Sean Markey grew up in Charleston, SC until, at age sixteen, his house burned down. “Our family moved to Florida after that, and I left Florida as soon as I possibly could.” He went to college to be an elementary school teacher and earned a certificate for teaching in special education. “I initially went the ‘becoming a teacher’ route because I had illusions of spending all my spare time writing fiction, and I (mistakenly) thought ‘oh, I’ll just spend the whole summer writing, it’ll be The Best!’—Spoiler alert, that’s not how that works.” He also attended a writing workshop on the Oregon Coast with Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith.

Markey lived in Salt Lake City for several years, then moved with wife Beth Wodzinski to the high desert outside of Moab in southeastern Utah. “It’s incredible there, the weathered red rock landscape hundreds of millions of years old. We eventually escaped the drought and the ever-increasing 100+ temps in the summer by moving to this old farmhouse in northern Vermont. It’s got a huge barn on the property that used to be a grist mill, and it has its own little pond. It’s beautiful and I love it here, even in the winter when it’s -20°F sometimes . . . ”

In addition to running Psychopomp, Sean Markey earns a living doing marketing-related work. He did spend some time working in education, among other things. “My favorite job was as a person-counter for a newly opened (at the time) commuter rail system running eighty-three miles from Provo to Ogden in Utah. They wanted to get a sense of how popular the trains were, so they hired people to just ride the trains up and down in shifts. I loved that job—I’d have to count people from SLC up to Ogden and down to Provo that got on my car, and then I could just chill on the way back. I’d bring my ancient laptop and work on fiction—as at the time I still tried to write fiction.”

Sean Markey took a stab at selling his work beginning in 2005 and landed a couple of notable sales, including “Sorrowbird” in Fantasy Magazine’s June 2008 issue and “The Spider In You” in Strange Horizons in March 2009. He was also a slush reader for Clarkesworld and did some work with Shimmer. “At first it was just helping Beth stuff magazines into envelopes and take them to the post office to mail. But eventually it was helping with the website and some of the tech/distribution stuff.”

The Deadlands launched in May 2021 with E. Catherine Tobler as editor-in-chief and Markey as publisher. Markey launched Psychopomp in January 2023, with Christopher Barzak’s novella A Voice Calling as their first book (both print and digital) in March 2024. Stories from The Deadlands have received many accolades, including finalists for the WSFA Small Press Award, the Sturgeon Award, and the Locus Award. Tobler received a World Fantasy nomination for her work with The Deadlands, adding to her already impressive list of accolades. Psychopomp purchased Fantasy Magazine in late 2024 and relaunched the publication as a quarterly under the editorial stewardship of Arley Sorg and Shingai Njeri Kagunda, the former a two-time World Fantasy finalist for co-editing Fantasy from 2020-2023, the latter a two-time Hugo finalist for her work as co-editor at PodCastle. As a book publisher, Psychopomp is off to a strong start, with work by notable genre figures like Barzak, Vajra Chandrasekera, Premee Mohamed, and others; and having received praise from respected critics in the field.

How did you get into science fiction, fantasy, and similar? Who were the authors or what were the works that you consider to be formative and important to you?

I was way too young for this book at the time, but my mom gave me a Stephen King short story collection—Skeleton Crew, and it scared the absolute shit out of me. But I was hooked on it. I proceeded to go and read nearly every single Stephen King book I could get my hands on over the next few years. I constantly got in trouble for it in school, reading when I should have been paying attention or doing classwork.

I got really good at taking tests because I knew if I could finish first, the teacher would let us quietly read until everyone was done. So I’d finish quickly and then spend the next hour or two reading. It was amazing.

It’s no surprise to me that the Dark Tower books by King really grabbed my attention. It feels like they mean to me what I’ve heard other writers say LotR means to them. All of my interest in the multiverse and other worlds and the great, ginormous end of all things comes from reading those books at juuuuust the right age—late high school.

