"DIY is a part of who I am."

An interview with Sam Logan of SLUGGER

Without looking it up, how many Honors Colleges would you suppose offer a creative writing course on body horror?

Thanks to Sam Logan, I can confidently answer, “At least one.” Sam is a university professor, writer, and now the founder of SLUGGER, a new paying horror market that will start publishing this fall. He joins us today to answer a few questions about writing, teaching, and what excites him about his new project.

I was really fascinated reading about the origins of SLUGGER, and how it connects back to your experiences in teaching. Could you tell our readers more about the project and where it began?

I’m a university professor, and I sort of cracked the code on turning my hobbies into courses that I convinced someone in admin to let me teach. I started teaching a seminar course in the Honors College within our university in my first couple of years as faculty. The first course was titled “Toy-Based Technology for Children with Disabilities.” This course focused on my research that centers on a project called Go Baby Go. We take off-the-shelf, battery-operated ride-on toy cars and modify them for accessibility. This involves rewiring the activation switch from a foot pedal, which is difficult for young children with disabilities to use, to a large and easy-to-press switch that is installed on the steering wheel. We also create a custom seating support out of low cost materials including Velcro, pool noodles, and PVC pipe to make sure it's safe for each child to drive. The total cost of the modified ride-on cars is about $200 each compared to $3,000 for a motorized wheelchair. The course provided students with the science behind why mobility is important for young children with disabilities, then they modified cars in my lab throughout the term.

All of this to say, DIY is a part of who I am.

I burned out on teaching this course. I taught it 16 times or so over several years. Once COVID hit, I took a pause and thought about what else I could teach. I convinced the Honors College to let me teach a course titled “Punk 101.” It was successful, so I decided to push the envelope a little further. I had just discovered indie horror and was blown away by the quality of stories. Lor Gislason’s novella Inside Out and the Your Body is Not Your Body anthology published by Tenebrous Press were some of my early reads that grabbed me and didn’t let go.

I put together a course description for “Body Horror” and fired it off to the Honors College administrator who made curriculum decisions.

Course description:

Prepare to enter the soupy-goopy, gushy-slushy, grimy-slimy world of body horror. Body horror is a subgenre that involves the transformation, degradation, destruction, manipulation, or hostile takeover from creepy-crawlies of the human body. Body horror is gross and disgusting, consider yourself warned. Sounds fun, right?! It is! Or at least, it can be. Body horror can be campy and/or a means to explore deeper themes such as identity, gender, disability, technology, biology, and bodily autonomy. This course will take a contemporary perspective through short fiction centered on underrepresented perspectives, with an emphasis on queer authors such as Bound in Flesh: An Anthology of Trans Body Horror. Guest speakers will be featured throughout the course. Students will complete a final writing project about body horror such as an original short story, a non-fiction work, screenplay, zine, or related format. Students’ writing projects will be compiled into an anthology (i.e. collected works). Students will participate in the design, creation, distribution strategy, and launch event of the anthology. This course will be taught with punk pedagogy principles including a do-it-yourself ethos, anti-hierarchical structure, co-creation of knowledge, and inclusive and accessible learning space. The instructor is a white, straight, able-bodied, cis-gender man/male. We will learn from each other through our shared experience with body horror course materials. NO previous writing experience required.

I was shocked when I received a quick reply in support of the course.

I taught Body Horror for the first time in Fall 2023. I had an absolute blast with it. I received some professional development funds from the Honors College to teach the course so I hired a horror author, Nico Bell, to give students editing feedback on their stories. I also used the funds to self-publish students’ stories in a physical book with cover art designed by one of the enrolled students.

We are going to publish stories from Body Horror students in a special issue of SLUGGER. We will have open submission calls for our other issues. University students are going to be paid to design the covers and illustrate one image for each published story. It will be token pay ($25 for a cover, $10 per illustration), but we love the idea of paying students for their art. Student involvement may grow over time if there is interest, but it’s a start.

I’m thrilled that I have a co-founding editor with SLUGGER—Arwyn Sherman. We met in the Tenebrous Press Discord in May 2024. We became pals, often exchanging stories for critiques and chatting about writing. It’s been fun. They have a unique perspective that will inform decisions for SLUGGER.

Next year, I’m teaching Body Horror, Punk 101, and Swifties Unite (a story for a different day).

SLUGGER is a horror magazine, which is a genre that seems to cycle in and out of respectability (not unlike crime fiction). What is it about horror that appeals to you in particular?

This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about in recent weeks. I think there is a perception that horror only comes in a few flavors—slashers, ghosts, and creatures like zombies, werewolves, and vampires immediately come to mind. While it may seem like there are only a few variations within horror, there are really tons when you dig into it—cryptids, cosmic, folk, body, survival, psychological, splatterpunk, extreme, weird western, religious, apocalyptic, to name a few. Then of course there are combinations of horror specific tropes with other genres like sci-fi, dark fantasy, bizarro, weird fiction, comedy. My point is that horror is a broad tent that includes a lot more kinds of stories than are typically thought about, especially within indie horror when you have authors taking risks and making bold choices. Horror appeals to me because it grabs and holds my attention, and it has just as much heart as any other genre.

