Rose grew up with a jumble of native and semi native languages including Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew. She began writing poetry and fiction in English as an adult after pursuing a Ph.D. in Linguistics at UC Berkeley. Her poetry has appeared in many places including Abyss & Apex (which published last year’s Rhysling nominated “Odysseus on the War Train”) and Goblin Fruit (which published this year’s Rhysling nominated “Godfather Death”), and her short fiction has appeared in G.U.D., Strange Horizons, and Fantasy Magazine.

Stone Telling is Rose’s newest project, an online magazine devoted to literary speculative poetry. The title is the name of a character from a story by Ursula K. Le Guin, and the first issue will feature a previously unpublished poem by Le Guin. The first reading period opened on the 14th of June, and will close on the 14th of August.

Rose is on LiveJournal and Twitter, and also maintains a Stone Telling LiveJournal community. She is currently a professor at a large research University in the Midwest.

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OA: Stone Telling is open for submissions until the 14th of August. What sorts of poems are you hoping to receive?

RL: I am looking for literary speculative poems with an emotional core. I’d like to receive poems that blow my mind, bend my brain, make me fly, make me cry, and hopefully don’t make me throw up or throw the laptop against the wall. As you can see from the guidelines, I am pretty open genre-wise, style-wise and length-wise. I am a very open-minded reader, but also a very picky one.

Ideally I’d like to regularly showcase poetry that illuminates the experience of being Other, or encountering Others. Speculative poetry, I feel, is a perfect vehicle to deal with othering; real life also offers us plenty of othering experiences, some incredibly painful and some less so. I want to read poems that consider what it means to feel alienated or lonely or different or changing or belonging to a community that’s different from other communities; I want to read about what it means to grow up in a different place, to speak a different language, to think about the world in different colors. However, I am not going to reject poems simply because they do not deal with the issues I list. I will consider all poetry I receive.

OA: Are you actively interested in poetry with LGBTQI themes?

RL: Yes, I very much hope to receive poetry with LGBTQI themes. Please send them to me!

There are some very fine poets already in the genre who are active in the LGBTQI community, whether or not they choose to explore LGBTQI issues in their work. And you don’t have to be a member of the LGBTQI community in order to write poems that explore these themes. One of my first published poems, “Two Births of a Bird Shaman” (in Mythic Delirium 19) dealt with gender change.

OA: What other themes interest you?

RL: Simply put, I am most interested in speculative poems that explore diversity. To give one example not at random, I would very much like to publish poetry that deals with race, and I’d like to see poetry by people of color (whether or not they are writing about race) in my magazine and elsewhere. I am also very much into disability issues.

OA: Why did you decide to start a poetry magazine in the first place?

RL: I first got this idea last year, when Lone Star Stories folded. Journal of Mythic Arts, another beloved market, folded in 2008. I sorely missed both venues, and asked myself what I’d do if I had a chance to launch my own zine. The answer was clear – I would consider a broad range of speculative (and occasionally, outstanding non-speculative) poems, and I would work hard to promote diversity in speculative poetry. But 2009 was such a disastrous year for me, I had to shelve the idea for a better time – and now I feel that the time has come. I was immensely encouraged by the positive responses from the community, and I feel that together we can create something worthwhile.

OA: Like Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Conrad, your first language was not English. Do you think this makes you more mindful of the words you choose when you write in English? Does it influence your writing in other ways?

RL: Absolutely. The multilingual experience is at once very enriching, and very humbling. As a poet, I have been shaped by the multilingual poetry I read, and I learned some of my languages through poetry. The humbling part comes from never quite knowing the right words – so have to I use wrong words, odd words, triangular words, words that smell like linden flowers, words that smell like tar. I can make embarrassing mistakes, so I have to check every word, and that makes me mindful. My imagery and rhythms and associations are an amalgamation of everything I’ve experienced so far, and that experience is foreign everywhere. It’s not a very comfortable personal place, but it is also a place of strength.

OA: “Godfather Death” is a Rhysling nominee in the long form category this year. What drew you to revisit that fairy tale in modern poetry?

RL: That’s quite a story. In December 2008, I banded with Deirdre S. Moen and Josh Moore to run a charity fundraiser, HelpVera, in order to help the speculative author and publisher Vera Nazarian save her home from foreclosure. The fundraiser was nothing short of amazing – there was such an unforgettable outpouring of love and community spirit. As a part of the fundraiser we ran a charity auction, and I auctioned a custom poem there, which was bought by one of my favorite speculative poets, JoSelle Vanderhooft. When I received JoSelle’s prompt, “Godfather Death”, I had a sinking feeling, since I had never before (or since!) written a poem about death. But I knew this was an important theme for JoSelle, so I dutifully sat down to reread the Brothers’ Grimm fairytale. And then the poem just bled itself from my fingers. I had nothing to do with it.

OA: On the Stone Telling website, you list three examples of literary speculative poetry: “The Seven Devils of Central California” by Catherynne Valente, “The Bone Harp Sings Nine Moods” by Shweta Narayan, and “Hungry: Some Ghost Stories” by Samantha Henderson. Who are some of your other favorite poets?

