Once again, chaos and luck have conspired to release another issue of the venerable Revelator magazine into the world!
In this issue, you can read new fiction by Sofia Samatar and John Chu; an excursion into musical history by Brian Francis Slattery; surreal prose poems by Peter Dub矇; an essay by Minsoo Kang; revelatory, rare, and historical Wizard of Oz comics; art by Chad Woody; and, among other esoterica, shotgunned books!
Posting here is likely to continue to be sparse for a while, aside from occasional announcement-type notes such as this one. I'm preparing for Ph.D. qualifying exams and anything not related to that and/or to the impending release of Blood: Stories has been cut from my waking hours since this summer.
Blood: Stories has an official release date of February 20. It is at the printer now as I write this, and can be ordered not only from the publisher, but also from Amazon (U.S.), Barnes & Noble, and Small Press Distribution. (It hasn't hit Book Depository yet, but when/if it does, I'll post a link, as that's often the least expensive way to order internationally.) There will be an e-book version eventually, but not until this summer at the earliest. BLP also has a new subscription series for their books, which has various options, all of which are less expensive than buying the books individually.
I'll be in New York City this coming weekend to read at the Sunday Salon series on February 21 at Jimmy's No. 43 (43 E. 7th St.) at 7pm alongside Alison Kinney, Thaddeus Rutkowski, and Terese Svoboda. If you're in the area, stop by!
Speaking of books, Eric Schaller's debut story collection, Meet Me in the Middle of the Air, has now been released by Undertow Publications (and is available as both a bookbook and an e-book at the usual outlets). It's a marvelous concatenation of stories of horror, dark fantasy, and general weirdness. Some are disturbing, some are amusing, some are both. It's a really smart, entertaining book. I'm especially pleased it's coming out now, near to the release of my own collection, because Eric has been my erstwhile partner in a number of crimes, including The Revelator (a new issue of which is impending. Even more than its been impending before). Eric hasn't always gotten the credit he deserves as fiction writer because he only publishes stories now and then, and often in somewhat esoteric places, so it's a real pleasure and even a (dare I say it?) revelation to have a whole book of his work and to get to see the range and complexity of his writing.
Finally, in terms of new work, I have exciting news (well, exciting to me) -- my story "Mass" will appear in the next print issue (issue 66) of Conjunctions. It's a tale of academia, mass shootings, and theoretical physics. Having it published by Conjunctions is almost as exciting for me as having a book out, because Conjunctions is my favorite literary journal, the place where the aesthetic feels most convivial to my own, and I've been submitting to it for almost 20 years. I've had stories on the website twice ("The Art of Comedy" and "The Last Vanishing Man"), and numerous stories that came close, but were not quite right for the theme of the issue or didn't quite fit with other material or just weren't quite to the editors' tastes. Getting into the pages of Conjunctions means more to me than getting into The New Yorker or any other magazine would (although I'd love the New Yorker paycheck!).
I think that's it for news. Thanks for reading, and thanks for bearing with me!
I've promised myself to devote the month of January primarily to work on a book manuscript (about 1980s action movies and their relationship to the Reagan presidency) that a certain academic publisher is interested in. Thus, I need to get work done. The internet looms as an endless temptation, and I am more than skilled at losing hours to idle surfing. I've also got other writing assignments that need doing, classes to prepare for, etc.
So I'm signing off at least until February, barring interesting announcements or cosmic events or just an overwhelming desire to violate my own resolutions. (It usually happens.) I will also likely be only slowly or vaguely responsive to emails, etc. Please don't take it personally. I've got three weeks in which to get real work done, then life returns to its normal craziness.
For the Advanced Prose Workshop class that I'm teaching at Plymouth State University this term, I had the students create and manage a blog. They've been playing with it for a little while now, testing out templates and figuring out how to post different types of things.
I'm pretty much letting them do what they want with it, hoping that having a real audience for their work will be both educational and encouraging. With that in mind, I encourage you to take a glance and leave a comment, particularly if something they've written especially interests you. For many of these students, this is the first audience they've ever had beyond friends, family, and teachers.
