Writer Violet Glaze and illustrator Josh Meyers slide quietly into a coffeeshop corner table on a weekday afternoon, warm drinks in hand, 15 minutes early for this interview. Meyers is a modest 21-year-old illustrator just getting started in Baltimore. The now Philadelphia-based Glaze, 35, is a widely published movie critic (including five years with City Paper) and internet erotica writer with a published novel under her belt. Together they’re responsible for the new collection of short stories I Am Genghis Cum. They look like an unlikely pair, but the awkwardness of their age difference enhances their clearly aligned artistic viewpoints. During a conversation about their collaboration, it becomes clear that each had little to do with the other’s creative process; the fact that their efforts unite so seamlessly in such an unusual product is rather remarkable. Genghis’ stories chronicle four aspects of procreation—conception, pregnancy, infancy, and parenthood—with savage honesty and ruthless humor; Josh’s soft ink drawings of robot fetuses and sunglass-wearing sperm place the stories in context. Glaze’s take on infancy, “10 Darlings and a Handbag,” details a woman’s violent attempt to rid herself of the responsibility of her newborn, but in a raggedly funny way that makes the grotesque easy to swallow. Glaze dives into the deep at word one, and she stays there, never losing her footing on a rough and wild trek into the void she encountered after the birth of her first child.

City Paper: Let’s start at the beginning—tell me about where the book came from.

Violet Glaze: The real genesis of this is about three years ago, I got pregnant. The long and short of it was I had a horrendous delivery. I was in labor for 90 hours—that’s n-i-n-e-t-y, 90—and the reason for that was I was trying for a home birth, with a midwife, and—I won’t get into details—but it was a combination of us not really being philosophically aligned about what the best kind of birth is and me just being a stubborn cuss and not willing to throw the towel in. I went to the hospital at 80 hours, and then I had a C-section at 90 hours.

And after the C-section the PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] started. I don’t remember holding my son for the first time, and after he was born I started having flashbacks. I started all the classic symptoms—I wanted to kill people, anything that had to do with a baby or maternity I started having panic attacks, and finally when my son was about 5 months old I had a full-blown nervous breakdown and suicide attempt and we had to move out of our house and move in with my parents. And that’s when a psychiatrist said, “You have PTSD,” and I had to move forward from that.

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