RL: Non-speculative or speculative? I read a lot of poetry and I read poetry in many languages. Some of my favorite poets composed epic poetry, and are anonymous. I love Old Norse and early Icelandic poetry, and my favorite poet in that language is Egill Skallagrímsson, who lived in 10th century Iceland. As an undergraduate, I spent a lot of time translating various Taliesin poems from Welsh for my own entertainment, and I love those. Russian poetry is amazing. I grew up reading Anna Akhmatova and Valeriy Briusov and Mikhail Lomonosov, who was born a poor peasant and became a 18-century polymath – a scientist and a poet and an artist and a linguist, among other things. My favorite Russian poet is Vladimir Mayakovsky. In English… there are too many to list. I love Ted Hughes and Winfred Owen and Elizabeth Bishop. Speculative poets, in addition to those already mentioned? Ursula Le Guin has been an inspiration for everything I do since my early teens, when I first read a Le Guin novel. It was Rocannon’s World and it changed my world. And Ursula Le Guin is a wonderful poet. Jane Yolen, I think that’s a given. And I was just telling a friend how much I love Delia Sherman’s “Snow White to the Prince”, a poem that is true and heartbreaking. And last but not least, Amal El-Mohtar.

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Thanks, Rose! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Rose’s work, and consider submitting something to Stone Telling.

Djibril has always assumed that explorations of sexual difference were key to science fiction, so The Future Fire has welcomed queer fiction since it began in 2004. The most recent issue has a feminist theme, and Djibril is currently reading for a queer themed issue, which should be out soon. In addition to the magazine, The Future Fire also has a reviews blog, which focuses on reviews for small press publications.

Djibril has lived and worked on both sides of the Atlantic, and is currently based in London, UK. He is a formally trained historian with a collection of animal skulls. He maintains a Twitter feed as @thefuturefire.

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OA: The Future Fire is putting together a queer themed issue right now. Can you tell us more about that? Is it already full, or are you still looking for new pieces? Any stories you’ve accepted that you’re particularly excited about?

DA: The “Queer-themed” issue of TFF is basically a spin-off from the Feminist Science Fiction themed issue that we advertised about a year ago and published in January, which was also our 5th anniversary issue (though I forgot to make a fuss about that). We buy stories depending on how excellent each story is individually, and we don’t have any quotas or maximums, so we ended up buying too many stories that fit the “sex, gender, sexuality and gender identity” theme that we’d specified–more than we would normally include in a single issue, anyway. So we decided to divide them into two categories: the first, sex and gender and women’s issues generally; and the second, focussing on sexuality and gender identity, will be the “queer issue”. We’re still very much open to submissions on this theme, up to about the end of the month to get into this issue; but as we say, there will never come a time when queer stories are unwelcome in TFF.

Beyond that I can’t say very much more about what we’re looking for. TFF publishes speculative fiction with a focus on social and political themes (think 1984, Island, Fahrenheit 451, anything by Le Guin, Dick…), and would like to see more cyberpunk than we do. We have always valued the cosmopolitan, stories that address diversity and tolerance, stories by underrepresented groups (including non-Anglo scifi). This issue will be no different, except that it will further narrow that focus to stories that address issues of sexuality and gender identity, which have always been a key part of science fiction, I think.

In the stories we’ve taken on already, there are two main approaches: either there is a queer protagonist whose difference and difficulties reflect other differences or forms of alienness/alienation in the same or other characters; or queer protagonists only represent the queer struggle against very real repression in a dystopian, slightly exaggerated world. These approaches are both fine, of course; maybe there are others.

OA: What made you decide to start The Future Fire, and what are some of the upsides and downsides to running an online magazine?

DA: The Future Fire was set up kind of naively by a small group of SF fans some years ago–of the five of us there were two left within a year, and we’re still the core of the team. I’m not sure we really had any idea why we were doing this, or what we were letting ourselves in for; between us we had no experience of publishing either traditional or digital. I’d often imagined publishing a small print ‘zine, but I guess it was only ever going to happen when we had the possibility of doing it online. We were most inspired by the trippy paranoia of Philip K. Dick and the postmodern hoaxes of Jorge Luis Borges–imagined writing fake book reviews and event reports and all that sort of thing. It was only after a couple of years that we realized that what we really wanted was to focus on the social and political aspects of speculative fiction, things that we care about, things that can (or should) change the world.

As for the advantages of running an online magazine, the most obvious is just that it’s much less trouble–marketing and distributing a print magazine would be a *lot* of work (less so now I suppose that we could use POD to actually print and distribute, but still having to worry about marketing to make the magazine profitable would still be prohibitive for a volunteer-run venture). The down-side is the flip-side of that coin: because TFF is free, and we’re not interested in running crappy ads, it makes no money. The donations we receive cover less than 10% of our costs, and the rest comes out of our pockets. For a small ‘zine like this that’s fine, I think it’s worth it. The time is actually a much bigger cost than the money.

The correct answer to “what are the upsides of running an online magazine” ought to be that it removes certain restrictions of space and medium, and potentially attracts a much wider audience. If we buy a story that is 20k words long rather than the 4-6k average, we don’t have to worry about how that’s going to affect the page count of the next issue. (We do worry about how long a reader is willing to stare at a screen hitting page-down over and over, so we serialize longer pieces.) We ought to be able to say that we can publish stories with a visual element, animation, audio, interactive features, hypertext fiction, stuff that’s impossible on paper. That is true, but we’ve yet to be offered anything like that. I’d love to see it, but I don’t know what it would look like.

