In the Spotlight: Liliana Carstea
On Romanian Culture, Strange Tales, and Witchcraft
I spoke with Liliana Carstea via email where we discuss homeland, macabre stories, and witchery writing. Find our conversation below.
Raquel Abrantes: Our roots help to shape our character. You are a Romanian writer. To what extent is your writing influenced by your culture?
Liliana Carstea: My writing is really influenced by parts of my Romanian heritage and our folklore, especially pagan beliefs. I spent a lot of my school holidays in small villages with relatives or family friends, so I was exposed to a plethora of folk tales and rural myths—some were quite grotesque and those stuck with me the most. Romanians, in general, are very superstitious, and they believe in all sorts of things, such as strigoi (the undead who feed on the blood of the living), sânziene (fairies who can be both gentle and fierce), or the dead returning from the grave to get revenge. Our approach to death is, as I see it, honest and very accepting—we often prepare our dearly departed for burial, talk to them, mourn them during gatherings around an open casket, take post-mortem photographs, and share food in their name. I have a problem with how Western culture addresses mortality and loss—it’s all very cold and clinical.
RA: In your tale The Account of a Moth Mother II you wrote: “I wasn’t born in the woods to be afraid. I know some things to be sacred, like being loved by a Romanian woman.” Tell us about the love of those women.
LC: Most of the women in my stories are shaped from the flesh and what I imagine to be the thoughts of my grandmothers, my aunts, my mother, and other women of their generations, who learned about their womanhood through the eyes of a fractured society. They had no choice in how they existed as women, and this damaged their perception of love. In 1966, Ceausescu’s Decree 770 was enacted—he wanted to raise the birth rate to strengthen the economy of our country, because he was obsessed with his legacy. Under this decree, women under the age of forty who didn’t already have four children were forbidden access to contraception, and abortions became illegal. This led to a large number of lives lost, to poverty, depression, stigma, and so many unwanted children. There are a few documentaries about the scale of the cruelty in the orphanages created during Ceausescu’s era—the images and confessions are brutal beyond words.
As a writer, I want to highlight the pain of these women, but also their ferocity, and how some of their actions have impacted their children, my generation. It’s not surprising that I mostly want to write about mothers and daughters at the moment. Ancestral healing is very important to me as a young Romanian woman.
RA: Ancient, magical, and strange are adjectives that characterize your work. Feeding Stillness with Life, A Woman Waiting, as well as Blessed Be Beltane are imbued in these elements. What fascinates you about them?
LC: To me, there is a wonderful sense of empowerment coming from things ancient, magical, and strange, so simply exploring that is fascinating. In the stories you mention, I simply extracted macabre elements from my culture and tried to normalise them, to give them new qualities. There is something liberating, on a deeper level, about exploring ‘the other’ in women—and that’s what I’ve been trying to do in my fiction. We’re so often told that a ‘good’ woman is someone delicate, feminine, soft in manners. Of course, there isn’t anything wrong with being those things, but there is so much more that women are. I like to explore less socially-accepted female traits: the women in my stories can be vengeful, cruel, brutal. They are witches, wild entities, nocturnal creatures. They commit unforgivable acts through their dark powers. They symbolise the biggest nightmare for the patriarchy. They don’t exist to set examples, but to free themselves, and that’s why it’s essential for me to write magical realist tales in which they dominate the narrative.
RA: Your story written in the form of letters and postcards addresses several themes such as intolerance, sisterhood, and witchcraft. What sparked the idea for this story? Why did you decide to write it in this format?
LC: It’s funny, but I can’t clearly explain why and how this story turned out the way it did mostly because it wasn’t planned at all. The idea for it was sparked by my interest in witchcraft and by how much I’ve been missing my sister. I knew I wanted to simulate an old and quite obsolete way of communicating, but that was it. I wouldn’t recommend writing a story without any outline, especially if that story is intended for publication, but I was very self-indulgent with it because there was no pressure, it was all for my personal website. And I wanted to experiment with format (I’ve been writing only flash fiction for the past two years) and decided to do it in parts because I honestly didn’t remember how to write a longer story. Oddly, this one had its own agenda, almost like a disconcerted ghost who wanted to be heard. I didn’t even manage to give it a title, I now realise.
RA: The final paragraph is both powerful and visceral. What do you wish to convey to the reader?
LC: Thank you! I’m more interested in language and how prose can create spaces and images, than in plot and characters—the latter are not my main concern because to me they exist only to make the story palpable, not as concrete entities. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about them, but I don’t spend much time coming up with backstories and personality traits—I simply allow these characters to be independent. Even if my work is not poetry, sometimes it feels close to that. I hope the reader can appreciate this predominantly surrealist style of telling tales. My intention is to offer enough to relate to, while I try to show that playing with aesthetics isn’t and shouldn’t be pretentious, but an approach to learning about our psyches. There is so much we can’t know about ourselves, therefore the expectation of clear resolutions in fiction doesn’t seem realistic to me.
RA: You consult the cards. How does this practice benefit your written work? Do you consider yourself a word witch?
