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!

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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 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.

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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!

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).

***

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.

First, congratulations to all the Hugo winners! Lots of awesome stuff up there, including plenty of things by LGBTQI friendly people. Congratulations, too, to all the nominees who didn’t end up taking home a rocket ship of their very own. It was a great crowd this year. Special thanks and congratulations to Cheryl Morgan, who provided live coverage of the awards (alongside podcast superstar, Mur Lafferty), and shared the Best Semiprozine win with Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace of Clarkesworld.

Second, Congratulations to Outer Alliance founder, Natania Barron, for a few things! Aside from being in on the groud floor of the new Geek Mom blog, our fearless leader has a story in the new Dark Futures anthology. She’s in great company as the anthology is full of stories by excellent writers, including two who’ve been interviewed here before: Sara Harvey and Michele Lee.

But that’s not all Natania’s been up to! She’s also agreed to take on editorial responsibilities (along with OA member, Jaym Gates) at Crossed Genres starting next year. Bart Leib and K.T. Holt will still be the publishers, but they’re handing over the editorial reins so that they can focus on putting together anthologies, and managing the Science In My Fiction site, which they started last March. The best part? Science In My Fiction will be publishing short stories each month, which means there’s yet another LGBTQI friendly SF market in the world (here are the submissions guidelines). Hurray!

Next is something not speculative fiction related, but noteworthy all the same: the fine folks at Lambda Literary have posted a call for submissions to a Mothers of Trans Children Project. This will be published by Cleis Press and edited by Rachel Pepper, co-author of The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Families and Professionals.

And finally, here’s a thoughtful guest post about bisexuality and gender-bending in paranormal romance by Cecilia Tan on the GLBT Reading blog.

That’s it for this week. If you have any Spotlight-worthy notes, news, links, etc., please let us know in the comments, on the OA google group, or by telling me on Twitter. You can address me directly, or use the Twitter tag #oaspotlight to let me know what’s new. I look forward to hearing from you!

Cheryl Morgan has been active in SF fandom for many years. She edited the Hugo winning fan magazine, Emerald City, and won the Hugo for the Best Fan Writer category in 2009. Currently she’s the non-fiction editor for Clarkesworld Magazine, and part of the team behind Science Fiction Awards Watch, Convention Reporter, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards.

Her newest project, Wizard’s Tower Press, just went live this month, and aims to publish e-books as well as a non-fiction magazine, and some print anthologies. The magazine, Salon Futura, will launch its first issue in September at WorldCon, and Wizard’s Tower Press’s first anthology, Dark Spires, will be released in November to coincide with BristolCon.

Cheryl mirrors her blog on LiveJournal, and maintains a Twitter feed. She lives near Bath, UK.

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OA: Wizard’s Tower Press just went live a couple of weeks ago, and it looks pretty exciting. Why did you choose to focus on the e-book publishing format, and what is you vision for WTP’s future?

CM: E-books are interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly I have little experience of making physical books. I do, however, know a fair amount about web sites, and an e-book, internally, is pretty much the same. Also e-books allow you to sell easily to people all over the world without having to pay printing and shipping costs. That’s very much how I like to work. And as someone whose library of physical books is scattered in numerous locations on two continents, and whose current home has no room for bookcases, I can see the attractions of the portability of e-books. This doesn’t mean to say that we are e-book fanatics. Everyone at Wizard’s Tower loves physical books too, and we will be publishing some. We just have to be a lot more careful with them, because the economics are much more risky.

As to the future, I’ll be very happy if I can connect lots of good books with eager readers, and avoid bankrupting myself in the process

OA: You’ve mentioned wanting to help out midlist writers with this venture. How do you hope to do that?

CM: The big publishers and bookstores are becoming more and more focused on a small number of best-selling writers, and on looking for the next big name. Midlist writers are getting squeezed out. Many of them have extensive backlists that are out of print. If we can put those books out as e-books then those authors have a potential new stream of income, and readers have a plentiful supply of books that have previously been hard to find.

OA: The first issue of WTP’s non-fiction magazine, Salon Futura will come out in September to coincide with WorldCon. What kinds of things can readers expect from that, and are you open to submissions for later issues?

CM: We are open to submissions now, both for issue #1 and future issues. The plan with Salon Futura is to provide a quality literary review magazine focused on genre literature. Clarkesworld has been very successful paying good rates for really good stories. I want to show that you can do the same with non-fiction. Of course there will be some surprises as well, but you’ll have to wait for issue #1 to see them.

OA: Dark Spires is WTP’s first planned anthology, due out in November. Can you tell us more about it?

