An Interview with Loren Rhoads
Write&W(h)ine founder Lex Vranick sat down with author, editor, and blogger Loren Rhoads to discuss the Kickstarter campaign for her upcoming book Death’s Garden Revisited, a compilation of essays from cemetery celebrating their shared love for cemetery travel.cemetery ● (sem-i-ter-ee) ● noun
an area set apart for or containing graves, tombs, or funeral urns, especially one that is not a churchyard; a burial ground; a graveyard⁺
How do you feel when you think of cemeteries?
Some people recoil. These oft too-quiet fields of stone slabs are reserved for the dead, after all. They have heard hundreds upon thousands upon millions of tearful goodbyes. Graveyard soil hugs caskets that hug bones that once belonged to be people, and perhaps that is too sad or too uncomfortable to think about for too long. Others find comfort in the closeness cemeteries can provide. We can return again and again to the place where we said last goodbye, and perhaps even squeeze in a few more hellos. We can sit with our loved ones, see their names carved in stone, talk to them as if they are seated beside us.
Still others hold their breath when they drive by, lest they breath in death, lure a hitchhiking ghost, or offend those buried beyond the gates⁺.
Cemeteries have been described as spooky, creepy, uncomfortable, and even sad. Many find them scary or unsettling. Loren Rhoads, author of 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die and editor of Death’s Garden: Relationships with Cemeteries, finds them beautiful.
“The first time I actually realized I was in love with cemeteries my husband and I ended up in England by accident,” Loren recounts to me a Saturday afternoon. She is soft-spoken and passionate, and even through a slightly grainy internet connection I can see her eyes light up as she conjures the memory. “We were headed for Spain as the first Gulf War started, and we kept missing connections. We ended up in London and decided, well, we speak the language — we probably should stay here until things have settled. We discovered Highgate Cemetery, which was just…amazing — gothic, romantic, overgrown.”
Highgate Cemetery, located in the Highgate suburb of London, was consecrated on May 20, 1839 as part of an initiative to take the load off of overcrowded inner-city graveyards and provide respectful, dignified burials by ringing the city with larger modern cemeteries. It is the final resting place of novelist Mary Ann Evans and William Friese-Greene, the father of cinematography, among others.
“It had been abandoned,” Loren goes on, “and the Friends of Highgate Cemetery formed to buy it, fix it up, run tours and all of that. We were there in January, we were the only people looking at the cemetery that day. There were angels everywhere, and it was the first time I realized that a lot of these old cemeteries are public sculpture gardens. Anybody can walk through them, they’re open to everyone. And then I got hooked.”
That accidental stop in London had Loren eager for more. “What else can I see?” she asked, and quickly answered as she sought cemeteries on her travels.
“One of the best trips my husband and I ever took,” Loren remembers, “we rented a car in Boston and just drove around and looked at cemeteries. Some of the things we found along the way were as amazing as these world class famous places. We discovered the old North Burial Ground in Providence, which is down the hill from Swan Point — this world class arboretum, fabulous, one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. But the North Burial Ground had all these captain’s graves, so as you walked around there are all these ship captains, and they have either the wheel of the ship on the headstone or sails — all kinds of interesting stuff that I’ve never seen anywhere else. It gave me a better sense of the nautical history of Providence than I ever had before.”
The North Burial Ground was established in 1700, and Swan Point was founded as one of America’s first garden cemeteries in 1846. Both are still active cemeteries today, and both remain open for public visitation.
I can feel Loren’s connection with these places as she talks. She is, of course, fascinated by cemeteries, and with that fascination comes a deep respect and love for their uniqueness in both artistry and history. I can feel her passion and her excitement, and she becomes more and more animated as she talks about the places she has visited and learned about. Her favorite cemetery, though, is difficult to pin down.
“That’s such a hard question,” she laughs, and I admit that it may be loaded. How many of us who love something are able to easily pinpoint our favorite aspects of that thing? I myself can’t even give one solid answer for my favorite book, favorite movie, favorite food. I’m betting Loren’s sentiment — “It changes.” — is relatable to many.
