***

Machine
-or-
why everyone should fall in with kinky genderqueer pagans in their early 20s
by Jennifer Pelland

Binaries suck.

Although I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that.

I started getting my education in the fallacy of binaries when several biracial friends in the early- and mid-80s taught me that A + B did not equal AB, but rather that 1 + 1 equaled 1. (In other words, a human being cannot be two diametrically-opposed halves sutured down the middle — a human being
can only be a whole, indivisible person.) That education continued in college with my own burgeoning bisexuality, although I’ll admit that before I came to that realization about myself, I was one of those annoying people who thought that bisexuals should just pick a side and not be so damned indecisive.

Then, just as I was graduating from college, I fell in with the pagans, and in Boston at that time, the intersection of the pagan and bisexual circles was a queer pagan group called Q-Moon. In Q-Moon, I met several “gender-fuck” transsexuals, as they called the movement at the time, several of whom were into sacred sexuality and BDSM. And they blew the lid off of my brain in the best possible way.

Picture a 21-year-old recent women’s college graduate having lunch with one of these new friends, who asks her, “Have you ever questioned your gender identity?” No, I hadn’t. The new friend smiles and asks, “Why?”

Whoa.

Later on during that same lunch, picture the 21-year-old’s face as her new friend says, “I really want to have a cunt, but I have nothing against my cock. And that doesn’t make me any less a woman.”

Again, whoa.

Picture a ritual in someone’s basement for that same new friend, a dedication to a goddess, involving a nude postulant,chakra anointing, and the sacred consumption of estrogen pills. Picture one member of the circle being kept to the side throughout the proceedings because she’s currently undergoing a BDSM initiation of her own, involving bondage and a horse-tailed butt plug.

Picture the 21-year-old’s brain exploding like the Death Star.

Fast-forward fifteen years. There I am, coming up with the cast of characters for a novel about love, loss, and illegal body-hacking. Of course there’s going to be a character who wants both a cunt and a cock. Of course there are going to be characters with fluid sexuality. Of course there’s going to be a character who erases gender altogether. Of course there’s extreme BDSM. Of course my protagonist, a biracial lesbian, is going to get the lid blown off of her brain by all of this. And of course I’m going to feel like I didn’t go far enough.

So I would like to take a moment to thank the wonderful people of Q-Moon for giving this cisgendered, vanilla, bisexual feminist the education of a lifetime. I honestly think I’m a better person for having been forced to explain why I’ve never questioned my gender identity. Why should people outside the so-called “normal” paradigm be the only ones who routinely have to do that? And I honestly think I’m a better person for being exposed to such a bold group of people who went out of their way to make others uncomfortable with their gender nonconformity. I may not have emulated them, but I learned a lot from them. Most importantly, from them I learned that terms like “gender” and “sexuality” are far broader than their dictionary definitions would lead one to believe, and that we do the human species a disservice by pretending that those definitions are accurate and complete.

To conclude, I’d like to encourage all young people out there who aren’t already kinky genderqueer pagans to find a similar group to fall in with during your most impressionable years. You can’t reassemble a blown mind, and that’s a damned good thing.

________________________________________

Jennifer Pelland lives outside Boston with an Andy, three cats, an impractical amount of books, and an ever-growing collection of belly dance gear and radio theater scripts. She’s garnered two Nebula nominations, and many of her short stories were collected in Unwelcome Bodies, put out by Apex in 2008.

Machine is available in paperback and as an e-book from Apex Book Company.

Me? I’m a bit of a rebel. I hate shopping usually, and I loathe giant crowds. I tend to fall by default into the segment of the population  which calls this day Buy Nothing Day. Some of my compatriots feel passionately political about their choice. I mostly just feel relieved not to be in the middle of that fevered mess of acquisition. This year, though, I thought maybe it would be fun to do a little more. Instead of just quietly hiding from the world, or (horror of horrors) going out and joining the hordes of consumers, what if I offered an alternative? Whether or not you’re in the US, if you’d rather spend a bit of time reading free fiction than shopping today (or even in addition to shopping), this post is for you.

One of the neat things about the OA is that so many of the members are writers as well as readers. This means that, as a group, we produce a lot of awesome fiction. Much of that is for sale, but thanks to this wonderful internet, there’s a lot of great free stuff out there, too. Below are a few stories by OA members which have appeared online this month. Enjoy!

“Conjuring Shadows” by Craig Laurance Gidney is a story about a transgender conjure woman in 1920s Harlem. Since November is the month in which the Transgender Day of Remembrance falls, I thought we’d lead with this one. It’s a lovely fantasy, which will take only a few minutes to read, but which might linger in your mind for quite a while after you’ve finished it. You may read it at Expanded Horizons (and if you’re unfamiliar with that magazine, I highly recommend it in general. It’s full of gems, and makes a point of celebrating diversity in specfic).

