As part of The Pixel Project’s Read For Pixels campaign, we interview authors from genres as diverse as Science Fiction and Fantasy to Romance to Horror about why they support the movement to end violence against women and girls.
For Domestic Violence Awareness Month 2024, we present an interview with Read For Pixels author Lee Murray who contributed her original story The Moon Goddess’s Granddaughter to our 1st charity anthology, GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE, and co-edited UNDER HER EYE, our 1st poetry collection. Lee is a Shirley Jackson and five-time Bram Stoker Award® winner and holder of a New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction. Lee’s latest work is NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize-winner Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud.
Inspired to support The Pixel Project’s anti-violence against women work? Make a donation to us today OR buy the audiobook edition of our 1st charity anthology, GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE OR buy our 1st poetry collection, UNDER HER EYE. All donations and net proceeds from book sales go towards supporting our campaigns, programmes, and initiatives.
Lee’s portrait is by Maree Wilkinson
- As a Read For Pixels author, you have contributed an original story in the form of a prose poem to The Pixel Project’s GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE charity anthology and then became one of the two editors of The Pixel Project’s first charity poetry collection (in partnership with Black Spot Books), UNDER HER EYE. Why did you decide to participate in both books and The Pixel Project’s Read For Pixels campaign?
My first contact with The Pixel Project was via award-winning poet and HWA Lifetime Achievement Award-winner Linda D. Addison. Addison embodies everything I aspire to be – talented, compassionate, and a champion of marginalised voices – so her recommendation made me sit up in my chair. After that, a quick online perusal of work by the Pixel team to eliminate violence against women on the world stage made it an easy decision to lend my voice to the rising chorus, especially since literature is such a powerful medium, enduring and accessible. Later, when author-editor Lindy Ryan, another champion of women’s voices, invited me to collaborate on the domestic horror poetry anthology, UNDER HER EYE, the thematic alignment was so apparent that, naturally, I introduced Lindy to The Pixel Project’s founder and president Regina Yau who saw the opportunity to reach and impact a wider audience in a way that statistics and facts, horrific as they are, might not.
- Tell us a bit more about the story you contributed to The Pixel Project’s GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE charity anthology – what is it about and what was your inspiration for it?
My story, The Moon Goddess’s Granddaughter, is a contemporary tale with cultural underpinnings, combining magical realism and Asian myth. In the story, a prose-poem, a woman discovers an ancient source of power to overcome the monstrous shapeshifter that has come to inhabit her husband. The shapeshifting metaphor allowed me to examine those glimpses of the former man that can make it hard for women to leave abusive partners, even when the situation threatens their lives and the lives of their children. Cultural expectations of obedience and duty placed on Asian women can also make it hard to leave. So while GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE provides some wonderfully brutal tales of comeuppance from my horror colleagues, The Moon Goddess’s Daughter leans towards unquiet rage, or finding one’s power when the moment calls for it.
From your perspective as a poet and the editor of UNDER HER EYE, what do you think are the strengths of poetry written by women and how can these strengths be leveraged to raise awareness about violence against women?
It isn’t a coincidence that my involvement in The Pixel Project revolves around women’s poetry because, to me, poetry is a powerful vehicle for social change. Poet, essayist, feminist, and civil rights champion Audre Lorde described it beautifully in A BURST OF LIGHT AND OTHER ESSAYS when she said: “Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.” You only have to open UNDER HER EYE to see this alchemy at work. Pick any page. Any poem. Grasp any golden line. Escape to the stars.
- Why do you think book lovers should read GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE and UNDER HER EYE?
Book lovers shouldn’t just read these books. They should ask for them at the library and at their local bookstore. Recommend them as their next book-club read. They should buy them and leave them lying about on coffee tables, kitchen counters, and in guest bedrooms. Give them as gifts. Donate them to community libraries and universities. Leave a spare copy in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. Because you never know who might need to read these stories and poems, who might recognise an aspect of their own experience and then use the resources listed in the back of the books. GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE and UNDER HER EYE comprise haunting, engaging reading, but they are also a starting point for dialogue, for connection, and for solace.
who cares? / not everyone / but any one
- Any final thoughts about why everyone should support stopping violence against women?
Because women deserve to live without fear. Because women deserve to live.
please, make him stop / final thought