Welcome to Basement News
Hey, I’m Erica, and this is Basement News. I’m the author of the novel TEAR (Invisible Publishing, 2022) and the strange hybrid book that is essentially a novel, provisionally titled IN THE CICADA SUMMER (W. W. Norton & Co., 2024). I’m also a teacher of English literature/creative writing and training to be a librarian.
You can learn more about me and my writing on my website, but all you need to know for starters is that I’m all books, books, books. (Okay, yes, sometimes art, movies, and TV shows—but mostly books.)
I created this newsletter as a space to house my thoughts on writing, reading, publishing, rewriting, thinking, working, studying, re-thinking, and living (dying?). More specifically, I created it as a space to house my thoughts that isn’t social media. Instagram is also a good place to keep tabs on my major writing updates, but without nearly as much nuance and musing. In general I find social media to be a sad clown-show fever dream funhouse where our hopes and best intentions go to fizz and disappear; however(!), sometimes fever dream funhouses are essential, and will inevitably roll on into the ether, and must be managed as they do so.
Speaking of fever dreams, have you read my book, Tear? It was published in September of 2022 with Invisible Publishing and has been dominating my life (in a good way) for the past six months or so. Although only four months have passed since the book was released into the world, there is a lot of work that leads up to official publication, most of which is intensely collaborative and therefore intensely rewarding. (Think copyediting, cover design, requesting blurbs, interviewing, event planning…)
Tear is about a young woman named Frances, who is so quiet and reclusive that her upstairs roommates sometimes forget she exists. Isolated in the basement, and on the brink of graduating from university, Frances herself starts to question the realities of her own existence. She can’t remember there being a lock on the door at the top of the basement stairs—and yet, when she turns the knob, the door won’t open. She can’t tell the difference between her childhood memories, which bloom like flowers in the dark basement, and her dreams. Worse still, she can’t ignore the very real tapping sound now coming—insistently, violently—threatening to break through her bedroom wall.
With the thematic considerations of Mary Shelley and Shirley Jackson’s work, and in the style of Herta Müller and Daisy Johnson, Tear is both a horrifyingly deformed Bildungsroman and a bristling reclamation of female rage. Blurring the real and the imagined, this lyric debut novel unflinchingly engages with contemporary feminist issues and explores the detrimental effects of false narratives, gaslighting, and manipulation on young women.
For Broken Pencil Magazine, Maria Cichosz wrote,
Where does trauma make its home? What shape does it take when it is suppressed, left to wander the hallways of our minds, linger in the spaces between? Tear puts these questions at its core, spinning them into a twilight world where materiality and metaphor collide as trauma becomes embodied in its quest to live and be heard. … [What results] is a gripping, frightening novel with a deeply gothic sensibility somewhere between Henry James and Shirley Jackson. […] Tear is a delightfully creepy, lyrical novel.
And in Book Therapy for Open Book, Stacey May Fowles wrote,
Tear is a deeply claustrophobic novel, concerned with what is real and what is imagined, and how being confined between the two is genuine torture. It is about the fears that come from within and the monsters we manifest as a result, forces that eventually destroy us—become us—without anyone even noticing. … It offers up the truly destructive forces of human emotion and human neglect, and gives us a loss that matters—excruciatingly so.
Ultimately, the protagonist of Tear—Frances—descends into the physical basement space of her home and the metaphorical basement space of her mind to reckon with what has happened and what is happening to her. She descends into the basement of herself.
Although I won’t be digging into the deepest parts of myself in these update posts, Basement News is still a form of descension, a quiet space of reflection and respite. Here you’ll receive not only updates on my writing and upcoming events, but also my thoughts on what I’ve been reading and watching, where I’ve been travelling, and how I’ve been getting on with life in general.
So, welcome to the basement. Don’t forget to come up for air and deep breaths, go outside, laugh heartily, eat protein, and take care of yourself.
With love,
E