Rose and Shweta have both been guests here before, so if you want to find further information about their taste in poetry and vision for Stone Telling, please check out Outer Alliance Spotlight #39 with Rose, and Outer Alliance Spotlight #71 with Shweta (who was not yet co-editor, but was guest editing an issue at that time with J.C. Runolfson).

For up to the date insights to help you figure out what to submit for this current issue, read on!

***

RL: I feel that Stone Telling has grown more and more into itself with each issue, and I feel that our submitters have a much clearer picture of what it is that we are looking for. Definitely I consider our last two issues to be the best so far. It is what I expected the magazine to become, and more – not unlike discovering one’s best poem in the process of writing it. I did, however, expect the magazine to be more whimsical on occasion (hence the Whimsy issue) – certainly an experience I would love to repeat!

One of the things that happened in 2011 is the expansion of the team; first, Shweta Narayan and J.C. Runolfson edited the fourth issue; subsequently, Shweta Narayan joined as a full-time co-editor . Shweta brings a unique poetic and intersectional vision to the team; it is a delight to work with her, because we are very much in tune both aesthetically and viewpoint-wise. The only downside of this is the ongoing editorial spoonie tango, since both of us are dealing with chronic health issues; Shweta’s are significantly more serious than mine, but I am also parenting a child with a disability, so the end of 2011 was especially interesting, in the proverbial sense. I am very proud of what we accomplished, despite those shortcomings, and this would not be possible without our assistant editor, Jennifer Smith. Jenn joined the team as of Issue 3. She does most, if not all of the coding and proofreading for the magazine, and lends her opinion on submissions as well.

RL: Oh yes. Shira Lipkin’s genderqueer “The Changeling’s Lament” has gone viral – people were reposting and discussing it all over the internet! It has 111,000 hits on Stumbleupon as of now. I am also very proud to have published a poem by JT Stewart in the Mythic issue.  When Shweta and Jules were guest-editing this summer, they published a powerful, immense poem by Nisi Shawl; and then I asked Nisi to reprint that poem in my feminist speculative poetry anthology The Moment of Change, Nisi told JT about me and my anthology, and we started talking. I hope that more and more of the speculative poetry community will get to know JT Stewart’s work; she is one of our elders – she co-founded Clarion West! – and I am thrilled to bring her work to more readers. I am probably most proud of publishing emerging voices, including people’s very first poems – for example Peer Dudda’s “Train Go Sorry”, Tara Barnett’s “The Star Reservation”, Koel Mukherjee’s “Sita Reflects”; and though Sofia Samatar had one poem accepted (“The Year of Disasters”, forthcoming at Bull Spec and reprinted in the Moment of Change), I think that “The Sand Diviner” was technically her first published poem. Her science poem, “Girl Hours” opens Issue 6; it is tremendous. I have no doubt Sofia will become an important voice in the genre.

Another thing I am very proud of is changing the scene  somewhat regarding queer speculative poetry. When I read for issue 1 I was very upset about what I perceived as dearth of queer speculative poetry in the inbox. I talked about it non-stop, and when Shweta joined the team, we both talked about it non-stop. Over time, the number of queer submissions in our inbox grew – some were even written with the thought of submitting to us, such as Alex Dally MacFarlane’s “Sung Around Alsar-Scented Fires” and Tori Truslow’s “Terrunform” in the Science/Science Fiction issue. It gives me warm fuzzies to think that we have encouraged such excellent queer poetry to come into existence.

RL: We hope never to see another homophobic poem in the inbox ever again. Unfortunately, homophobic poetry does occasionally land in our inbox, as (somewhat more frequently) does poetry with racist undertones. One again, with feeling: we are anti-racist and queer-friendly!

As to what we hope to see: the full spectrum of queer viewpoints. Really looking forward to some bisexual, genderqueer and trans* poetry; really looking forward for gay and lesbian viewpoints as well.. For this issue, we would actually love to take a look at things that fall outside the heteronormative paradigm. We want to read about poly relationships, for example.  Clueful treatments of power exchange -  again, clueful treatments of power exchange would be great to see. I have not yet read a speculative poem that treats asexuality; perhaps I am missing something – but would love to see that.

RL: Well. I am starting to be worried about gender balance. The submissions pile seems to be more or less equally divided when it comes to gender (though I have not run the numbers), but a lot of times it feels like many of the guys are submitting work that is great, but would better fit some other magazine. So yes, I want to see more wonderful work from guys that fits the magazine. In general, I hope to get poems that will grip me from the first line and never let go, that will stay with me for months and years.  I want the magic. Send it to me, please.

OA: When is the reading period for that issue?

