Readercon 2019!

In a little over a month, Readercon 30 will be upon us! It's July 11-14th at the Quincy Marriott.

I hope you're ready for a con where I'll mostly be talking about horror, because horror is the order of the day!

The Horrors of Being Female
Gillian Daniels, Gemma Files, Gwynne Garfinkle, Arkady Martine, Kate Maruyama (mod), E.J. Stevens
Fri 3:00 PM, Salon 4
Horror and dark fiction frequently reflect the everyday indignities and dehumanization of women living in patriarchal cultures—especially women who are also minorities. For example, GOH Tananarive Due writes about the fears of black women, while Caitlín R. Kiernan and Shirley Jackson depict the stigmatization of mentally ill women in ways both overt and subtle. How can authors find ways to describe the terrorizing of women without crossing over into objectification? What makes these works resonate with, and even empower, women readers?

Fascism as a Genre
Gillian Daniels, Ruthanna Emrys, Paul Levinson (mod), Kip Manley, Howard Waldrop
Fri 5:00 PM, Salon 4
Many thinkers have approached fascism as storytelling. In 1936, Walter Benjamin wrote, "The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life." Umberto Eco's 1995 essay "Ur-Fascism" considered this approach. And in 2018, Nick Harkaway tweeted, "Part of the danger of Fascism is that it's less an agenda and more a style." How can the lens of genre help us understand and combat fascism in the present era? What would anti-fascist aesthetics look like, and how can we write them into speculative fiction?

Renovating the Haunted House
Jeanne Cavelos, Michael Cisco, Gillian Daniels (mod), Hillary Monahan, Jess Nevins
Sun 12:00 PM, Salon 3
The haunted house story has been intermittently popular since the 1840s, with peaks in the 1950s (with Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House) and the 1970s (with Stephen King’s The Shining and Anne Rivers Siddons’s The House Next Door). In the 21st century, the haunted house story is enjoying a new popularity. What is it about haunted house stories that draws readers and writers alike? What makes haunted house stories retain their relevance and power?

06.23.2018

A dream of detention camps. This one's already been on the blog.

06.20.2018

A comic about feeling my feelings over the news.

Punchin' Nazis with Art

I'm so damn excited to have THREE of my poems in not just a zine with comic artists, but the zine, Cartoon Punk: Artists Against Fascism.

What an enormously satisfying project to take part in.

The 2016 election and all the near-constant pounding of awful news afterward has altered much of what I write and how I write it. I'm still a writer of genre--fantasy, sci-fi, and horror--but my poetry has taken a slant toward the political. 

When I heard that Lily Hoyda and Rosa Lee Monroe were putting together a collection of comics and essays against anti-semitism, racism, feminism, and, yes, fascism, I queried to see if they were accepting poems. 

It seemed unlikely but I figured I should at least try. While I have doodled autobio comics about my political frustrations, I didn't have much I considered polished enough for an illustrated submission to a zine with professional artists. So I thought, "Ha, maybe they'd want a poem or whatever."

They took three: "The Hero John Wayne," "The Boston Holocaust Memorial Vigil," and "Anyway, Here's a Poem About the Internet," the last of which is probably my favorite title that I've ever come up with for a poem.

My hope is I can find more places to publish my political poetry, short stories, and maybe even my sketches.

So if you want to support artists against fascism, you can order it here. Punch Nazis with art.