Another writer that’s very important to me is Kelly Link. I attended the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, NY in 2007. It was my first convention, and I randomly wandered by the Small Beer table in the dealers room. She was there signing books, so I was like, all right, fuck it, I’ll pick up a book this lady is signing. I had never heard of her before, I was very new to the non-Barnes-and-Noble side of genre fiction. I picked up a paperback copy of Magic for Beginners, which she signed, “love! magic! zombies!” I just now went and looked that up. The book looks like hell. I’ve taken it everywhere with me, the corners of the pages are all bent, people have spilled wine on it, but I love it. It really blew my mind wide open about what’s possible in fiction, and what someone with a strong voice and a ton of creativity can do to and with a story.

It reminds me of a similar path I took with music—I’d been a Metallica fan since like 1992, when I was nine years old, and I almost exclusively listened to Metallica until late high school, when I discovered the band A Perfect Circle, and I was like, Are you kidding me? You can do this with music?

So, it was similar reading all this Stephen King popcorn fiction for ten straight years and then reading the title story “Magic for Beginners” in that collection, and it just kind of changed my whole world. So it’s a pretty important book for me.

What does it mean to be the publisher for The Deadlands, and is the way you inhabit this role different or similar from other magazines which have a publisher/editor distinction?

I think it’s a bit unique. Almost every other magazine I can think of right at this moment, with the exception of Apex, runs with the “editor is the publisher is the editor” model. It’s obviously a great, smart way to run things. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes wish I was also the editor, to soak up some of those accolades (for whatever that’s worth).

But honestly that would be an infinite disaster loop. I have big ideas, and I make big things happen. That’s great for coming up with cool things to do or try, but really, really bad for making straightforward decisions and being a stable person that meets deadlines. I could never do it. The Deadlands would have lasted exactly one and a half issues if I was the only one in charge. I’ve got a great team that helps me make amazing things happen, and Elise (shout out Elise Tobler!) is extremely responsible for our successes. I also have zero editing skills, and she has ten thousand editing skills, so it’s an arrangement that works really well for me—and I hope she’d say the same!

Honestly there are pros and cons to each way. I think the most important thing is that one does a job one is well suited to. I work in marketing and SEO for my day job, so focusing on that for a magazine or a publisher is something I bring to the table. I have put together an amazing team that helps me bring The Deadlands and Psychopomp to life (shout out Elise, Nico, David, Laura, Jo, Cory, Amanda, Melissa, Annika, K.C., Christine, Shana, Felicia!).

How did The Deadlands get started, and how did that lead into publishing books as well?

2013 is the earliest I remember being like, I want to publish books! I didn’t have any money for it, had zero experience, and had no plan. But the interest stayed with me. In 2019 I sold one of the websites I was building for a life changing amount of money, and used some of those funds to continue to build websites.

I did a lot of thinking and journaling for the rest of that month about what I wanted to do with my time. I had worked very hard on all these websites. I’m talking sixteen-hour days every day for years, and I remember telling Beth I could just take the next year off—completely off—live on the savings I have, and just explore. What a gift. I’m so lucky to be in this position.

After journaling a bunch, I basically concluded, Okay! It’s time to start a magazine!

So instead of taking a year off, I got into publishing! And then to make things even more complicated, we made an offer on a house that May (issue 1 of The Deadlands was also published that May), and moved across the country from Utah to Vermont with two cats and two dogs in the car with us, at the end of June.

It was an extremely turbulent time to have started a magazine, it turns out, and I just want to say Elise is amazing and the best, because she carried it all through those months.

As to how that led to publishing: much like how authors say, “I want to write books but I guess I have to establish myself as a short story writer” (however wrong that is or isn’t), I really want to publish novels, but I thought I’d start with short fiction, since I have had experience working at two magazines, and it seemed a lot more straightforward than trying to publish a book with zero experience . . .

The name The Deadlands is from the T.S. Eliot poem “The Hollow Men” (“This is the dead land”). That was Elise’s suggestion after a couple weeks of brainstorming names.

