Juliet Kahn is an Eisner Award-winning writer and editor living in Boston, Massachusetts. Her short stories, poetry, and criticism have been published in Black Warrior Review, The Comics Journal, and Luna Station Quarterly, among other outlets. Her first graphic novel, Fabiola & Ylini, is forthcoming. “Seven Minutes in Heaven with the Electric Seraphim” is her first appearance in Uncanny, a troubling and provocative story of young women who struggle with—and break away from—an embodied existence.
Uncanny Magazine: This is a dark, intricately structured examination of life, consciousness, and the mind-body problem. What was your starting point or inspiration for the story?
Juliet Kahn: In its earliest incarnation, this was a horror story about everything being within humanity’s grasp: A bunch of girls reach actual heaven and in a few generations it becomes as mundane as anything else. But as I expanded it, it became more and more about why these girls wanted to achieve bodilessness in the first place. There’s a quote from Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born I returned to a lot while writing: “The body has been made so problematic for women that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit.” Once I got on this track, the epistolary format went from being something I wanted to try for the fun of it to a way of examining how young women who struggle with the body are commodified, pathologized, sexualized, romanticized, etc.
Uncanny Magazine: “Seven Minutes in Heaven with the Electric Seraphim” contains a lot of troubling and difficult elements, as is evidenced by the content note (suicide, sexual assault, ableism, dysmorphia, torture). What did you find challenging about writing these elements? Do you have advice for other authors trying to grapple with difficult topics?
Juliet Kahn: Mostly, writing about these elements is a relief! Venting my teenaged spleen felt amazing, even years after the fact. Being seen by so much of the world as a stupid, shallow hysteric who could be tolerated only while inducing an erection in a higher class of being sucked. Articulating how and why it sucked makes me feel better and is the closest thing I’ll ever get to sweet, sweet revenge on the worst guys of my past. If I didn’t deal with life this way, I think I would either become a Montana hermit with too many giant dogs or an ambulatory migraine.
But I did find it difficult to portray the intertwined pain, dignity, and desperation of Weird Teen Girldom without either validating or condemning it. People love to point at young women who do something that seems transparently bizarre and self-destructive (launching their brains into cyberspace, in this case) and say, look, how crazy! Maybe they mean it sympathetically, or maybe they just want to point and laugh. But they never take the circumstances of these girls’ lives seriously. In the case of this story, few of the parents, forum posters, podcasters, op-ed writers, etc., look at the world constantly screaming YOUR BODY IS A PROBLEM at the Seraphim—they just look at the girls’ response. There’s never any grappling with the fact that girls who do something out-there are making rational choices according to powerful norms and rules they did not set up or enforce—and that lots of the people pointing and laughing benefit from, in one way or another.
So I wanted to capture that. But at the same time, I definitely didn’t want to portray the Seraphim’s choice as defensible or their community as liberatory—and I really wanted to nail how easy it is to fall in love with harm in these contexts. I’m native to these kinds of Weird Girl spaces; I know how good their “solutions” can feel, even when they feed on anxiety and cause very real pain. These subcultures are also often a great way to bond with other girls, especially if you’re struggling to do so in real life. It can be a sort of pseudo-feminism and feels like real empowerment—the Seraphim do, after all, take charge of themselves in a very concrete way. Girls in these circumstances are attempting to exercise autonomy, dignity, and self-respect with extremely limited tools. But that doesn’t mean the tools aren’t shit. It doesn’t mean there isn’t harm being done. I was so concerned that I wouldn’t get that across. There are probably a dozen snippets I cut from this piece, then re-added, then cut again, out of worry that I wasn’t making things clear. For authors trying to achieve this kind of balance and honesty about anything thorny…my advice is to embrace the frustration and difficulty, the constant “am I getting this right?” anxiety. It’s a hard topic; it shouldn’t be easy to write about.
Uncanny Magazine: What research did you do for the story? Did you learn anything that surprised you?
Juliet Kahn: Most of the research I did had to do with how this sort of technology would fail to achieve the immortality people dream of. I’m lucky enough to have some brilliant friends in neuroscience and psychology who gave me insight into things like synaptic pruning and intra-lab drama. Probably the most surprising and valuable info, though, came from talking with one of my best friends, who works in IT. As in any field, ideal conditions are rarely met, and he gave me insight into precisely how a set-up like the Seraphim’s would fall apart due to simple missteps like failing to test restore functions. I went into this knowing their afterlife would crumble, but it wasn’t until I talked to him that I realized just how much of a role quotidian crap would play in that process.
Uncanny Magazine: The story has a powerful ending; did you know how it would end before you started writing? More generally, what do you need to know before you can start drafting, and what do you discover as you write?
Juliet Kahn: I did know how it would end! Honestly, no matter what I write, I figure out the beginning, ending, and the major thematic arc that connects the two pretty much immediately—it’s fleshing out everything in between that’s hard. That’s what I have to discover as I write. I keep hoping I’ll cook up a tidier and more preliminary process, but so far, there’s no way for me to do it but to do it.
Uncanny Magazine: Who are some of your literary influences? What is something you’ve read recently and loved?
Juliet Kahn: The two great literary loves of my life are Joanna Russ and Sandra Cisneros—I think if you smash the former’s essays on female subcultures and the latter’s “Little Miracles, Kept Promises” together, you get this short story. I’m also hugely influenced by Michael Chabon, Lisa Taddeo, Shirley Jackson, Kyoko Okazaki, Kij Johnson, Toni Morrison, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and Elaine Kraf. Recently, I’ve been rereading a lot. Casey Nowak has been a big favorite—I dream of making something as precise and gutting as Diana’s Electric Tongue—as well as Tamsyn Muir’s shorter work. I want to eat Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower whole, I love it so much.
Uncanny Magazine: What are you working on next?
Juliet Kahn: I have a few short stories I’m hoping to finish in the next couple of months. One is about a pair of vampires trying to deal with immortality-induced anomie by becoming Republicans, while the other is about a group of late ’90s feminists who summon Lilith, then don’t know what to do with her. I was a teen minarchist who grew into the kind of person who quotes Adrienne Rich, so basically, total indulgence of my fixations, past and present. I also just signed with Desiree Wilson at Looking Glass Literary & Media, and am looking forward to bringing my graphic novel Fabiola & Ylini to print with their help!
Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!
© 2025 Uncanny Magazine
