Leila Taylor
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Grave dirt makes the best mud pies…
Leila Taylor, writer, designer, cultural critic and Creative Director of Brooklyn Public Library, joins Joanna Ebenstein for a rich, wide-ranging conversation about the Gothic as both a cultural form and a lived sensibility—one that moves through memory, history, music, and space.
Drawing from her acclaimed books Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul and Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread, Taylor explores how Gothic feeling is not confined to aesthetics or subculture, but emerges through lived experience: in architecture that unsettles, in histories that refuse resolution, and in the emotional residue of place.
She reflects on growing up as a “spooky kid” in Massachusetts, playing funeral in a cemetery with friends—lying in open graves, performing rituals of death, and making mud pies from “grave dirt.” These early encounters with mortality become a lens for understanding how we learn to live alongside death, even as children.
The conversation moves through Black Gothic traditions, literary and musical influences—tracing back to Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit and moving into Joy Division, The Cure, and Siouxsie and the Banshees—as well as Gothic literature from Frankenstein to Wuthering Heights. Taylor also reflects on haunting media, brutalist architecture, and theories of residual memory, sound, and haunting.
📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468.
💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.
Host: Joanna Ebenstein
Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara
Studio Engineer: Fernando Robleto Vargas
Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill
Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine
Executive Producer: Steven Rajam
Artwork: Lauren Seeley