OA: The Future Fire holds mini-cons in the summer in London. What are they like,  and who may attend?

DA: We started out holding joint mini-conventions with Whispers of Wickedness, a British small press magazine of dark and atmospheric fiction, to which typically a dozen people would come, read or perform some of their work, and generally chat about speculative fiction on a Saturday afternoon in a pub in London or Swindon. It’s a lot of fun. Since WoW stopped publishing a year or so ago, we’ve carried on with the TFFcon. Anyone and everyone is welcome. We often see a sample of TFF authors, artists, reviewers and editors, along with friends, fans and assorted randomers. Other magazines or small presses are sometimes represented, or sometimes just send promotional materials or freebies (especially if they’re not based in the UK). For the last couple of years we’ve tried to have a story competition, with entries voted for on the day, and prizes donated by various publishers present.

We don’t have a date for the 2010 TFFcon yet, but it will be announced on our website and in all the usual places. Would love to see some Outer Alliance representation there this year.

OA: How did you come to have a collection of animal skulls, and do you have any favorite, or unusual ones?

DA: I’m not sure any of them are particularly unusual, but perhaps the most random is a stag skull set on a shield, which used to adorn the wall of a zoologist at a Scottish university, and which mysteriously turned up at my door encased in cardboard and polystyrene. I’d like to be able to say that having samples of animals skulls are essential to my archaeological research, but I’m very much an armchair historian, not a fieldworker. I can’t remember the first skull I acquired, but the barn rat is one of my favourites. The jawbone of a shark is also pretty impressive–it’s the only part of the head that isn’t cartilage, so technically I guess it is a skull. For the record, the human skull is a replica, and the goat was not sacrificed.

OA: You say that explorations of sexual difference are the key to science  fiction. Do you have any recommendations on this theme?

DA: I cut my teeth on writers like Ursula Le Guin, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Michael Moorcock, so I guess I’ve always assumed that a genre like science fiction that explores difference, alienness, xenophobia and other prejudices, and social norms different from ours would be full of sexualities and gender identities that push the boundaries as well. Now that I think about it, I’ve been surprised by how much speculative fiction adheres to modern, western notions of heteronormativity and cisgender. Are we really that conservative a genre?

Beyond the above, and equally obvious authors like Samuel R. Delany, James Tiptree Jr., Poppy Z. Brite, Joanna Russ, I suspect that your readers can suggest me more good queer science fiction than I can them.

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Thanks, Djibril! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out The Future Fire.

Kyell has won several Ursa Major Awards for his work, and recently won two Rainbow Awards for his novel, Out of Position. His latest book, Shadow of the Father, is being released this weekend at Further ConFusion in San Jose, California. Another novella, Bridges, will be released next month at Furry Fiesta in Dallas, Texas, where Kyell will appear as the Writing Guest of Honor. Bridges is part of a new project called Cupcakes, which Kyell is launching along with some other furry authors.

Kyell has been active in furry fandom and queer speculative fiction for ten years. In addition to his fiction, he also co-produces (with K.M. Hirosaki)  a furry podcast called Unsheathed. When he’s not writing and podcasting, you might find him at cons, or campaigning for gay rights in his current home state of California. He lives in the San Francisco bay are with his partner, Kit Silver.

Kyell blogs on LiveJournal as kyellgold, and maintains a personal website at www.kyellgold.com.

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OA: Shadow of the Father takes place in Argaea, a fantasy world you’ve written about before. What keeps you coming back there, and do you plan to return in future books?

KG: Whenever I write a story, it involves a host of secondary characters, and the lives of the main characters obviously extend beyond the scope of the story. After writing my first story in that world, I was intrigued enough with the characters to write a “before” novel and an “after” novel. I think one of the appeals of the medieval/Renaissance world is that it is simpler and starker than our modern world. The stakes in any conflict can be higher: literally life and death. Because survival was much less assured than in our contemporary world, because class distinctions were so much more important then, the stories that we write about can be more visceral. The story of Shadow could not be told in a contemporary setting: even a mountain city would not be isolated, with our modern communications; assassination would not be as credible a threat.

I do think the lack of a communications infrastructure is a big part of what I enjoy about that world. It increases the characters’ reliance on each other for information, which lets me explore their motivations in more detail–lies carry more weight. I’m definitely returning to that world–I have a story started that takes place there, and doesn’t involve any previously written characters.

OA: Furry fandom is the butt of many jokes, even amongst other geeks. Why do you think people are so wary of it, and how do you cope with negative reactions?

KG: I’m certainly aware of that reputation, though I’m not sure where it comes from. I think partly it’s partly due to one of the unique aspects of the furry fandom: that the fandom has no media source material. Star Trek fans, Star Wars fans, Harry Potter fans, with all those people you can look at the TV shows, the movies, the books, and you can understand the appeal that drives people to band together around them. Furry fandom is harder to understand because there is no TV show, no movie, no book that is the focal point of the fandom. Even generic “science fiction” fans have Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Card; “fantasy” fans have Tolkien. Furry fans tend to create their own source material, tailored to their tastes, and that can be a bit hard to understand from the perspective of an outsider looking in.

