Posted: October 30, 2024
How My Book Began
Episode # 1
Transcript
Nate Carpenter
Hello and welcome to How My Book Began, where we talk with authors about the origins of their research and writing. I'm Nathan Carpenter, managing editor of Lehigh University Press. Thanks for joining us. In today's episode, I talk with doctor Kyle Brett, co-editor of Youth Horror Television and the Question of Fear, published by Lehigh University Press in 2024. This is the first interview in the How My Book Began series, and it was just a wonderful conversation with Kyle about his research, the inclusive horror community he found as a graduate student, and what it's like to co-edit and co-write a book with friends. I loved the conversation and hope you enjoy it.
Nate Carpenter
So, before we begin, talk a little bit about yourself and your background.
Kyle Brett
Yeah. So I got my degrees in “words” like I tell my friends. So I got my first degree at Lockhaven University of Pennsylvania — first generation kid. I was going in for biochemistry and wanted to be a doctor. Clearly I changed the path a bit and became a different sort of doctor. I changed my major to English, fell in love, came to Lehigh for a masters, stayed on for the PhD, and graduated with the PhD in 2021 in American literature —nineteenth-century American literature, which is a little different from what we're talking about today. So I'm happy to go into a little more detail on how this how this started.
Nate Carpenter
Youth Horror Television and the Question of Fear is a collection of essays examining youth horror television shows from the 1970s to the early 2000s. The book argues, at least in part, that horror television shows that kids watch are sort of generative in the sense that you, you write in the in the introduction: “We see the power of televised youth horror to captivate, inspire, and invite youth audiences to shape and respond to the adult world around them.” In a sense, then, you are contesting common characterizations of youth horror television as what you call “paralyzing” experiences. The book is in an edited collection. That is, there are nine authors who have contributed chapters, and you and Ethan Robles have curated and edited the collection and wrote the introduction.
Kyle Brett
That’s right.
Nate Carpenter
The volume then started . . . I'm assuming that wasn't when you were on the path into the sciences.
Kyle Brett
No
Nate Carpenter
So, talk a little bit about the origin of this, where and how did the idea of a book about youth horror television start?
Kyle Brett
It started in Easton, in Porters Pub, and it was kind of a conversation between Ethan and I. We were both in Lehigh's program. He was a master’s candidate at that time, writing his thesis on folk horror and I was writing a dissertation on nineteenth-century authorial economies. So, we kind of had this shared interest in horror, we both took coursework with Dawn Keetley. We both wrote for Horror Homeroom and what we started to notice in our course work was the films that we were discussing, which were highbrow (which is strange to say now ... highbrow horror), were echoing what we remember as kids. A great example is in The Simpsons, which is kind of an adult-facing cartoon, but still I snuck in to watch it. “Tree House of Terror” is a great example of common horror tropes being rearticulated to a different audience. Sometimes children. In this case The Shining. The great image of The Shining is Jack Nicholson, Jack Torrance, tearing down a door with an axe. It happens with Homer Simpson, and that was my first exposure to The Shining, which is strange.
So that raised the question of OK, why does that happen? We noticed and we wanted to track why these shows in particular, on television, are geared towards a particular audience — children, early teens — and how their creators, who grew up with universal creature features and everything else, started to use the power and idea of horror as liberatory, as a pedagogical tool, as a way to envision new possibilities.
Nate Carpenter
Let me just back up for a second because at the at the time, would you have characterized yourself as a scholar of horror?
Kyle Brett
Yeah. In the same way that I study nineteenth-century American lit, I am a horror geek. It's sort of something that I loved in coursework. It's part of the reason why I wanted to work with Dawn Keetley. It was one of those scholarly projects that gave energy when I was writing a diss and going “I want something else to charge.”
Nate Carpenter
Right. There's a there's a community here of other scholars who were . . .
Kyle Brett
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had a film club. We went to go see Us. We went to go see, Get Out altogether. Like, we would do this after writing tutoring, after doing research in archives. We would go and watch . . . we could go to the Promenade Shops right up the road and watch these films together and we’d talk about them like critics. We weren't really trained, but we jumped into and had some fun. And some of that led to publications. So one of my other publications was in an edited collection on Get Out. So this leads to interesting areas. I still teach the nineteenth-century form of horror. My last class at Lafayette was a 300-level course on American horror. So it was really, really fun to dive into that and sort of meld those interests.
Nate Carpenter
So this is an edited collection. You have nine other contributors who have all contributed their own chapters to the book and you and Ethan have written the introduction. There's a sense that . . . You're talking about a shared experience. You're watching these shows as children with our buddies, with our sisters or brothers, and in a sense, I mean, this edited volume is very much a collaborative endeavor, and you're talking about the kind of community that you had at Lehigh in those formative years. So talk about how you approached the project as an editor.
Kyle Brett
Yeah, it was hard. I think because it was something . . . I mean you said it right. Ethan and I framed the introduction where we start with the idea that we were scared kids and that kind of carried over. And we found as we collected more essays, as we had more open calls, that there were other scared kids out there. And not just like scared, terrified children paralyzed in fear, but scared kids who then launched major careers in the academy. So this is a bunch of very, very, very intelligent people talking about horror and many talking about youth horror. So it was very much we viewed it as a conversation. And so we found this area which was very rich. We were kind of worried, like “Is this idea going to fly?” Are there going to be people who are like “Courage the Cowardly Dog was a formative TV show that shaped my entire being?” Sure enough, four submissions on Courage the Cowardly Dog in the first round all talking about the same episodes, all talking about how it changed them, and all through a different critical lens. Well, that's how we knew we had something. And that's how we sort of came to launching this project and getting behind it full steam. There is a wealth of criticism on youth horror in print. There is a wealth of youth horror film study. This I think had to make a case for youth horror television and part of the way we did that was access. I mean, you think back to when you were a kid. No one had to take you to the theater to watch these shows. You went home. I remember running home as a kid to watch Goosebumps and then throwing a VHS into our VCR to record it. No, my parents didn't know what I was doing. People snuck in to see Watership Down. My first exposure to Watership Down, the film, and why it's in this collection, is it was on Cartoon Network. Cartoon Network!