The Deadlands has a focus on death, in the sense of “the ends we face here, and the beginnings we find elsewhere.” Why this particular focus, and are there challenges that arise specifically because of having this focus?

I’ve always been kind of fascinated, definitely terrified, of the idea of death—from when I was just a kid, staying up late at night trying to process the idea that one day, one actual, real day, I won’t be alive anymore. Terrifying. I had never talked to anyone about this at the time, just held it deep inside, and let it grow there in the dark.

I’ve always been drawn to stories involving death, but also—most stories have something of this in them, right? It’s one reason I was drawn to Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. Reading that series introduced me to T.S. Eliot and The Waste Land. Reading his work led me to “The Hollow Men”, and that really—I don’t know. The imagery in that poem stayed with me.

I don’t quite know when the idea to do a death-focused magazine came, but when it was time to start such a project, the imagery of “The Hollow Men” immediately surfaced and had a big influence over the vibes.

As for challenges that arise, haha, there are some!

At first glance everyone paints us as a horror mag. “Oh, The Deadlands? Must be horror.” But it super is not! If you’ve read it, you know this.

Elise and I jokingly refer to it as “Death Shimmer,” since these two magazines share an extremely similar aesthetic (and Elise was EiC of Shimmer Magazine, so . . . obviously).

We also get a lot of stories submitted where a character dies, but the story isn’t about death. A death happens, but it’s not the point of the story. And that is the biggest difference, the biggest thing people just getting to know us, who haven’t read any of our fiction (despite being free online), assume we want to read about in theirs.

Maybe digging a little too deep into the marketing side of things, but it is harder to publish a specialized magazine. The topic is only interesting to a smaller number of readers. The topic might be too much for some readers, some of the time (when my cat died in early 2022, I thought publishing a magazine about death was real stupid for a couple of months, but ultimately I took comfort from reading these stories and myths about dying and what comes next, and that is also the point of The Deadlands). Covers are harder to find, because they have to be so specific. It’s all around a harder thing to pull off than just general sci-fi/fantasy (in my limited experience at least).

What are your highlights regarding The Deadlands—what are you most proud of to-date? And what are your hopes and even plans for the future, as far as the magazine goes?

I think, thirty-six issues in at the time of this writing, we have made a very solid reputation for ourselves. We’re not well-known in the wider world, but the people that do know of us, it seems, respect us.

When I announced that we were opening to novellas (another step on the journey to publishing novels), we received a bunch of really amazing submissions.

I think if I just directly started Psychopomp and said “send me your novellas,” we would have gotten some action, sure, but we’d be an unknown quantity, and many writers would not have taken us seriously for the first few years.

But we weren’t unknown, we were those people behind The Deadlands. We invested in releasing a bunch of really high-quality, big-vibes magazines.

So I guess that’s what I’m most proud of to date, the reputation for really great work that we’ve built.

We also received some recognition, such as having Elise nominated for a World Fantasy award for her editing of The Deadlands, or getting a story from one of our first three issues included in The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Fourteen by Ellen Datlow. We’ve had stories be finalists for the Locus Award and Theodore Sturgeon Award. Every year that they were eligible we had poems as finalists for the Rhysling Award—and one of our poems won (tied) the Dwarf Star Award.

Of course, awards aren’t the end-all-be-all goal of publishing, but to get any recognition in such a crowded field of ultra talented authors writing unbelievably good stories for so many outstanding magazines—it really makes me happy.

Plan for the future—honestly to keep publishing issues and have our readers like what we do enough to support us. As many people reading this will know, it’s tough out there, a lot of good magazines are closing due to not enough support. I know that isn’t a super wild goal, but we’re still young enough that it’s a challenging goal, and what I’m working toward: sustainability, and to keep building a big reputation. You want high quality stories, poems, and nonfiction about death, because that’s your jam for some reason? The Deadlands is the obvious zine you need to read.

Psychopomp has already published a handful of books in print and digital, including novellas and an anthology. What has been the process for sourcing authors and works so far?

