Nameless Digest: Author Spotlight: D. T. Kastn

As we continue our Author Spotlight series (this month featuring contributors to A Darke Phantastique), our next featured author is D. T. Kastn.

Kastn’s contribution, “Real Live Lobsters” poses the question, “What if inanimate objects came to life?”:

“The first time it happened was with a penny. Kedger picked it up off a sidewalk and Lincoln started chatting away. Not right off the bat, of course; he moved his mouth around a little, smacked his lips a few times as though getting the taste of copper off his tongue, and when he finally made noise it wasn’t much more than a stutter.
‘Y,’ he said. ‘Buh. Ih. I don’t—I don’t belong to you.'”

She writes about her story:

“When I was a kid, I figured inanimate objects must have names and personalities, and I spent a lot of my playtime trying to figure out what they were. It was a great way to keep myself occupied and procrastinate on my homework. By and large, things in the world seemed friendly, or at the very least benign. Every once in a while, though, a villainous pencil or a cruel coffee cup would show up, and the forces of inanimate light would have to fight with the forces of inanimate darkness. I can’t tell you how many times the denizens of my crayon box had to band together against the dry erase markers. Some things just don’t know when they’re beaten. Somewhere in that childhood habit is the basis for ‘Real Live Lobsters,’ in which Kedger discovers that his presence is suddenly triggering inanimate things to become animate, to move and to speak and, more often than not, express their displeasure with their lot in life. The story turned out to be less about my imagination as a child, and more about the grownup fear of reality no longer applying. Kedger feels the shock of things he’s always taken for granted suddenly turning against him. I wish I could have sent in my Crayolas to help, but sometimes we have to face these things on our own.”

D. T. Kastn is a writer from the wilds of Northern California. She also works as a caregiver and massage therapist, runs an Etsy shop for handmade gifts, and is studying graphic art because she finds font-based design to be wildly exciting. She is a champion procrastinator, especially when the Internet is involved. Nonetheless, her short stories and poems have appeared in a number of publications, both online and off, including Danse Macabre and The Arcane Anthology, among others. Her comic novel about a time-traveling kitchen chair, Tendence and Cavile, was published by Leeftail Press in 2012.