Interview with Author DC Corvino

DC Corvino's story "Caviar" isn't a piece that's easily overlooked. Its dark humor and body horror elements are fantastic, deeply uncomfortable vehicles that discuss social and cultural issues from an unexpected angle. "The horrors of the human body are nigh endless," DC writes in our interview below. Read on for their advice on creating art, their least favorite font, and their definition of "weird."

Why write?

I think I’d go insane if I wasn’t writing. I get cranky if I go too long without it. 

Advice on creating you had to learn the hard way?

Finish a draft before you edit it. I used to write, hit a snag, start from the top just prettying up lines and working my way back down, then rinse and repeat until I was so sick of looking at a piece that I never finished anything. Now I have an entire digital graveyard full of beautiful half-written stories. I’m strictly on a “one complete draft before any edits happen” policy now.

If you were a cryptid, where would you live?

Florida Everglades, under a mangrove. 

What other lit journals are you into right now (and what do you like about them)?

I’m mostly a fairy tale and fantasy writer. I’m always into Fairy Tale Review for the way they show how innovative the genre can be, and Corvid Queen for their commitment to explicitly queer and feminist fairy tales. On the fantasy side, Beneath Ceaseless Skies has the best secondary world fantasy, and Old Moon Quarterly is doing a lot with dark sword-and-sorcery that I like. 

Do you have imposter syndrome when you write?

Not since generative AI became a thing. Thinking about how people are so desperate to have the cultural clout of being an artist without putting in any of the work has given me a newfound smugness in my skill set. 

One sentence soapbox: 

It’s Pride Month, give money to your trans friends!!

Do you enjoy editing? Why or why not?

It’s my favorite part of writing! I have very granular thought processes, so it’s difficult for me to move forward while there are sentences I don’t like still floating around the document. The editing stage feels like a treat where I get to spend time tweaking and finessing and getting closer to what I actually want to say. 

Have you written about food in a story before? If so, what food was it and why did it appear there?

I’ve got (most of) a novella in the aforementioned digital graveyard that is Top Chef meets Dante’s Inferno, where the protagonist is a Denny’s line cook battling her way through the layers of hell for a ticket out. There’s obviously a lot of different dishes in that one, but the most significant ones serve as indicators for how much the protag is willing to confront her past—the two most important are a Pepto-pink grapefruit cake and a French onion soup, with the former connected to her mother and the latter a dish she made for her girlfriend before she died. 

I’ve also got a Pied Piper retelling coming out in Trollbreath Magazine later this year, and that one features a feast shared by the rats and the children—but I don’t want to spoil too much! 

When did you realize you were weird?

Probably as soon as I had conscious thoughts?? One of my earliest childhood nicknames was Freakazoid and my reputation has not changed since. 

What font do you detest?

Courier New looks like a serial killer’s font, I’m glad it’s not the standard any more. 

What is your favorite museum or gallery?

Hard to pick, but purely for the inspiration to be gained from it, the Mütter Museum in Philly. It’s a medical history museum I got to visit the year AWP was in Philly and I think about it all the time. The horrors of the human body are nigh endless. 

What is weird?

Weird is what unsettles, what challenges, what makes you do a double-take. It is alienation and liberation. 

What do you aim to accomplish by writing?

I want to change the way someone looks at something, anything. My favorite stories are the ones that rewire my brain to new associations for otherwise mundane things I wouldn’t have thought twice about. Like how reading "Seven-Eighths" years ago changed how I think of sloths—now when I see one, I think of a sloth-alien-boy-hybrid at a punk show. If I can do that to a reader, I think I’ve succeeded.  

What’s the point of all this, really?

Make art, meet cool people, dismantle capitalism. 

DC Corvino is a South Floridian living in the high desert of Nevada with their cat and two goblinesque chihuahuas. They are a graduate of Clarion West, and under the name December Cuccaro, their work has been published in Three Crows Magazine and Baffling Magazine, and is forthcoming in Trollbreath Magazine. Talk to them about body horror and fairies on Bluesky: @dc-corvino.bsky.social.