Author Q&A With Fin Leary

Pull up Fin’s Luca & Ilana playlist before you dive into this interview. Believe me, you’re gonna love it, especially if you’re into vampires and queer friendship.

For this week’s Author Q&A, I spoke with Fin Leary, a 2025 Ink & Impact Finalist, who is currently on tour for the anthology, These Bodies Ain’t Broken.

Fin and I have a childhood love in common - My Chemical Romance. I allowed myself two whole questions to start off this interview before gushing about MCR. Their response captured what many fans of early 2000s alt music grew up wanting to express and scream — be true to yourself despite what the dominant narrative is saying.

Hearing this message as a queer young person stuck with me and created a makeshift armor of possibility that pulled me out of bed every day. My closest friends from middle school, now affectionately named “The Aging Emo’s” in our group chat, offered that same hope and respite with their acceptance and care. Friendship transcends age, geography, and our physical presence in this world — it can become an enduring embrace that seals this reminder in our hearts: you are loved exactly as you are. Fin’s story, “Kissed By Death", celebrates that.

Fin and I met for coffee this Spring to chat about our mutual interests and experiences, and there are a whole lot. Gerard Way mythology, grief, identity in your 30s, teaching, publishing, Fall aesthetics, collaging. We made collages while we spoke, a personal favorite of mine among the neurodivergent-friendly-activities you can do together at a coffee shop. I’m so thrilled to read “Kissed By Death” this week, and to experience how Fin brings his passions and creative ideas to fiction.

Enjoy Fin’s interview here while you listen to their millennial-approved playlist, and then run out to grab a copy of These Bodies Ain’t Broken to support the distinctive, imaginative, and needed voices of disabled authors.

Your fiction work is out now in These Bodies Ain't Broken, a YA horror anthology edited by Madeline Dyer. It's so encouraging to see an all-disabled anthology project in the world. Can you share what it means for you to be part of this anthology? 

It's incredibly meaningful to have my first widespread fictional publication be in an anthology dedicated to disabled authors. I have known that I'm autistic since I got a diagnosis as a child, and I've also navigated my Ehlers-Danlos syndrome diagnosis since my mid-twenties. Disability community has long been a profoundly important part of my life, and it's an honor to be a part of the canon of disability fiction for young adults. As disabled authors, we're creating space for ourselves where there hasn't historically been as much, in horror. I still remember the first time I watched a horror movie, when I was a kid and snuck downstairs to watch one of the Child's Play sequels that my mom was watching and told me I was not old enough to watch with her. Making space for disability in this genre—especially for younger readers—is a way of saying actually, disabled people belong in this space too, which is a radical act. 

I want to know all about Luca! What inspired their character? What are her dreams for the future? Does Luca have a huge crush on their best friend, Ilana, or is it platonic?

Luca came onto the page for me just immediately. I usually have a very rough concept or idea for something I want to write before I sit down to do so. In the case of this story, I knew it was about teenage best friends and I knew one of them was going to go missing (and be declared dead) and then show up a few years later, at the other one's bedside, as a vampire with blood-stained jeans. That was actually all I knew at first. The rest came later. Luca really formed herself as a character. One thing I really wanted was to explore what kind of person would not immediately be terrified if their best friend were turned into a vampire, and I worked backward from there. I also really loved this idea of exploring what queer shame and internalized homophobia looks and feels like when you're raised by a queer family in an LGBTQ-friendly area. Luca's biggest dream for the future right now, I think, is to start living for herself more. And I don't know how to answer the crush/platonic question! Their dynamic is loosely inspired by Jennifer's Body and the idea that there aren't always easy answers to the question of whether something is romantic or platonic. I'm aromantic-spectrum, so I love when stories leave us lingering in that space. I want to always write love stories—platonic or otherwise—that are so profoundly loving that you cannot always tell. As that one meme says, "Were they friends or lovers? Worse." 

You know I HAVE to ask you about the My Chemical Romance inspiration here, as I'd say we are both nearly-lifelong fans. Is 'Vampires Will Never Hurt You' one of your favorite songs, and how loud were you singing when you finally got to see them live? Seriously though, what has this band meant to you and how has it influenced your writing?

