April 16, 2025 • 16 mins
What happens when the desperation to survive peels away the last shreds of identity?
Jennifer Weigel is a multi-disciplinary mixed media conceptual artist. Weigel utilizes a wide range of media to convey her ideas, including assemblage, drawing, fibers, installation, jewelry, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video and writing. Much of her work touches on themes of beauty, identity (especially gender identity), memory & forgetting, and institutional critique. She lives in Kansas, USA with her husband and is an avid art collector who enjoys playing board and role-playing games, junk store thrifting, and mail art. Her spirit animal is the deer. Her favorite foods are unagi don or broiled calamari steak and frosting with or without cake.You can read more of Weigel’s writing on her website here. https://jenniferweigelwords.wordpress.com/
Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash
You can read "Ravenous" at https://www.kaidankaistories.com.
Website: kaidankaistories.com
Please feel free to contact me through the website contact form.
Follow us on:
Instagram
Facebook
Bluesky
Substack
Jennifer Weigel is a multi-disciplinary mixed media conceptual artist. Weigel utilizes a wide range of media to convey her ideas, including assemblage, drawing, fibers, installation, jewelry, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video and writing. Much of her work touches on themes of beauty, identity (especially gender identity), memory & forgetting, and institutional critique. She lives in Kansas, USA with her husband and is an avid art collector who enjoys playing board and role-playing games, junk store thrifting, and mail art. Her spirit animal is the deer. Her favorite foods are unagi don or broiled calamari steak and frosting with or without cake.You can read more of Weigel’s writing on her website here. https://jenniferweigelwords.wordpress.com/
Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash
You can read "Ravenous" at https://www.kaidankaistories.com.
Website: kaidankaistories.com
Please feel free to contact me through the website contact form.
Follow us on:
Bluesky
Substack
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Welcome to the Kaidan Kai Podcast, where the eerie, the mysterious,
and the spine chilling come alive in stories that linger
long after the last word is spoken. I'm your host
Linda Gould, and tonight I'm reading Ravenous by Jennifer Weigel,
a tale of isolation, hunger, and the fragile line that
(00:31):
separates the living from the monstrous. What happens when the
desperation to survive peels away the last shreds of identity?
What happens when someone is not entirely predator and not
entirely prey. Jennifer Weigel is a multidisciplinary mixed media conceptual artist.
(00:52):
Weigel utilizes a wide range of media to convey her ideas,
including assemblage, drawing, fibers, and installin. Much of her work
touches on themes of beauty, identity, especially gender identity, memory,
and forgetting an institutional critique. She has such an interesting
(01:13):
and long bio, so please have a look in the
episode description to see her full bio and where you
can find more of her work. Now, dim the lights,
settle in, wrap yourself in a warm blanket, and let's
listen to Ravenous by Jennifer Weigel enjoy silence. I shift
(01:42):
my weight. A scant twig trapped between my foot and
the earth snaps, alerting the deer to my presence. The
silence is broken. The lone dose, huge bowl like ears
prick forward, honing in on the transgression. Her deep black
eyes stare into the underbrush, pleading as they meet my own,
(02:08):
nostrils flare, body quivers, and she bounds away reluctantly. Her
footfalls grow further from this place, and as they disappear
to distance, the silence returns in their stead. I sigh.
Hazy sunlight shimmers through snow capped trees, their woody surfaces
(02:31):
stripped of bark. I am again alone in these scant woods,
the first and last year I have seen in well
over a month. Both one and the same has escaped
for now, But she is thin, scarcely able to hold
herself up, not much meat left upon those boons. I
(02:56):
have to admit. I am not faring so well myself
these days. At this point, any meal would be a
welcome change, and long over dew. It won't be long
now before I catch up with my quarry. But which
of us will succumb to starvation. First, there's the ultimate question.
(03:22):
The warm glow glistens off the deer's tracks receding down
the path towards the valley. She knows as well as
I do that there's nothing left to eat down below.
The creek bed is frozen solid. But then again, there's
nothing left to eat up here either, not really. I
(03:43):
pry a bit of bark from a nearby pine tree
and pursue my prey. I strip the inner lining of
the gnarled husk with my front teeth as I walk
along the path, following in her footsteps. The dry snack
is both woody and bitter, but it gives me something
to gnaw upon than the gaunt interior of my own
scabbed over cheek, unwilling to be further bloodied by my chipped,
(04:06):
razor sharp teeth scraping at its meager surface from within
the trees in the valley, I have long since been
stripped bare. Best to take advantage of what little nourishment
I can get before I leave this place to trail
along after my prey. Despite the frigid cold, the sunburns
hot on the nape of my neck. My thinning hair
(04:29):
leaves much of my head and scalp exposed to the elements.
