THE VOICE
E.G. WARE
Author of Literary Fiction and Gothic Poetry
E.G. Ware is a writer, mixed-media artist, and occasional spectre occupying the American Midwest. She enjoys giving new life to old things and dissecting ancient stories. She lives in a 1920’s boarding house turned family home with her children, Birdie the basset hound, and Yenna the family feline mascot. Her work travels the deep seams of female embodiment. Her top fantasy dinner guests are Horace Walpole, David Bowie, and Christina Mirabilis.
Her words are forthcoming in, or have appeared in Gone Lawn: A Journal of Word-Things, Blood + Honey Lit, The Alchemist's Cabin, The Dread Literary Review, and Fractured Lit, among others.
She is at work on her first novel.
A Feature with
The Dread Literary Review
Greetings! I work under the name of E.G. Ware, though really everyone calls me Liz. I reside, create, and habitually unravel in the American Midwest. Specifically, St. Louis, Missouri, where I live in a hundred-year-old brick building that was once a candy supply company and boarding house. I’ve lived in a few places, but St. Louis always pulled me back. There’s something about the collision of beauty, ruin, and strange endurance that feels impossible to quit.
At the most basic level, I think I’ve always been a compulsive maker. For as long as I can remember, I’ve romanticized everything into story or art. At the moment, I’m spending most of my time reading and writing, and disappearing inside highly specific historical rabbit holes. A current one is the world of Hild by Nicola Griffith. The author and subject are both incredible. My mindscape is often filled with medieval mysticism, gothic fiction, decaying architecture, folklore, werewolves, or all of the above. The Castle of Otranto remains my favorite novel of all time.
I’ve been writing poetry and short stories for most of my life, and am currently being consumed by my first (hopefully to be) finished novel.
Much of my writing draws on embodiment and the human impulse to personify the unknowable. Ancient deities once gave shape to grief, weather, hunger, fertility, catastrophe; ways of asking why a child dies, why the hawthorn blooms too early, why the body betrays itself. I think poetry can be a really exceptional device for continuing that exercise in speculation. We’ve always tried to explain the unexplainable, though now we direct attempts more outward to technology, spectacle, apocalypse, and cosmic horror. I suppose my poetry tries to tighten the lens: to the intimacy of the body, household, field, wound, inheritance.
My storytelling instincts were shaped early. I grew up in a liberal household and was raised equally on science fiction, fantasy, and convention halls full of handmade monsters. The fantastical and the uncanny were everyday dinner guests. I later studied theater, which gave me a new vocabulary for how wardrobe, gesture, and setting shape a character's interior perspective. These inheritances surface in my poetry (and fiction): a pull toward the unknown and a reliance on tactile language.
I’ve also lived through some significant trauma, individually and relationally. I’ve spent a long time learning to metabolize anxiety, depression, and PTSD. Poetry increasingly became the place where I built those tools for myself. That process strengthened my understanding of the aftermath of women’s experiences, especially how pain lingers physically, socially, and linguistically. And it’s helped me become the kind of parent who can hand a better toolkit to my children. Hopefully, much better than the one I was handed.
My current collection, Black on Her Tongue, focuses on the years I spent in an abusive marriage. I know, not a subject that’s rare territory for poetry. But I’m less interested in confession than in psychic texture. I’m interested in how fear alters perception and how shame inhabits the body, through the viewpoint of a psyche in the act of breaking. And the specter of the break that never really goes away.
Language is also very central to my process, particularly archaic vocabulary. So much has been lost in the simplification of the English language. Older lexicons are almost used as costume in certain fiction, and even shed from historical fiction because it’s difficult for people to process. We’ve given up enormous musicality in the trade. Poetry in its spoken form is music, and older phrases (sometimes a single word!) carry that music in a way modern speech rarely does. I love researching obsolete vocabularies and finding ways to braid them into contemporary landscapes.
One of my more ambitious word-crawls became Mandragora, a long-form poem rooted in medieval folklore surrounding the mandrake root. I fell deep into the history, superstition, medicinal lore, and visual art surrounding the plant (it's so wild) and came out months later with one of the most difficult pieces I’ve written. If you’re not familiar with the lore, I encourage you to look up the history and art.
I’m also working on a related series inspired by humoral theory and the regimen sanitatis traditions of southern France between the 11th and 14th centuries; poems concerned with seasonal health, bodily balance, devotion, appetite, decay, and the strange intimacy medieval people had with their physical fragility.
At a personal level, my poetry is how I express and widen my own understanding. When the heavier work reaches outward, I hope it meets someone where they are or gives them language for something they hadn’t yet named. And at the simplest level, I hope it brings joy. Poetry is art, it’s beautiful, and I feel lucky every time someone makes space for it.