An Interview with Logan-Ashley Kisner, October 2024
'Logan-Ashley Kisner is a Vegas-born author who writes about trans kids surviving the horrors (supernatural or otherwise). He is also the unofficial transgender horror historian, cat dad, and horror addict (his favorites include Ginger Snaps, the Evil Dead series, and Sleepaway Camp).'
' Old Wounds follows two trans teens (Max and Erin) who find themselves stranded in Northern Kentucky and terrorized by a group of men who plan to sacrifice one of them to a local legend, which allegedly only feeds upon girls. '
What sparked your initial interest in horror? What inspired you to begin cataloging and researching horror films specifically?
Horror has just always been a part of my house, I think it would’ve been a miracle for me to come into adulthood and not have been horror-obsessed. COVID resulted in my college dorm closing, so I moved back with my parents and was once again around horror nearly 24/7. But the inciting incident for my trans horror curiosity was just coincidence: my mom put on House at the End of the Street, which [spoilers] ends by explaining that the killer’s parents force-femmed him as a kid. I remember watching that and being like, “huh, that’s dumb.” Then the next movie we watched was Terror Train, which reveals that the killer was hiding by crossdressing the whole time. It was just a perfect one-two punch of movies wielding transmisogyny to no end, and it made me think: “okay, what do horror movies with trans characters actually look like? Because this can’t be all there is.”
Why do you feel that it’s important to keep a record of trans representation in horror films? What is your main motivation for continuing with this project?
In all honesty, I just love a good list! I love being able to look at it all laid out in one convenient place and to see the patterns change and morph with time. It’s easy to look at one or two examples and decide a trend has begun, but my goal with trying to catalog trans horror is to see what our trends actually look like. Are we seeing as many or as few stories as it feels like? What do the breakdowns of representation look like? My main motivator for sticking with it is knowing that whatever else is out there is either incomplete or unsatisfying, which is what got me here in the first place. And it’s funny: I don’t think I’m singlehandedly changing the narrative or saving films from total obscurity, but I hear from enough people (filmmakers, creatives, regular folks) that I do think it’s made a small difference in people’s lives. As long as there are still films to discover and bring to a slightly larger audience, there will be an up-to-date archive.
How do you feel that the trans horror archive informed Old Wounds? Was there anything specific from it that you drew inspiration from?
What’s beautiful about the archive is that it is this look back at history and how we (trans people) have existed in art. I think it’s also a great document to show what doesn’t exist. Eventually, so much negative space creates an image of its own. In writing Old Wounds, I wanted the reader (and the story itself) to be forced to sit with transness and gender identity in a way that I rarely see done in horror fiction. I took a lot of “what NOT to do” from the archive, but there are also films like “Bit” and Till Kleinert’s “Der Samurai” that I love for their dedication to considering non-cis identities in their gender horror!
How did the finished book differ from your initial drafts? Did you know how the story was going to end when you started writing?
Originally, we spent a lot more of the book inside of Erin’s head than Max’s. It took a lot of edits to get closer to a 50-50 split. We also spent closer to 2 or 3 chapters in Berkley, which I mourn having to cut but also acknowledge that it killed the pacing. I think the biggest change was the logistics of the time stretch. I originally wrote it as if each character saw slightly different things within it (specific to their history and trauma), but trying to juggle that and the Beast was a lot. Luckily, having Max and Erin confront their ghosts in less-literal ways was ultimately much more satisfying. Old Wounds always ended the way that it ends (plus or minus a few sequences). The characters who live were always going to live, though their states of being changed a little from draft to draft. But when I started writing, this was always going to be a book about trans resilience, and I fought to keep the ending what it is so that message is there until the last page.
Having very little to take reference from in terms of similar media, what was your writing process like when focusing on Erin and Max’s transness/the stories from their past? Were there any specific details/ideas you Knew you wanted to include? How much of your personal experience was embedded in this book?
I’d spent so much time thinking about what other films/books did “wrong” that I already had a pretty solid idea of what I wanted out of Erin and Max when I was writing. Again, so much negative space creates an image of its own. I wanted Erin and Max to be realistically teenaged (selfish, unaware of their blind spots, cracking bad jokes at the wrong time) but also emblematic of trans identity as a larger, broader community that’s frequently fighting with itself.
If Old Wounds is autobiographical in any sense, I’d say it’s more in the emotions than the literal events. I’m lucky enough to come from a very accepting family, but it did take time to get to the point we’re at now. I was a closeted teenager once, too, and Max’s paranoia pulls from a lot of those memories.
What was your inspiration for the monster? Why an animalistic creature?