CM: I’m part of a group that runs a small convention in the south-west of England, BristolCon. Last year Colin Harvey edited an anthology called Future Bristol that featured SF by local writers. He wanted to do something similar this year, and when I decided to get into publishing I offered to help him. Dark Spires will speculative fiction stories inspired by the locations of Thomas Hardy‘s Wessex, all written by local authors. The cover, as with Future Bristol, is by local artist Andy Bigwood.

OA: You’ve been very active in SF fandom for some time. You’re on the teams responsible for Science Fiction Awards Watch and Con Reporter, and you’re the non-fiction editor at Clarkesworld. You even won the Hugo for Best Fan Writer in 2009. How did you first get into fandom, and how did your involvement in fannish circles get to be so big?

CM: Back in the 1980s I got a job programming microcomputers for use in hotels. I was heavily into role-playing at the time, and my boss, Martin, suggested that I might enjoy science fiction conventions. He introduced me to his best friend, Dave. These people were Dave Langford and Martin Hoare (the guy who collects Dave’s Hugos at Worldcons when Dave can’t afford to attend). I guess I got lucky.

As to why I have got so involved, I guess I’m just hyperactive. If I see something needing doing I tend to try to do it.

OA: Has your involvement in fandom taken you to geographical places you might never have thought to go otherwise? How is fandom similar and different in non-English language locales in your experience?

CM: I have traveled quite a bit with my day job, but it was fandom that took me to Finland. I met a lady called Irma Hirsjärvi at an academic convention in Florida, and she invited me to attend her local con. I have been back every year since. Finland is beautiful in the summer (though I’m not sure I’d like the winters much) and the Finns are wonderfully hospitable. They are also magnificently well organized. The country has a population smaller than that of many US cities, and yet they run conventions that are bigger and better run than most I have seen, and are free to attend because the Finns are so good at getting sponsorship. Also there is sauna.

Fans are pretty much the same all around the world. We like the same sort of books, and the same sort of geek toys. What tends to distinguish local fan cultures is how ambitious and inclusive they are. In some countries fan groups tend to be small and tightly focused on specific areas of fandom; in others fan groups are very diverse and enjoy reaching out the general public through big events.

OA: You’re part of a team of people working to launch the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards, recognizing translations of foreign language work into English. The first awards ceremony is scheduled to take place at the Eaton Conference in Riverside, California next February. Why is this award important, and how can people submit work for consideration?

CM: In running Science Fiction Awards Watch I noticed that almost every country that has awards for SF&F literature includes an award for work published in translation to the local languages. The only exceptions were English-speaking countries. So I decided to start a set of awards for SF&F translated into English. Fortunately I have some very capable friends who are helping me make it a reality. There are hundreds (possibly thousands) of genre novels and stories published every year in languages other than English. By the law of averages, some of them are going to be brilliant. But without encouragement they will never get translated and most of us English-speakers won’t get to read them. I hope the awards will help change that.

There is no formal submission process. The number of works published in translation is quite small and we did not want to put any barriers in the way of considering potential nominees. However, if publishers with eligible works could write to us and let us know about their books (info [at] sfftawards.org) that will make sure we don’t miss anything.

OA: A lot of people would like to see greater diversity in SF, and I get the feeling you’re no exception, but how would you like to see the SF community embrace the diverse? To that end, what advice, if any, would you give to a new fan just entering the scene? What about old and entrenched fans, writers and editors?

CM: If people want to embrace diversity then it is pretty easy to do these days. There is a big Internet out there. My regular blog reading includes writers from Brazil, India, France, Ghana, South Africa, Malaysia, Israel and Indonesia. The biggest problem is finding time for all of the good material out there.

Of course you can’t force people to embrace diversity. If people want to stick to what they know then you have to persuade them of the benefits of stopping doing that. But something that readers, writers and editors all tend to say they are looking for is new ideas; something different. One of the best ways to get that is to read outside of your comfort zone.

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Thanks, Cheryl! Join us next week for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Wizard’s Tower Press!

Sacchi Green is the erotica writing pseudonym for Connie Wilkins, and she’s got a list of publishing credits that’s about a mile long. She identifies as a lifetime bisexual person with strong lesbian leanings, and a definitely lesbian writing muse. Most recently, she won the 2010 Lambda Award in the Lesbian Erotica category for co-editing Lesbian Cowboys with Rakelle Valencia. She also edited Girl Crazy, and the forthcoming Lesbian Lust (due out in August), and is currently taking submissions for Lesbian Cops.

As Connie Wilkins, she edited Time Well Bent, an anthology of queer alternate history stories. Her personal fiction contribution to that volume is reprinted in Bedazzled Ink’s Year’s Best Lesbian Fiction 2009 and (with slightly more erotic content) Circlet Press’s Best Fantastic Erotica. She also has a story coming out in Hellebore and Rue, an anthology of stories about lesbian magic users due otu from Drollerie Press later this year.