What excites you most about the current horror fiction scene?

Independent horror. I know this is broad, but I’m still pretty new to the horror fiction scene. I grew up on R.L. Stein’s Goosebumps and Fear Street. I read a bunch of Stephen King books in my 20s. I simply did not know indie horror existed until late 2022. I’m still impressed by so many talented writers who put out creative, dark, heartfelt, and socially conscious work. I’m convinced that horror is primed for another explosion of attention. There are a few publishers that stand out to me as forging the path ahead including Tenebrous Press, Shortwave Publishing, and Ghoulish.

Tell me about your own path as a writer. When did you begin to write seriously? What teachers or influences helped you along the way?

I have about 18 years of experience in scientific writing as a researcher. It’s my favorite part of academia so there was always an interest in writing, but never creative writing until I found indie horror and developed my Body Horror course.

My course proposal for Body Horror said that students would write their own short stories. When the course was accepted and I knew I’d teach it the following year, I thought “Oh, shit. I’ve never written a short story before, and I have no idea how to teach them.” Even though I knew I was going to hire a horror author/editor to help out, I still felt like I should at least try to write a short story.

In early 2023, I wrote my first short story titled “Dead Blow Hammer.” It was terrible, but I had written something. I reached out on a critique channel via Shortwave Publishing’s Discord and Alan Lastufka, the owner, was kind enough to give me feedback. He was very encouraging, despite it being clear I hadn’t heard anything about “show don’t tell.” On my second submission try, the piece was accepted into the first issue of Mouthfeel Fiction. It was a confidence boost that let me know that perhaps I could write a competent story.

Around the same time, I had a great experience serving as a first reader for the Dark Academia anthology co-edited by Christi Nogle and Ai Jiang, and published by Shortwave Publishing. This was also a formative experience and a peek into the process about how short stories are evaluated and chosen for publication.

In early 2024, I took Richard Thomas’s at-you-own-pace short story workshop. It was a game changer. I learned the basic aspects of short story components and turned in written assignments and received feedback. I kept writing and paid for developmental feedback from a few editors that helped me tremendously (Nico Bell, Eric Raglin). I’ve taken a couple more classes from Richard Thomas, Fright Club, and The Center for Fiction. I'm privileged to be able to pay for these services and recognize that this isn’t the case for many new writers. I’m enjoying the process of learning something new. My goal is to keep writing and keep getting better.

What is your writing routine?

Most days, I’m able to get an hour in sometime between 4:30-6:30 a.m. Sometimes I’ll get an occasional evening or two a week. We have a young kiddo so there isn’t much open time during a typical day between work and life. If I’m working on a story, I tend to hyper focus on it until it's drafted, revised, critiqued, revised again, and finished. Then, there’s usually a break. So I’m not writing every day, but it comes in waves.

Do your students have a pretty good sense of what “body horror” entails, or is part of your class about introducing them to this as a subgenre? What kinds of body horror most appeals to them?

The course seems to attract students who are already horror fans in one way or another. Although, there is often a student or two with no prior interest or experience with horror who end up in the course because they needed to fill their schedule. It’s great to have a mix of students with different levels of familiarity with the genre. When I developed the course, I commissioned essays from Mae Murray and Lor Gislason (both fantastic horror authors) that serve as an introduction to body horror and tips for writing it. One aspect of body horror we talk about early on in the course is being mindful that ableism doesn’t creep into students’ stories.

We get a range of interest from students in types of body horror they write about—some explore their gender identity, some link it to their major of study like a pre-med student who wrote a medical body horror story, some turn their own experiences with a physical injury into a story, and others just go wild and get weird with it. I love that students have the space in this course to explore whatever aspect of body horror that appeals to them.

What has been the most surprising thing you’ve learned from your students as you’ve taught these courses?

Students are fearless. Many of them have zero creative writing experience, but they are willing to take a risk and put themselves out there. This is incredibly difficult to do, and they take the challenge head on. They meet the moment, and their stories are BANGERS! I’m proud of every single one of them for the stories they’ve created for the course.

What are you hoping to accomplish with SLUGGER? How can people support you?

There are few paying markets for horror (token or otherwise). We, horror authors, all have stories that were written for a themed submission call that didn’t get published. SLUGGER is intentionally a broad market that takes general/non-themed horror stories to give authors another paying outlet to send their work. We think it's an important niche that SLUGGER can help fill.

We hope to build a reputation as a cool market who treats authors well. We’d like the magazine to start breaking even in 5 years. A modest goal that hopefully is realistic. We know it will take time to build an audience, but we are in it for the long haul.

Our first issue is planned for release in Fall 2025. We’ll be posting stories online for free, and putting out physical issues for purchase. In the meantime, there are a couple of ways to support SLUGGER:

(1) Follow us on socials (Instagram, Bluesky)

(2) Sign up HERE for our newsletter that doesn’t exist but will some day.