Additionally, you can’t ignore the fact that the fandom is more openly sexual than most other fandoms. Most of my work is adult, and it’s had a good reception in the fandom, even from straight people who are happy just to skip some of the explicit scenes. There are people in the fandom who avoid anything sexual, and a great amount of non-sexual work, but of course when outsiders are looking for something to represent the fandom, they’ll pick the thing that looks strangest to mainstream society.

That said, I think that negative reaction is not as widespread as perhaps people think. Loud people in any group can affect the perception of that group, and a few loud people mocking furry fans on the Internet does not mean that that attitude is in the majority, nor even widespread. My experience has generally been that people who don’t understand furry fans usually just shrug and leave them alone. I’ve been quite happy to see my books getting some appreciation outside the fandom among gay readers, in Elisa Rolle’s journal, for example, and in her Rainbow Awards (which was a huge surprise), so I haven’t had to deal with a lot of negative reaction at all. When I do, I just ignore it. The need to create our own source material has made the fandom astonishingly creative–mostly, as you note, in the realm of visual art, but writing and music are catching up. There’s even two furry musicals, though neither of them has had much play, and there are about a hundred furry podcasts now. It may not be to everyone’s tastes, but I’d rather focus on all that positive work than on a few critics.

OA: Are there any particular stories you’d recommend to someone who is new to the concept of furry fandom?

KG: Sofawolf Press publishes a journal called “New Fables,” which collects literary-quality furry stories of many different types. That’d be a great place to start. There are a few other books that are close to the fandom: Michael Payne’s The Blood Jaguar (Payne attends furry conventions and is familiar with the fandom) and iBooks’s Furry! (a collection previously published by Sofawolf Press as Best In Show, an anthology of the best stories published in fifteen years of the fandom).

Mainstream books and movies that relate to the fandom–Richard Adams’s Watership Down, Disney’s Robin Hood and The Lion King, Alan Dean Foster‘s Spellsinger series, Cordwainer Smith’s Underpeople stories.

OA: You’ll be launching a new novella called Bridges at Furry Fiesta next month as part your new Cupcakes project. Can you tell us a bit more about Bridges, and the basic concept behind Cupcakes?

KG: Bridges started as a short story about an unusual sexual experience. It’s set in a world contemporary with ours, starting by following a young man (a fox) looking for a date, approached by a flirty fellow named Hayward. Hayward becomes the central character of the story–the whole “quiet, shy person approached by attractive, outgoing person” is a popular romantic fantasy, but it made me curious to build Hayward into a real person, to figure out what his motivation would be for the things he does. The more I wrote about it, the more I became curious about his life, and the wider and more far-reaching the story grew, until it ended up as a novella. So I didn’t want to just post it online, as I do with a lot of my short fiction.

I participate in a writing group, and one of the things our group has noticed is that some of our stories have settled into a novella length, and there are very few outlets for that. We are friends with a couple publishers in the fandom, and it turned out that one of them, FurPlanet, was interested in publishing some shorter works. Novellas fit perfectly. But we wanted to establish a brand associated with our novellas, something that would be kind of fun and would allow our fans to follow our work and discover other people. Cupcakes are a big trend right now, and a favorite of my partner and myself, and we thought that was a perfect description for a shorter, snack-sized story that still had enough substance to it for people to really get into. It also has a bit of a “treat” association with it, something special, and we liked the way that sounded. As a bonus, it gives us an excuse to have cupcakes at the release party.

Mine’s the first to come out; there’ll be info about the other projects and the other authors at www.furrycupcakes.com.

OA: Furry fandom tends to involve a lot of artwork. Are there any artists or individual pieces that you think we should check out?

KG:There are a ridiculous number of talented artists in the fandom. As I mentioned, the unique nature of our fandom really encourages creativity and artwork. I can’t possibly give a rundown of all the ones worth watching, nor even all my favorites, but I’ll highlight a couple that would be good places to start.

Blotch is a friend of mine, and one of my favorite artists. “He” illustrated my novel, Out of Position, and the cover is one of my favorite pieces of his. All the work at his online gallery is great, but a couple of my favorites are “Laugh at Life” and “Fly By”.

Sara Palmer and John Cooner have been kind enough to illustrate my books, and have extensive bodies of wonderful work. Sara has a lovely soft touch with marker and colored pencil; John is an excellent cartoonist, a former animator who really understands how to bring characters to life.

oCeLot also does terrific work with color and design. John Jay Doggett does adorable old-timey cartoony pics. Katmomma has great style as well. If you’re looking for more, you can venture to the furry-only art site furaffinity.net and look for some of the above artists (Blotch, oCeLot, John Jay Doggett, Katmomma, Sara Palmer, John Cooner) as well as a couple other of my favorites, Kenket and Kamui and check out the other artists they like and follow. There’s a lot of great work out there.