The novellas are all from an open call. In January of 2023 and January of 2024, we opened to novella submissions through the end of April. We will not be opening to novella subs in January 2025, because I ended up buying two years’ worth of novellas last time we opened. Whoops. There were so many amazing stories though.

The 2024 novelettes were solicited. I reached out to a handful of authors whose work I liked (with input from Elise) and a few of those had the time to write something. The 2025 novelettes—two of which have been announced already, came from a closed call. We were going to publish four novelettes in 2024 and we had three, so I sent an email to everyone we’ve ever published in The Deadlands—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and said, “hey we need a fourth novelette for 2024, if you’ve got something send it over!”

We just needed one so we didn’t want to open to submissions for 2-3 months or something, and sending to The Deadlands authors was a more manageable way to do that, which also had the advantage of sending to a pool of authors whose work we know very literally that we like. That’s how we ended up with novelettes from Erin Brown and Natalia Theodoridou. There’s one more novelette announcement coming in late spring-ish 2025.

The anthology—Afterlives: The Year’s Best Death Fiction 2023, which was curated by Vajra Chandrasekera (who wrote the very first story that The Deadlands published, “Peristalsis”) was published in summer last year. I’d had the idea in my head for a while—one thing I love about having a small press that’s 100% mine is that I can just have an idea, a wild and outlandish idea like, what if year’s best, but death stories? and just push it out into the world, brand new.

I met Vajra in person for the first time at Readercon in 2023 and asked him to sign a copy of his Deadlands story in our year one anthology. I had been thinking about it, and I thought he’d be the perfect curator for this wild idea I had about a themed year’s best anthology, given how often he writes about death in his fiction (and just go to his website and look at the header—vibes are right). He was game, and we made it happen. Year two of this anthology is being curated by Sheree Renée Thomas, who I cold-reached out to and asked if she’d like to be involved, so I’m super excited for Afterlives 2024 to come out this summer.

You have also published a short story and novelettes on the Psychopomp site. Is this essentially the beginning of a magazine, or is this something else?

I don’t think of it as a magazine. Maybe I should? I don’t know. I think of it as this weird, undefinable platform of way-cool work: stories, nonfiction, blog posts, music—like a city that grows organically from nothing, and navigating around it doesn’t make a lot of sense, vs. something planned in advance on a grid, with thoughtful wide streets, like Paris vs. Salt Lake City.

I like that it can be whatever it becomes . . . music reviews, best-of lists, books or movies or whatever! The downside of this, from a publisher’s perspective, is it doesn’t get a lot of coverage. For instance, we published a short story by Premee Mohamed on Psychopomp about Voyager I. It’s such a fantastic little story that got basically no reviews from any of the regular places that review good short fiction, because it wasn’t a part of an organized, ongoing publication. No one was watching for it, anticipating it. So that’s one downside we’re dealing with currently that I think will fade away as the site grows over time and becomes more known.

The story of how that story came to be is actually an interesting window into what I love about Psychopomp:

I saw a story going around social media about Voyager I by Doug Muir, which started like this:

“Billions of miles away at the edge of the Solar System, Voyager 1 has gone mad and has begun to die.”

And I thought omg that is a story I would like to read. Science fantasy is probably my favorite subgenre (see the answer to the next question) and I thought the story of an anthropomorphized Voyager I dying would be a perfect fit for a story on Psychopomp.

I reached out to Premee right away because I knew she would do an amazing job with this, and because we’ve worked with her previously in The Deadlands (and are working on her collection One Message Remains, which we are releasing Feb 11th), and because I am genuinely a fan of her writing. I was right, she totally nailed it, and the story really resonated with a lot of people.

So . . . yeah, I don’t know what to call Psychopomp—not quite a magazine, more of a living, breathing thing that’s undefined.

Do the books published by Psychopomp fit a certain vibe? Do you intend for the line of books to have a certain flavor?