The torn leather of my coat lays across my shoulders,
tattered and worn thin at the edges, from whence I
had stolen my last repast, chewing what scraps I could
afford to lose to make a meager meal. I had
previously used a fur trim from my hood to patch
(04:50):
my boots, but that was a while ago now and
the holes are wearing through once more, the icy dampness
encroaching on my nearly forgotten toes. There is hardly enough
left of my garments to call these remains clothing, let
alone coat or boots or what not. Any More, The
(05:11):
whole of me is but a hodgepodge of fragmented cloth
and cloak, fur and hair, skin and bone. And I
am chilled to the core, my heart as black as
my frost bitten fingers. My mind reels. I can still
(05:32):
see my husband's face clear as day, his amber eyes
offering some solace from the raging storm, until they grow
too distant. Eventually their light dims completely lost, forever within
the sunken recesses of his skull. Our old farmstead is
(05:56):
another world away, somewhere where hope once resided is not
of this life. Its warmth is no longer familiar or welcoming.
It's just another hollow void, like my heart, lost and unfulfilled.
(06:19):
My husband and I made an unspoken agreement before his
passing that whichever of us survived these lean times would
find sustenance in the other. We felt no need to
speak of the inevitable, and I simply did what needed
to be done. I outlived him, and I thusly upheld
(06:41):
my end of the bargain. I wasn't proud of this
at the time, but I have come to see things differently.
The longer the wind roars at my back, and the
thinner and wearier I become by consuming what I could
of his flesh, I am still here. He gave me
the strength to face another day, another couple of weeks. Honestly,
(07:06):
I would have wanted, rather demanded, that the opposite hold
true had betrayed places. It would have been the least
I could do and the most that I could offer.
So I acknowledge that I should actually find some refuge
there from drawing him into my body to nourish and
sustain me. This was the last connection that we had
(07:31):
my way of keeping him with me even after his
slow death. I know that I should treasure this gift,
and that I should miss him, But yet I feel
nothing except for the awareness that I am him and
he is me in some meaningful way, for his body
(07:53):
dwells within me, and we are interwoven into one entity, now,
surviving these desperate times together in one form. But although
I sense that I should find some solace in that,
feel some connection in spirit, my hunger only worsens and
(08:14):
my heart grows more and more hollow. He is gone.
I am here, That is all. There's nothing more. The
afternoon drags on, the sun still passing its judgment from
its perch high above this wasteland. This weather should have
(08:37):
broken by now, but it remains unseasonably cold and bitter,
like the cambium of the inner bark, mixed with spit
and acid reflux that I swirl around in my mouth
to maintain my awareness of the here and now. The
silence is my song, stoic and mournful. It is my
(08:59):
ever presence, shallow trailing. As I follow in the doe's
weary footsteps, the deer stays her course, too weak to
run her body rigid waiting, her eyes darkening, receding even
deeper into her skull, like those of my husband in
(09:19):
another lifetime, far from here. Whatever respit or forgiveness his
soul had offered was left forsaken in the windows of
the farmhouse I abandoned when the hunger overtook me. The
dough leans against a small tree, her dark, brooding gaze
stripped as bare as the trees that surround us are
(09:42):
bereft of bark, no longer able to provide nourishment to
those outside of their own form, She stares at me
in disdain. Neither of us relishes the inevitable movement, this
journey which we embark on together now and again, Predator,
(10:02):
and pray. I half hope she will stay still and
wait to die, That she will collapse where she stands,
welcoming the inevitable, so that I may feed unhindered, conserving
my energy so that I can carry on a bit longer.
And yet I half hope she will not. Neither of
(10:24):
us ready or willing to give up. Not yet, both
of us hungry. A part of me wants for her
to put up a fight, and wishes that I will
be the one to fall, succumbing to my weakness and
letting go of my own will to triumph life, death
becoming unbecoming. There is a beautiful and harmonious inevitability in both.
(10:51):
They are intertwined, two sides of the same. Our eyes
meet the voids within, forming unspoken understanding between the dough
and myself. We are one connected in spirit and sacrifice.
