Email gets a bad rap. Well, actually, it might be largely deserved, but that’s not the fault of email itself. Everyone loves the ding of a good email showing up. A unique part of being a writer is waiting a long time for an email only to have it be a rejection. Writers, then, especially need some nice emails. Long story short, Mitch Nobis wanted more good emails, and because he also likes interviewing writers, Inbox Wisdom: Email Interviews on Creativity was born.

John Chrostek is a writer, editor and designer living in Buffalo, NY, with his partner Amanda and their border collie Madeline. He is the EIC of the literary magazine Cold Signal and the co-owner of the new downtown bookstore Evening House with Amanda. He is the author of the books Boxcutters andFeast of the Pale Leviathan, and he has been featured in magazines like Little Engines, Coffin Bell, X-R-A-Y, HAD, Cease Cows, Hex Literary, Maudlin House, Scrawl Place, Deep Overstock, River Heron Review, Taco Bell Quarterly and more.

[Interviewer’s Note: It took me a while to get these interviews posted. Back when I began this interview with John in the spring of 2025, Feast of the Pale Leviathan wasn’t out yet, but you can now get it here!]

A lot of your work (and your editorial curation) veers toward surrealism and horror. What draws your creative attention in that direction instead of, say, realistic fiction or comedy or something else?

I’ve had this question going in circles in my head since I first read it. My first knee jerk response was: But I love realistic fiction and comedy! Especially comedy. I love making people laugh whenever I can. But at the same time, I can’t really argue with the assessment. I think that surrealism and horror are the dominant strains in my work and in the work I want to promote right now because they are such malleable forms. I love irreality in fiction because in irreality I often find really compelling images, characters and ideas that have so much to say about life. There’s a lot of wisdom in the language of dreams and myths. But I also desperately need (I’m searching for the right phrasing here) that specific kind of organic matter literary fiction produces in my genre fiction. There’s a sensitivity to the body, a careful touch with emotions and pacing, an ability to go beyond basic tropes in literary fiction that I think a lot of genre fiction can struggle to access. What I’d be happiest to do, with my own writing and with Cold Signal, is to bridge the middle. I want genre fiction that gestures at life, that encompasses the fullness and strangeness of it all, that’s trying to genuinely say something beyond “here’s an interesting story.” There’s a lot of great writers I think are capable of playing in that zone, but it’s maybe poorly defined in the popular imagination. With Boxcutters, I wanted to shove everything I love in short fiction into one book, into as many of the stories as possible, which was really satisfying (if it doesn’t also make this shit really hard to sell!)

I kept thinking about this and wanted to add that horror and surrealism have also been of interest for me for years now because I find them to be comforting. I think that dark stories tend to help people who struggle with the outside world, with the heavy burden that normalcy can sometimes be. Shirley Jackson is a foundational force in horror, and so much of her work is about the violence below the surface of our society that often goes deliberately ignored or suppressed. Same with Kafka. In the pandemic, when we were laid off from our jobs and the wildfire smoke turned the sky red, Kafka’s short stories were a lifeline to me. They felt like they depicted the world I was facing, a large and cruel structure difficult to understand and harder to survive. For me, it helps me to go on. To make meaning out of the challenging rather than to ignore it. So I think there’s a lot of empathy and support in these stories, even when they can seem initially bleak and depressing. It’s all bitter medicine that does its job. 

I love these answers. Personally, I’ve never been into shock horror (not sure that’s the right term, but I don’t like the hyperviolent stuff like torture), and I think it’s because I’m there for the  “bitter medicine” as you called it. I want the big ideas, not the gore, because I’m hoping the story will make me think and reflect and make connections between reality and rationality when those two aren’t obviously connecting. I should also add I’m very much looking forward to Boxcutters showing up in my mailbox soon (note: I have since read it and loved it), and to clarify my first question, I think you’re great at writing a wide range, including literary and horror/surreal. I want to come back to your point about dreams and myths. I haven’t been sleeping well lately, which means I’m in dream cycles more than you’re supposed to be. It’s kind of a silver lining to sleep troubles, though, because I’m always interested in where my subconscious spends its time. I also think fiction in general acts a bit like dreams for us in that it takes our brains that can be overly rooted in the daily mundanities and forces them to consider life from other perspectives. When you’re writing, how much are you exploring spaces you’re curious about but haven’t been allowed to really spend time delving into deeply? How much is writing an escape from daily demands? 