“Cockatrice Girl Meets Statue Boy” by Willow Fagan is a funny and sweet story about… well, the title says it all. It doesn’t feature overtly QUILTBAG content, but it does playfully examine gender assumptions, and the author identifies as genderqueer. The bio accompanying this story on the Cast of Wonders page explains that, “… they feel more like a pirate princess than like a man or a woman.” Rock on, Pirate Princess Willow! I love that description! You may listen to this story in two parts here and here.

“Eight” by Corinne Duyvis is a more somber exploration of personal sacrifice, war, and alternate timelines. The protagonist is a bisexual woman, though this is neither integral to the plot, nor really mentioned in more than a passing sentence. This is a story which suggests a hundred other stories, and given its subject matter and prose style, it might especially appeal to fans of Elizabeth Bear’s Jenny Casey books. “Eight” is available at Strange Horizons.

“The Day Alan Turing Came Out” by Leonard Richardson explores alternate timelines from a different perspective. This one has a bittersweetness, which comes from knowing that in our current timeline, history unfolded less pleasantly. This story first appeared in the Retro Spec: tales of fantasy and nostalgia, but the author has now put it up on his own website. If you are curious about the background on this one, you can find a brief interview with Leonard as part of the OA Spotlight post about Retro Spec.

That’s all I’ve got for today, but if you have recommendations for great free fiction, I’d love to see them! Please consider leaving them in the comments!

***

***

I suspect it’s easier to find a single overarching “Big Idea” in a novel than in a collection of short fiction. Part of me wanted to be completely smart-alecky and say, “It’s a bunch of stories by Me” and leave the whole Big Idea notion at that.

But the more I thought about it, the more I recognized that the book does have some overarching common themes. It represents a certain kind of story that I’ve written over the course of the last sixteen years. All the stories in this book have lesbian or queer female protagonists. And all of those characters appear in fictional roles commonly assigned to men: pirate, playwright, private detective, bard, swordswoman. Some of them are very handy with a sword. Some of them are not. Still it is one of the other elements they all have in common: they’re doing the kind of things that I would have loved to read about when I was a teenager and power-reading my way through novels by Dumas, Sabatini, Pyle and Hope. I always loved a good swashbuckler, full of sword fights and deeds of derring-do, where honor trumps almost everything else.

But in those stories, women are love interests to be rescued, or more rarely, villains who are killed like Dumas’ Milady. I always liked Milady. She got a raw deal. She was an entirely memorable character and fiercely, uncompromisingly strong. When I started writing, I wanted to write about characters who shared some of those characteristics: strong women, fighters, though not always with swords. Women I could relate to, but who weren’t me. I tend to write to write about queer women because that’s how many of my characters come to me. The truth is, though, that I want to write about queer women doing things that are about doing things. A writer friend recently pointed out that the majority of my characters take being queer for granted. It’s part of who they are, but it’s not the engine that drives the plot. That would be my worldview working its way through my imagination and looking for inspiration in all sorts of places.

My inspiration for these particular stories was fairly wide-ranging. Some were written because I read about a real woman who fascinated me, like Julie d’Aubigny La Maupin, seventeenth century opera singer and professional duelist or her contemporary, Caribbean pirate Jacquotte Delahaye. Other stories were inspired by editorial guidelines like the one I wrote for the themed anthology that didn’t happen: supernatural mysteries with lesbian protagonists stylistically influenced by Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.

Story inspirations are always a grab-bag, at least for me. I run across a reference and think “what if?” Or a first line comes to me out of the blue. From there, if all goes well, I get a scene, a paragraph or two that kicks things off. After that it’s all about trying to figure out what would happen next to this protagonist in this given situation. I’m not one of those writers who know how the story ends when I start it. I have to follow it on all its twists and turns. Sometimes, the writing flows easily and a story gets written in a few sessions. Sometimes, I go through multiple false starts, working and reworking voice, plot and perspective before the story gels.

For me, putting a collection of those same stories together is all about opportunity. First, I figure out what I have that’s available from the stories I’ve already written: nothing that’s under contract that hasn’t been published yet and which hasn’t reverted back to me, for example. Then I need something to tie the work together so it’s a matter of figuring out what these particular stories have in common. Some will just jump out at me as playing on themes I like to work with, while others are just as clearly a bad fit.

At that point, I also need to figure out what I have that’s unpublished; I always want to give my readers something new. Then once all the selecting and editing and writing of individual stories is done, I get to tackle the magic of story order. Trying to figure out what stories will flow into each other without jarring the reader out of the text is an art in itself.

The truth is, though, that hardly anyone ever reads stories in the order I put them in, but the illusion of control is part of the fun of being a writer in the first place, isn’t it?

***

Catherine Lundoff is the award-winning author of Crave: Tales of Lust, Love and Longing (Lethe Press, 2007), Night’s Kiss (Lethe Press, 2009) and A Day at the Inn, A Night at the Palace and Other Stories (Lethe Press, 2011). She is also the editor of Haunted Hearths and Sapphic Shades: Lesbian Ghost Stories (Lethe Press, 2008) and co-editor, with JoSelle Vanderhooft, of Hellebore and Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magic (Drollerie Press/Lethe Press 2011). Her website can be found at www.catherinelundoff.com.

