In this episode we talk to Mallory O’Meara – horror screenwriter, producer and the author of The Lady from the Black Lagoon. Join us as we discuss the book which features the story of Milicent Patrick, the creator of Gill-man from the film Creature from the Black Lagoon. He was, and still is, one of the most recognizable monsters in cinema history alongside Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolfman. For decades the credit for the creation of the creature was given to Bud Westmore, the head of the Universal makeup department, who fired Patrick rather than have her role in the creature’s success become known. This book sets out to right this wrong.

O’Meara discusses her obsession with bringing Patrick’s story out of the murky swamp and into the light, the almost impossible journey it took to uncover the truth, dealing with the haters in horror after she did. She talks openly about what it is like to be a woman in the horror industry today — and how very little has changed, and what it was like growing up as a girl who loved monsters.

Posey was dubbed by Time Magazine as the “Queen of Indies” after starring in such cult hits as Dazed and Confused, Party Girl and The House of Yes. She later played unforgettable improvisational roles in Christopher Guest mockumentaries, including Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show. She has gone onto create memorable roles in both TV and film and is currently Dr. Smith in the Netflix reboot of Lost in Space. Her memoir, You’re on an Airplane, proves that Posey is not only a film icon, but also a talented writer. In this episode she talks about her road from soap opera actress to indie queen, how much the business has changed since her start, growing up with a cast of characters, how she paved her own way outside of the Hollywood machine, and how it’s important to always show up for friends.

Han exists primarily as the one-human show Handsome Devils Puppets. A self taught sculptor and puppeteer, touring storyteller and songwriter, her creative journey is about much more than creating art, it is a means of self-expression. “I started making puppets when I felt I didn’t have a voice. I sculpted powerful, magical creatures to dance and sing and cry and give me that voice.” In this episode, Han talks about growing up in a strict Catholic household in Kansas and how that shaped her and her art, her background in costume design, her love of murder ballads, her battle with anxiety and how her puppets are her proxy for interacting with the world, how she deals with life’s tragedies through her art and how not revealing her full name and moving to a different city every few years helps her cope and keeps her sane.

Han will be touring the West Coast soon, so check out her website for upcoming performances and follow her on instagram to see her custom puppets which include Merricat Blackwood — the main character from Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Sylvia Plath, post mortem babies, Frida Kahlo, Wednesday Addams, Vampira and David Bowie.  This episode is a must-listen for creative souls forging their own paths and struggling to cope with life in general.

Palmer is a singer, songwriter, musician, author and performance artist with an experimental bent. Beginning her career as one half of the beloved “Brechtian punk cabaret” duo Dresden Dolls, she embarked on a solo career in 2007 releasing acclaimed solo albums and collaborations with Ben Folds, Jherek Bischoff, Brendan Maclean, her father, Jack Palmer, and her husband, writer Neil Gaiman. November 2014 saw the release of Palmer’s part memoir/part self-help book, The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help by Grand Central Publishing. It became a New York Times bestseller, and is considered one of the definitive works about crowd-funding and getting things done outside the system. Join us as she opens up about her personal life – her marriage to Neil Gaiman, giving birth to her son Ash – her latest projects and striking the balance between protecting her family’s privacy and her artistic ambition to live her life as an open book.

In this special Easter edition, just in time for the Catholic funeral processions, we feature Catholic relic hunter and creator of the All the Saints You Should Know blog Elizabeth Harper. Harper travels the word to photograph and write about the unusual (and often macabre) things she finds in Catholic churches—incorrupt corpses, holy relics (which are often the preserved body parts of saints), memento-mori tombs, exotic taxidermy and human bone art. Currently, her photographs of incorrupt saints are featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s catalog Like Life: Sculpture, Color and the Body. Join us as Harper opens up about growing up catholic, how she related to saints as a young girl –especially Catherine of Sienna the patron saint of eating disorders, when Harper suffered from anorexia and what Holy Week in Zamora, Spain is really like – what happens in Zamora stays in Zamora.