Sacchi blogs on LiveJournal, maintains a Facebook profile, and is active on the Lesbian Fiction Forum. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, and will be reading in various East Coast cities this fall.

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OA: You’re a big proponent of erotica with high standards of plot and craftmanship, as evidenced by the Lambda award you recently won for co-editing Lesbian Cowboys. What are some common mistakes you see in the submissions pile?

SG: There are some mistakes that all editors see, such as stories that have nothing to do with the required theme (or have been stretched to the breaking point to try to make them fit.) Then there are the erotica-specific blunders, using words that don’t mean what the writer thinks they mean, or metaphors that are worn-out clichés or downright ridiculous if you stop to think about them. Anatomical improbabilities are troublesome, too; if a reader has to pause and wonder how part one can be in contact with part two without someone being a contortionist or breaking in half, the mood and suspension of disbelief have been destroyed, and in erotic scenes, more than in most others, that sort of interruption can be (metaphorically) fatal. And don’t try to write BDSM scenes unless you know what you’re talking about, because those who do know will catch any mistakes. I won’t go into grammatical misadventures, since those can usually be fixed, but like every editor, I do have my pet peeves.

OA: You write erotica as Sacchi Green and speculative fiction as Connie Wilkins. What’s the story behind your two names?

SG: When I started writing for publication, rather later in life than most, I focused on science fiction and fantasy. I managed to sell enough short stories to qualify as an active member of SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America), and planned to keep on that way, especially after I sold a couple of pieces to Bruce Coville’s series of anthologies for kids. Those paid better than anything else I’d written, and I hoped to do more along those lines. When I sold my first erotica story (to Best Lesbian Erotica 1999) I figured that was a one-time thing, and if I were going to be writing extensively for children, it might be wise to use a pseudonym for my erotic work. Things didn’t work out that way; I was seduced by the erotic side of the force, and never wrote for children again (although I haven’t given up on the idea,) and by the time I noticed that my alter-ego Sacchi Green had racked up a lot more credits than Connie Wilkins, it felt too late too undo the damage. I do sometimes use my given name for speculative fiction, even when it’s erotica, but it’s all become somewhat muddled. My advice to anyone considering using a pseudonym is to consider how you’ll feel if your alter-ego becomes more successful than “you” do.

OA: Lesbian Cops is open for submissions until the first of August. The title is pretty self explanatory, but are there any kinds of stories you’re particularly hoping to see for that one? Any tropes you’re sick of?

SG: I always hope to see stories that are so original that I didn’t know I wanted them until I saw them. And I try to have a wide variety of themes, styles, settings, etc. As to tropes, in theory I believe that any idea, however overworked, can be done creatively by the right writer, but at this point I really don’t want to see any more traffic cops stopping drivers and demanding sex. A major problem with this kind of book (and with most erotica, though even more so here) is in meeting the varying hopes and expectations of the readers. I know people, personal friends, who have deeply-felt cop fetishes that involve officers doing things that would make others see them as villains. For that matter, I know people who have villain-fetishes. I also know women who are cops, real people with complex lives, and I don’t want stories that make them into caricatures. No single reader is going to like every story in a book, and many readers will find at least one story offensive; I need to find a balance. The best advice I can give is to pick a setting and characters that interest you, and take it from there.

OA: Time Well Bent is an anthology of queer alternative history stories you edited, and you contributed a story as well. What is it about history that draws you? Do you have any favorite time periods?

SG: I’ve always loved to read stories set in different eras. History itself, as we perceive it, is a form of story. I could pontificate about needing to understand our history in order to understand the present that grows out of it, but really, I enjoy reading and researching and writing about historical periods in the same way that I like to know about other cultures and parts of the world. Why limit yourself to one point in time, any more than to one point on the surface of the earth? As to favorite time periods, as a kid I was interested in the Medieval period because so much fantasy literature was set there, and as a young teen I was wrapped up in Jane Austen and Regency romances, but the older I get, the more history there is, and recently I’ve been working with the WWII period and on to the Vietnam War, which was my “present” not all that long ago, it seems.

OA: You’re arranging readings for the fall. What new projects are on the horizon, and where can people find your tour schedule?

SG: I’ll be posting readings and events on Face Book and Live Journal. Definitely one during Women’s Week in Provincetown (October 8-17), featuring several Cleis Press books including Best Lesbian Erotica and Best Lesbian Romance and my Lesbian Lust (because we can’t get enough readers together for any single book,) probably one in Philadelphia in mid- to late September, and possibly one in NYC in November. Boston is possible, too, if enough readers are available. I don’t “tour” much out of the Northeast, since I can’t afford the time or expense, but occasionally I’ll have a few writers close enough to each other to organize readings of my books in other parts of the country.

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Thanks, Sacchi! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Lesbian Cowboys and Time Well Bent.

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.