by Ana Hein | Jun 5, 2026
You wouldn’t expect a show centered on undead, blood-drinking, immortal creatures of the night to be the perfect model for how to write personal narrative, but you’d certainly be pleasantly surprised to discover so when watching it with your roommate. When I saw AMC’s television adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, I was already familiar with the story of Louis, Lestat, and Claudia from the original novel and the 90s film adaptation. As a vampire-loving tween who grew into a vampire-loving adult, I adored the first iteration of The Vampire Chronicles, though I hadn’t continued with the book series, intimidated by its volume of titles. But when my roommate urged me to watch two seasons’ worth of vampiric melancholy with them, what surprised me the most wasn’t how the original queer subtext of Louis and Lestat’s relationship was now an unambiguous life partnership, or how deftly handled the racial reimaging of Louis and Claudia as Black was, but how accurately the show captured what it means to craft a story from memory and reckon with one’s past. Every episode, I’d quip something like, “I literally had this conversation in my MFA,” or “This is totally what it’s like to write nonfiction,” or “Yup, as a writer, can confirm.” I’m sure my roommate was thrilled to hear my unsolicited professional opinion.
by Ana Hein | May 28, 2026
Ojeda explores abstract ideas and interiority through her characters, creating not a sequence of events that build into a plot per se, but a series of interlocking ideas.
Mónica Ojeda estranges sound. Across her now three novels translated into English by Sarah Booker, the Ecuadorian horror writer has penned some of the weirdest, most interesting sentences I’ve ever read. Sentences that jump perspectives from clause to clause. Sentences that spiral in on their own syntax. Sentences alive with surprising, disturbing metaphors. Things are always other things in her writing: “To sing is to enter the lonesome night of the breast”; “Every head is a cave that dreams”; “Volcanoes are the tear ducts of the earth!” She is an expert in using the unit of the sentence to show the simultaneous beauty and grotesqueness of language. Throughout her oeuvre, Ojeda positions art as both an expressive and corrupting force, a vehicle of annihilation and ascension for her characters, something at the forefront of her latest novel.
by Ana Hein | Apr 22, 2026
For the last third of her memoir, Trauma Plot, Jamie Hood is in therapy. This fifth and final section of the book is composed almost exclusively of scenes of Hood in Zoom sessions with her therapist, where, in stream-of-consciousness prose, she grapples with not just the trauma of being raped multiple times, but the difficulties she faces in articulating this trauma during the writing process of Trauma Plot. In one session, Hood muses, “Art, in my view, should transport those who encounter it, should be larger than itself. The act of turning my rapes into an art object, making of them a kind of thing, presupposes that this thing does more than record or relay a sequence of events. The thingness of my survival mandates import.” But how is one to craft a narrative arc when, as Hood states in a later session, “Rape is the opposite meaing[?]” In the Introduction, Hood offers a “diagnosis of rape as a formal problem,” that neccesitates adopting, “a kaleidoscopic technique of narration,” to tell her story, a form that reflects all the ways trauma corrupts time, plot, meaning, and, ultimately, one’s self.
by Ana Hein | Apr 10, 2026
Horror is a genre of solitude
When we first started dating, my partner told me, “I don’t really like horror.” Still, that didn’t stop him from sitting next to me on the couch to watch Ethan Hawke prowl his child-ghost-infested house in Sinister, or jointly analyze how the demon haunting is all the bad boyfriend’s fault in Paranormal Activity, or marvel over how Nosferatu captures Gothic eroticism. His foray into fear is motivated by his love for me and nothing else. He knows that I will venture into these haunted houses and abandoned asylums regardless, and he wants to keep me company.
by Ana Hein | Apr 9, 2026
If I could, I would restart every day to do it better
It’s nearing one in the morning, and I’ve consumed somewhere in the ballpark of three coffees and two energy drinks so I have the time and energy to study for my upcoming calc and bio exams, do my lit reading, exercise at least twice, sell some outfits I never wear to make a quick buck, and maybe, if I have a couple spare seconds, take a bath to recharge my energy and improve my mood. I over-ate today, but I needed to fill up my guts, so I’ll write it off as a cheat day, which means I can now eat whatever I want. Down the hatch the chips go. Hey, I need it to get rid of my munchies debuff so I can get back to studying.