That access is also under question, and I know we talk about ratings and we talk about what we expose people to, media-wise. Well, this is one of them, right? This is was one in the 90s when I grew up. It was full exposure all the time whether my parents wanted it or not.
Nate Carpenter
This is a historical study. It's a period in time because the ways in which young people consume what we would call television has changed dramatically. And so I'd certainly be interested in in hearing if you’ve thought about if there's a second iteration of this — scholars looking, continuing to look at, youth horror in what is the modern-day version of television, which is YouTube or something else that I'm probably not aware of.
Kyle Brett
Exactly. Something that we're not aware of. I do think that part of the goal of this collection was to open up that conversation and move it away from television too, right? We want to see the trajectory launch. I mean, one of the areas, and I think you're right here, is streaming. I mean most of the shows that we talk about are now available on streaming services. The access question is still kind of there.
Nate Carpenter
What do you mean by the access question?
Kyle Brett
So like . . . we can run home and watch the TV without parents knowing. We now have it on mobile devices, right? A child with an iPad can watch this if parental controls aren't there. But I I really hope that this adds to that conversation.
Nate Carpenter
I want to talk a little bit about process. So you do a lot of writing.
Kyle Brett
Now!
Nate Carpenter
You do a lot of writing now and a lot of that writing is collaborative writing. Talk to me about your approach for co-writing an introduction. Had you co-written a piece before this? And how did you approach it for the book?
Kyle Brett
Ethan and I had never wrote an edited collection before. This was our first entry into this, so even there it was different. We never co-wrote anything. We shared material and posts and stuff like that. He's a creative writer and I've looked over his stories. He's looked over some of my essays and shorter fiction but co-writing and sharing of vision is a little difficult. It's an ebb and flow. It's a give and take. So then add editors from the press, which are great and were fantastic helpers to sort of refine that vision, so now you have at least three human beings, maybe more, working on an introduction, shaping it, creating, co-creating, challenging ideas, focusing points, and it becomes a collaborative process.
Nate Carpenter
And how about the mechanics? Were you working together on a shared document? Would you write something, send it over to him? He would write, or would you just both write separately and then you come together and do a melding?
Kyle Brett
A lot of the initial drafts that went into the prospectus and that went into the first version of the manuscript were written during, and immediately after, the pandemic of 2020 and 2021. So everything was Google Doc driven and everything was like Zoom calls and telephone calls with Ethan going “Hey, I have this idea. Does this work? What about this essay?” And so I remember choosing the essays that that made it into the first round of the manuscript over a Zoom conversation in my apartment. So even the boundary of scholarly place was different here.
Nate Carpenter
How did the final book differ from what you had imagined?
Kyle Brett
Yeah. A bit! And that's (1) not unexpected, and (2) not a terrible thing. As an editor, and as someone who is close to the project, who worked on it through these years . . .I'm close to the project. I valued the contributions of all of our contributors. Their essays were fantastic. But I think the presence of an editor who was not as close to the project or . . .that's not fair. Approaching it in a different mindset could spot things in essays that we wanted to include that just weren't pairing right. The press was great with organization . . .
Nate Carpenter
So when you say editor, you're talking about an editor from the press who's kind of working with you on . . .
Kyle Brett
So I mean, this is Lehigh press writ large. And I think the changes, like dropping of a few essays, reorganizing, these were fun challenges. And I think helped clarify the original vision that we had for the for the text.
Nate Carpenter
Who is the first person you would like to have read this book?
Kyle Brett
That's a really good question. I think, it's impossible but . . .I had a great aunt. She lived to an age of 98. She was an old English Teacher. Aunt Dorothy was phenomenal, and I remember as a kid I was obsessed with her library. And I remember pulling Moby Dick off of her shelf. And she said, “Hey, you can have it if you can read the first page without stuttering or messing up a word.” I didn't get it. She never knew that I went into English. She never knew that I sought out higher degrees, and she never knew that I was, and am, a teacher. And I think what would be . . . she would have no interest, I can see it now. She would have no interest in youth horror. But I think and Dorothy would be . . . would feel something by having the book on her shelf. And would take the Moby Dick copy and go trade it, but I think it would be personally fulfilling to have that. Now, my parents have it for sure. Of course they get it. They've heard about it for years. But I think of Aunt Dorothy as someone who I know can never get it. And that is who it would mean most.
Professionally? That kind of already happened. In the process of building a collection you send it out to readers who review it, and one of my friends who came up in grad school with me, who I admired, wrote me a blurb. And that was mind boggling to me. And I was like, “This is great! Thank you!” I think professionally seeing it in libraries, having friends at work now coming up to me and going: “You published a book?! I want it.” And you're like, PALCI it, because libraries matter. But that's exciting. To have it on my desk at work is exciting.
Nate Carpenter
Well, Kyle it has been really wonderful speaking with you. And I thank you for taking the time today.
Kyle Brett
Thank you, Nate. It's been a pleasure.
Nate Carpenter
Thanks so much for listening. Please subscribe to our podcast for notifications about future episodes. You can learn more about Lehigh University Press at lupress.lehigh.edu. I'm Nate Carpenter. I hope you'll listen again to How My Book Began.
