A.C. Wise Sings the Ballad of the Bone Road: Criticism & Craft from Haunted Cities

Mookie Spitz welcomes A.C. Wise to the 24th episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory: a Canadian-born, award-winning speculative writer, and one of the most incisive critics across genre circles. Wise boldly crosses boundaries between science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and her decades-long career has explored them from both sides of the page as creator and critic. 

Mookie and Alison chat about her work as an author of novels like Wendy, Darling and Hooked — quirky, character-driven stories that reveal trauma, identity, and belonging through fantastical lenses, written alongside her celebrated short fiction such as those in The Ghost Sequences collection, where ghosts, monsters, and eerie impossible moments become mirrors for alienation and self-discovery.

Alison's prolific contributions to creative writing and literary criticism have sharpened her discerning eye, making her an even more insightful author and reviewer. From Apex Magazine to Locus, A.C. brings dedication, empathy, and rigor to all her pursuits as she constantly asks herself and her readers: whose story is being told, who gets to tell it, and what does that choice reveal about us? 

Their lively conversation explores:

• Her philosophy of criticism as a creative discipline, not just a thumbs-up / downswing based on her own subjective tastes.
• How themes of alienation, memory, and self-discovery thread through her characters: from haunted cityscapes to fractured identities.
• The mutual influence between her reviewing and her own storytelling, and how criticism sharpens her empathy, craft, and lived experiences. 
• Why atmosphere and character matter more than spectacle, and why good speculative fiction inhabits moody worlds with complex characters. 
• Exploration of the bleak, the melancholic, the unresolved, and why those states are where the most compelling drama emerges.  

Alison goes beyond writing as merely a craft, and treats storytelling as a way of better understanding the world and ourselves, and of questioning what others overlook. Mookie wholeheartedly agrees: the true power of speculative fiction resides in exposing the flaws, the pain, and the very human hope that by telling these tales we might discover things we've somehow known and felt all along. 

The Guest

A.C. Wise is the author of the numerous novels and novellas, and over a hundred short stories. Her work has won the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, and has been a finalist for the Nebula Awards, Stoker, World Fantasy, Locus, British Fantasy, Aurora, Lambda, and Ignyte Awards. In addition to her fiction, she contributes a review column to Apex Magazine.

Her Website: https://acwise.net/