Q: What work of art has been the most inspiring for you?
A: No one particular work of art, but when I was eight years old, my mother and I moved in with the man who would become my stepfather a year or so later. His closets were a treasure trove of comic books and speculative fiction paperbacks (which was definitely a huge influence on me as a writer!) but the thing that first caught my eye about his house were the posters he had taped up all over the walls. Prints by Frazetta, Vallejo and more were plastered over every square inch, depicting mighty warriors, monstrous beasts, spaceships with guns blazing… I was enchanted, and whenever I had trouble falling asleep right away at night, I would think of one of those prints and a story about it. Who were they? What were they fighting for? What alien or fantasy world had they sprung from? Many of the stories I still write today took their earliest inspiration from some of those prints.
Lisa Short’s story “Genesis”
in Metaphorosis Friday, 15 October 2021.
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