That’s fair! Even after all this time, I’m still heavily affected by the visceral side of horror, but if it’s got meat on the bones I grow to love it after the adrenaline comes down. (ASIDE: Also, thanks for the kind words! I didn’t want you to think I was feeling defensive about your read on my work, lol, it was fair! Should’ve included the “hahaha” to clarify that, but I decided against it at the last moment)

Sorry to hear about the dysregulated sleep, Mitch. I’m a chronic insomniac as well. I go through periods when I just can’t sleep until around 4 AM. Solidarity and good regular rest to you. Love your point about the counterbalancing of dreams, though. It’s alchemical what it does to us. To your question, it’s definitely something I love deeply about writing. I like trying to take something, an issue or a problem or a feeling, and expand it, stretch it into irreality to dig deep into it. It’s an escape from the bullshit, the white noise, but it also can be a really spiritual act. Putting all the components of life into a blender and creating this sharp, mysterious frame to pour it into. Everything I write is drawn from my life, is directly talking back to my life, but I don’t want to be stuck in my own biography. There’s people I want to understand better. There’s crises I want to work through (being seen, acting tough, losing hair, opening up, e.g.) There’s a lot of ourselves that never get to be real, to become grounded in material reality, but it’s all still a part of us and it matters and colors the rest. I think those are the stories that mean the most to me, when I get something down like that feels alive but isn’t just me.

I always love when writers who do speculative work say it’s still speaking back to their lives. I think that’s inherent in art, really. There may be no obvious or clear connection between something we make and how it speaks to the artist, but why else would the artist make it other than to speak back to their life in some way? Circling back to the idea of how dreams can impact our creativity, I think that “speaking back” can be subconscious sometimes. Do you ever have that moment where engaging in the writing led you to realizing something, or are you more of a planner? This is ultimately that old writers question phrased differently, but do you let the writing take you somewhere, or are you driving the piece toward a known destination? 

To answer your question, I think I personally fall somewhere in the center. I frequently start with a structure to build from: a pun, a pitch, a title, an image or a character that I want to build around. With short stories, I’ll normally sit with the concept for a while before I’m ready to play with it, let it soak in the subconscious for a while and get some flavor. Then when it comes to the actual writing process, it becomes more about the poetry and the line and the emotionality, and it’s a lot of erasing and false starts until I land on something I resonate with. Sometimes, rarely, I get lucky and a short story comes out almost done in one go. Those I always remember fondly, because they tend to really speak back like we were talking about.

With Feast of the Pale Leviathan, that’s a story that’s been building up in me for over a decade. I’ve been fixated on Hobbes’ Leviathan and Atlantis for a long time, and I knew I wanted to find a narrative to use either or both. Then right before the pandemic, I floated the idea of a man being devoured by a Hobbes’ Leviathan swimming in the sea to a friend. A Leviathan in every sense of the word. Shortly thereafter, the pandemic hit and all of us at Powell’s were laid off. The future seemed uncertain, terrifying, especially in Portland that summer with the backlash to the marches and the wildfire smoke turning the sky red. The story became a distraction to dive into, originally meant to be a novella. I tried to trim it down to a short story just to get a grip on it, but everyone who read that draft said it felt too incomplete. It was then it became something a lot more grounded in my own life experiences (with more than a half-step away from hard biography, as I try very hard not to write about people or memories in my life too 1:1), connected to my complicated feelings about this moment in history and it ended up taking its current shape and meaning the world to me. Boxcutters, in comparison, was more like a measured kind of therapy, where the surprises still arose but more in the details and the little moments. But I love that in short fiction, those little moments carry so much water. You can’t make a body without skin and bone, but the proportions are so different with short stories versus novels. They can become such strange animals. 

