Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

My guest this week is Vivian Asimos who recently achieved her PhD on theology and virtual storytelling at Durham, with ‘Slender Man’ as her main case study, and we begin by talking about blurring the line in horror between fiction and reality. Born in Florida, Vivian reveals how she has to give different answers to the question of where she is from as she has been living in Durham for several years. She talks about the cold war in a previous institution between Theology and Religious Studies and about the ‘intellectual rollercoaster’ with the concept of Theology. Both of her parents are ‘education forward’ people and she discusses how she is perhaps following what her mother would have done if she’d taken a different path. We discuss the difference between intelligence and education and how Vivian wanted to be a creative writer. Vivian reveals how she found herself stumbling into Religious Studies and she talks about the narrative dimension to her PhD. Vivian is more of an audio than a visual person