Hello and welcome to Queer as Fact, the podcast bringing you queer history from around the world and throughout time.

I'm Alice. I'm Irene.

And today we are here with Emily M. Danforth to discuss her latest novel, Plain Bad Heroines.

Thank you, Emily, very much, for joining us. Do you want to start off by just telling us a bit about your novel and what it is?

Sure. Thank you for having me.

Play bad heroines is a very difficult novel to summarize.

I'm going to do my best, but I'm just sort of warning you, inevitably,

someone's going to read the book and then say, that you didn't summarize it well, and I think

that's fair. My joke about the book is that it's, it's sort of like picnic at hanging rock,

plus the Blair Witch Project, Times Lesbians. So that's sort of like my quick, you know, my quick and dirty on it.

But it's essentially divided into present day half and a historic half.

And the historic half takes place in and around 1902.

We go a little bit further back in time, but largely in 1902, at a coastal

boarding school for girls. And the students in question have gotten their hands on a very real

memoir that I'm sure we're going to talk about later called the story of Mary McLean, very real

book. And every student that gets hold of this book, bad things seem to follow. There seems to be some sort of curse kind of gripping this boarding school.

And so we really just follow a copy of the book as it passes hands.

And that's roughly the historic half of the book.

The present day portion of the book, it's roughly present day.

I think of it as about 2015-2016 is sort of where I sketch things out when I was writing the

novel. That involves the making of a horror movie, a controversial queer horror movie,

about that curse. And so they're shooting on location at the Bracont School for Girls. And the

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