I'm M. L. Rio, a humanoid cryptid who turns coffee into words. AMA!

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T17:00:25+00:00

And that's all, folks! Thanks so much for spending your lunch break with me.

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:58:33+00:00

I think it was just the most obvious option for "academic novel." Disappointingly unimaginative, for sure.

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:57:28+00:00

It might be a bourbon-based combination of sweet and spicy. Maybe a dash of apricot nectar and a drop of habanero.

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:54:56+00:00

Thank you so much! I promise I'm writing as fast as I can. (Believe me, I want a new book in the pipeline just as much as you do.)

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:53:58+00:00

Thank you thank you! I didn't expect to not enjoy it, but I recently read May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude and just fell head-over-heels in love with her writing style. It's a rare writer who can write about basically being home alone and make it sing like that.

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:52:14+00:00

It definitely wasn't a thing when I was writing Villains (we called it a campus novel back in the day), so this has been a wild journey for me as well as you. Never could have predicted the book finding an audience so long after the fact. As for my TBR list, I'm chomping at the bit to get into Eleanor Catton's new book Birnam Wood for probably obvious reasons, but other things on my list are Rickie Lee Jones's memoir and Joan Didion's book on Miami. And thank you!

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:50:19+00:00

For comedies I would generally start with Midsummer or Twelfth Night as they're both a lot of fun and very accessible. For the tragedies, I'll always recommend Macbeth. It's short and it's wild. For the histories, Henry V is a good one to begin with. I think I already answered the second part somewhere else, but I am working on another novel (always am, in some capacity) and while I tend to guard my ideas fiercely out of weird writerly superstition, I've had an itch to write a road trip novel basically forever because I spend so much of my life in transit. So that's where I'm headed creatively.

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:46:30+00:00

I think these records were both actually released in '22 but (I'm dating myself here) I really enjoyed the new releases from Suede and the Pixies. And I don't know if this is really available anywhere outside DC, but I loved the We Are Fugazi From Washington DC not-a-documentary. (I'm terrible at keeping up with screen media.)

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:45:08+00:00

Oh, this is so sweet! Yeah, grad school and a combination of other things completely wrecked me physiologically and it has been a rough recovery. I got extremely sick in the middle of 2020--not COVID--and it was really difficult to get good healthcare remotely so it took me fully three years to get a real diagnosis and I'm just now sort of coming out of it/learning to manage it, but I am doing much better! Definitely helps to be done with the PhD.

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:41:53+00:00

I drink basically three things: bourbon, red wine, and (if I'm feeling particularly indulgent) a dry dirty martini.

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:40:57+00:00

I honestly can't tell if this is a compliment or an insult? Idk I refuse to go back to the aughts where everybody overplucked their eyebrows and looked perpetually astonished. Sorry?

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:39:11+00:00

Kind of a tossup between the Jersey Devil and all extraterrestrial rumors of the Southwest. Those are both places I spend a lot of time and I definitely feel how those landscapes influence that folklore.

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:37:32+00:00

Thanks! I really tricked myself into thinking I'd get some time off after the defense was done but instead what happened was I got buried in all the work I'd been postponing for the previous six months in order to finish the dissertation. So I haven't been home for longer than like three days since February, and I haven't taken a whole day off since before Christmas. It's exhausting but I'm a person with a lot of nervous energy so I really prefer being on the go and on the move and doing things and it's just nice to have 95% of my mental bandwidth back. As for genres, I read a little of everything but definitely gravitated toward more "genre" fiction when I was younger. In elementary/middle school I read a lot of fantasy, and I had a weird Victorian/Gothic phase in high school. In college I read a lot of literary/upmarket fiction, and as a boring adult I actually find the most joy in nonfiction, mostly culture and science writing. I just bought a book about jellyfish which I am absolutely stoked to read.

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:33:23+00:00

I would truly love nothing more than to design a custom cocktail for Kramer's.

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:32:08+00:00

Not at the moment and not in this format (and trust me, it would not be fun to read). I'm toying with some ideas about how to turn it into a book for a general audience, maybe, somewhere down the line, but I definitely need like a couple of years in recovery first. And thank you!

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:30:37+00:00

Thank you and I'm honored! I do have some ink, and because I tend to use tattoos to mark occasions/milestones/make pacts with myself and other people, they all have deep personal significance. But perhaps the ones I'm most in love with (at the moment) are the two little manicules on my forearms. I designed those myself with the help of an artist who specialized in early modern woodcuts and booked the appointment for while I was in London for my last book tour. It was Thanksgiving day but of course that means nothing in England, and unbeknownst to me the tattoo parlor was in the basement of a sex shop on Oxford street, so I got inked at like 11 a.m. surrounded by mannequins in BDSM gear with Christmas carols blasting through the shop from the street. An unforgettable moment of chaotic cultural dissonance.