Music is a deeply important part of this story, because it drew me and my friends together when we were teenagers and it still does as an adult. I started listening to My Chemical Romance when I was in middle school because my best friend Mary introduced me to them. There's a lot of MCR inspiration in my writing and in my life generally, not just the vampirism, but also the ways that my story, "Kissed By Death," is about being true to yourself in a world that tells you that you're a freak. As hard as it is to choose, my actual absolute favorite MCR song is "Famous Last Words" (which I thought a lot about while writing this) but "Vampires Will Never Hurt You" is definitely up there, and also was so fitting for that scene. My friend Mary died when we were nineteen in a car accident, and I had a hard time listening to MCR for years, aside from isolated listening in her memory, much like Luca. I finally got to see MCR live in September 2025, with one of my very best friends. This friend, when we first became close, suggested that the next time MCR toured we needed to go see them and bring a photo of Mary in a locket with us. I have a screenshot of that text because it was so meaningful to me to have someone else care so much that she wanted to share in my grief and memorial ritual with me for someone they'd never even had a chance to meet. We also went with this friend's mom, who had an absolute blast. The three of us were standing and singing the whole concert! We also did a PowerPoint night several days before, where my friend went over Joan of Arc themes and imagery as an inspiration to Gerard Way, so their mom could learn more about the mythology and concepts behind MCR's discography. It was so fun. 

There's a lot of MCR on the writing playlist I made for "Kissed By Death," obviously. 

Any fun moments from your book tour so far that you'd like to share?

It has been a blast connecting with readers, and getting to do an event with in-house Page Street YA editor Tamara Grasty, since editors and authors rarely get to do events together in that way. I've loved when people ask me recreationally about MCR and I have to physically stop myself from launching into 45 minutes on Gerard Way lore because this is an event about an anthology! The best thing, really, is feeling like the teenage versions of me and Mary are kind of in the room on tour with me, humming along to the discordant screams of Gerard. 

Is there anything you'd like to share with folks who are interested in writing YA fiction? What advice would you give to an earlier version of you working on this project?

I'd suggest continuing to write, finding writing community and mentors, and not writing for anyone else except yourself and letting your audience find you. People will want your words, your story, and you shouldn't have to make it "less queer" or anything like that in order to make it more profitable or marketable. We're here and we always will be. And advice I'd give to myself is just: Enjoy this process, and continue learning and growing as an author. That's all I ever want to do, as I continually challenge myself creatively as well as in every area of my life.

Fin Leary (they/he) is a trans and autistic author, a program manager at We Need Diverse Books, and a faculty member at GrubStreet and Emerson College. Fin is the editor of the science fiction anthology Future States of Stars (OwlCrate Press, 2026), and a contributor to the young adult horror anthology These Bodies Ain’t Broken edited by Madeline Dyer (Page Street Publishing, 2025). They were a 2024 Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ+ Voices Fellow for Young Adult Fiction. Fin lives with their orange literary cat and a rainbow bookshelf outside of Boston, Massachusetts.

These Bodies Ain’t Broken: A monstrous transformation within your own body. A sacrificial imprisonment. A fight to the death against an ancient evil. These stories showcase disabled characters winning against all odds. Outsmarting deadly video games, hunting the predatory monster in the woods, rooting out evil within their community, finding love and revenge with their newly turned vampire friend--this anthology upends expectations of the roles disabled people can play in horror. With visibly and invisibly disabled characters whose illnesses include Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, Crohn's disease, diabetes, PTSD, and more, each entry also includes a short essay from the author about the conditions portrayed in their stories to further contextualize their characters' perspectives. From breaking ancient curses to defying death itself, these 13 horror stories cast disabled characters as heroes we can all root for. Contributors include bestselling and award-winning as well as emerging authors: Dana Mele, Lillie Lainoff, Anandi, Soumi Roy, Fin Leary, S.E. Anderson, K. Ancrum, Pintip Dunn, Lily Meade, Mo Netz, P.H. Low, and Carly Nugent.