m reading a fantasy. On the other hand, if a story is written in Enriquez’s measured, objective-feeling tone (which somehow maintains a dreamlike quality—I don’t know how she does it), when the fantastical creeps in, it doesn’t register as fantastical to me; it registers as real. Enriquez has spoken about Stephen King’s impact on her as a young reader, saying, “To me, at that moment, that book was real. This atmosphere that makes you go inside of fiction and find some truth in fiction to the point that you live inside it.” That’s how I feel reading her.

Enriquez also reminds me of that thing I really appreciate about speculative horror: its ability to defamiliarize a familiar subject, so that we may more critically observe it from that new distance. About her story “The Dirty Kid,” she’s said, “[Readers] ask how can I go so far. The truth is, I don’t go far at all. That child in the story seems like an exception, but he’s not…When fiction does the trick of moving people, it’s like they can look at it again. I normalize it too of course: you can’t empathize all the time; you’d go crazy. So I guess I write to de-normalize it for me too.” In this de-normalizing, she never preaches or offers solutions. All her societies are diverse and troubled. All her characters are capable of profound sympathy and crushing selfishness. All are inadequate yet reaching, and I find this incredibly humane.

Are there any works in your bibliography that you feel are closest to the work of your favorite—whether in terms of style, subject matter, length, etc.? Talk a little about those similarities.

A number of her stories are set around Buenos Aires’ Matanza-Riachuelo River, apparently one of the most polluted places in the world. My story “The Dreadful and Specific Monster of Starosibirsk” also features a river contaminated by careless, greedy industries, and it’s similarly interested in boundaries and borderlands, both literal (the boundaries the river creates) and not (the slippery boundaries between natural and supernatural, fiction and reality, victimhood and blame).

Blame and shame figure heavily in both our works. I think a lot about personal versus collective complicity, and about obedience at varying levels of society: from succumbing to peer pressure in the classroom, to developing people-pleasing habits for frictionless interactions, to falling in step with the conformity enforced by a repressive regime. I think, too, about personal versus collective (or cultural) guilt: the guilt born of being part of a social problem that you can’t do much about as one person in the face of a sweeping, deeply entrenched system—or as one person in the face of a brutal, traumatic past. Of her characters’ tendency to put themselves in dangerous situations, Enriquez has said, “They crave evil because they feel guilty and want to be punished. So they seek it to see something they don’t know, to get what they think they deserve…[but] they won’t find it soothing because it’s not them, individually, that deserve the punishment.” I’m fascinated by this. Many of my characters have fallen prey to a similar promise: that individual sacrifice can absolve collective sin. It’s a tempting proposition. It’s one of the oldest stories we have, after all.

Enriquez tells this anecdote about getting her first copy of Pet Sematary from an uncle, who wasn’t clued into the horrors inside but bought it simply because that edition had a cat on the cover, and he thought his young niece might like cats. Now Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine has a bunch of bunnies on the front, and I can only hope for the same. There are definitely echoes of Enriquez in there, in stories like “The Curing” and “Mel for Melissa,” whose insubstantial, gradually disappearing bodies feel in conversation with those in “No Flesh Over Our Bones” (Things We Lost in the Fire).

Where does your writing diverge from your favorite author’s? Are there any elements from your favorite author’s work that you would like to incorporate in your own? If yes, what are these?

While we both write in response to repressive systems, I tend to rely more on distance, abstraction, and allegory. I think this stems from an interest in fairy tales, as well as an interest in the coded language of Soviet literature used to dodge state censors. The town of Starosibirsk, in the story I mentioned earlier, is a fictional place based loosely on an amalgamation of real ones. One of the stories in Tell Me Yours takes place in a fictional, satirical authoritarian city-state called Dushagorod. Enriquez’s settings are real places, findable on a map (Buenos Aires, Los Angeles), and in that way her critiques are more barefaced and direct.