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Thanks, Kyell! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, why not check out some of Kyell Gold’s books, or even find him in person at Further ConFusion? If you’re not in San Jose, but are interested in meeting other allies at cons, be sure to check the Queer Friendly Cons page, which has been updated a few times in the week since I first posted it. Please keep those suggestions for further additions coming!

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!

Chris and his longtime partner Jeff moved from St. Louis, Missouri to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 2007, after the restaurant they’d run together failed financially. Chris took that failure as an opportunity to reboot his creative writing side, and in February of 2009, started the magazine, M-Brane SF.

As one of the very first people to join The Outer Alliance, Chris has been an active Outer Alliance blogger and advocate from the start. In addition to M-Brane SF, he also recently edited an anthology of queer speculative fiction called Things We Are Not, which contains several stories by other Outer Alliance members. On the horizon, slated for a June 2010 release is another anthology to be published by Hadley Rille Books called The Aether Age, which Chris is co-editing with Outer Alliance member, Brandon Bell.

Chris keeps a personal blog at mbranesf.livejournal.com and is active on Twitter as mbranesf. He has two cats names Maus and Jack.

***

Would you tell us a bit about Things We Are Not? How many of the contributors are Outer Alliance members, and what kinds of LGBTQI themes are included in the collection?

I am very pleased with this book. It is my first such project, and I am really proud of the great work that the writers did for it. Nearly all of the writers in it ended up joining the Outer Alliance either early on or a bit later, including the straight allies, which I found very gratifying. I was pleased that some straight-identifying writers wanted to contribute to my queer book, and then even more so when they all supported the Alliance (which was founded right around the time that I was finalizing content and starting to promote the book).

The project formed when I decided that I wanted to read and publish some queer science fiction and realized that none of was showing up in the normal M-Brane slush. Though the zine is not queer-focused, I would have been happy to publish more queer material if I ever received any. So one day I decided to see if I could manage to do a stand-alone book. I put out a call for submissions and was amazed at the number of stories that showed up.

I decided from the beginning that I wanted the collection represent a lot of points of views and orientations. In particular, I didn’t want it to be too gay male-oriented or too focused on sexual matters or erotica. As it turned out, however, I didn’t need to think about it too much, nor apply any kind of quotas to my selections. It just happened to work out that the stories that I liked best also represented a lot of diversity. Several items are gay male stories, but just as many are about lesbian characters. Some of the other stories feature variations that are probably only possible in science fiction (a young man’s love affair with a giant sentient machine, for example). Some of them deal with other issues, such as reproduction and marriage, in a quite subversive way. One disappointment that I had with the selection of stories is that I did not end up with anything that I can point to as a “real” trans or intersex story. There are certainly some items in the book that get away from the gender binary, but which might do it in too science fictional a way to really satisfy someone looking for transgender content. It’s just the way it ended up this time, but if I ever do another queer anthology, I may make a more deliberate effort to find more stories that fit under the “T” in LGBT. I was a bit surprised that I didn’t see more of it when submissions were coming in.

You’ve been an active Outer Alliance member since the beginning. What has your experience with that been like? Do you have any goals or wishes for the future of the group?

I think I might have been the first or second person that joined it, literally moments after Natania Barron announced on Twitter that she wanted to start this organization. It just seemed like it was the right time for something like the Outer Alliance. As members recall, it started in part as a mobilization against the homophobic attitudes expressed by John C. Wright in his psychotic screed about the Syfy channel. But even if there had not been something really outrageous like that to stand against, I think it was still time to gather together queer and queer-allied writers and publishers into an association like this. A number of queer sf/fantasy groups exist that one can join—in fact, I belong to a couple of them—but they are mostly focused on visual media fandom and not so much on reading and writing. I don’t mean to knock movies or TV or fandom in general, but it’s really nice to have a group that is focused on the written genres, has a lot of creators in its membership, and which also has a pro-queer stance.

Since the group is still very new, it’s hard to know how it will grow or what it will be like in the future. We’ve already demonstrated that we can put together a respectable group action, such as the Pride Day on 9/1, and also our very measured and reasonable handling of the Flash Fiction Online controversy. The latter was really quite remarkable since no one was formally “in charge” of the situation and it could so easily have spiraled into a loud, ugly “fail” thing. So we’re already pretty good at things like that when they come up, and I expect we’ll have more chances to face bad situations or put together positive events as a group. Also, I see the Alliance potentially being a terrific networking resource for its members. I’ve already made contact with so many cool people that I did not know before, and I’ve enjoyed that a lot.

M-Brane SF has been going for several months now, and you’ve just put an anthology out. How hard was it to start these things? Do you have any advice for other individuals who might like to venture into the world of indie publishing?

It’s certainly been a lot of work in that it consumes a great deal of the time that I am not at my day job. But it gets easier with time, too. The monthly issues of the zine get easier each month because I learn new things about how to work better and more efficiently with each issue. If it were still as hard now to complete my tenth issue as it was to do the first one, then I probably would not have taken on the anthology. But I’ve found ways to work smarter and I now feel that I have the ability to do other projects like that anthology and still manage everything else. I can see it coming to a point where I will need help if I want to grow as a little indie publisher, but we’ll see how it goes. Right now, it doesn’t generate real income, and so it remains more-or-less a one-man show until I find a way to make some money from it.

