I like to think of myself as fairly well-read. It comes with the territory of being an author and investing in the art and craft of it all. This column should, hopefully, stand as proof of that notion. As a result, for the majority of  “favorite author” selections, I have at least a cursory knowledge of the author’s work, having read at least a piece or two. So, it’s a thrill when an interviewee comes back with a selection that’s brand new to me. The magic of discovering a new author through the enthusiasm of another reader provides one of the purest, most uncut joys I can imagine. For this installment, Donyae Coles has selected an author new to me and makes a compelling case for why her favorite author deserves a place on all our TBRs.

Donyae Coles is the author of Bram Stoker nominated novel, Midnight Rooms. She is currently working on her sophomore Gothic horror, The Sunken, The Adored. Her short work has been published in a variety of places and she can be found on Blue Sky and Instagram. She is also a recent-ish transplant to my neck of the woods in the Midwest, making the ranks of the weird and creative just that much stronger out here in the middle of the States.

Who is your favorite author and why?

My favorite author is Francesca Lia Block. There are a lot of authors that really went into making me the author that I am today, but her work is the one that really showed me that prose can be poetry, too.

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

It was like the seventh or eighth grade, I think? I was twelve to thirteen years old. I want to say it was definitely before high school proper. I found her books in the library. I have no idea what pulled me to her work. It doesn’t actually make any sense.

Because at this time I was already reading adult horror/science fiction/fantasy and had been for some time. I was tearing through the adult fiction section of my library at a fast clip. I was going to run out of stuff to buy in the bookstore soon (it should be noted here that this part of the history takes place in Aviano, Italy, so, to be fair, the library and bookstore weren’t that big.)

And Block’s work are these very slim volumes. I don’t even like the 90s cover art on them! But by some magic, I picked up one of her books and it fundamentally changed the writer I would become.

It was meant for me to read and I did. I read everything by her that I could get my hands on into the early 2000s.

I had no idea you spent some time at that age in another country. Could you speak a little more about what that experience was like in terms of your reading selections, reading habits, etc.? Is there anything you feel like you gained in terms of books or authors you were exposed to that you might not have experienced in the States?

I don’t know if it changed my reading habits so much as created them. I moved overseas when I was 10, so that was happening really during my formative years. I think what it did, more than anything, was give me a lot of unrestricted access to reading material.

My parents both worked and we lived off base, so if I wanted to hang out with my friends after school I had to stay on base, I couldn’t just go home and there were only so many places to hang out so. . . the library it was!

And I have no proof of this (if some military librarian is reading this, chime in! Send me an email and let me know), but it felt like the base’s collection was one built more for entertainment than education. What I mean by that is that there was no reason to be at the library for anything other than entertainment. I was never going to need to walk in and find a book on an historical event or science concept because there was a library in the school for that purpose. So there was little to no shelf space dedicated to that shit for my age group at that time. Instead, it was just filled with genre fiction because that is what airmen were reading, I guess. Which was great for me because that was what I was reading too.

So, now that I’ve written all of this out, I think it did do something. Because I had this experience: the act of reading, of enjoying bookspace, is one that is almost completely tied into pleasure for me. It’s where I was with my friends, it’s where I spent my free time, it’s where I had time to discover thousands of fantastic little worlds. It was never really “I have to look up this thing for school,” it was always, “Lets see what I find today.”

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?

Even though I usually mention Weetzie Bat when I talk about her and I love it, it’s because that’s the famous one, the one people are likely to know. But the book I think really roped me in was Girl Goddess #9 or maybe I Was a Teenage Fairy.

She also wrote a couple of dark fantasies, Ecstasia and Primavera, that really stuck with me because they were both dark and full of light. They felt like they presented the kind of world that you can turn the wrong corner and slip into from our reality. 

She’s lyrical in a way that I hadn’t experienced any other writers doing much of at all. Her prose is poetry, every line is beautiful. Most of what I’d read up to that point was work that may have had a good line every now and then but mostly it was utilitarian. But this work! It wanted to be beautiful, it was beautiful. It was singsong, like a fairy tale. I also think there’s something to be said for the work just being. . . cool and about girls. Even with its faults, it was still about flawed, soft girls and that’s something that we don’t get to see often. These weren’t girls who were cool because they were bad ass and witty. They were just. . . girls trying to survive being girls.

You mention the poetry in Block’s prose and the connection to fairy tales her writing invokes. Did you feel any connection or kinship back to stories and storytelling experienced from your earlier youth? Looking back now, do you see these links in the evolution of your reading?

We were not a fairy-tale-reading household, we were about that Dr. Seuss life. So the enjoyment of fairy tales and that sort of storytelling is something that evolved organically for me. And, really thinking about it, I think I discovered general fantasy before I discovered fairy tales.

Okay, that needs more explanation.