LC: I love consulting the cards! It feels like an otherworldly influence, one that means absolutely no harm. I know many people who think tarot works with evil forces, or that it is capable of predicting the future, so they fear it—I think they couldn’t be further from the truth. Tarot doesn’t work that way, you can’t exactly foretell events with it. Utilised as a daily or frequent practice, either for personal or creative reasons, it can be a fascinating tool. I’m still learning how to let the cards speak to me. My writing is rarely conscious, so the cards bring me messages from a realm I can’t easily access otherwise.
I do consider myself a word witch. I work with words, I serve them, and I am guided by them. When I write, especially short texts, each word or phrase is placed the way it is because it felt right to put it there. It is a ritual of self-expression, even if I don’t fully control it.
RA: Some writers claim that the subconscious is important to their work. How crucial are dreams when it comes to your short stories? Have you received characters through them?
LC: Most of my stories are fabricated in my mind, initially without my involvement, in a hidden space. The thing is, as a writer I feel it’s vital to have a curious nature about all sorts of things. Feeding that curiosity helps create an extension of ourselves and it will eventually bleed into our dreams, whether we remember them or not. I tend to dream every other night and in most cases forget about what, but I can always recollect fleeting glimpses and how a dream made me feel. Most of my dreams are boring, just bizarre conversations with people I know and occasional running and flying (which is pretty cool). I rarely get nightmares, but when I do, I see them as gentle warnings. The only dreams I know for sure have offered me characters are one in which a woman was sewing herself inside blue wallpaper, and another in which I turned into a huge moth and punished a man who came to attack me in the barn where I was hiding.
RA: You are currently working on a collection of short stories. Do you have rituals to do before beginning the writing session? Can you share your creative process?
LC: As with most things that characterise me, my writing ritual is quite eclectic, though pretty steady. I keep a lot of notes on my phone and in my diary. I talk about writing with people I trust, writers or not, because contrary to what I thought years ago, writing isn’t a solitary process. If I feel terribly emptied of words and I want to write a story, which happens often, I do writing exercises and try to force the writing process a bit, otherwise I won’t ever do it—I can be complacent at times and I want to challenge that.
On a good day, I wake up early, have breakfast and a tarot card, followed by a session of reading. I always read before I start writing because it sets a certain mood I need. Plenty of writers would say they dislike being actively influenced by others’ work, but I think influence is unavoidable. No writing is ever ‘new’, and it always contains, whether from fiction or real-life stories, something that doesn’t belong to us. Oh, and I can’t listen to any kind of music when I write.
RA: You once said and I quote: “My writing is my little form of activism. My inspiration comes a lot from Romanian folklore and the struggles of women in my country, during & after the dictatorship of Ceausescu.” Do you think writing has a preponderant role to raise awareness?
LC: It would be presumptuous of me to say that all writing must have an activist quality to it, but in the end I don’t think we can escape that. I come from a simple family, but my sister and I were luckier than other kids my age in that my parents have always loved books. We were raised by people who were out in the streets during the Romanian revolution in ’89. My dad is a feminist and my mum a survivor. My Romanian friends could tell you all about the gatherings organised by my parents. We’ve always talked freely in my home, from politics, sex and sexual identity, and mental health issues, to death, the occult, and the macabre. Through my writing, I want to create the same kind of comfortable space for discussion, for thinking. I care about what I say and how I say it, but I know when not to censor myself or force my work into a particular mould.
RA: Can you name a few of your favourite books?
LC: I’m always bad at picking favourites, but here are some recent ones:
Collections of short stories: Dark Tales by Shirley Jackson, The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, The Doll’s Alphabet by Camilla Grudova (my writer’s epiphany), Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez, The Ammonite Violin by Caitlin R. Kiernan, The Dark Domain by Stefan Grabinski, You’ll Know When You Get There by Lynda E. Rucker, and What is Yours is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi.
Novels: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, The Wanderer by Timothy J. Jarvis, In the House in the Dark of the Woods by Laird Hunt, The Grip of It by Jac Jemc, Threats by Amelia Gray, The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington, Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda, and Glister by John Burnside.
Liliana Carstea is a Romanian writer fascinated with the macabre, the ancient, and the magical. She writes mostly strange and magical realist tales inspired by her culturally rich background. Through her short stories, she hopes to illuminate the tragedy and complexity of her culture. She currently lives in the UK, and has a BA with Honours in Creative Writing from the University of Bedfordshire. You can find her on Instagram with the handle @adaughterofmoths, and her work on her website (adaughterofmoths.com), in Black Flowers -Volume Seven (blackflowers.online), and in CIVILIAN (civilianglobal.com).
About the Interviewer
Raquel Dionísio Abrantes is a writer from Portugal. She has a Bachelor's Degree and a Master’s Degree in Cinema from Universidade da Beira Interior. Raquel gave a Master Class in Writing of Scripts about Narrative Structure. Her writing has appeared on Write or Die Tribe, Better Than Starbucks, The Pangolin Review, New Hand Lab, Fleas on the Dog and The Fictional Café. She writes for Read Poetry. More about her work can be found on Instagram, @woodland.poem