We eat or we are eaten. It is this that
(11:13):
consumes us as our bodies lurch towards one another. We
dwell wholly within this knowledge. It speaks through the silence,
within the biting cold, gnawing its way both in and
out of our respective beings. I already exist within her,
and she within myself, here and now and furthermore, even
(11:36):
before anything else happens, even before the inevitable fight for
life or death. Her hoof, pointed like a hatchet, strikes
me in my left shin. As I close, I feel
the warmth of my blood pooling as it rises to
the surface. This sensation, slight, though it is, enlivens me.
I lunge and grab her thin velvet ear within my
(11:59):
teething upon its soft recesses, we fall to the barren earth.
Inextricably tangled. I clawed her face and at her flared nostril,
my raw and jagged fingernails securing their hold on the
fragile folds of flesh where her lip meets her nose.
Her teeth grind into the bones of the back of
(12:19):
my hand, working their way upwards toward my wrist. I
feel each painful crack as the brutal bones give way
to a snapping of twigs, one by one, each breaking
the silence. The search for quietude is no longer necessary,
as the scream for survival wells up from within this moment,
(12:39):
hunger itself made manifest. There is no escaping it. Now.
Both the dear and I lock together in this eternal struggle.
We succumb to the winter, to its wrath, to our
anger and resentment. At this dire situation, we are both
stripped bare of bark, but we are not barren. All
(13:02):
of my numbness, my blackened heart, and frost bitten extremities
unite in pain and fire. I am engulfed by their
all consuming rage. My sensations rediscovered, eat or be eaten.
This unspoken agreement transcends both predator and pray past and present.
(13:25):
The deer and I arise, reformed and reawakened. We are one.
We are here, We are the Wendigo, and we will
be now and forevermore hungry. Okay, this is one of
(13:54):
my favorite stories. Oh. What I love about this story
is that it's apocalyptic on a personal level. Think of
all the movies and books where society falls apart. In
the stories about what humans do under the post apocalypse conditions,
there's always the group that tries to remain civilized and
(14:15):
maintain norms, and there's always the group that resorts to
their basis natures. Two of my favorite books about this
are The Postman by David Brynn and Cloud Atlas by
David Mitchell. But in today's story, that battle rages within
an individual. How long can someone keep their humanity when
(14:38):
they are in extreme conditions and starving. Jennifer Weigel does
not ask whether we are capable of becoming monsters. Rather,
she asks, under extreme circumstances, how long can we escape
the inevitable? And I love how this story honors the
(14:58):
whn Digo mythology of the Algham when speaking peoples, while
expanding the cautionary tale to all of humanity. The when
Digo legend endures because it speaks to something primal in us,
just like all this zombie stories, just like any post
apocalyptic story, And this story, like the legend, reminds us
(15:22):
that the most terrifying monsters are not always external. Sometimes
there was left behind when everything civilized about us is gone,
a reminder that fundamentally we're just animals and that yeah,
that's really uncomfortable for me at least for you too.
(15:46):
The Kaiiton Kai has so many interesting stories from every genre.
This is just one example. Please subscribe to the podcast
and check out the substack to see comments by authors
and their inspiration. I also post art that I like
any kind of art like on the various social media platforms,
So pick your poison and follow me on Instagram, Facebook,
(16:09):
Blue Sky, or substack. All the links are in the
episode description. So wow, amazing story. Thank you so much
for listening today, See you next week.
Welcome to the Kaidan Kai Podcast, where the eerie, the mysterious,
and the spine chilling come alive in stories that linger
long after the last word is spoken. I'm your host
Linda Gould, and tonight I'm reading Ravenous by Jennifer Weigel,
a tale of isolation, hunger, and the fragile line that
(00:31):
separates the living from the monstrous. What happens when the
desperation to survive peels away the last shreds of identity?
What happens when someone is not entirely predator and not
entirely prey. Jennifer Weigel is a multidisciplinary mixed media conceptual artist.
(00:52):
Weigel utilizes a wide range of media to convey her ideas,
including assemblage, drawing, fibers, and installin. Much of her work
touches on themes of beauty, identity, especially gender identity, memory,
and forgetting an institutional critique. She has such an interesting
(01:13):
and long bio, so please have a look in the
episode description to see her full bio and where you
can find more of her work. Now, dim the lights,
settle in, wrap yourself in a warm blanket, and let's
listen to Ravenous by Jennifer Weigel enjoy silence. I shift
(01:42):
my weight. A scant twig trapped between my foot and
the earth snaps, alerting the deer to my presence. The
silence is broken. The lone dose, huge bowl like ears
prick forward, honing in on the transgression. Her deep black
eyes stare into the underbrush, pleading as they meet my own,
(02:08):
nostrils flare, body quivers, and she bounds away reluctantly. Her
footfalls grow further from this place, and as they disappear
to distance, the silence returns in their stead. I sigh.