Because, of course, I knew what a fairytale was and had all the classic ones down, but my relationship with fairy tales began not with reading but through TV. Specifically Jim Henson’s Storyteller. If you haven’t seen it, it’s available on a couple of places on the internet. Go and watch a couple of minutes. The show has a very particular, dark aesthetic (it predates whimsygoth, but it’s whimsygoth) that I liked. However, it felt like it was something else because of that aesthetic, whereas most fairy tale retellings I knew at that point were. . . Disney. So I really started to read actual fantasy fiction before taking on fairy tales as reading material.

But in the fifth grade, my class started reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales (actually, I still have this giant collection that we read from back then) with stories that weren’t the base versions, because, you know, the real originals were all bloody and horrible. These versions were toned down a little but they were still closer to that dark forest aesthetic. And that’s when I knew that oh, that’s the real aesthetic, that’s the truth that these aren’t nice stories. They can be beautiful but they’re brutal.

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

I actually stopped reading her work like twenty years ago. Which seems strange to then say she’s my fave. But I did go back and read her recently.

Block is primarily a YA novelist and I just don’t read a lot of YA work (remember what I said in the beginning? Even as a child…). But then I was like, you know, I love her work, I owe a lot of my own style to her so let me go back and check out the work I missed.

I could see the fingerprints of her on my own work in how I write, how I form a sentence, and how I find the thread of the story. But it’s funny because one of the things I read was Necklace of Thorns which is her sort of autobiography/craft book. And, on the one hand she talked about how she had had these successful books and she was still broke, and I was like, girl same. If you, one of the best to ever do it, is broke, then me, a baby, am doing alright. It’s okay that I’m also a poor. Very affirming.

But! In the craft portion I learned that we don’t approach this thing at all the same way. We could not be more different in our approach to the work. And I think that’s wild! Because I can see her influence so much in the craft of my work while we’re still not at all approaching craft the same way.

Looking back at an influential author whom you hadn’t read in twenty-odd years seems like it’d be quite an undertaking. Was it done out of curiosity in a broad sense or were you specifically looking for insights into your writing style/place as an author?

It was just broad curiosity initially! I realized I hadn’t read her in a long time and that she must have kept publishing after I stopped reading her work. And she had. I’m still working my way through her newer books, but, honestly, the hardest part was just getting them. As I said before, I’m a poor! I ended up having to get two of them through interlibrary loan! (Thanks for visiting me, books!)

It was interesting in the sense that I could see right away how much she influenced me as a writer; but, just as quickly, it was clear where we deviated in how we told a story and what kind of stories we told. And I think the easy thing to say is, well I’m not a YA author; but, even when I read her adult, non-erotic work I daw different paths I would have taken in the narratives.

So I didn’t intend for it to be, but it became this interesting exercise in, “okay, I know I would do this differently, but why?” I generally don’t do that when I read so there was something unique happening while I was engaging with this work. 

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?

Yeah there are and I think a lot of that is just the chasm that exists between our experiences. All her work is about sick, sad white girls and I am very far away from that. When I was an actual teen in the 90s and in my early 20s in the 00s, it worked better because I was connecting with the work on an ideological level.

My reading at that time was desire-led, I wish I could be as cool and as pretty and as thin as these girls. I wish I could live this magical life. I wish, I wish.

But coming back to it all twenty years later it was really clear how problematic some of those things were. I reread Nymph, which I still think is beautiful, and I loved so much about it, but at the same time I realized that she treated the one Black character horribly. I realized that there weren’t people who looked like me in her version of L.A., or at least, not many. Which is wild, I’ve been to L.A., we out there!

For readers who might not be as familiar with Block’s works, could you share a little bit more about what Nymph is about and what kind of world it presents to readers? In looking at these worlds and their limitations, did you find yourself more conscious of the settings and the characters populating your own writing?

Nymph is a collection of interconnected erotic short stories that take place in a fantasy version of L.A. There are mermaids and oracles and strippers with animal heads. It’s a very short work. The physical book—which I have—I got when it came out. It is small, like half the size of a mass market paperback, and only like 120 pages. It’s short!

So it tells this story, through a handful of relationships, about how people find and lose and find love again. Sometimes, you find someone and it’s magic and it’s forever, and sometimes you find someone and it’s magic and it’s one night. And sometimes they leave you, and sometimes they die, but there’s always more love for you to find, and eventually you’ll find the love for you. It’s more of a vibe than a plot.

And that’s very true to her work because yes, there’s a plot but a lot of it is the vibe around an experience and the experience of experiencing that.

But this realization did not impact my own craft at all (beyond that realization that I too can have no plot, just vibes) because my work is birthed in a place beyond the limitations of her worlds. My work is about Black femmes. So, already it’s spotlighting those who exist only on the margins of her work.    

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

My lessons have really been all about voice. How the works sound, making it, not poetic, but sing. Finding the rhythm, the heartbeat of it and following it through. And this wasn’t something that I did on purpose, I didn’t even know I was doing it. Not until twenty years later, when I read through her work again. That was when I could really see the things I’d learned.