Cassandra Peterson is an actress, comedian and entrepreneur born in Manhattan Kansas in 1951. She is best known for her longtime portrayal of the legendary horror hostess character Elvira, Mistress Of The Dark, which she created for local Los Angeles television station KHJ-TV in the early 1980s. Her sexy gothic look, dark humor and Valley Girl speak were an instant hit, attracting a national audience for Elvira’s Movie Macabre, her weekly horror movie show, and making Peterson the only nationally syndicated horror host in history.

Join us for a tell-all interview with the Queen of Halloween as she discusses the ups and downs of her fascinating life and career — from go-go dancer at the age 14 to Vegas showgirl at 17, hanging out with Jimi Hendrix, dating Elvis and losing her virginity to Tom Jones, joining the Groundlings with her friend Paul Reubens, balancing being a brand and a personal life, as well as some horrific casting couch experiences, #MeToo moments, divorce and and how she overcame it all to ultimately become an icon.

This week’s guest, Lydia Lunch, is passionate, confrontational and bold. Whether attacking the patriarchy and their pornographic war mongering, turning the sexual into the political or whispering a love song to the broken hearted, her fierce energy and rapid fire delivery lend testament to her warrior nature.

Queen of No Wave, muse of The Cinema of Transgression, writer, musician, poet, spoken word artist and photographer, she has released too many musical projects to tally, has been on tour for four decades, has published dozens of articles, half a dozen books, appeared in numerous documentaries, conducted workshops and taught at Universities and simply refuses to shut up.  Lucky for us!  Listen to Lunch talk about everything from Louis C.K., the #MeToo movement and the Golden Globes to growing up abused and hustling her way to survival on the streets of New York City in this essential episode of in-your-face timely truths.

This episode we dive deep into the beehive for a wide ranging discussion with legendary B-52s singer, songwriter, multi instrumentalist and small business owner Kate Pierson! The post punk pioneer and kitsch culture icon talks growing up in NJ, the band’s punk and New Wave beginnings in Athens, GA, their rise in the gritty New York City music scene in the 1970s – the first band to play the infamous Mudd Club, the band’s thrift store chic fashion, the decision to carry on after the AIDS related death of bandmate Ricky Wilson and their worldwide success in the late 80s and 90s, her unforgettable collaborations with REM, Iggy Pop, The Ramones and Sia and her more recent adventures as a motel keeper in Woodstock. Tune in to find out what it was like then and what it’s like now to be an artist, to be an entrepreneur, to be a woman in music, to be Kate Pierson.

This week we welcome Kat Kinsman for a special Thanksgiving edition. Kat is the Food and Drinks Editor at Time Inc.’s all-breakfast site Extra Crispy and the author of the book Hi, Anxiety: Life with a Bad Case of Nerves. Previously, she was an Editor at Large and Editor in Chief of Tasting Table. the Managing Editor of CNN’s Eatocracy, edited CNN’s Matrimony section and First Person essay series and was a writer and editor for CNN Living.  Join us as we talk holiday food and drink, anxiety & depression, finding your tribe, day-in-the-life of a dominatrix & the magic of whiskey sours and much more!

This week we welcome Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris—storyteller, medical historian and author of The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine. Fitzharris received her doctorate in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology at the University of Oxford. She is the creator of the popular website The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice, and she writes and presents the YouTube series Under the Knife. Join us as we talk about her love of storytelling, the gruesome history of Victorian medicine, surgery horrors, the importance of failure, reinventing yourself after divorce and growing up in Illinois with a grandmother who loved cemeteries.

Join us for a special Halloween edition of Stories of Strange Women podcast as we welcome book critic and award-winning Shirley Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin! In this episode we explore Franklin’s epic biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life — discussing Jackson taking her crown as the queen of horror, being a female writer in the 40s and 50s, managing a demanding husband, four children and work, growing up as an outsider with a verbally abusive mother, her struggle with mental illness, Jackson as a feminist and her reputation as a witch.

Franklin is a former editor of The New Republic. Her biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2016, a Time magazine top nonfiction book of 2016, and a “best book of 2016” by The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, and others. In The Washington Post, Elaine Showalter called it “a sympathetic and masterful biography that both uncovers Jackson’s secret and haunting life and repositions her as a major artist.”

Franklin’s work appears in many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in biography and a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library.