A Gay (Straight) Girl (Man) in Damascus (Edinburgh) by Ali Abbas and Assia Boundaoui is an explanation of the damage the Amina hoax did from two “New York based writers and freelance-journalists that submitted a blood test and birth certificate to affirm that the above thoughts are their own analysis based on a lifetime of Arab and or queer and or American and or woman identification.”

White Privilege and the ‘Gay Girl in Damascus’ is an NPR segment in which Brian Spears (a white man) talks about white male privilege and why it’s not okay to co-opt the voices of marginalized people.

Sara Amis will be moderating a Feminist SF Twitter chat on Sunday at 2pm EST. The theme of this discussion is worldbuilding. If you want to participate, just follow the FeministSF hashtag.

And while we’re talking about #FeministSF, NPR is asking people to share their favorite SF/F books with the goal of ultimately making a top 100 books list. Nicola Griffith reminds everyone to consider including books by women on the list. I’ll add a bid for considering including books by queer people and people of color.

Finally, Ladies of Trade Town is available now at HarpHaven Publishing. I talked to Lee Martindale about this in the big Gaylaxicon podcast episode–it’s an anthology of stories about the oldest profession, with stories by Catherine Lundoff and Cecilia Tan.

Before we get to our main dish, though, there are some news tidbits to share.

*The Jessica Verday situation has developed and drawn further comment from many people since OA Spotlight #70 went up two weeks ago. Charles A. Tan has a good summary at Bibliophile Stalker.

*This week marked the release of Malinda Lo‘s second YA fantasy novel, Huntress. Happy release week, Malinda! Huntress is set in the same world as Ash (a retelling of Cinderella with a lesbian protagonist), but several hundred years earlier. Malinda will be traveling with the Diversity in YA Fiction Tour in May, so you might want to check and see if she’ll be visiting your area.

*And, finally, Lauren McLaughlin and K. T. Holt weigh in on the proposal to cut federal funding to Planned Parenthood. Lauren explains why this is not actually about abortion, while Kay offers a Super Uterus t-shirt to anyone who wishes to make a fashion statement. All the profits from t-shirt sales go to Planned Parenthood.

And, on to our awesome interviewees!

Shweta Narayan is a writer and visual artist. She received the Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship for the Clarion Writers Workshop in 2007, and is an active proponent of diversity in speculative fiction. Her stories and poems have appeared in Steam Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories, Clockwork Phoenix 3, Jabberwocky 5, and Apex, among other places. Her novelette, “Pisaach”, which appeared in The Beastly Bride, is currently up for the Nebula Award.

J. C. Runolfson is a poet, reviewer, and knitter. Her reviews have appeared in The Fix and Strange Horizons. Several of her poems have been Rhysling nominees, and she has new ones forthcoming in Goblin Fruit and Mythic Delirium.

Stone Telling is a quarterly poetry magazine published (and usually edited by) Rose Lemberg. Stone Telling welcomes queer content any time, but Shweta and Jules wanted to come talk about what kind of poems they’re especially hoping to see for Issue #4. They have a general guideline theme of inter- intersectional, international, interstitial, and the reading period for this issue is open until the 25th of May.

***

OA: Tell me a bit about your personal connections to poetry and encouraging diversity.

J. C. Runolfson: I’m a product of the California Poets in the Schools program, which had a poet regularly visiting my classroom when I was attending grade school in San Francisco back in the day.  When I say poetry was one of the first languages I learned, that program is part of what I mean. I always like to point people at the Carl Brandon Society and The Outer Alliance and Broad Universe when talking about the growing diversity and social justice movements in speculative poetry.  I also like to promote the poetry sections at people’s local libraries and bookstores.  They’re usually small and seriously understocked, if they exist at all, but I still feel like they’re the place to start if someone wants to taste-test poetry.

Shweta Narayan: I love Jules’ list of places to point to, and would like to add the Interstitial Arts Foundation to it — because breaking genre boxes is another aspect of diversity I care about in speculative fiction and poetry. In my other (currently on hold) life as an academic, I’ve been looking at viewpoint in language, and how pervasive it is; communication always seems to involve negotiating whose viewpoint gets to be taken as the default.  There’s always a default.

I think part of what poetry does, when it’s right, is embody a viewpoint so vividly that the reader can take it on.  And that’s part of why I think it matters.

OA: Both of you have written a lot of poetry, and presumably you read a lot of it, too. What are some of the things that draw you to this form? What makes a great poem in your estimation?

JCR: I like that poetry can be both distilled language and compounded meaning. I love the tension between what’s written and what isn’t in poetry, which tends to be more overt than in prose forms. I love the resonance of sounds, even in pieces never written to be read aloud. I like the almost dream-logic that poems can achieve. I grew up on poetry–I think that’s true for a lot of the population, what with all the verse in kidlit and how saturated the world is in song, but it’s unusual to really be made aware of that. I’m not the first poet in my family, and I benefitted from a program that brought a poet into the classroom when I was in third through fifth grades, so I was conscious of all the poetry that surrounded me, and was equipped early with some of the vocabulary to discuss it.