“I grew up outside of Flint, Michigan,” Loren says after a thoughtful moment. “One of the graveyards there has a sculpture garden — they’re not grave monuments, they’re just sculptures amongst the graveyard — and it’s amazing.” She smiles as she describes her favorite piece: a depiction of children playing a game of crack-the-whip. “It’s life size, about six or eight kids. They’re all individual, they have different expressions. The last girl’s getting pulled off her feet, so she’s practically in midair. One of them has lost a Birkenstock, so the shoe is separate in the grass. And it’s just this little graveyard, you know, across from the river, on the street that leads into the town I grew up in. It’s just an amazing place that, unless you know someone in Flint, you would never know it was there.”
Loren likens cemetery travel to birding. Active birders often keep life lists of species they’ve spotted in the wild, and many will travel for a chance to see birds known to specific regions. Similarly, Loren has a list of cemeteries she hopes to visit. “There are places I need to check off!” When I ask if there are any major cemeteries on her bucket list, she gets excited. “I have a big birthday next year, and I really, really, really, really want to go to Cairo and see the pyramids.”
As she visited cemeteries near and far, Loren found a small community of the morbidly curious — people who, like herself, found comfort and beauty among gravestones. She calls them kindred spirits, and she delights in sharing experiences with these like-minded cemetery travelers.
In 1994, Loren was gifted a collection of cemetery photography from a friend. Inspired, she gathered up essays and photographs from her fellow cemetery lovers — historians and genealogists, ghost hunters and tour guides — and compiled them into a book. Loren soon published Death’s Garden: Relationships With Cemeteries through her press, Automatism. Now, 25 years later, Loren has launched her first Kickstarter campaign to fund volume two, Death’s Garden Revisited.
“It’s such a bizarre feeling,” Loren tells me, describing the day of the launch. The campaign went live at 9:00AM on March 17, 2022. “I sat there. It was 9:00AM, and I was like, okay! I had a writing group set up that meets from nine to noon on Thursdays, and so I went straight to my group. I wasn’t going to say anything, but they had kind of talked me through this whole process.”
Loren’s writing group was eager to know about her campaign. Was it up? How was she feeling about it? Excitement buzzed around her. “They were really kind about it,” Loren says. The group soon shifted into normalcy, and Loren soaked in the distraction. She chatted and wrote with friends while the numbers started to climb. “I think if you didn’t have something to do, you would just spend the entire day refreshing the page. So that was good, because I was busy for three hours. When I came back at noon, it had already reached $400.”
The campaign’s funding goal was $1,000. In just three hours, Loren was nearly halfway there. She kept herself busy throughout the day, taking a walk and attending a second writing group in the afternoon. When she returned to her computer at 5:00pm, Death’s Garden Revisited was fully funded. “It wasn’t even 12 hours. I was like, yes! This is really going to happen!”
The campaign has only continued to grow, quickly bypassing stretch goals Loren never anticipated it would reach. “I’ve been amazed,” she says. “We’ve passed the first four stretch goals. I thought that would never happen.”
As of this interview, Death’s Garden Revisited is 284% funded with 24 days to go. Based on the stretch goals already achieved, Loren will be commissioning two additional essays for the book. “If we make $4,000, I’ve promised to finish another book of essays so that backers will get two books for the price of one,” Loren says, and it’s looking more and more like that bonus book will become a reality.
Loren is no stranger to the publishing game. She founded Automatism Press in the 1990s, through which she published Morbid Curiosity, a non-fiction journal described by San Francisco Weekly as “a Reader’s Digest of the dark side.” She has worked as an editor, writer, and publisher for years, and this is the first time she’s turned to crowdfunding to bring a project to life.