Hazy sunlight shimmers through snow capped trees, their woody surfaces
(02:31):
stripped of bark. I am again alone in these scant woods,
the first and last year I have seen in well
over a month. Both one and the same has escaped
for now, But she is thin, scarcely able to hold
herself up, not much meat left upon those boons. I
(02:56):
have to admit. I am not faring so well myself
these days. At this point, any meal would be a
welcome change, and long over dew. It won't be long
now before I catch up with my quarry. But which
of us will succumb to starvation. First, there's the ultimate question.
(03:22):
The warm glow glistens off the deer's tracks receding down
the path towards the valley. She knows as well as
I do that there's nothing left to eat down below.
The creek bed is frozen solid. But then again, there's
nothing left to eat up here either, not really. I
(03:43):
pry a bit of bark from a nearby pine tree
and pursue my prey. I strip the inner lining of
the gnarled husk with my front teeth as I walk
along the path, following in her footsteps. The dry snack
is both woody and bitter, but it gives me something
to gnaw upon than the gaunt interior of my own
scabbed over cheek, unwilling to be further bloodied by my chipped,
(04:06):
razor sharp teeth scraping at its meager surface from within
the trees in the valley, I have long since been
stripped bare. Best to take advantage of what little nourishment
I can get before I leave this place to trail
along after my prey. Despite the frigid cold, the sunburns
hot on the nape of my neck. My thinning hair
(04:29):
leaves much of my head and scalp exposed to the elements.
The torn leather of my coat lays across my shoulders,
tattered and worn thin at the edges, from whence I
had stolen my last repast, chewing what scraps I could
afford to lose to make a meager meal. I had
previously used a fur trim from my hood to patch
(04:50):
my boots, but that was a while ago now and
the holes are wearing through once more, the icy dampness
encroaching on my nearly forgotten toes. There is hardly enough
left of my garments to call these remains clothing, let
alone coat or boots or what not. Any More, The
(05:11):
whole of me is but a hodgepodge of fragmented cloth
and cloak, fur and hair, skin and bone. And I
am chilled to the core, my heart as black as
my frost bitten fingers. My mind reels. I can still
(05:32):
see my husband's face clear as day, his amber eyes
offering some solace from the raging storm, until they grow
too distant. Eventually their light dims completely lost, forever within
the sunken recesses of his skull. Our old farmstead is
(05:56):
another world away, somewhere where hope once resided is not
of this life. Its warmth is no longer familiar or welcoming.
It's just another hollow void, like my heart, lost and unfulfilled.
(06:19):
My husband and I made an unspoken agreement before his
passing that whichever of us survived these lean times would
find sustenance in the other. We felt no need to
speak of the inevitable, and I simply did what needed
to be done. I outlived him, and I thusly upheld
(06:41):
my end of the bargain. I wasn't proud of this
at the time, but I have come to see things differently.
The longer the wind roars at my back, and the
thinner and wearier I become by consuming what I could
of his flesh, I am still here. He gave me
the strength to face another day, another couple of weeks. Honestly,
(07:06):
I would have wanted, rather demanded, that the opposite hold
true had betrayed places. It would have been the least
I could do and the most that I could offer.
So I acknowledge that I should actually find some refuge
there from drawing him into my body to nourish and
sustain me. This was the last connection that we had
(07:31):
my way of keeping him with me even after his
slow death. I know that I should treasure this gift,
and that I should miss him, But yet I feel
nothing except for the awareness that I am him and
he is me in some meaningful way, for his body
(07:53):
dwells within me, and we are interwoven into one entity, now,
surviving these desperate times together in one form. But although
I sense that I should find some solace in that,
feel some connection in spirit, my hunger only worsens and
(08:14):
my heart grows more and more hollow. He is gone.
I am here, That is all. There's nothing more. The
afternoon drags on, the sun still passing its judgment from
its perch high above this wasteland. This weather should have
(08:37):
broken by now, but it remains unseasonably cold and bitter,
like the cambium of the inner bark, mixed with spit
and acid reflux that I swirl around in my mouth
to maintain my awareness of the here and now. The
silence is my song, stoic and mournful. It is my
(08:59):
ever presence, shallow trailing. As I follow in the doe's
weary footsteps, the deer stays her course, too weak to
run her body rigid waiting, her eyes darkening, receding even
deeper into her skull, like those of my husband in
(09:19):
another lifetime, far from here. Whatever respit or forgiveness his
soul had offered was left forsaken in the windows of
the farmhouse I abandoned when the hunger overtook me. The
dough leans against a small tree, her dark, brooding gaze
stripped as bare as the trees that surround us are
(09:42):
bereft of bark, no longer able to provide nourishment to
those outside of their own form, She stares at me
in disdain. Neither of us relishes the inevitable movement, this
journey which we embark on together now and again, Predator,
(10:02):
and pray. I half hope she will stay still and
wait to die, That she will collapse where she stands,
welcoming the inevitable, so that I may feed unhindered, conserving
my energy so that I can carry on a bit longer.