For me, a great poem is one that lingers because of both ideal phrasing and a strong emotional response. Ideal phrasing doesn’t just mean excellent word choice, but also excellent use of whichever form the poem is written in, solid line breaks and stanza placement. I can’t separate out “great” poetry from “technically competent” poetry.  Some poets can achieve that competence intuitively some of the time, but my own experience has been that when a poet reads a lot of poetry and has thought about and/or studied poetics mindfully, that really shows. At the same time, the technical isn’t the only aspect to poetry that stays with me; again, there’s got to be an emotional response. That response won’t necessarily be sympathy or empathy with the narrative voice, because for one thing, I don’t believe in universal experience beyond drawing breath in this world. I do look for some form of connection or comprehension, though. Repugnance is not really an experience I seek out. I like poems that feel like epiphanies even when saying something I already know. I like a trueness of voice, which doesn’t mean I think a poem has to be confessional to be great, especially not when talking about speculative poetry, which can be written from the viewpoint of a planet, as one example. I just like it when I feel like the poet has committed to the voice in which they’re writing.

SN: I come to this quite differently from Jules. I didn’t read much poetry growing up; I didn’t even have so many rhymed books as a kid. I could come up with facile rhymes even when I was quite little, but I fundamentally didn’t get poetry.

And unless someone analyzed it for me (or, later, I analyzed it myself), I continued not to get poetry.  Till about 5 years ago. I’m not sure what happened then — it may even be that I started thinking more laterally as a result of asthma & brainfog — but I started to get the poetry I read. And soon after that, it started happening to me!  I’m still pretty confused about that, actually.

I’m not sure what makes a great poem, but I think it needs at least:
1) to be saying something.  I think the more compressed a form, the more it needs to be insightful.
2) to have the right words, rather than the good-enough ones, because good enough isn’t.  (Twain’s comment about wanting the lightning, rather than the lightning bug, sticks in my head.)
3) to only have the right words.  I feel rather often that otherwise-awesome poetry is padded, and would be improved at half the length.

OA: What are some things that turn you off, both in areas of content and form?

JCR: For content: assumptions of universality. Essentialism. Othering and objectifying and exoticizing. Nostalgia for any form of ignorance. Lamentation for a lack of pain or suffering. Evopsych, which is demonstrably crap.

Verse is a hard sell for me. Even sophisticated end-rhyme tends to sound facile and forced to my mental ear. Partly as a result of that, there’s a lot of formal poetry that doesn’t work for me. Visual poems can be tricky; I’ve got some vision problems, so there have been poems I just can’t parse because, for instance, they’re in the form of fish or airships. On the other hand, I might be more lenient with visual poems I can parse than is strictly warranted by their content. I think that’s related to my weakness for punning. I can be way too enamoured of wordplay.

SN: Formally, I’m a hard sell on rhymes. I write rhymed poetry, and if I could do better I’m not going to like it. And while I love concrete poetry that doesn’t strike me as contrived, much of it does.

I’m also a hard sell on very short and very long poems. Most of the very-short poetry I’ve seen strikes me as clever rather than amazing. I’m not too impressed with clever, generally. And with long poetry, my focus often drifts. Once I start skimming, it’s all over. (Cat Valente’s poem in Issue 3 is a great counterexample, a fairly long poem that works wonderfully for me. I think because it demands my attention, and rewards it with surprises and insights, the whole way through.)

Content-wise — Orientalism, exoticism, unconsidered privilege (especially male gaze/white gaze issues), most nostalgia. Any universalizing comment on “humanity” that dumps me or people I know outside that category, or nonhumans who are clearly based on Othered human cultures? Way offputting. And bad science, especially bad cognitive science, makes me laugh — but not in a good way.

OA: It sounds like both of you have a similar list of turn offs, and some of those are fairly well explained in your answers (Shweta explained the complaint against universalism, for instance), but I wonder if you can say a little more about things you haven’t unpacked yet, like essentialism and evopsych/bad cognitive science. Are these things you’ve seen in poetry before? What makes the difference between bad and good science?

SN: I see essentialism (treating an aspect of experience as part of the “essence” of being human, or being female, or being a sibling, or…) as an aspect of universalism; I think it excludes people in the same way. For example, if one treats aspects of cisgendered straight female experience as “essentially female”, one is excluding the experience of all other women from that supposedly universal/essential “femaleness”.

I find this hard to pin down, because it generally is an underlying assumption; it turns up in the background. I haven’t seen poetry about it. I’ve just seen a lot of poetry that builds upon the cultural assumptions and narratives that enforce it, and would love to see more poetry that undermines it.