She’s in good company — acclaimed science fiction/fantasy author Brandon Sanderson recently launched his own campaign to fund the self-publication of four novels he’d written in secret in 2020 and 2021. Kickstarter’s own statistics show that publishing projects are popular, with two million backers pledging $200 million to books, zines, and literary spaces in 2020 alone. Loren herself has backed upwards of 60 projects since she joined the platform in 2011, most of them books.
On why she opted to crowdfund Death’s Garden Revisited, Loren explains, “I wanted to build an audience beforehand. When I usually publish a book, I put it out and then I try and find the audience for it. I wanted to do it the other way this time.”
Kickstarter is a great option for generating buzz around a book. It offers a unique opportunity to not only inform audiences about upcoming projects, but to make readers a part of the publishing process. By providing backer incentives, publishers can get the funding they need while giving back to readers in the form of copies of books and exclusive products and experiences. “One of the tiers, I thought, No one will ever fund this,” Loren says. “I said: for $500, come to California. There’s a little town south of me that has 17 graveyards. We’ll go spend the afternoon, we’ll go look at graveyards. I’m not gonna give a tour, we’ll just wander around and talk about cemeteries. Somebody said yes!”
I feel like Loren’s story is proof that we should never underestimate our audiences. It might be easy to second-guess rewards when setting up a crowdfunding campaign like Loren’s, but it’s important to remember that passion breeds passion, and passionate people are often eager to share their excitement with — to use Loren’s phrasing — kindred spirits.
Loren also emphasizes the relief crowdfunding can give to publishers who, thanks to early promotion and secure funding, won’t feel the pressure of finding readers and earning back production costs upon a book’s release. “That will have already happened,” Loren says.
The early success of Death’s Garden Revisited has turned it into a Kickstarter Project We Love. “That was completely unexpected,” says Loren, still astonished. “It’s such a small campaign. I didn’t think they’d pay attention to it. I just assumed, you know, they’ve got Brandon Sanderson’s $30 million campaign, why would they pay any attention to mine? But I got an email from them yesterday. Geez. It was just so nice.”
Loren did a lot of preparation before launching the campaign for Death’s Garden Revisited. “I have a bunch of friends who have done Kickstarters over the years, and so I wanted them to check me,” she explains. Loren already knew how things worked on the side of Kickstarter backers, so she set out to fill in the gaps on the creators’ end. She spoke to friends, enrolled in courses, and read books to ensure she had all the knowledge she needed to set her project up for success.
Among the resources she used, Loren recommends Crowdfunding Your Fiction: A Best Practices Guide by Loren L. Coleman and its free accompanying course, Kickstarter Best Practices for Fiction Writers, taught by Loren L. Coleman and Dean Wesley Smith. She also recommends Russel Nohelty and Monica Leonelle’s Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter.
“It’s worth doing a bunch of research in advance to understand what people’s expectations are as backers and what Kickstarter wants to see you do,” Loren says.
Loren also has some of her own advice for writers considering launching crowdfunding campaigns, including pre-planning your production schedule. She learned from backing other campaigns that not all creators go in with the understanding that it takes some time for funds to hit the bank after a campaign closes.
“It takes a little while for the money to come from Kickstarter,” Loren explains. This is because Kickstarter doesn’t charge backers until a campaign has reached its funding goal. Backers also have the option to cancel or change their pledge before a campaign closes. Add in processing times between backers, banks, and creators, and it can take some time for a creator to see their funds. To avoid having to kick off your project launch with apologies, Loren recommends building this delay into your production schedule. It’s a delicate balance, of course. There are lot of factors to contend with: funding, mailing rewards, fulfilling crowdfunding promises.
“I’m trying to build in enough time for everything that can screw up to screw up and still get the books to people on time,” Loren says. For Loren’s timeline, “The text of the book is about 90% done. I still have essays coming back, but everything else is edited. I’m still working out the order [of the essays], but it’s ready to go to the proofreader, who’s ready to read it. All of that should be done by the end of May, and the book is coming out in October.”