RL: We have opened to submissions on the 25^th of December, and will stay open to submissions until February 20^th.

OA: You’re editing a book of feminist poetry. Can you tell us more about that? And is there anything else you’d like to share with us?

RL: I talked a bit about the Moment of Change above. It’s the first anthology of feminist speculative poetry, and it is about time! I am actually done with the actual editing, and the full ToC is here. The anthology is wonderful, even if I say so myself – it is intersectional, vibrant, diverse, and magical. There are many queer poems in it, even though I had to work hard to get some of the perspectives – but I am so proud of the result. There will hopefully be an event at WisCon 2012, which is when the book will be coming out. 

***
Thanks, Rose! For anyone who might be interested in submitting to Stone Telling (and I, personally, would love to see lots of OA members in the QUILTBAG issue), here are the magazine’s guidelines.

Crossed Genres has been actively involved in the Outer Alliance from the start. I interviewed owners Bart and Kay back in 2009 for OA Spotlight #8, and they’ve been industriously celebrating, promoting, and soliciting queer content for the duration of Crossed Genres Magazine‘s run.

Earlier this month, they announced that the magazine will be closing. This is sad news for those of us who have loved anticipating each new theme for the past three years, but it’s actually great news, too. The reason Bart and Kay are closing the magazine is so that they’ll have more time to concentrate on anthologies and novels, like Fat Girl in a Strange Land (whose table of contents just went live today!)  and Broken Slate (which was the subject of OA Podcast #9).

With a solid track record of diverse content, we can certainly look forward to excellent things once the magazine closes, but first, Crossed Genres Magazine is having one last major hurrah. Issue 36, which will come out in December, has the theme: Different. Submissions are open until the 31st of this month, and they’re accepting all sorts of different things for this one.

For this issue, we are open to all types of media. Previously we haven’t accepted poetry, or podcasts, or photography; now we are. We’ll even consider longer or shorter pieces of writing. (maximum 10,000 words though!) This will make the final issue – well, different from anything we’ve published before.

And we’re looking for as diverse a body of submissions as possible to choose from! We want submissions with characters of color, quiltbag characters, disabled characters, elderly or child M/C’s. We want underrepresented perspectives!

Wouldn’t it be lovely to see a lot of OA members in that last issue? I think so! If you have something Different for Bart and Kay to look at, do send it in!

Crossed Genres is accepting submissions for a new anthology. Fat Girl in a Strange Land will be a science fiction and fantasy anthology with fat female protagonists. According to the guidelines, “Fat can’t just be a passing detail of the main character’s physical description. It should have an impact on the plot and character development. Just like in real life, fat should be an asset or a liability, or even more realistically, both over time.”  And, of course, queer content is always welcome at Crossed Genres.

JoSelle Vanderhooft is now reading submissions for Femmes Fatales, a noir lesbian mystery erotica anthology. This will be published by Lethe Press in 2012, and while it is not strictly SF, speculative fiction is open for consideration .

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, 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.

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)

We Got your Back:

Another excellent project to give hope and support to LGBTQI teens popped up this week. The We Got Your Back Project wants your written or video stories, whether you are part of the LGBTQI spectrum, or a supportive ally. Their site is full of great resources for people who are considering suicide, or people who know others in that position. If you submit something to this project, please let us know and we’ll link to your story.

New Releases:

Sandra McDonald’s story, “Seven Sexy Robot Cowboys” is up at Strange Horizons. It’s got queer content and there’s a link to a video of sexy ice-skating cowboys at the bottom in case sexy ice-skating cowboys are your thing.

Salon Futura’s latest issue features a podcast discussion in which Nicola Griffith, Hal Duncan, Cheryl Morgan, and Catherynne M. Valente talk about writing LGBTQ characters.

Lee Benoit’s novel, Moonspun is out as part of Loose Id’s special Coming Out Day 2010 collection.

Angelia Sparrow’s erotic steampunk romance novella, Sky Rat is available from Pink Petal Books.

JoSelle Vanderhooft announced the table of contents for an anthology she’s editing, Steam Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories. The book should arrive in January of 2011, but you can pre-order or request review copies now by contacting JoSelle.

Calls for Submissions:

Circlet Press has four anthologies open right now. Like an Iron Fist: Dystopian Erotica and Like a Moonrise (erotic coming of age stories about animal shapeshifters) both close on the 15th of October. Sense and Sensuality (paranormal Jane Austen inspired stories) is open until the 1st of November, and Like a Cunning Plan: Erotic Trickster Tales is open until the 15th of December.