I find that mythic poetry is especially tricky if we’re not conscious and critical of the base mythology, because all our mythologies are packed with essentialist notions about roles and relationships. I do love the work that mythic fiction and poetry have done to unpack those so far, but I think we could go further than I’ve seen yet

JCR: Shweta did a great job of explaining the trouble with essentialism, and how that and bad cognitive science tend to permeate the subtext of speculative poetry. I’ll add a bit of my personal experience, which also informs how I define bad versus good science. I was raised by a scientist, and he taught me that the basis of good science is to pay attention to the evidence, to take every deviation into account, and to revise your theories and beliefs based on the proof you found, including those deviations. My first recognition that essentialism and evopsych are bad science is that the theories put forward in both cases didn’t apply to me personally. My psychology, experiences, and perspective didn’t match the assertions made by those who espoused essentialism and evopsych as true, so if those things weren’t true even in my own case, how could I assume them to be true in other cases?

Unfortunately, despite this recognition, I still sometimes catch myself writing characters as though that bad science were true, and the narrative voices of my poems are characters. I realized I need to continuously make the effort to consciously recognize where my characterization is coming from, on what my characters’ motivations are based. This is true of the poetry I read, as well, and I’ve found a lot of poetry fails the test, I think because many writers fall into the habit of perpetuating the fictional cognitions we’ve read, even when we know from personal experience that those modalities don’t replicate actual human behavior and psychology.

A concrete example that leaps immediately to my mind is the framing of all female experience in the mythical terms of the maiden-mother-crone cycle, without challenging the various base assumptions encapsulated in that cycle. Even when it seems one of those assumptions is being challenged, like the idea that parenthood is fundamental to womanhood, the piece usually ends up either asserting that every woman is wired to parent, and will therefore find a way to do so even if they can’t bear a child, or assert a woman who has no desire to be a mother is a flawed/unfinished woman at best, and not really a woman at all at worst. I want the pieces that say what’s flawed is the concept of maiden-mother-crone as some kind of essential universal progress to which every woman in every circumstance needs to bend her life’s path.

OA: Rose has an anti-mermaid bias. Will that carry over to your Stone Telling issue?

SN: Yes. I want Rose to love this issue as much as I love the first three issues!

JCR: Rose and I joke about her mermaid aversion and my, well, mermaids are my kryptonite. I think one reason she suggested that Shweta and I co-edit, rather than each guest editing a separate issue, was so someone would be there to rein me in on mermaids. Well, that and that Shweta and I each wanted a co-editor so if one of our health crashed, the other one would hopefully have the spoons to do a few things before her health crashed, and we trade off depending on who’s got spoons that day for what needs doing.

OA: Let’s talk queer content. Obviously you wouldn’t be doing this interview if you weren’t open to it, but what makes for good queer viewpoint poetry in your estimation? Have you got any favorite examples?

SN: Hm, I want to split apart two things here, at least for discussion: content and viewpoint. Content is what the poem’s about; viewpoint is… who’s talking, I guess, which is some blend of character/narrator and writer. In the best poetry, I think the writer is very close to the surface of that blend; the narrator doesn’t have to be them (and may be their antithesis, for example!) but needs to relate to them in some emotionally important way.

We normally notice such a viewpoint most when the content challenges default norms, but it’s always there; everything is viewpointed. So I want to say: I think any good poetry written by queer poets is good queer viewpoint poetry. (Though I use the word “good” with some qualms, since it implies objectivity, and that’s been a way to privilege some viewpoints over others.) Poetry doesn’t have to feature overt queer content for the writer’s viewpoint to matter, any more than my poetry has to be about being Indian to embody my viewpoint.

I’m not sure when or if a queer character written by a straight cis poet would count as taking a queer viewpoint; I think that’s up to folks other than myself to decide, and it would be appropriative for me to make claims about it.

Content is easier, being what we see rather than what’s underlying it And I’d love to feature poetry with queer-positive content!

…On which note, I’m blanking on awesome examples right now. Except Sam Henderson’s “The Gabriel Hound” in Stone Telling issue 1, but we need to draw on examples that aren’t in ST! Jules?

JCR: I’m sorry to say I haven’t seen enough queer viewpoint poetry to really say what makes for the good stuff, other than what makes for the good stuff in any viewpoint poetry: a kind of honesty in the narrative voice. As for examples, there’s the Adrienne J. Odasso poem, “Journeying,” in Issue 20 of Mythic Delirium, which I think is the basis for her collection of the same name, which will be put out by Papaveria Press in the very near future. JoSelle Vanderhooft writes a lot of great stuff from a queer perspective. I remember a poem she had out a few years ago, possibly another Mythic Delirium publication, in which a desert, coded as female, was extolling the virtues of a female hiker who had died in her sands. Cat Valente writes gorgeously sensual stuff which often draws that sensuality from a bisexual perspective.

There aren’t nearly enough speculative poems that feature LGBTQ viewpoints, but I feel like we are at last getting more, and I’m excited for the poems still to be written.