Psychopomp really is a reflection of my own interests. I guess an alternate name for it might be Markeysworld. : )

The kind of stories I love to read are the kinds of stories I want to publish. I put together a list for the guidelines when we were soliciting novellas (currently closed!) and it’s kind of a grab bag of ideas, like:

• Stories where grief or loss plays a leading role
• Stories that feature the afterlife or the underworld
• Stories that involve the journey through death/the journey of the dead
• Stories that involve death personified (Death!)
• Stories that take place in, or utilize a multiverse
• Stories that involve time travel (esp. those that involve time travel + a previously mentioned theme)
• Space, but make it goth
• A story within a story (within a story [within a story] within a story) within a story . . .
• Stories where things that are not usually personified ARE personified (planets? galaxies? time? . . . bones?)

You can see my preference for science fantasy in that list, but it’s not all I want to publish. The stories we publish are on vibes, but this list definitely gives a flavor of the kind of books we publish.

Honestly I’d love to publish more “space, but make it goth” kinds of stories. In early 2024 we published “What Any Dead Thing Wants” by Aimee Ogden, which is about a team of exorcists that visit planets that have been terraformed to banish the lingering ghosts of the native life that’s been wiped out, and for me it really carries the banner for what kind of stories I’d like to publish.

What do you have coming up from Psychopomp that you are excited about?

Well, I’m sure readers have just learned about the acquisition and relaunch of Fantasy Magazine by Psychopomp, so I’m 10/10 excited for that.

We also recently announced a book/music collaboration with our upcoming novella Starstruck by Aimee Ogden, and a similarly titled EP by the band Hail Your Highness. Music is my first love, and since I’m building Psychopomp to be this bizarre and wonderful uncategorizable thing, I’m super excited to start exploring how we can bring music into the mix.

Hail Your Highness is an indie band from Michigan, two sisters creating amazing, dreamy pop. I’ve been a fan for years now and this past autumn I reached out to see if they would be interested in creating an EP inspired by a book. They were game, and Aimee was game, and I can’t wait to share the results of this collaboration.

I want to do more of this, specifically with music, but I’m open to other ideas. How can we connect books with other categories of art to make really unique, special arrangements? I don’t know, but let’s find out!

As mentioned, we have three novelettes coming out this year, three novellas by Aimee Ogden, Josh Rountree, and K.L. Schroeder, then three the year after by Bernie Jean Schiebeling, Thomas Ha, and Amal Singh.

In addition to everything I’ve already mentioned you can also look forward to an audiobook or two, the collected works of The Deadlands Year Two and Three digital books (we’re a bit behind on that), Afterlives 2024, the collected novelettes from 2024 (print and digital), the collected novelettes from 2025.

What are your plans for Psychopomp for the next year as well as the next few years?

We’re a very small press with very limited funds (and almost everything paid for is paid out of pocket), but I dream big. I’d love to publish a novel around 2027, but we’ve got some work to do around marketing and distribution (a huge, huge problem for small presses) before we can really take that on.

Also, don’t be surprised to see an original anthology announcement in the next year or two. There’s an idea I’ve had in mind for a while that I really want to see out in the world, but that’s all I’ll say about it for now.

You recently attended a few in-person events. For folks who might see you out and about, whether they are authors or readers, what should they do if they are interested in having a conversation with you?

Approach me. I’m super shy. I will never walk up to people and just start chatting, but I’m always down to meet people and talk about publishing/writing.

Or email me and set up a time to meet. It’s easy to remember: sean at psychopomp (you can figure it out from that).

Is there anything else you’d like Clarkesworld readers to know about The Deadlands, Psychopomp and its titles, or you and your work?

If you like what we’re up to please support us! Go to Psychopomp.com and buy a book. Go to our Patreon to get an e-copy or print issue. Participate in our yearly October fundraiser where we create a new Ferryman’s Coin every year (and have some interesting stuff in store for the next one).

If this is your first time hearing about us, I’d love for you to go to Psychopomp.com, Psychopomp.com/deadlands/, or Psychopomp.com/fantasy/ and check out what we’re up to, if you’re into that kind of thing!

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