I love the variety in your answer. I’m always a little leery (but also awed) by writers who work in a pretty strict regiment. I love how your answer acknowledges that different pieces require different approaches from us as writers and that some take a LOT of time to cook before getting written. Of course, I might love that answer just because I’m the same way. 🙂 You’re also incredibly busy starting a brick and mortar book store. For local readers of this series, we have a great new indie bookstore in Farmington, Michigan, too. It seems to me that one reason people love their local independent bookstores so much is that they feel more vibrant and creative than a chain. I miss Borders and am happy that Barnes & Noble still exists, but nothing feels the same as a great small bookshop. What role does creativity play in starting a small business? The numbers are daunting of course, but what parts are fun and creative? 

That’s a lovely question. Evening House has been so much fun to make happen (but also as you said, a bit daunting economically, lol) We’ve been lucky to find some extremely sweet and supportive people at the Lane on Main who want to uplift small businesses, so it was basically a chance to build up from nothing to something. With the move to the storefront this month, there’s been a whole host of logistical challenges and exhausting tasks to knock out, but it’s stayed fun the entire time.

Amanda and I have just talked for years about the joy of bookselling. It’s a really wonderful industry, if a difficult one, but one we’re both passionate about. Over the last year, Amanda’s done so so much to make this thing a reality. In the beginning, we talked a lot about what Evening House was, what might make it special or worth caring about. We both love books outside the best seller list, indie presses, books in translation, as well as the burgeoning artistic mega-culture of the weird that seems to extend beyond boundaries and borders. For us, making a smaller collection that’s really hand-picked and easy to explore was important. A place to discover new things rather than a place for all things. We also just cannot afford to go wall-to-wall books, so all the more reason to lean into our strengths and keep it lean to start.

 As we’ve started building the physical space (for the small suite and now the slightly larger storefront), what we’ve been focused on is making a place that’s nice to spend time in. A place to relax, spring, summer or winter, that’s inviting and off-kilter, to inspire people to spend some time with the books and with each other. We also want to feel like one small node in the larger, healthy ecosystem of indie books. I think that’s why bookstores have been doing so well lately. Indie bookstores are in it together against Goliath, and that’s how we should act. I see every bookstore as a separate and beautiful vision, a thin slice of the ocean of literature, even when their interests overlap. We want all of them to succeed, we want everyone to find the stores that speak to them and feel like a third space to cherish.   

With the world the way it’s been, there’s something really beautiful about trying to make a new welcoming place for others to be, something we can put our whole hearts into. Being able to connect people with books and celebrate beautiful strange books is just really fulfilling and worth the risk. Even if we fail, if it all falls apart, I don’t think I could regret it if I tried!

Thanks for that wonderful response about bookstores amid our current world that seems to prefer cold profits. There was a lot of love in that answer, and I’m not sure how my brain works but that made me think about early reading loves. What did you read as a child, teen, or early adult that made you want to write yourself? How did that input lead to output? 

Growing up, I knew I wanted to tell stories somehow, I just didn’t know what was feasible or was the best medium for me. Before middle school, I loved fantasy books like Lord of the Rings, detective books like Encyclopedia Brown and Harriet the Spy, as well as those old abridged versions of classics like Three Musketeers, Jekyll and Hyde. I also would pick up Steven King books my dad would leave around the house. When I was in fifth grade, I read Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, which I think really started me on the path I’m on now. I kept reading a lot of classics (with a bent towards the fantastic) as well as more modern works of science fiction and fantasy. Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jose Saramago, GRRM, Murakami, more Bradbury. Vonnegut was essential for me in high school. I liked older, established books and stories, because I was always attracted to the past. Not because I wanted to live back then, but because it was fascinating and alien and realer than real? And it made me feel like death was less terrifying, that people could live on in their stories and talk to people through their fiction.