They're really just getting started with posting, but there should be a steady stream of material over the next few weeks.
(And as I've warned before, my own blogging here is likely to be light through December.)
I don't generally publicize Kickstarter projects, etc., here, because it would be easy to get overwhelmed, but here's one I've got multiple personal interests in: Unstuck: New Literature of the Fantastic and Surreal.
Unstuck is a new(ish) annual(ish) journal out of Texas. Their first issue included fiction by Aimee Bender, Matthew Derby, Amelia Gray, J. Robert Lennon, Meghan McCarron, Rachel Swirsky, Leslie What, and others who are just too fabulous to name.
Their upcoming (at the end of the year) second issue will include work by Other People You Know, plus me (a very short story about Victrolas and turtles that I read last year at Readercon). The rewards for funding the project are pretty great.
Also, one of the editors is Meghan McCarron, someone whose life I nearly ruined once by hiring her to teach at a boarding school in New Hampshire. She's beginning to forgive me. She'll forgive me more if you fund this project. (But don't use that as an excuse not to send money!)
Meghan's in the video above. She says, "Barbarians who collect heads," in what may be the world's most perfect line reading.
Also, Tyler Stoddard-Smith, who demonstrates how to use Unstuck to combat insects and rodents, is my new favorite superhero.
Readercon has always had a zero-tolerance harassment policy.
Harassment of any kind — including physical assault, battery, deliberate intimidation, stalking, or unwelcome physical attentions — will not be tolerated at Readercon and will result in permanent suspension of membership.
As always, Readercon reserves the right to strip membership at its discretion.
Earlier today I was contacted by a Readercon representative, who let me know that by decision of the Board, my harasser has been suspended from Readercon.
For two years.
I was not given the reasoning behind the decision; the board’s deliberations, I was told, were confidential.
I was assured the board had taken everything into account – my report, my eyewitnesses, others who had come forward with information they declined to detail. They asked me if I felt they had taken my complaint seriously. They hoped to see me at next year’s Readercon.
I love Readercon and have been on the programming committee for the past two years. (I am not on the general con committee, so had no involvement in this decision.) Because I rarely go to other conventions, it's the one time in the year when I get to see a lot of friends from around the country and world.
But I cannot support an organization that doesn't enforce its own policies.
The language is clear, blunt, and unambiguous. The decision is a violation of the stated policy.
Two years is not permanent.
If the convention committee wants to change the harassment policy to give them more leeway, then they should do so and make their decision public so that people who attend the convention know the policies under which they are agreeing to attend. But until then, the committee should enforce the policy that exists — the policy we all agreed to abide by when we decided to attend Readercon.
I'm just learning about this now, and I have respect for the members of the convention committee, so I hope they will address the discrepancy between their policy and practice soon.
But I promise this: I will not be associated with an organization that so blatantly violates its own policies. Until the decision is either better explained or, preferably, changed, I will not be associated with Readercon.
Update: The head of my committee, Rose Fox, responds to the decision: "This is not the outcome I wanted, and it makes me very unhappy." Rose is one of the major reasons I got involved behind the scenes at Readercon, and I respect her tremendously.
And as Rose says: Feedback on the board's decision should go to info@readercon.org.
Update 2:The Readercon Board of Directors has issued a statement about their decision. I wrote my post pretty soon after reading Genevieve's, and my language was a bit wishy-washy in some spots because I was so surprised and shocked. I thought there must be something I'm missing, some miscommunication somewhere, something that would make this make sense. But that's not the case.
I've officially resigned as a member of the programming committee. This is heartbreaking for me, but it also feels obviously necessary. I support the people who are continuing to work with Readercon despite their disagreements with the Board. We need people to do so. We need people to help the convention get better, because it's been making all sorts of great strides until now. But I just can't do it.