Well, the original plan was just to swipe a preexisting regional cryptid, but I just couldn’t find one that felt right. I wanted it to be plausible that someone could conceivably mistake/write off the Beast as an ordinary animal, familiar but still distinct. I pulled from descriptions of dire wolves and prehistoric giant ground sloths, as well as a few films (namely 2016’s The Monster.) I can’t go into much more detail without spoiling the latter half of the book, but very basically, the Beast was always conceptualized against the idea of control. Can you control a wild animal? How much of that control is genuine versus illusion? Is it living by your rules, or are you living by its rules?
What was the process like getting this book published? Was there any pushback due to its content?
Honestly, most of what I can call “pushback” came with a character’s suicide attempt and how Max and Erin’s transness is “discovered”; we played with a few scenarios because what I originally came up with was a bit much for a YA audience.
When I originally wrote Old Wounds, I think this concept appealed to me because it would be really hard to take the transness out of the story. My fear was that if I did not make the transness a vital gear, I would get sucked into The Big Evil Publishing Machine and be miserable. Thankfully, that didn’t happen! My agent and editors asked plenty of clarifying questions to better understand where I was coming from, but I never got hit with “this is too trans” or anything like that. Everybody I’ve been in contact with in the industry has been extremely supportive and I remain endlessly grateful for them.
You’re one of the VERY few authors to write/publish a story deep-diving into the realities of being trans, especially via horror/fiction literature. Have you felt any pressure from this? - I’ve heard from many queer creators that they often feel pressure to represent the queer community “well” or abide by specific/heteronormative standards when making public work surrounding queer topics. Have you experienced this? What is your take on it?
“Good representation” and “good art” are not two concepts inherently at odds with each other, though I do believe overindulgence in the former leads to increasingly less of the latter. I think good representation comes from authenticity and a willingness to be ugly, not from characters being pure/flawless/however some people want to characterize “good.” Both Max and Erin act/speak/think in ways that probably categorize them as “bad” representation, but I think that’s also what’s allowed for readers to connect with them as much as they have. They’re flawed people! That’s the point! At the end of the day, I can’t control what a reader likes or hates, nor can I predict every reader’s personal relationship with transness. I can only write. That pressure will always be there, but the goal is to be aware of it without being overly influenced by it. Do your best to be authentic, but don’t stress yourself thin trying to cover every potential perspective.
Why do you think including fully-formed trans characters in entertainment/media is important? (Ex. Depicting trans characters as real people who do things, go on adventures, go through emotions, love, heartbreak, etc. rather than only focusing on their transness and voiding all other points of a personality)
It’s always been important (if for no other reason than that is simply how human beings work), but it feels especially important now for how much attention is on trans humanity. To be honest, I’m not overly concerned with whether a cis audience is going to come away from books like Old Wounds feeling new sympathy or empathy for trans folk. My concern is with the trans reader. Because you’re exactly right: it’s still so hard to find art that considers trans people as three-dimensional beings, and that really messes with your self perception! My concern is to give the same consideration and basic decency to trans readers and give them challenging, authentic characters to read and root for.
What main takeaways do you hope your audience gets from this book? What conversations or progress do you hope to spark from readers? (Especially readers who aren’t familiar with trans topics/have read books with trans characters in them?)
It’s surreal to think that this will inevitably be someone’s first trans book. On that note, I hope that Old Wounds encourages people to ask more of their fiction, horror or otherwise. I hope it inspires people into creating trans art of their own. More specifically, I hope that some of the themes and conversations in this book give people the language to talk about issues they might not have had before (I think especially to the conversations Max has on how we remember our dead and the issue of inevitability.)
What are some of your hopes for the future of horror as a genre? Do you predict a break-out of traditional themes/tropes and exploration into new ideas?
Oh God, I don’t dare try to predict anything when my taste is as selfishly singular as it is. That being said, I hope horror continues to expand the way it has with more diverse characters and executions of stories we haven’t seen before. And while I hope to push for original stories above anything else, I do think there’s great potential in revisiting familiar stories with trans/queer voices (there’s a “Remixed Classics” anthology series I’m extremely interested to dig into for this reason.) Whatever keeps horror as weird and interesting a genre as it is, I want it to hit us as hard as it can.
What does your future hold? Any big plans, goals, projects, etc?
When I sold Old Wounds to Penguin Random House, it was part of a two-book deal: the next (forced detransition-themed) trans horror book I have is going to be coming out in September 2025! I have a number of projects actively in-the-works or planned (unfortunately none I can talk about right now). My dream project, though, is still to write a trans horror film (ideally either a high school creature feature or a Deadwood/Tremors-style Western.)
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