OA: And finally, on the topic of intersectionality (but maybe not in the direction one might think), both of you are multi-talented artists. Shweta does visual art and Jules is a knitter. How do these things inform, influence, and enhance your other artistic endeavors? And would you be open to submissions that combined poetry with other art forms?

SN: I think visual art stops me from getting so enamored of words that I forget to pay attention to the sensory experience they’re evoking. But the price is that I have trouble putting it into words, beyond that.

Personally, I’d love to see submissions that combined poetry with other art forms, but — having done a little of that — it’s such a commitment to work multimodally that I would feel bad asking for such submissions. Because we can’t guarantee that any given piece will work for us both, or (if it’s visual art) that we’ll even both be able to parse it!

JCR: I see all my creative hobbies and work as interconnected, and have been pondering the idea of what a knitted poem would actually look like. I love what Elise Matthesen does with some of her work, hosting haiku earring parties, where you write a haiku inspired by a pair of her hand-crafted earrings. She also does Artist’s Challenges, where, as part of the payment arrangement for a particular piece, the person who wants it has to create a work of their own inspired by it, be that work a song, poem, short story, painting, etc.

I’d love to be open to submissions that incorporated other art forms, but of course there are practical constraints on what those other art forms can be if they’re to be showcased in an online text-based magazine. Audiovisual components are obviously the things most likely to work, and should I ever figure out my knitted poem, I could send an image file of it alongside the poem in word form. If I manage to create a pantoum in food form, however, I don’t think that’s really something I can send out as a submission. I could send a recipe, sure, and an image, but if the experiencing of the poem is in the baking and the beholding and the consuming, then there’s not really a way to share that except with people who can make it to my house and eat the thing with me.

***

Thanks, Shweta and Jules! If you’re interested in submitting to Stone Telling, check out the full guidelines here. If you’re not a poet, but enjoy reading poetry from a diverse array of perspectives, check out Issues 1, 2, and 3, which are available free on the Stone Telling site.

Join us next week for a new Outer Alliance Podcast episode!

In this episode, Nora Olsen talks to me about her book, The End: Five Queer Kids Save the World, and Brandon Bell and Frank Ard talk to me about Fantastique Unfettered. After the interviews, Nora reads from her book, and I read an excerpt of Frank’s story.

You can subscribe to the podcast RSS feed here or use this link to subscribe with iTunes. You can also hit play on the embedded player in this post and listen to the podcast on the web, or visit the individual episode page to download this episode as an MP3 without subscribing.

Notes:

Nora’s book is available through Prizm Books, and you can sign up to win a free copy by filling out this form. The End was originally written during National Novel Writing Month. If after hearing this interview you’re interested in creating your own emergency survival kit, Jim Macdonald has a great guide for you.

Brandon’s current major fiction project is a novella called Elegant Threat, which will be available soon in a double issue of M-Brane SF.

Frank’s stories are listed here, including links to those available online, and information about upcoming releases, like “Chickadee” in the Jazz Age anthology Jaym Gates and Erika Holt are putting together.

Submit to Fantastique Unfettered‘s second issue through the end of February. Guidelines are available here, and you can learn more about the Creative Commons license here.

Resoures for writers: Brandon mentioned Absolute Write, a website where writers share advice and information about the publishing world, and Frank waxed ecstatic about the Clarion West Writers Workshop (and the Leslie and Neile he mentioned are Leslie Howle and Neile Graham). Clarion West is open for submissions until the first of March.

Thanks for listening, and please do feel free to leave feedback here, on the google group, or by e-mailing me at julia@juliarios.com. I’d love to hear from you.

In this episode, JoSelle Vanderhooft, Amal El-Mohtar, and Mike Allen join me to talk about Steam Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories. Mike and Amal also read excerpts of their stories after the interview. This podcast episode does contain a bit of profanity as well as some mentions of a certain part of male anatomy (yes, in an excerpt of a story about lesbians–the irony has not escaped us), so if that kind of thing puts you off, be forewarned. I hope you’ll decide to listen, though, as these three have a lot of really interesting things to say about editing, what they like to see in reviews, encouraging diversity,  and how to pronounce Amal’s name, among other things.

You can subscribe to the podcast RSS feed here or use this link to subscribe with iTunes. You can also hit play on the embedded player in this post and listen to the podcast on the web, or visit the individual episode page to download this episode as an MP3 without subscribing.

Notes:

JoSelle is co-editing Hellebore and Rue with Catherine Lundoff. This anthology about lesbian magic users is forthcoming from Drollerie Press. JoSelle also edited Sleeping Beauty Indeed, an anthology of lesbian fairy tales available through Lethe Press.

Mike Allen is the former president of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, editor of the poetry magazine, Mythic Delirium, and of the Clockwork Phoenix anthologies.

Amal El-Mohtar co-edits Goblin Fruit with Jessica Wick. She’s also a Rhysling winning poet. Amal and Jess officially own Mike since they bestowed a fabulous poetry hat (seen below) upon him. The woman peeking over Mike’s shoulder is his wife, Anita, who added embellishments to the hat.