Our trust was betrayed by the Board of Directors. Before the convention, at least one email went out reminding attendees of the con's various policies. They're on the website and in the program guide. We agreed to attend Readercon 23 with those policies known and in place. Our expectation was that the policies would be enforced. They were not.
There is a time and place for helping people who have made mistakes learn from those mistakes, atone for them, and grow from them. I've said and done plenty of things I have heaps of regret for, and I'm grateful to friends and acquaintances who have helped me learn from them — and will, I hope, continue to do so, since I'm not done living and thus not done making mistakes. I want to live in a world that's more about rehabilitation than punishment. But rehabilitation is not the responsibility of an event or its committees. If you hold an event, your job is to make sure the people who attend are as safe as you can reasonably ensure. Your job is to put policies in place and to enforce them. That's your responsibility. Readercon has failed in that responsibility.
And so I have resigned, and will remain so regardless of how this plays out further (and I expect we have not heard the last of this). Perhaps I will attend next year, perhaps not; I'm never exactly sure what's going on in my life that far in the future, anyway. If progress is made (and my schedule permits), I will attend, because I support the convention overall, and I want it to continue to get better. The Board's statement is not evidence of this so far. But I hold out hope for improvement.
Update 3: The Readercon board resigned and Readercon has instituted new policies. An excellent response to the situation. My thoughts are in a new post.
I will be at Readercon 23 in a few weeks. It's the one convention I attend every year, and I'm especially excited about this year because the panels are especially interesting, the guest list is awesome, and one of the guests of honor is Peter Straub, whose work I am in awe of and who is among the most delightful people to hear on panels or in interviews or readings or, really, anywhere. (Honestly, if Peter Straub were a train conductor, I'd follow him from car to car. He'd get freaked out and call the police, and I'd get arrested for being a weirdo, but it would be so worth it!) Also, we get to celebrate 50 years of Samuel Delany's work. And we give out the Shirley Jackson Awards!
Before posting my schedule, I wanted to note the Readercon Book Club selections for this year. These are panel discussions of specific books, a "classic" and a recent work of fiction and nonfiction each. This year's are:
A quick site note: I've neglected to update the Fiction page on the blog here for some time, so I just did so. It now contains not just links to stories originally published online, but information about all the fiction I can remember publishing over the last 10 years or so.
A couple old links were dead, and I found two stories completely available via Google Books ("The Lake" and "In Exile"), which made me very happy, because those are two of my personal favorites (which is to hint that reader reaction to them has been decidedly ... mixed...), and I had thought they were inaccessible and obscure. But no! (Well, their content may be inaccessible and obscure — or, as some have maintained, pretentious, arrogant, presumptuous, artsyfartsy, and — or maybe that was somebody describing my cats...) You can even still buy the whole zine or book in which they appeared, which you should, indeed, do, because you are a supporter of small presses! (Though you should really buy that issue of Lady Churchill'sfrom the publisher's own ebook site, which offers it in many formats, all DRM-free. In fact, you should probably buy all of their ebooks. High quality, handmade. Artisanal, we might say.)
Meanwhile, the Selections page here remains out of date and a bit of a mess, but that's a much bigger project for a later time...
I am a juror for this year's Shirley Jackson Awards (along with Laird Barron, Maura McHugh, Kaaron Warren, and Gary K. Wolfe), for which the nominees have just been announced. It's a diverse and interesting list, I think, but then, I'm one fifth of the people responsible for it, so I'm a bit biased. The winners will be announced at Readercon in July.
NOVEL
The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock (Doubleday)
The Dracula Papers, Reggie Oliver (Ch繫mu Press)
The Great Lover, Michael Cisco (Ch繫mu Press)
Knock Knock, S. P. Miskowski (Omnium Gatherum Media)
The Last Werewolf, Glen Duncan (Canongate Books, Ltd.)
