Outer Alliance Spotlight #13: Shaun Duke December 11, 2009
Posted by juliarios in : interviews, queer-friendly publishers , trackbackWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #13. Each Friday the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is reviewer and editor, Shaun Duke.
Shaun is a straight ally with a gay mom, who believes that people of all orientations should be able to tell the stories they want to tell. He reviews and discusses speculative fiction on his blog, The World in the Satin Bag, and he is the co-owner of the Young Writers Online forum and workshop website. He recently released the first issue of Survival By Storytelling, an online magazine that publishes young writers.
Though originally from the West Coast of the United States, Shaun currently lives in Gainesville, Florida with nine leopard geckos. He is working towards an MA in English at the University of Florida, specializing in science fiction, post-colonialism, and fantasy.
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Young Writers Online and Survival By Storytelling are both geared towards people under the age of twenty five. What made you pursue the idea of a community and magazine for young writers, and why did you pick 25 as the cutoff age?
Well, there’s a really long story about why YWO came to be, but that involves a lot of annoying drama that nobody really wants to hear about. The big reason, though, is because my friend and I wanted a place that young writers could go to that would provide them a constructive environment for developing their craft. There are a few sites for young writers out there, but we’ve tried to go in different directions with YWO than other places, particularly by making sure that the site didn’t become another one for trolls or one of those “yay, this is wonderful” sites where critiques are nothing but validation. Writers don’t improve by being told they’re great or by being told they are terrible; they improve by being shown what’s wrong and how they can fix it. That’s what we wanted to achieve with YWO. We got a lot of things right, but the site is still young and there’s much left to do.
The magazine, however, came from a desire to prove that even young writers are capable of writing an excellent story or poem (or article). SBS also served as a way to help a lot of our younger members get a grasp on the submission process (cover letters, format, and the big one…rejections!). The result, I think, is quite good, as we got a wide range of fiction from an equally varied age group. Heck, some of the best stories I’ve ever read are published in this magazine, and that’s saying something!
The cut-off age was somewhat arbitrary. Twenty-five is around the age that most people finish college for good. Now, that’s not true of everyone, but it is true of most of us (I won’t be done with college until I’m at least 32, unfortunately). That and 25 is the age you have to be to rent a car in most places, so, it seemed like a good number.
Survival By Storytelling‘s first issue is live now. Can you tell us a little bit about what went into the making of it? Do you have any plans for the next issue?
Months and months and months of reading submissions with my co-editor (a young teenager from Canada), a little arguing, a lot of eye-rolling, and a few moments of pure irritation at people not reading the submission guidelines. The slush pile was actually the most exciting part, to be honest. I loved getting to read submissions from teenagers, especially when I knew I was the first editor to ever see it. After that? Formatting, which is not exactly the most exhilarating part of the process. But, in the end, we found a lot of amazing stories from all over the genre spectrum, and some nifty poems to boot. Plus, the cover art (from Kaolin Fire) is amazing, and I’m glad we got to use it.
We hope to have a second issue, but right now we’re in the process of figuring out if the first issue is successful enough to make a second one worthwhile. We put a lot of time and effort into making this thing a reality, including learning a lot of stuff we didn’t know before for the first time (mostly in regards to formatting, which is, in my opinion, evil). Hopefully we’ll be able to do it, because I’ve got a lot of cool ideas for the future, but we’ll see.
Your mother is gay, and you’ve faced some unpleasant things because of that. How did you cope? Do you have any advice for others in similar situations?
I’ve reacted with everything from complete despair to bitter anger at some of the things I’ve seen. I’m originally from California and was one of those who felt like the world had ended when Prop 8 passed, and the kind of hatred and anger thrown at homosexuals simply because they love “differently” (which I think is a load of B.S. to begin with) is astonishing.
But I think the best way to cope with it all is to laugh. What else can you do? You can’t force people to change. You can try, and some of them will change, but human beings are incredibly stubborn and sometimes the most bitter of hatreds cannot be culled from our psyches for generations. This is the kind of fight homosexuals and others who are not part of that human/Other dichotomy are stuck with. So, it helps to laugh about it. Make fun of the opposition, make fun of yourself (or make fun of the group you’re not technically a part of because you’re straight), and try to enjoy life. Yes, this is all about getting the rights the LGBT(etc.) community damn well deserves, but it does nobody any good to get stuck in that endless cycle of despair. Think about when Wanda Sykes gave a speech at one of the post-Prop 8 rallies. Was she pissed off? Oh yeah. But she’s a comedian, and she knows exactly how to handle even the most horrible features of our species: with a bit of laughter.
Now, I’m not saying that joking about your situation will always work. Sometimes you can’t joke, and I understand that. There are times when I couldn’t laugh about this, when these terrible guys with the “Truth Trucks” ran around handing out pamphlets to elementary school children telling them that Jesus hates gays and that anyone who is gay will burn forever in hell. I didn’t laugh then. I laugh now, because they are so ignorant and hypocritical it’s astonishing, but at the time I didn’t laugh. But you can’t let those non-laugh times consume you.
You’ve been reviewing things and making general observations about genre books and movies for a few years now on your blog. Are you open to receiving review copies from new authors? If yes, how should interested parties contact you? And what’s the deal with your refrigerator magnet project?
Absolutely! I have no objections to debut authors. I only object to review copies if they don’t fit within my reading interests or whatever else is on my guidelines. But debut authors are more than welcome to contact me, and they can find out how to do so by reading my guidelines.
My refrigerator magnet project is somewhat of a silly, but fun project I’m working on to fill my refrigerator with promotional magnets for books, magazines, and anything SF/F related. And here’s how it works: I get a magnet, you get a post dedicated to whatever the magnet is a for. You can find specifics here. It’s sort of a fun way to offer promo to authors and publishers while meeting a silly goal of my own to see my fridge covered in magnets. The secret history, though, is the result of going to my mail box too many times to find nothing in it. It makes me sad. So, really, you’d be doing me a favor by making me feel accomplished every day!
Okay, recommendation time! Are there any exciting young writers we should be keeping an eye on, or works of queer speculative fiction you particularly love?
Oh, definitely. Kelsey Ray is a big one to pay attention to, I think. Her first story was actually published in Survival By Storytelling and is, in my opinion, a fantastic take on vampires, without all the flashy glitter. In fact, a lot of the young folks we published in SBS are some names to look out for in the future, including Adrienne Copeland, Nick Lyle, Niyousha Bastani, and others (the list would be too long for this). Hopefully some of them will submit work elsewhere, but we’ll see (I know Kelsey is considering sending work to Shimmer Magazine). There are, of course, others who were not published in SBS who likely have bright futures ahead of them: Kaleb Nation recently released his first novel to some level of excitement and we all know some of the iconic examples, like Paolini (for good or bad), et al.
As for queer specfic: Wicked Gentlemen by Ginn Hale, pretty much everything by Elizabeth Bear, all of Christopher Barzak‘s novels (there are only two, but both are fantastic), and, again, the list could go on and on. In fact, if you want to see some of the best queer specfic out there, check out the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards. They have a novel and short fiction category and the winners are really some of the best works of science fiction or fantasy with LGBT themes out there. I’ve served as a judge two years in a row and am consistently surprised by some of the amazing fiction being produced in the LGBT vein.
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Thanks, Shaun! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Survival By Storytelling!
Comments»
As the parent of a teen writer, I was very interested in what you had to say about your website and magazine. I’ll have to check out both, and send her along to do likewise.
The fridge magnet project sounds awesome too