And yet I half hope she will not. Neither of
(10:24):
us ready or willing to give up. Not yet, both
of us hungry. A part of me wants for her
to put up a fight, and wishes that I will
be the one to fall, succumbing to my weakness and
letting go of my own will to triumph life, death
becoming unbecoming. There is a beautiful and harmonious inevitability in both.
(10:51):
They are intertwined, two sides of the same. Our eyes
meet the voids within, forming unspoken understanding between the dough
and myself. We are one connected in spirit and sacrifice.
We eat or we are eaten. It is this that
(11:13):
consumes us as our bodies lurch towards one another. We
dwell wholly within this knowledge. It speaks through the silence,
within the biting cold, gnawing its way both in and
out of our respective beings. I already exist within her,
and she within myself, here and now and furthermore, even
(11:36):
before anything else happens, even before the inevitable fight for
life or death. Her hoof, pointed like a hatchet, strikes
me in my left shin. As I close, I feel
the warmth of my blood pooling as it rises to
the surface. This sensation, slight, though it is, enlivens me.
I lunge and grab her thin velvet ear within my
(11:59):
teething upon its soft recesses, we fall to the barren earth.
Inextricably tangled. I clawed her face and at her flared nostril,
my raw and jagged fingernails securing their hold on the
fragile folds of flesh where her lip meets her nose.
Her teeth grind into the bones of the back of
(12:19):
my hand, working their way upwards toward my wrist. I
feel each painful crack as the brutal bones give way
to a snapping of twigs, one by one, each breaking
the silence. The search for quietude is no longer necessary,
as the scream for survival wells up from within this moment,
(12:39):
hunger itself made manifest. There is no escaping it. Now.
Both the dear and I lock together in this eternal struggle.
We succumb to the winter, to its wrath, to our
anger and resentment. At this dire situation, we are both
stripped bare of bark, but we are not barren. All
(13:02):
of my numbness, my blackened heart, and frost bitten extremities
unite in pain and fire. I am engulfed by their
all consuming rage. My sensations rediscovered, eat or be eaten.
This unspoken agreement transcends both predator and pray past and present.
(13:25):
The deer and I arise, reformed and reawakened. We are one.
We are here, We are the Wendigo, and we will
be now and forevermore hungry. Okay, this is one of
(13:54):
my favorite stories. Oh. What I love about this story
is that it's apocalyptic on a personal level. Think of
all the movies and books where society falls apart. In
the stories about what humans do under the post apocalypse conditions,
there's always the group that tries to remain civilized and
(14:15):
maintain norms, and there's always the group that resorts to
their basis natures. Two of my favorite books about this
are The Postman by David Brynn and Cloud Atlas by
David Mitchell. But in today's story, that battle rages within
an individual. How long can someone keep their humanity when
(14:38):
they are in extreme conditions and starving. Jennifer Weigel does
not ask whether we are capable of becoming monsters. Rather,
she asks, under extreme circumstances, how long can we escape
the inevitable? And I love how this story honors the
(14:58):
whn Digo mythology of the Algham when speaking peoples, while
expanding the cautionary tale to all of humanity. The when
Digo legend endures because it speaks to something primal in us,
just like all this zombie stories, just like any post
apocalyptic story, And this story, like the legend, reminds us
(15:22):
that the most terrifying monsters are not always external. Sometimes
there was left behind when everything civilized about us is gone,
a reminder that fundamentally we're just animals and that yeah,
that's really uncomfortable for me at least for you too.
(15:46):
The Kaiiton Kai has so many interesting stories from every genre.
This is just one example. Please subscribe to the podcast
and check out the substack to see comments by authors
and their inspiration. I also post art that I like
any kind of art like on the various social media platforms,
So pick your poison and follow me on Instagram, Facebook,
(16:09):
Blue Sky, or substack. All the links are in the
episode description. So wow, amazing story. Thank you so much
for listening today, See you next week.
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