Photo by Anjeli Stewart

The critically objective review of Steam Powered, which we referred to twice during the interview is by Rush-That-Speaks, and can be found here.

Art inspired by Steam Powered includes work by Tooth-And-Claw, these teasers by Shweta Narayan, and jewelry by JoSelle.

Amal’s story, “To Follow the Waves” is available in full on Podcastle #139, read by Marguerite Croft.

Guidelines for Steam Powered 2 are available here

Thanks for listening, and please do feel free to leave feedback here, on the google group, or by e-mailing me at julia@juliarios.com. I’d love to hear from you.

In this episode, Natania Barron talks about her work and how she started the Outer Alliance, Lynn Flewelling talks about writing sex scenes and teaching a writing workshop on a cruise ship, and we have an excerpt of Georgina Bruce’s story from Aether Age: Helios.

You can subscribe to the podcast RSS feed here or use this link to subscribe with iTunes. You can also hit play on the embedded player in this post and listen to the podcast on the web, or visit the individual episode page to download this episode as an MP3 without subscribing.

Notes:

Gender Playful Marketplace is collecting startup funds over here.

Elisa Rolle hosted the 2010 Rainbow Awards, which recognized works by several Outer Alliance members. Congratulations, winners!

Hayden Thorne’s historical fantasy comedy (not a problem novel!) Desmond and Garrick Book One is available now at Prizm books.

Natania Barron’s website has all kinds of info about her fiction and non-fiction. Go there to find out all about stories available now and coming soon.

Lynn Flewelling has links to signups for the cruise workshop and place to buy her work (including the sexy Nightrunner short story collection that flustered prim and proper me in the interview) over on her website.

Aether Age: Helios is out now. You can find out more at Aether-Age.com. Author Georgina Bruce maintains a blog at thebeardedlady.wordpress.com, and you can learn more about narrator T.C. Parmalee at Aural Spice.

Thanks for listening, and please do feel free to leave feedback here, on the google group, or by e-mailing me at julia@juliarios.com. I’d love to hear from you.

Kathe is a straight ally whose short stories and novels feature a diverse range of characters in a variety of genres including fantasy, horror, historical, and young adult. She began seriously writing after she attended the Clarion workshop, and her first novel, The Cipher won the Bram Stoker and Locus Awards. Following that success, she went on to write several more novels for adults before turning a short story for younger readers into her first YA novel, straydog. Several YA novels followed straydog, including Talk, a story about a closeted teenager, which was named a YALSA Best Book for Young Adults in 2006.

Most recently, Kathe has returned to writing for adults with her new novel, Under the Poppy, which will be released on the 26th through Small Beer Press. This romp through war-torn nineteenth century Europe is a story of love, betrayal, fidelity, and some very naughty puppets. Kathe has also adapted the story into an immersive stage show, which will debut in Detroit in 2011.

Kathe lives in Michigan with her husband, son, and three cats. She keeps her main journal on her website, and also has a Facebook page and a website specifically for news and notes about Under the Poppy. She’ll be appearing in person in Ohio next weekend at the World Fantasy Convention, in Michigan on the 10th and 11th of November at the Common Language Bookstore in Ann Arbor and Five 15 in Royal Oak, and in New York on the 17th of November at KGB Bar.

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OA: Under the Poppy has a very colorful cast, and some of the most colorful characters are the puppets (or mecs). Do you have a personal favorite mec?

KK: What a rockin’ question to lead off with!  Yes, in fact I do – the antic, slippery, completely untrustworthy Pan Loudermilk, who scares the hell out of one of the poor working girls in the book’s opening scene, and wreaks havoc every time he takes the stage.  I do admire a fellow with flair. Puppets make wonderful fictional characters because they are themselves fictional from the get-go, but unbound from all the constraints a “real” character must obey.

OA: With a well-researched 1870s setting and a queer love story at its heart, it’s understandable that some people compare Under the Poppy to Sarah Waters‘s Victorian lesbian novels. Had you read any of those books before you wrote yours, and what do you think of the comparison?

KK: I’d been aware of but hadn’t read any of the books before I wrote Under the Poppy – I stay away from fiction in general when I’m writing any novel – but since then I’ve read all three and adore them all (though Fingersmith is probably my favorite).  To be compared with Sarah Waters’ work is a pleasure and a compliment.

OA: You’ve written all over the map in terms of length and style, from short stories to novels, in horror, fantasy, mainstream literary, and now historical fiction. Is there anything you haven’t tried that you’d like to write in the future?

KK: I never really know what I’m going to write next – one of the great joys of doing this work is just following the path, seeing where the work leads. Although there have been blind alleys along the way, and a couple of dead ends, it’s tremendous fun and always a challenge to work in a new genre, learning its contours and figuring out where the boundaries are.  I never thought I’d write a historical novel, just like I never thought I’d write YA (and ended up writing seven YA novels, thanks to the vision of my very visionary agent, Christopher Schelling, who encouraged me to try it in the first place).