It all gelled together when I got deeper into modern lit and also found Ursula K. LeGuin. Lathe of Heaven catalyzed it all and the Dispossessed sealed the deal. That’s around when I figured out what I was doing. LeGuin, Saunders, Shirley Jackson, rediscovering Kafka, PKD. I got sent in the right direction.

I also for a while thought I wanted to be a filmmaker and writer at the same time (put out movies and books somehow, lol, just pure belief it was possible because I wanted it so bad) so there’s a long list of movies I love that I studied and loved and influence my writing to this day, but that’d be a whole other long too-long answer!

Ha, yeah, someone else needs to start an interview series or podcast or something where writers talk about movies and filmmakers talk about books! That could be pretty great, really. John, this has been a real pleasure. I do hope to keep these interviews on the short end, though, so sadly we should wrap up.  For your last question, could you tell us a little about your most recent book (or in your case, books, plural!) and about what you think you might focus on next? To bring us full circle, I guess you could say, please describe how your creative works look as finished products versus in-progress projects. 

It’s been amazing, Mitch. I can’t thank you enough for reaching out and asking me such engaging questions!

As you mentioned, I’ve got two books out in short succession. Boxcutters, my book of short stories, is out now with Malarkey Books, and Feast of the Pale Leviathan, my debut novel, will be out August 26th with Deep Overstock Books!

Boxcutters is a wide-ranging book of stories, flitting between weird literary fiction to more genre-heavy tales of horror, science fiction and mythic fantasy. There’s a strong bent towards the absurd and the satirical with a fair amount of sadness and joy and love. Right now, the title seems to me to be most about the urge to break out of confines, to be bigger and stranger and more organic of a person than something that’s easy to put into a box! 

Feast of the Pale Leviathan is another escapist fantasy of sorts. It’s my personal take on the concept of Hobbes’ Leviathan, and the singular image from the frontispiece of a titan made of many men. In “Feast”, a man falls asleep on a river raft tube and drifts out to sea, where he is found by the kaiju Leviathan and devoured whole. Inside, he finds a community of survivors clinging to life inside the guts of the beast. To escape, he learns to integrate and through strange circumstance, learns of the cult that has been feeding the beast to sustain a New Atlantis. I compare it a lot to Clive Barker’s “In The Hills, The Cities”, John Langan’s “The Fisherman”, Karlo Yeager Rodridguez’s “As the Shore to the Tides, So Blood Calls to Blood”, Moby Dick and Attack on Titan, among a host of other comparables and inspirations.

It’s a really strange place to be in, having these two books out or nearing release. I’m certainly proud of the effort it took to make them and so thankful for the collaborators and supporters I’ve had who helped make them both a reality. Ultimately, what I love best about writing is the act of writing itself, and the friendships that writing and reading enables. Whatever life these books have, I’m just happy to be living this life and I’m excited to keep at it and see where the craft takes me. In the short term, I’ve got more Cold Signal and Evening House work ahead of me, and a good list of ideas for stories that could be shorter or longer depending on their own needs, but I’m in no big rush to put out another book! It’s been a crazy few months and I’m just excited to find some time to relax and let the good energy flow as it needs to. 

Thanks again for everything!!

Fantastic last answer, John, and thanks again for doing the interview!

Inbox Wisdom is an interview series conducted by Farmington writer Mitchell Nobis. He is the author of The Size of the Horizon, or, I Explained Everything to the Trees (Match Factory Editions, 2025). He also hosts the Wednesday Night Sessions reading series for KickstART Farmington, facilitates the Teachers as Poets group for the National Writing Project, and co-founded the Not at AWP (NAWP) reading series. For more, see mitchnobis.com.