Eleanna Castroianni is a writer, poet, and oral storyteller from Greece. Eleanna’s writing has appeared in various publications such as Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld Magazine, Fireside, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, PodCastle, Fantasy Magazine, and The Stinging Fly and has been reprinted in year’s best collections. In 2025, Eleanna was selected as an Aspen Words SFF Fellow. Lives in Athens with too many books, art supplies, and string instruments. “Thicker” is Eleanna’s second appearance in Uncanny, a powerful story of family and history, set in a flooded village with a contested past.
Uncanny Magazine: “Thicker” has a vivid setting, imbued with history and swirling with conflicting narratives. What was your starting point or inspiration for the story?
Eleanna Castroianni: The starting point was an actual village in Greece that was permanently flooded and its inhabitants had to move elsewhere—it is said it is still visible sometimes! That happened because of river works, which is one of the alternative explanations mentioned in the story, but I kept wondering, what if the reason was something darker and the pain of the memory led people to make up another explanation? What if we don’t know what happened at all, one conflicting narrative blending with the other? That was the subsequent inspiration for the story: my long-time interest in recent Greek history, among which the Civil War sits in the bloodiest, cruelest of memories. Two polarized sides means that there are two opposite accounts about almost everything that happened. One of the histories is now official, because it was the victors’ side, but what is really true and what isn’t? Countries with a legacy of a twentieth-century civil war will know what I’m talking about. To this day, the past is a contested space. Narratives are never resolved. Human suffering and intergenerational trauma sit in the midst of all this—and this is what I tend to write about.
Uncanny Magazine: The story has themes of family and community, with a focus on Vassia and her mother. What do you need to know about your characters and their relationships before you start writing? Do your characters ever do anything that surprises you?
Eleanna Castroianni: The milieu of my characters is always important, as they are always struggling with something that is beyond and over them, a structure (like family, religion, or community) or a societal demand (like gender expectations) that they have to grapple with. But my approach to that tends to be less the individualist/optimist kind that says we can simply overcome unjust or traumatic conventions and legacies. I’m more concerned with the kind of survival that happens within those structures and the complexity of those bonds (in the connective sense and in the imprisoning sense—these always co-exist). When a setting is historical, characters tend to show up as I do my research. Something in the voices of oral histories rings true and a character starts speaking. I don’t know everything about them, but when I feel like I know enough I can start writing. And they do things that surprise me, although this usually happens in longform. The short story is more or less complete before I start writing, but sometimes a detail or another will go in the direction it wants!
Uncanny Magazine: What research did you do for this story?
Eleanna Castroianni: I didn’t do any specific research for this one, as it is based less on actual events and more on the affective experience of living in a country that went through a twentieth-century civil war. In a sense it is the result of my long-time interest in the topic. One thing mentioned by a historian that stuck with me was that the essence of a civil war is that you can’t go back to your village—your neighbors might want to kill you because you killed their kin. This is mentioned in the story, as I think it captures the essence of the generational implications: there’s no going back home, home is a place that has changed forever. Despite making peace eventually, hate is now part of the mortar in the walls of the houses. This changes communities, gets passed down to the next generations. One important source apart from historical texts and oral histories is always the literature around the topic. In Greece, talking about the legacies of the Civil War, the Junta, and political exile in general, has been an important topic since the 80s, when people could finally write openly about it. Poetry and non-realist fiction (absurdist, weird) were the preferred vehicles, I’m guessing because they give people more tools to convey what is hard to talk about or what is essentially unspeakable in a conventionally representational manner—part of the reason why I prefer the speculative mode myself. We are currently in a new generation of writers writing about these topics, I believe—Eleni Linas’s short “Carry On” definitely influenced this story.
Uncanny Magazine: Vassia brings a Walkman with her when she goes to the village. If you were traveling with a Walkman, what songs would you have on the tape?
Eleanna Castroianni: I miss my cassette and CD players! And I miss the experience of having a tape, playing start to finish, rather than something on shuffle or streaming. I like melancholic songs especially when traveling in the countryside, even if it’s super sunny outside (in fact, sunny makes me even more melancholic; sunny is horror material for me. Midsommar got it right). So I’d love to have London Grammar’s earlier work or the haunting soundtrack of the Japanese movie All About Lily Chou-Chou.
Uncanny Magazine: Who are some of your literary influences? What’s something you’ve read recently and loved?
Eleanna Castroianni: I’m one of those people who grew up reading whatever I could get my hands onto, because resources were scarce. Some people call this eclectic taste, but it has always been closer to scavenging for me. To this day I’m still a scavenger—although I do have options now, I still tend to read in multiple genres and just go toward whatever grabs me. Some of my favorite writers are Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Arundhati Roy, but I am also a hardcore fantasy fan (I will gush about Robin Hobb every chance I get). I am currently obsessed with Romantic poets, because their nature-inspired rebellion reads so contemporary right now it has almost become an invaluable resource for coping with daily life. And I am deeply awed by my contemporaries’ talent, with Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall and Natalia Theodoridou’s Sour Cherry among my favorite reads of the past couple of years.
Uncanny Magazine: What are you working on next?
Eleanna Castroianni: I am working on several things! Some are long-form and others short-form, but common themes are: folk magic and hauntings in Greece, archaeology and colonial extraction, non-human others and the justice we do by them. Hope I can share some of these soon!
Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!
© 2025 Uncanny Magazine
