Outer Alliance Spotlight #27: Sumana Harihareswara March 26, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews , trackbackWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #27. 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 Sumana Harihareswara, co-editor of Thoughtcrime Experiments.
Sumana is a straight ally, who is committed to promoting diversity and acceptance in everything she does. She has written for Salon and Bookslut in the past, and currently writes for the Geek Feminism blog. Together with her husband, Leonard Richardson, she edited the anthology Thoughtcrime Experiments in 2009. Thoughtcrime experiments has been longlisted for the British Fantasy Award, and one of the illustrations in it (“Gaia’s Strange Seedlike Brood (homage to Lynn Marguils)” by Patrick Farley) is on the shortlist for the Ursa Major Awards.
In her non-writing and editing life, Sumana dabbles in all sorts of pursuits from standup comedy to technical project management. She has managed projects for Fog Creek Software, Behavior Design, and Collabora, and one of her former colleagues recognized her as an exemplary woman in technology for Ada Lovelace Day this year. Sumana keeps a personal journal on her website, a fanfiction profile at Archive of Our Own, and a micro journal on identi.ca (also available on Twitter).
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OA: How did you try to encourage diversity in the stories you received for Thoughtcrime Experiments? Are you happy with the end result, or are there things you wish you’d seen more of? Would you do anything differently if you put together another anthology?
SH: We published nine stories and five illustrations. I believe four were by women and five by men, and at least two of the nine authors were people of color. Two of the five artists were women, and I don’t know whether any of the artists are nonwhite. At least one of the authors and one of the artists identify as queer, but I don’t know the sexualities of most of our creators.
We wanted a lot of kinds of diversity in the submissions. We wanted diversity specifically in topic, theme, and approach in the stories, and diversity in the authors’ genders, ethnicities, sexualities, and other identifying characteristics. We mentioned several of these in the call for submissions. I wish I’d tried harder to recruit nonwhite and queer authors; I wrote to a few relevant blogs, mailing lists, workshops, and interest groups, but not as many as I could have, and I got several bounce messages I should have followed up on.
Our submissions statistics were okay in terms of gender, compared to some other publications; it looks like about a third of the submitting authors were women. But out of 200 distinct authors who submitted pieces, a naive look at author names makes it look like we got only 14 submissions by people of color. I should have tried harder there.
Of course, that’s going by the names authors gave us, which might have been pseudonyms, and I can’t tell anything about whether authors are transgendered or cisgendered from their names, and many people of color have names that I read as white. Still, if I edit again, I’ll do more recruiting and outreach via affinity groups and publications.
I am happy with the diversity of themes, approaches, and topics in the stories. We have futuristic noir, a fable, a Manhattan cat story, a poly queer chromatic academic/merchant family IN SPACE, magic, slapstick political satire, hard physics entrepreneurialism, theology, and a military Mrs. Claus. I figure that’s something for everyone.
OA: You’ve gotten more interested in trans issues over the past year. Why and how did that happen? Can you recommend any resources for other people who are interested in learning more about that subject?
SH: I am dismayed that I’d been so unaware of issues specific to the T in LGBTIQQ until 2009. Two friends of mine came out to me as trans last year, and through them I started hearing about their legal, medical, social, familial, and other challenges. Here I was thinking I’d been all hip and allied on gender issues — didn’t I go to UC Berkeley? didn’t I teach Left Hand of Darkness and love Varley‘s “The Phantom of Kansas”? And yet I hadn’t been grokking how harrowing it could be simply to need to use a public restroom, or how many hoops medical establishments put in the way of transitioning. I didn’t even know the word “cisgender,” much less realize that it describes me. I’d sort of understood how homophobia plays a role in policing sexual identity and expression; now I understand better how transphobia polices gender identity and expression.
Some resources:
Questioning Transphobia: http://questioningtransphobia.wordpress.com/about/
This blogroll: http://nixwilliams.blogspot.com/
OA: Last year was your first WisCon, and you liked it enough that you’ll be there again this year. What was your previous experience like, and what are you looking forward to this time around?
SH: Not only was it my first WisCon, it was my first con, period. Basically, I thought that promoting the anthology gave me a reason (an excuse!) to go.
WisCon changed my life; it was a singularity and every day since has been different than the years before. I felt at home, challenged intellectually and emotionally, and exhilarated. I compare WisCon to going to a vegetarian restaurant; I’m paralyzed with choice because I want to do everything! I met several new friends there, including some very close ones, and got into some authors and media (N.K. Jemisin, Dreamwidth, and fanvids, for examples) I thoroughly enjoy. WisCon was the first time I’d ever met so many fans of color. And there was the lunch with four acquaintances, where I was the only one who’s not queer!