The schedule that Loren has laid out leaves wiggle room for Loren to deal with delays in receiving her Kickstarter funds, complications with mailing out backer rewards, adjustments to the book design, and any issues that may arise at the printer.
It was stressful, Loren admits. But when I ask if she’s considered giving Kickstarter another go in the future, she’s game. She laughs, but she’s game! “I was thinking about this in the shower! I was thinking about maybe next year maybe doing another one.”
She gets a bit somber here, letting out a quiet breath as she says, “Writing is so — I know you know this — writing is so lonely. It’s so much of you in your own head, with all your own doubts. To create something like this and have people be invested in it and encouraging and helpful — it just means the world to me, it’s really great. I can see how that part [of crowdfunding] can be addictive.”
Loren’s words ring true. Writing is a solitary activity, and so much of its creation is quiet. It’s not a spectator sport, and the cheers and encouragement often come after the bulk of the work is completed. By the time an audience is digging into a fresh book, the writer has usually started drafting another project. This is why community is so important for writers and other creatives. As I sit with Loren, I’m struck by the fact that we would not be here — the two of us together, in our respective offices on two different coasts, talking about graveyards and crowdfunding, if it weren’t for the Write&W(h)ine community.
“You know, social media — people badmouth it,” Loren says. “It seems like everyday someone is flouncing off of Twitter, they’ve had a terrible experience and they’re going to take their bone and go home. But I think that social media is the most amazing thing. Being able to connect with people around the world instantly? People don’t respect that enough.”
She laughs, jokes about how she started writing on a typewriter so many years ago. “When I first started publishing back in ‘97, we wrote to each other. I sent out a postcard every time there was a new issue [of Morbid Curiosity] and then people would write me an actual, physical check and often a letter, and so I felt like I knew my readers and they knew me. That’s kind of carried over into social media. Meeting you through Twitter has just been really cool. Meeting all these people who get together on Friday nights to hang out and talk about writing — I think that is the best thing ever.”
I get flustered here — flattered, too, but flustered. When I first asked Loren if she’d be willing to speak with me about her Kickstarter campaign for Death’s Garden Revisited, I hadn’t expected her to bring the conversation full circle back to how we meet - on the #WriteAndWine hashtag on Twitter. Loren started joining in chats about two years ago, and we’ve kept up with one another ever since. Finally getting to put a face to her name was a unique sort of magic, and it was a bit surreal to sit with her and actively recognize that we might have never known one another if it wasn’t for social media.
“Thank you for that,” Loren says, and I thank her right back, because — just as Loren might not have become the cemetery expert she is without that chance stop in London, the Write&W(h)ine community simply could not exist without Loren and all the other writers who have taken time out of their Friday nights for the past three years to chat about writing on Twitter.
That sense of community is also alive and well among cemetery enthusiasts. I ask Loren how one might get involved, a little bit for me but also for readers who might be intrigued by her stories. “If you just search in cemetery- or gravestone group on Facebook, you’ll turn up so many. But one of my favorites is The Cemetery Club, just because they’re super nice people. Cemetery people are just the nicest people. It’s kind of weird that they’re so nice. I think we all have a sense that time is short. Why be mean? You’ve got some stuff to do before the end.”
Loren also mentions that Instagram is ripe with cemetery content. “There’s at least about 200 or 300 cemetery bloggers on Instagram. If you just put in cemetery, you’ll find all kinds of stuff!”
Loren Rhoads is the author of 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die and Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel, as well as five novels, a short story collection, and a memoir. She was the editor of Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues, Tales for the Camp Fire, The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two, as well as Morbid Curiosity magazine. Her newest book is called Death’s Garden Revisited, and collects essays about visiting cemeteries from 40 genealogists and geocachers, tour guides and travelers, historians, archaeologists, and ghost hunters. She is @morbidloren on Twitter and Instagram. You can keep up with her cemetery and bookish adventures at lorenrhoads.com.
You can back Death’s Garden Revisited on Kickstarter until April 16, 2022.