Some of her stories borrow from real events: news items about local crime which she then morphs into something supernatural. The way we consume much of our news now—scrolling through algorithm-sorted headlines on social media, clicking in occasionally only to hit a paywall; and much of this news not local—I haven’t thought of it as a potential well to draw from. But I’d like to try sometime.

Also, Our Share of Night impressed on me that Enriquez writes sex really well! I believe sex has a place in literature as much as anything in our lives has a place in literature. Yet while my characters are often driven by (...practically bursting with…) desire, I haven’t lingered on those scenes as much as I could.

If a reader wanted to start reading your favorite author, what piece would you recommend they start with?

Spanish readers are lucky in that they have access to her entire oeuvre, including her first novel Bajar es lo peor (1995) and Cómo desaparecer completamente (2004), as well as the novelettes Chicos que vuelven (2010) and Ese verano a oscuras (2019). If you’re counting on English translations, like me? It’s hard not to recommend Our Share of Night. It’s formally exciting, narratively complex, totally captivating, and convincing in its comparisons of state violence to the occult. It’s a big, ambitious work from a writer raised on a canon of fantastical literature, including Borges and Cortázar—very different from the canon presented to me in American schools, where fantastical literature was assumed to be the domain of little children.

To get a sense of Enriquez’s range, I’d say: start with the story collection Things We Lost in the Fire, then read Our Share of Night, and then (because it should be out by the time this interview’s published) Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave, her new memoir in the form of a cemetery tour. It’s about her relationship with death, ghosts, and—after the mass forced disappearances under the military dictatorship—what it means to have a peaceful final resting place, and a body to bury.

If you could ask your favorite author one question about their work, what would it be?

Enriquez has talked about the challenge of not being repetitive, especially in a collection, where she doesn’t want her stories, though thematically linked, to sound too similar. At the same time, plenty of writers spend their whole lives poking at the same obsession/s from different angles. So my question would be: How does she feel her writing has evolved over time, and what factors does she think have contributed to that evolution, besides the shifting political landscape?

What do you have coming out next on the writing and publishing front? What are you working on now?

My debut story collection, Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine, is out October 7. It’s a blend of horror, fabulism, folklore, and sci-fi, and every story deals in some way with the darker side of games and childhood rituals. Later this year, I’ll have a story out in F(r)iction’s fairy tale issue: a modern tale of Koschei the Deathless and his captive brides, featuring a compendium of breads and the particular flavor of madness brought on by wedding planning. I’m also working on that novel I mentioned earlier, and have hazy plans for my next story collection, as well as a handful of stories having nothing to do with that collection.

Thank you for taking the time to chat with me about your favorite author.

Thank you! In case the news hasn’t made it all around by now, the Enriquez adaptation My Sad Dead is coming to Netflix. It’ll be a four-episode miniseries borrowing from the titular story, plus three others. Watch party, anyone?

Hot damn. That sounds great! I’m in. But the real question is: do your dogs also decide that the perfect time for you to play with them is when you’re trying to watch TV or is that just my dog?

I’m usually sitting down to watch TV around 9 p.m., by which point my dogs are completely cooked. I have this herding dog who believes it’s his personal job to hold the world up: keep the clouds in the sky, keep the trees from pulling their roots up and lumbering over to some new location, all that. So he stares out the window on the highest alert, and by the time it gets dark and he can’t see said clouds and trees anymore, he’s exhausted. Meanwhile, the other dog is worn out from performing the day’s handful of basic dog tasks using the one sweet, tiny brain cell that God allocates to each golden retriever. The real challenge around here is getting the volume up loud enough to be heard over their snores.

Where can readers find you online?

At kristinaten.com, you can see what I’m up to and sign up to receive my brief and infrequent newsletter about finding beauty amid apocalypse. I’m also sometimes on Instagram/Threads (@kristinasergeevnaten) and Bluesky (@kristinaten.bluesky.social), and on various writing- and non-writing-related Slack and Discord servers. Write me and I’ll write you back.