I found strangers via the Internet who would let me sleep on the floor of their hotel room. I signed up to speak on panels and ended up on three; perhaps I was useful in two of them, but they were all interesting.
This year, I’m of course interested in several panels, like “Facebook and Its Discontents,” “Fighting Imposter Syndrome,” the “Once Upon A Time” game-playing panel, and panels on small presses, worldbuilding, supportive artists’ SOs, forgotten women writers, and fanfic. I hope I get to participate on a panel or two. I look forward to seeing friends I saw last year. I’ll be seeing college pal Shweta Narayan again for the first time in years, and I’ll get to meet Alexandra Erin, whose Tales of MU I’ve been reading for years. And Mary Anne Mohanraj, whose “Jump Space” appears in Thoughtcrime Experiments, is a WisCon Guest Of Honor, so I shall puff out my chest and bask in reflected glory.
OA: How did your decision to publish Thoughtcrime Experiments under a Creative Commons license affect its production and distribution? Is this a publishing model you’d recommend to others? Do you have any advice for people who want to make their own anthologies?
SH: I can’t conceive of us trying to make this one-shot anthology make money. It was barely a decision; we both knew from the start that it’d be CC. We are two amateurs, not marketing geniuses, and we weren’t mining a profitable niche in porn or a top-shelf brand, so it would be pretty difficult to make any money off yet another obscure anthology. We wanted to get it out to the world, and we could afford the expenses, so any attempt to charge money would just get in the way of readers getting it. Creative Commons licensing is a great way to signal “I’m doing this to give back to the community.” (Leonard goes into this more in his blog entries about Thoughtcrime Experiments. The summary: you should donate time or money to get your tastes represented in the short speculative fiction market, but don’t ever think you’re going to get financial ROI or tons of readers.
I think CC made the production easier (fewer worries) and distribution easier in most ways. People felt free to make audio adaptations, ebook files, etc. Our use of the noncommercial CC clause does make some meatspace selling issues a little tighter (the paperback has to be sold at cost), but on the other hand, the creators know no one’s making a quick buck off their work.
An anthology’s a great medium for collecting interesting essays, stories, and art. As with graduate school, you need a *reason* you’re doing it, some particular and fresh question or purpose you’re pursuing. If you’re thinking of making an anthology, read our appendix and use our OpenOffice templates!
OA: You’re a champion at social interaction and helping people relate to each other (you’ve been described as a geek whisperer because of your ability to translate between tech savvy people and luddites). Have you got any party, conference, or workplace survival tips for those of us who are a bit less socially confident?
SH: To any happy introverts reading this: I do not mean to tell you what to do! And let me link to some tips for allies to ensure that shy folk have better times at parties. Also, I was massively antisocial until I was in an environment where I blossomed, so all mileages may vary. With that out of the way, people who want tips for themselves:
For social and work settings, it’s useful to have a business or personal card, and a set of boilerplate questions you can ask, like “Do you live around here” or “What have you been reading” or “How do you know the host/speaker”. These just lube a lot of interactions. Or perhaps you can think of them as handles, affordances, like names, that everyone can use to grasp and make their way.
Kirrily Robert has tips on getting good interaction and quality downtime at conferences.
In conversations, I endeavor to enthusiastically listen and ask follow-up questions and bring up related topics and trivia. This is a learned skill, and sometimes I don’t have the energy to do it. Some people respond in kind and get the momentum of the conversation going, start new threads and return to old ones. Some don’t. If after five minutes of that treatment (plus pump-priming with my boilerplate questions) the person isn’t saying anything particularly interesting, I say, “will you excuse me” (they basically have to! NEAT TRICK) and say something about food or drink or work or something, go away, and return to my work or find some other person to talk to. If it’s a conference or party, I almost always find someone who can do twenty interesting minutes with me. And now I’ve made a new acquaintance, probably a friend. If I now need to mingle more to get good ROI out of the event, I frankly say, “I need to go mingle and meet more people,” take her card or give him mine, and move on.
Generally, if you think someone is interesting, you can ask them about the things they’ve done that you find interesting, and if you listen well, they’ll think you’re interesting. That’s nicked wholesale from Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, I think.
Possibly the most useful social confidence tool I discovered in 2008 was a page about status-raising and status-lowering behaviors that improv performers put together. I suddenly understood when I was seeing a dominance display or ritual submission. You can make those scripts work for you.
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Thanks, Sumana! Join us next Friday for another Outer Alliance Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Thoughtcrime Experiments.
Comments»
Great interview–and what an awesome book cover
[...] I can’t really improve on what Sumana said in your interview of her. For detailed analysis I’d point people to that interview or her blog post on the topic. [...]