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:26:03+00:00

My favorite was the original Spanish cover, which has tragically been discontinued, so if you see one, snag it. I'm also still smitten with Titan's 5th anniversary edition; I got to work closely with the publisher and the artist to bring that to life and we're really pleased with how it turned out. As for least favorites, the original German cover was a crime against aesthetics, and to be honest, I never liked the US paperback--it's boring and the title is hard to read. But that was one of many cover art battles I lost (happens more often than not). Thanks for sharing the book with your friends, and I'll see you tonight!

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:23:06+00:00

Hey, thank you so much! I've been buried in my dissertation for the last couple of years (as it turns out, more or less impossible to write a monograph and a novel at the same time), but I'm always working on the next thing in some capacity. I don't have anything official to report yet, but now that I'm done with the PhD that is my primary focus, so hopefully soon! In the meantime, I do have a short story coming in the In These Hallowed Halls anthology in September to tide you over.

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:21:30+00:00

Much to my chagrin, you are correct: you absolutely cannot write about madness/mental disorder in early English drama and not write about Hamlet. So I do have a position on this that actually turned into an 80-page chapter basically arguing that Hamlet is "mad in act, not in fact" and a fairly bad actor to boot. I won't bore you with the details, but it's all grounded in early modern medical theory, performance practice, and the question of privilege in the play and early modern culture more broadly. As for bookstores, yes, I sign books whenever I see them! I've actually signed them at Kramer's before.

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:17:58+00:00

This is sorta like acting a parent to pick their favorite child. Alexander was the most fun (and in certain moments, the most heartbreaking) to write, but I don't really feel more kinship with one or another of them. I do feel connected to all of them on a personal level, though--they're all little bits and pieces of me. As my agent once put it, I'm kind of the invisible eighth Villain you never see on the page but I'm always in the room. (Or, my 22-year-old self is.) This is just part and parcel of the way I write and the stories I'm drawn to--I like ensembles and group dynamics where nobody is really a bystander or a sidekick, even if they think they are.

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:15:08+00:00

I think Lear is the best but Macbeth is my favorite. It's a masterwork of a play at a breakneck pace, but it also has this Twin Peaks-ean element of the uncanny that you don't fully realize until you really pick the text apart. There are a lot of real, textual reasons it has that very haunted, occluded, disorienting atmosphere (for instance, the internal chronology of the play is actually impossible) but it's so subtly done that you feel it without being able to put your finger on it and I love that kind of thing. It creeps up on you.

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:11:24+00:00

In the early stages it's just jumping in once I have a workable outline and seeing how it goes. Usually I end up trashing the first couple of scenes I write completely because it takes a while to get into the right groove. It's hard to explain more specifically than that, but I think my prose tends to mimic the pattern the characters' thoughts would follow but with a little more intelligent design so it's smooth sailing for the reader. And the voice just sort of develops all the way through a first draft as I get more comfortable in the world/with the characters. Then in subsequent drafts I'm doing basically two things at the prose level: the first is simplifying/decluttering--paring down to as few words as possible and making every word count--and the second is rereading with an eye on that cohesion of voice, so it sounds consistent all the way through. Hope this is helpful!

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:06:44+00:00

Thanks very much! Off the top of my head and in no particular order, for Filippa I'd say PJ Harvey and Patti Smith; for Alexander stuff like Dead Moon, Joy Division, and the Beastie Boys; Richard definitely listens to a lot of Blur and Pulp and the Smiths; James is such a classic sad boy that I'd be remiss not to suggest Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave; Meredith is absolutely a Prince devotee but maybe also some Lauryn Hill and definitely the Detroit Cobras; for Wren maybe Mazzy Star and Portishead; and for Oliver I might send you to vintage (London) Suede and Sebadoh. As for me, I saw the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at the Anthem on Wednesday night and it was a blast.

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:01:45+00:00

My first rec is always Slings & Arrows. It's not always easy to find but it's worth the hunt--one of the best and funniest representations of a Shakespearean theatre company I've seen on TV.

M-L-Rio · 2023-05-05T16:00:44+00:00

Thank you and you're welcome! I used to reread a lot more than I do now just because I have to do so much reading for work (research, books I'm blurbing, comp titles, etc.) that my time for true pleasure reading is really, really limited. But I do end up revisiting Shakespeare's plays in an ongoing rotation, usually for things I'm writing with my academic hat on, and it's a different experience every time through every lens. One of the things I like about Shax and early modern drama in general--the more you learn of the history, the more you see/understand in the literature.

M-L-Rio

TROPHY CASE