Witches on the Road Tonight, Sheri Holman (Grove Press)
NOVELLA
“And the Dead Shall Outnumber the Living,” Deborah Biancotti (Ishtar, Gilgamesh Press)
“A Child’s Problem,” Reggie Oliver (A Book of Horrors, Jo Fletcher Books)
“Displacement,” Michael Marano (Stories from the Plague Years, Cemetery Dance Publications)
The Men Upstairs, Tim Waggoner (Delirium Books)
“Near Zennor,” Elizabeth Hand (A Book of Horrors, Jo Fletcher Books)
“Rose Street Attractors,” Lucius Shepard (Ghosts by Gaslight, Harper Voyager)
NOVELETTE
“The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine,” Peter Straub (Conjunctions 56)
“Ditch Witch,” Lucius Shepard (Supernatural Noir, Dark Horse)
“The Last Triangle,” Jeffrey Ford (Supernatural Noir, Dark Horse)
“Omphalos,” Livia Llewellyn (Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors, Lethe Press)
“The Summer People,” Kelly Link (Tin House 49/Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories, Candlewick Press)
SHORT FICTION
“Absolute Zero,” Nadia Bulkin (Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters, Prime Books)
“The Corpse Painter’s Masterpiece,” M. Rickert (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Sept/Oct, 2011)
“Hair,” Joan Aiken (The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories, Small Beer Press/ The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July/Aug, 2011)
I was bored with the old look of this site, so decided to change things around a bit. (If you're reading this via RSS or a mobile device or something, check out the actual website to see.) There may be some adjustments as I try it out on other computers and browsers, but for now this will do.
Until I decide to go all neon green.
Because clearly the internet needs more neon green.
Things have been mostly quiet here for a few months because of general busy-ness on my part since September. Not just with teaching, though that has eaten up more time than usual, but also with my membership on the jury of the Shirley Jackson Awards and the board of our local domestic violence shelter and resource center, Voices Against Violence. (Operating a domestic violence shelter and resource center that offers entirely free services in these economic times in a state where the legislature is full of anti-government, anti-spending fanatics is not the easiest job on Earth.) Free time and sleep have not been things I've experienced much for the past few months, and that took a toll as well, since I'm now recovering from a rather nasty virus. But we soldier on!
And there should be a bit more time for blogging in the coming months, so I've begun to make some plans. First, the usual reflection on the term's classes, which even if it ends up being terribly boring for most readers is very useful to me, and it's also helpful to be able occasionally to point people toward some of my writings on what I do in the classroom. One thing I want to do is write about a few of the books I used in the Currents in Global Literature course I taught, and which I'll be teaching again in the spring, because a few of them are books I haven't taken the time to write about before. So expect posts soon on Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood, Alejo Carpentier's Kingdom of This World, and Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men. (I've written previously about Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter and a little bit about Flaubert's A Sentimental Education.)
I also need to write about a few books some folks have sent me over the past six months; I've mostly discouraged anybody from sending me books (well, before I joined the jury of the Jackson Awards) because I knew I'd have limited time for reading and, especially, reviewing, but there's lots of really interesting stuff out there, and I need to take a moment to note some of it.
Also, I had fun creating the video essay on Derek Jarman, and would like to hone my skills at that with a few more. I'm thinking about something about Jean Renoir, maybe something on one of his most-neglected films, La Nuit du Carrefour, or perhaps a look at how Fritz Lang remade two of Renoir's films (La Bete Humaine became [or drew from the same source: Zola's novel] Human Desire and La Chienne became Scarlet Street). Or maybe/also something about 1980s movies like Red Dawn and Invasion U.S.A.We shall see...
I don't know Terri Windling, but she has been a great help to many of my friends in their lives and careers, so I am distressed to hear of her distress. I've got dozens of books in the house with her name on them, and far more with her name on the acknowledgments page.
Therefore, I decided to contribute an item to the auction, something I've had for a while and have been looking for a good cause to which to donate it. This seems perfect.
It's the final week of the Strange Horizons Fund Drive, and there are lots of fun prizes that have been donated by the various folks who support SH. But you shouldn't donate just to get a prize. You should donate because that's what keeps SH going, and has kept it going for 10 years now, long enough to make it venerable. Their staff is all volunteer, but they pay their writers good rates (think of it as the opposite of the Huffington Post that way).