I recently adapted Under the Poppy for the stage: my first try as a playwright!  Completely different than writing a novel or piece of short fiction: these words are meant to be SAID.  And theatre is a collaborative art, completely unlike sitting here alone at my keyboard. If I get very, very brave I might try to write text for a picture book for very young readers, the most difficult discipline of all, I think, next to haiku.

OA: You may be best known for your young adult novels like straydog, The Blue Mirror, and Talk, all of which are considerably tamer than Under the Poppy, even if they deal with potentially controversial topics. Do you ever worry that young readers will stumble upon your adult work before they’re ready for it?

KK: To me, what is most “adult” about Under the Poppy is not the sexy brothel bits or even the cruelty of the war scenes (both on and off the battlefield), but its inherent theme, which is faithfulness: how do we stay true, to a person, a profession, an art, how do we keep our love and commitment strong even through disappointment and loss, and the painful passing of time?  That’s not a young reader’s theme. So to my YA readers I would say, wait awhile, and this book will mean more to you after a few more years on the road.

OA: straydog (which is about a girl who tries to befriend a feral dog) won the American Humane Society’s KIND book award and the ASPCA’s Henry Bergh award. Have you ever worked in shelters, or rescued strays?

KK: All my cats have been adopted from shelters – there are three with me now, lazy, bossy, gorgeous little guys – and I definitely try to help if I see an animal who needs assistance (a friend and I just rescued a baby squirrel, in fact, so little his eyes weren’t even open!  We got him to a wildlife rehab expert, and he’s doing fine). I also volunteer with the Michigan Humane Society in an administrative capacity: they also serve who help file paperwork.

OA: With a husband who’s into painting and photography, and a son who’s into drawing and animation, you’re surrounded by visual artists. How does that affect your creative process? Do you think about writing projects differently after talking to your family members about them?

KK: Since they’re both visual artists, and I am verbal, I rely on their vision in spots where I have none, and on their very different ways of processing what they see (and read). It’s also given me a strong and thorough grounding IN the visual, since, like many writers, I tend to see everything as story first.

I’ve also been fortunate enough to work with both of them: Rick Lieder, my husband, has done all but one of the book covers for my YA novels, and Aaron Mustamaa, my son, worked on the gorgeous book trailer for Under the Poppy.

OA: While we’re on the topic of different forms of artistic expression, can you tell us more about the stage version of Under the Poppy? What will it be like, and where and when can we see it?

KK: It’s going to be intense and fabulous!  The moment you step inside you’ll be IN the world of the Poppy, there at your cabaret table surrounded by lovely floozies, the piano player playing his heart out, puppets of course, and film to help tell the story of the characters, all of whom are right there beside you … And if you wanted to attend in a top hat and tails, or Victorian punk attire, why, you’ll feel totally at home.

I’m collaborating with film director Diane Cheklich, who directed the trailer, award-winning costume and environment designer Monika Essen, composer Joe Stacey (who’s already written some amazing music for the show), with the shared goal of bringing the story alive in another, different way for the audience. We’ll be staging it at the Chrysler Black Box Theatre, at
the Detroit Opera House, in late 2011.

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Thanks, Kathe! Join us next week for more queer speculative fiction news. Please share any news you might have here in the comments, on the Outer Alliance google group, or via Twitter (mention either @omgjulia, or @outeralliance).

OA Members Talk About Coming Out:

Nicola Griffith shared an excerpt from her memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer’s Early Life. This is a sad, alarming, amusing, and sweet glimpse of Nicola’s teen years before she became a well-adjusted and happily out adult.

Cheryl Morgan reminded us that being out is not always simple, easy, or safe with a post examining some of the challenges trans people face.

Catherine Lundoff agrees that being out is a privilege, and asks that we consider supporting organizations which help queer youth like District 202.

New Releases:

Rigor Amortis, the anthology of zombie erotica edited by Jaym Gates and Erika Holt is available at amazon, and contains stories by OA members Kay Holt and Kaolin Fire.

The Little Death of Crossed Genres, edited by Chris Fletcher and Jaym Gates is available in both electronic and print formats through the Crossed Genres website.

The latest issue of Weird Tales contains Natania Barron’s three part poem about “made” women in mythology. “The Wakened Image” appears alongside pictures by Brigid Ashwood.

Calls for Submissions by Queer-friendly Publishers:

Rose Lemberg would love to see poems with LGBTQI voices for Stone Telling. The current submission window is open until the 21st of November, and at present, Rose says there hasn’t been nearly enough queer content in the submissions pile.

Port Iris Zine is accepting submissions for issue #4 until the 5th of November. See their guidelines for more details.

Karen Romanko is looking for Halloween themed stories for her next anthology, Jack-o’-Spec.

That’s all for this time. Join us again next week, and please share any news you might have here in the comments, on the Outer Alliance google group, or via Twitter (mention either @omgjulia, or @outeralliance)