I don’t know that my advice to anyone else that wants to venture into something like this would be any good. I am no expert. I just do what seems right and what seems to work, and then keep trying to learn from my mistakes and build on my successes. Most people who want to publish zines are basically out of their minds. It’s like some kind of chronic illness that can only be treated by publishing stuff. Fortunately, effective treatments are now within the easy reach of people who have computers and internet access. It’s become quite easy and inexpensive to launch a blog or a webzine or a publication like M-Brane SF where I am able to do electronic and print editions with no real up-front cost other than buying fiction. Even publishing a book using the new tools is not that difficult or costly. The biggest challenge seems to be getting the word out about what you are doing and convincing other people that it is good and worthwhile and that they ought to care about it. So you have to have a lot of patience and perseverance because people will probably not respond in great numbers right away. I am only just now starting to feel the beginnings of some progress toward the next level, so I am glad that I didn’t quit after a couple months.

You took a break from writing for several years in order to pursue a culinary career. Do you ever think about going back into the restaurant business? What are some of your favorite foods?

During the good years of my culinary career, I always did a little bit of writing but never in a way that yielded any finished manuscripts. I also toyed around with an early version of M-Brane that never got launched. During the last couple of years, where my day jobs are much less demanding, I’ve had the time and motivation to get more serious about it. Though I am in no way making any money off of writing or publishing yet, I have committed myself to the idea that I am publisher and a writer, and that’s what I do now as my real profession whether it pays the bills yet or not. I have no interest in returning to high-end restaurant work. I love cooking and still do it everyday at home, but I feel that I accomplished professionally everything that I could accomplish in that business and it no longer holds the appeal. My partner is also a fine cook (and gardener), and we enjoy doing that together at home nowadays. It’s hard for me to specify favorite foods because I am very curious about all cuisines and I move with great enthusiasm from one to the other. When I’ve had chances to travel abroad, I am the guy eating one of everything from the street vendors and the shabbiest dives so that I can learn something new. I’m sometimes mistaken for a food snob because I reject chain restaurants for various reasons, not all of them food-related. I’m not a snob at all, but I tend to be impatient with people who claim that they don’t like stuff that they have either never tried or not tried when properly prepared. Our everyday casual food around the house is currently pretty heavy on Mexican dishes, Asian-style items, curries, stews and pastas. These all have the virtue of being very economical yet delicious.

What’s next? Can we look forward to reading more anthologies in the future, or seeing you at any cons?

In addition to continuing the zine, I have a number of other book projects in the works. I recently announced The Aether Age, which will be an anthology of short fiction set in an alternate historical universe. Alliance member and writer Brandon Bell originally suggested the idea, and we are pretty excited about it. The shared universe will be a Creative Commons-licensed project that we hope will inspire some other projects as well. Hadley Rille Books has partnered with me as the publisher, and this should be a big benefit as far as getting the book distributed. We are aiming for June 2010 for this. I am also planning a couple of single-author short fiction collections. I can’t reveal details on these right now, though by the time this appears, I may have made an announcement or two. And there may be a second queer anthology, but a decision on that is at least several months away.

I definitely hope to make it to a con or two next year. I couldn’t fit any travel into the budget this year, but hopefully that will change, and hopefully I’ll be able to meet some Outer Alliance members in person!

***

Thanks, Chris! Join us next week for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out M-Brane SF and Things We Are Not, or consider submitting to The Aether Age.

Crossed Genres is in trouble. It’s not ‘end of the world’ trouble, but it’s building to that.

Bart and I have been paying for it out of pocket for a year and in that time, the magazine has taken in less than 35% of what we paid into it. And that’s not including the value of our labor because we don’t pay ourselves for running Crossed Genres. ‘Pay the contributors first,’ is one of our foundational principles. And you know what? Our contributors are grateful. They’ve bought more copies of the magazine than everyone else combined. Which is a great sign of the relationships we’re building with our writers and artists, but a very bad omen for the business as a whole.

We’re not looking to get rich off CG. Someday we’d like to be able to pay our contributors pro rates, but even at the very respectable pace we’re growing, we’re years away from that. Frankly, if CG doesn’t start growing like an irradiated lizard, it will never reach that point. Because if Crossed Genres doesn’t start breaking even soon, we’ll have to shut it down.

Crossed Genres is the best thing Bart and I have built together, besides our son, and we’re not done with it yet. As I said, we’d like to start paying pro rates. We’d like to have daily Flash Fiction and a weekly webcomic in the subscribers’ area of our site. We’d like to start a quarterly magazine on the side; one that’s just for our adult readers, if you know what I mean. Someday, we’d even like to have a game developed for Crossed Genres.

Ambition, we’ve got. Momentum is what we need.

By every measure except sales, Crossed Genres has had a successful first year. The magazine has surpassed every other goal we set for 2009. We’ve also put a lot more work into it than we originally intended, but that happens when you love what you do. But we can’t do everything on our own.

Crossed Genres needs you. Yes, all of you.