Here's some useful info:
Where does my money go?
Strange Horizons is staffed entirely by volunteers, so everything you donate goes towards the running of the magazine. At the moment, our costs break down something like this:
Your $5 donation will cover our administrative overhead costs for one week
Your $20 donation pays for one poem or one review
Your $50 donation pays for one article
Your $100 donation allows us to sponsor a convention event
Your $250 donation is the average amount we pay for a new story
Your $400 donation pays for an entire week's worth of material at Strange Horizons
And now, so I can follow the progress you help SH make, here's their progress rocket:
During Ann's tenure, first as fiction editor and then as editor-in-chief, the magazine has been more exciting, alive, and contemporary than it had been in at least 60 years, publishing all sorts of different types of fiction from writers young and old, new and famous; writers known within particular popular genres and writers known better among the literati.
The magazine has been a joy to read. More than a joy, really, because it became an exciting magazine of surprises, and we need all those that we can get.
Ann's a great editor and will go on to many marvelous things in the future, as will the rest of the extremely talented staff. They worked wonders with limited resources, and I have no doubt the future holds great things for them all.
Today, though, is a sad one.
Thank you to everybody at Weird Tales over the last five years. You've got a lot to be proud of, and you've made a lasting contribution to the history of a magazine with a history that was already pretty impressive.
The statement of purpose ended by saying, "Who knows what will come of all this?"
What became of it was certainly more than I ever expected. The busiest time for the blog, in terms of posts and of visits from readers, were the first few years, particularly 2004 and 2005. There weren't a whole lot of other people doing what I was doing, and it felt like everybody who was writing blogs about books and literature of any sort knew and read each other (hence the creation of the Litblog Co-op). But the blogosphere expanded rapidly, and one day it seemed like there were 1,000 book blogs out there. And a lot of us stopped thinking of ourselves as fundamentally book bloggers, for various reasons. I still write a few reviews a year, but usually for places other than this blog, and though I've always written about film here (the 6th post on the site was about Brazil), I've grown more and more interested in writing about it as over the last few years I've been involved in making some movies and have started teaching film and media courses.
The blog wouldn't have survived if it couldn't change along with me, and it really has -- not just visually, as this Wayback Machine capture of the site in the fall of 2003 attests. It's always been a place where I've tested out ideas, basically presenting a first-draft face to the world, which wasn't scary until suddenly, when I got some links from well-trafficked sites in 2004, people were looking. A lot of those early posts seem embarrassingly awkward, naive, and wrongheaded now, but there are recent posts that are awkward, naive, and wrongheaded, too. That's the territory, the necessary risk for any endeavor like this.
I'm giving Google Plus a test run, because with the Start Google Plus browser extension, I've been able to link all of my Facebook and Twitter feeds in a way that is not overwhelming, and so it looks like I might be able to use Plus as a single hub from which to access various forms of social networking clearly. Using Plus's circles, it's really easy to keep track of various groups of people, so I'm perfectly happy to add folks I don't know, which I don't do with Facebook, because I hate just about everything with Facebook's interface.
I don't promise to be a prolific poster on Plus (I'm not prolific on Facebook or Twitter), but if you want to add me, here's my profile, and I'll probably reciprocate. (I say probably because I'm still exploring the technology and don't want to make any categorical promises! My great fear is somehow I'll stop following somebody and then they'll think I hate them and I won't even have realized I've done it. Maybe I should create circles for my various anxieties...)
"Hitting Budapest" was the first story we wrote about for the Caine Prize blogathon, and it's held up better in my memory than I expected it would. Despite my qualms about some aspects of it, there's a vividness to the language that gives it some freshness. Were I on the jury, it wouldn't have been my first choice (that would be "The Mistress's Dog"), but it might have been second, or tied for second with "In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata", though that's a story that, unlike "Hitting Budapest", has diminished in my memory.