What would you say is the difference between poetic prose and prose that sings? Do you have specific examples you can cite from Block’s work or from your own?

So, there is no specific example because . . . it’s the whole thing. This style is not just a passage or a line, it is the entirety of the work. The entire book from opening to closing. So it’s all of Midnight Rooms. It’s Block’s whole catalogue.

The difference between poetic prose and prose that sings is the difference between a poem and a song. They have a lot of overlap, they can sometimes be swapped; but, in general, you know when you’re listening to a poem or when you’re listening to a song.

So, to me, poetic prose is really concerned with the beauty of the line. It’s really concerned with sentence-level beauty through imagery. There would be a lot of evocative and descriptive language. The goal is to paint a sort of picture.

Prose that sings is more about the cadence of the prose. This isn’t to say that language isn’t beautiful, the descriptions aren’t rich; this is not an “either / or” situation. But the song is the stops and the starts and the beat, the shifts and changes. It’s not just picking the best, prettiest words, it’s about the rhythm of the words that you choose, how those sentences string together to form the song…that is the work.

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. 

I don’t think so. I think that ultimately although I learned a lot about voice from her work, despite being so in love with it for so long, we are two very different authors. Well, okay, I do think that we both write about the experience of Being A Girl; but because our experiences are so different and we are coming from such vastly different places how that manifests is as two different beasts. And I’m going to backtrack again because upon reflection I do think there is one work that is very much like hers, but it is unpublished. And now, really considering this, I think that’s why it never sold. (actually it did sell but the magazine folded before it was ever published) Because it is in a lot of ways an imitation. It was one of my earliest horror works and I hadn’t really come into my own yet. This was over a decade ago, I was taking my first steps out and I hadn’t fully formed yet.

I know that imitating and echoing works of favorite and/or influential authors is often a part of every author’s development. Have you ever considered revisiting that piece and revising it to make it more “Donyae”? If doing so, what changes do you think you’d make to move beyond the Block influence?

A peek behind the curtains for the readers! I actually answered the question before this one earlier, and then Patrick sent this question as a follow up. So, in the time between when I answered the first question and this one, I did go back and look at that story.

I pulled it up and fiddled with it. I noted the parts where what would become my style were shining through. I thought about the story I was really trying to tell with the short and why I was pulling myself back from telling it all those years ago (it was weird and I didn’t know yet that I could be weird like that).

I spent, I don’t know, maybe forty-five minutes to an hour just reading, reconsidering elements, you know working on the thing before I stepped back and realized I’d already written the “Donyae” version of the story.

The version of that early work that was more true to me is “Sometimes Boys Don’t Know.” [Interviewer’s Note: This story appeared in Nightmare Magazine in 2021]

So, even without revisiting the piece, I’d still gone back to the concept, reworked it, and made it better. And with the concept removed, there is still a beautiful setting in the work. There is still the version that I didn’t write that’s still worth something, that still tickles my brain.

Now that I’ve done this, gone back and actually looked at it, ripped out the parts that became something better, I’ll finally be able to write the weird story it was meant to be from the start.

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?

Genre is probably the biggest thing. I am a horror writer and there are some elements of horror in her work with the closest that I’ve read being Beyond the Pale Motel. But we’re just in two different genres. And I think that the way I write about Black femmes really makes a difference because those experiences are just dramatically different from what Block portrays.

But that being said, I am always striving to be dreamer, more romantic. Even when I’m writing nightmares.

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

I think Girl Goddess #9. It’s a short story collection and I think it really captures just what kind of work it is she writes. And then for the other end of the spectrum I would read Nymph. I’m still upset about Coco, but I do think it’s a beautiful book done well.

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

I would want to know if she’d ever thought about revisiting her shorts. I know she went back and revisited Weetzie Bat for two more books; but she wrote a number of short stories, that were published in a variety of collections. I wonder if she ever considered expanding them into their worlds.

Have you encountered similar questions about your own stories? In reading works by others like Block, do you find yourself thinking about how the shorts might be expanded?

No one has ever asked me about expanding my shorts and I think maybe that’s because they’re so contained. And I think that’s why I don’t look for it in others much either. I also think it’s because I was reading her novels and shorts at the same time and that’s not how I generally experience a lot of people’s short works anymore.

Now, I’m mostly finding the shorts first, following people as their career progresses, so a few shorts, then a novella, and finally they’ve got a full book coming out. So, I think I only really thought about it because I was reading it all at the same time.

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

The next big thing is the paperback for Midnight Rooms which is coming out this summer in June I believe.

I am working on my next Gothic novel, The Sunken, The Adored. It takes place in Venice in the 1700s. I’ve also got a couple of short stories in the works. So I’m keeping busy!

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

You’re welcome!

Where can readers find you online?

I am on Bluesky at okokno and on Instagram at ArtByDonyae. I also have a website, www.donyaecoles.com.