There’s a little game we used to play in college called ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’. Most of you recognize that game as the Hollywood adaptation of the original idea that any two strangers on Earth are only separated from each other by at most six other relationships (each relationship is a degree of separation). In the game, movie trivia buffs challenge each other to link other actors to Kevin Bacon in as few degrees as possible. Bruce Willis was in Pulp Fiction with Uma Thurman, who was in Henry & June with Fred Ward, who was in Tremors with Kevin Bacon. Voila! From Bruce Willis to Kevin Bacon in only two degrees.

Some of you have already figured out where I’m going with this, and that’s fine. Use that head start to go tell Bruce Willis that Crossed Genres exists. Or Patrick Stewart, or Peter Jackson, or Lucy Lawless, or Neil Patrick Harris. Go tell Kevin Bacon, for goodness sake! He might like the magazine, and he might tell someone else that he likes it. And since he’s Kevin Bacon, the whole world might hear about CG as a result.

Yes, friends of Crossed Genres, I want you to play ‘Six Degrees’ with me. In a way, it’s just a grown-up version of the playground classic, ‘Post Office’. You tell everyone you know that Crossed Genres is great and affordable, and you tell them to pass it on. They tell everyone they know about CG and tell them to pass is on. And so on, and before you know it, the Crossed Genres website crashes because Neil Gaiman absentmindedly mentions it to his 1.3 million Twitter followers (purple monkey dishwasher).

That highly desirable problem is called a ‘NeilWebFail’, and for the record, if only 1/100th of 1% (~one out of every 8,700) of his followers preordered the Crossed Genres Anthology, we would reach our minimum goal overnight.

The internet is practically built for memes like this.

I can hear you thinking to yourself, “But I don’t know anyone famous.” Me neither. I think of all my friends as rockstars, but I know that most of you have friends like me; people who are too busy barely getting by to actually accomplish anything very far-reaching. That’s okay. In the long run, we’re all still just a few degrees away from Kevin Bacon (and my mom once met Bruce Willis in a sporting goods store).

Before you start telling me that it’s tacky to beg for celebrity endorsement, be assured that’s not what I’m doing. If you know a celebrity, of course I want you to tell them about Crossed Genres. But I really want you to tell everybody you know about CG. It’s called word of mouth advertising, and it’s three or four times as effective as the flashy stuff you see all over the internet and plastered across every marketable flat surface in the real world.

Your help could mean the difference between Crossed Genres celebrating a second anniversary or disappearing within the next year.

Will you play ‘Six Degrees’ with me?

(Reposted with permission.)

K.T. (Kay) and Bart are married, and both of them are bisexual. They started Crossed Genres together in 2008, and decided in the first couple of months that they wanted to do an extra large LGBTQ themed issue for the magazine’s first anniversary. The idea for Crossed Genres, which features stories that combine SF/F and another genre, grew out of Bart’s Genre Challenge community. Genre Challenge (which prompts members to write in a new genre each month) is still going, but has a new moderator now that Crossed Genres has taken off.

Kay’s love of speculative fiction runs deep. She wrote her first story (about a talking dolphin and his pet boy) at the age of six, and later got into college because of an essay on worldbuilding. Bart started writing poetry when he was in 8th grade, and took up prose fiction the next year. His non-fiction piece, “The Successful Hero’s List”, appeared in the April 2009 issue of Fantasy Magazine.

Bart and Kay live in Somerville, Massachusetts with their 3-year-old son, Bastian, and two cats named Romeo and Scout. In addition to writing and editing, both Kay and Bart take a keen interest in science. Kay works a day job in medical research administration, and is appalled at how little money brilliant researchers make. Bart’s particular scientific area of interest is sustainability, and people who use minimal resources to do amazing things. Kay and Bart encourage anyone with an interest in the future to blog about their favorite science news stories, and to fund research if possible.

What’s the story behind Crossed Genres? How did you come up with that particular idea for a magazine, and how do you choose the theme for each issue?

K: Bart tells this story better than I do.

B: I do? News to me!

It started with the Genre Challenge, which was something I came up with to help myself as a writer: each month I picked a new genre and had to write a story of at least 1000 words in that genre (without mixing it with genres that I found easier, like SFF). I’d originally intended to only do it myself, and spontaneously decided at the last minute to open the idea up to others. Now the Livejournal community has 250-plus members. See how I failed at that?

We’d talked about the idea of converting Genre Challenge into a magazine, but felt it wouldn’t work for a variety of reasons. Kay was the one who came up with the idea of having each month combine a new genre with SFF. Some conversations we had at Denvention III (WorldCon 2008 in Denver, CO) solidified the idea, and we decided to go for it very shortly after.

How we choose the genres varies. We want to encourage as much diversity in submissions as possible, and from all over the world, so we try not to pick any genre that’s too narrow. We never want to have any that are too similar too close to each other. We also really like pushing the boundaries of what defines a “genre”, which is how we’ve ended up with themes like Child Fiction (September 2009) and Antihero (accepting submissions in February (2010). We’ve got some real doozies on our list but we’re saving the really tough ones for further down the road.

In the current LGBTQ themed issue, how varied is the queer content? Did the submissions trend toward any particular part of the LGBTQ spectrum? Were there any types of characters you would have liked to see more of?

B: I think it’s not surprising that we received a lot of stories about transsexual and transgender characters – SFF has a long history of playing with the definition of gender. But for the same reason, I was pretty surprised at the lack of genderless or intersex characters. Still, overall I was very pleased with the diversity of submissions we got.