The Saints and Sinners Literary Festival Short Fiction Contest is open until the 1st of November. They’re looking for 5,000-7,000 word LGBT stories in all genres. There’s a $15 entry fee, and the top winners will receive $250 for first place and $50 for second and third place as well as publication in n anthology, which will be launched at the literary festival in May of 2011.

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

News & Notes

*This week marks the inaugural issue of Stone Telling, the magazine of boundary-crossing speculative poetry. Rose Lemberg has done a great job of seeking diverse voices for this issue. It’s full of excellent work, including some queer content.

*Tomorrow, the 18th, Connie Wilkins (AKA Sacchi Green) will be reading at the Strange Horizons fundraiser reading event at Pandemonium Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’ll also be there as a member of the audience. Do say hello if you see me (I’ve got blue hair, so I’m hard to miss). If you’re on the other side of the country, there’s another Strange Horizons reading with some West Coast authors in Portland, Oregon on Sunday the 19th.

*Bookview Cafe has just released a charity anthology to benefit Gulf Coast oil spill relief efforts. Breaking Waves is available as an e-book for $4.99, and includes a story by Sandra McDonald.

Interview with Bill Tucker

Bill Tucker works as a civil servant with law enforcement officials by day, and writes and edits speculative fiction by night. He grew up in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, but now lives in Boston,  Massachusetts. He’s currently seeking stories for an anthology of LGBTQI science fiction and fantasy. Rockets, Swords, and Rainbows is open to submissions until the 21st of November, and will be published by The Library of Fantasy and Science Fiction (an imprint of The Library of the Living Dead).

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OA: You do a lot of work with The Library of the Living Dead. You wrote one of the letters in Letters from the Dead, and you edited another anthology of zombie stories (The Zombist: Undead Western Tales) for them. What is it about zombies that has so much appeal?

BT: I think zombies are scary and appeal to me for many reasons. I like the apocalyptic nature of zombie stories and the human reaction to them. Zombies are a great metaphors on human nature as it is people who become zombies. They are monsters that are not necessarily supernatural and can grow in numbers like a virus.

OA: Submissions for Rockets, Swords, and Rainbows are open until the 21st of November. What kinds of stories are you hoping to receive? Any things you’re tired of, or would prefer not to see?

BT: I am keeping my mind open to everything… Though romance is fine, I am not looking for extreme erotic stories. Even as submissions are coming in I already have an artist named Ken Cain working on the cover and it looks fantastic so far. It is a celebration to LGBTQ science fiction and fantasy.

OA: What made you decide to put together an LGBTQ themed anthology in the first place? Do you have a personal interest in LGBTQ topics?

BT: As a gay man I enjoy and want to read more LGBTQ fiction – especially sci fi, fantasty, and horror fiction. I believe there is a large readership who wants this type of book and that there is a need to not only have the work of LGBTQ writers represented, but to expose society to LBGTQ ficiton in general.

OA: Other than Rockets, Swords, and Rainbows, do you have any projects out now or coming out in the near future?

BT: There are two books that I expect to come out in the near future. The first is Doomology : The Dawning of Disasters, which I co-edited with Wayne Goodchild. The book includes 23 stories about disaster and apocalyptic events from different perspectives. This book is also being released under the Library of Science Fiction and Fantasy and will be a great read for science fiction fans. The second book is Zombiality : A Queer Bent On The Undead. This book includes 28 stories that blend the zombie and glbt genres in a way that has never been done before. Not only do the stories range in their take of GLBT themes, but also on what zombies are. I believe that this book will appeal to a diverse audience and I am very excited about its release.

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Thanks, Bill! That’s it for this week. If you have any news about publications, events, or anything else related to LGBTQI speculative fiction that you’d like to see featured in the Spotlight, please let me know by leaving a comment, or talking to me on Twitter.

This week, our focus is on submissions!

First, Bart and Kay over at Crossed Genres have teamed up with several awesome judges to put on the Science in My Fiction contest. Submissions opened on the 1st of April, and will run until the 30th of June. They’re looking for science fiction stories inspired by recent science news.

Second, Hellebore and Rue (edited by OA members, Catherine Lundoff and JoSelle Vanderhooft) is still open for submissions of lesbian magic user stories. Submissions close May 15th.

Third, Megan Arkenberg is looking for articles, fiction and poetry exploring the ways in which  speculative fiction and politics interact. Her anthology, Crimethink, has a tentative deadline of May 15th.

And finally, on a non-submissions note, the Ursa Major Awards are open for voting until the 18th of this month (that’s just over a week from now!), so if you like anthropomorphic animal stories, movies, and art, the time to express your preferences is now.

That’s all for this week. Next week will bring us back to interviews as usual. Happy Spring!

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.