One other thing I was surprised at was how few stories we received that had human/alien pairings. But in retrospect I can see how that type of story might be seen as drawing a parallel (however unintentionally) between queer relationships and something literally alien.

How is it working as a husband and wife editing team?

K: Well, I think it’s more relevant that we’re best friends than that we’re married. First and foremost, we have fun running CG together. The fact of our marriage just means that we can run it from our living room. Spending this much time together is certainly good for our marriage, but I doubt that would be so if we didn’t both enjoy the work so much.

B: If we didn’t love doing it then we’d have quit long ago, married or not. But one of the biggest things that brought us together as a couple in the first place was a shared love of literature, fandom and geekery. Crossed Genres is essentially an extension of our shared passions, which makes it so easy to enjoy together.

Bart, you gave Kay an amazing birthday surprise at WorldCon this year. How did you manage to pull that off? And Kay, just how excellent and unexpected was it? Have you been getting a lot of use out of your CINTIQ in the past couple of months?

B: Rather than try to condense what happened, I think it would be easier if people read my after-the-fact blog post. It’s long but worth the read.

Pulling it off was… well read the post to see just how tricky it was. But it’s the first time I ever spent 5 solid months on a birthday surprise, I’ll tell you that. (And another HUGE thank you to all the wonderful conspirators!)

K: Completely unexpected. It was good enough for me that I was attending WorldCon for the second birthday in a row!

I’ve been having a lot of fun with the Cintiq, though of course I wish I had more time to spend making art. Soon after I started playing around with the Cintiq, I was honored with an invitation to do a guest comic for The Apple of Discord. And since then I’ve been posting the occasional doodle to my DeviantArt gallery, not counting the still-secret art gigs I’ve been doing for very patient friends.

Crossed Genres is a year old, and it’s still going strong. Do you have any advice or resources for other people who might want to start zines of their own?

K: The learning curve is steep; if you’re honest about the mistakes you make and learn from them, most people will understand. You don’t have to pander to the masses; it’s okay to start small and stay small. Don’t quit your day job. And get some sleep, for goodness sake!

B: Remember that you won’t make money – if you do it, you’re doing it because you love it. If you don’t love it, don’t start, because it won’t last. Set deadlines and stick to them, because the second one thing falls behind, everything will. Plan as far in advance as possible – in fact, set aside time just for planning ahead. And I’ll second what Kay said about starting and staying small. If that’s what you love, it’s what you should do. Don’t allow your zine to be forced to be something you don’t enjoy yourself. Keep it yours.

***

Thanks, Bart and Kay! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, go check out the LGBTQ issue of Crossed Genres!

“I thought it would be a good idea to let you all know about the
release of the first issue of the magazine I have been working on.
It’s called Survival By Storytelling.  Our announcement for the
release, with all the info on where it’s being sold, about our being
non-profit, and what we print (fiction and poetry by writers 25 years
old or younger, with some commissioned pieces by published authors)
can be found here:  http://sbsmag.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/survival-by-storytelling-issue-one-is-up-for-sale/

“Spread the word, if you like.  We also may have review copies
available if you have a review blog or a magazine with a review column
or something.  Preferably digital, because we are non-profit, but I
will have a handful of hard copies in a week or so.

“The reason I bring this up is that, while our first issue doesn’t, as
far as I know, contain fiction by or about LGBT authors/issues, our
magazine is very open to LGBT authors/issues.  The only thing we
explicitly don’t take are erotica and works with excessive levels of
gore or foul language (cursing is fine, as long as it has a purpose).
We will be opening submissions again soon, depending on how well the
first issue does, but I wanted you all to know about it, in case any
of you are young enough to submit.  Our submission guidelines are
here:  http://sbsmag.wordpress.com/guidelines/

“For us, a good story is a good story.  So, just to clarify, when we
say we are open to things like science fiction or, as I’m saying here,
LGBT fiction, we mean it!  (I’m personally an SF fan, but the magazine
is open to all genres specifically because the parent group, Young
Writers Online, isn’t SF specific, so, I have to play nice).

“Thanks for your time and hopefully I’ll see some fiction from Outer
Alliance members in the near future!”

“When I first decided to create a historical fiction magazine, there were three publications listed on Duotrope’s Digest dedicated exclusively to the genre: by the time Lacuna opened to submissions, there were only two. For me, as for many of you who read historical fiction, write it, or both, this is a very sad state of affairs. I created Lacuna in the hope that it could provide some relief for both readers and writers looking for a place to enjoy and create tales of days gone by.

“The lack of historical fiction magazines which lead to the creation of Lacuna has also kept me from narrowing the magazine’s focus to one particular style or theme. The stories are not all literary—though they are beautifully written and meticulously characterized; nor are they all adventure and suspense—though I guarantee you’ll find them hard to put down. The settings run from 19th century Spain to biblical Timnah to the pre-Columbian (or is it?) New World. Some stories have fantasy elements, some are alternate histories, and some aim for precision and historical accuracy.”

Though not specifically focused on queer-oriented fiction, Lacuna is open submissions with queer content.