Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre – Literary Hub

Fear, Friendship, and Finding Your Place: Kristen Simmons and Johnny Compton

Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 08:16:01 +0000

Tor Books, in partnership with Literary Hub, presents Voyage Into Genre! Every other Wednesday, join host Drew Broussard for conversations with Tor authors discussing their new books, the future, and the future of genre. Oh, and maybe there’ll be some surprises along the way…

Another voyage reaches its conclusion! What a whirlwind this season has been, what a joy! And what a hard time I had ending it!

This episode feels somewhat fitting: it’s two books that deal quite intensely with emotions, with fears, with the struggle of being human in this world. First, Kristen Simmons introduces the first book in her new duology (Find Him Where You Left Him Dead) and talks about writing for teens, the joy of being gross, and creating a mythologically-inspired game for her characters. Then, Johnny Compton chats about his debut (The Spite House), the real architecture behind the awful house in his book, and what he loves most about storytelling. Finally, to wrap things up, no special guest — but a poem by Robert Frost. A little something beautiful to ponder on your way.

See you soon,
Drew

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

Read the full episode transcript here.

Kristen Simmons on the Difference Between Eastern and Western Ghosts:

One thing that I thought a lot about prior to writing this was the difference between Eastern and Western ideas of ghosts. Japanese horror is very scary, and one of the things that I think is the absolute scariest about Japanese ghosts, about yokai and all the yokai stories, is that they don’t need a reason to do what they’re doing. They don’t need reason to haunt you. They don’t need a reason to try to kill you. Sometimes they hide in bathrooms and pop out of toilets and, and rip you to pieces just because they want to, just because that’s where they are. And a lot of ideas of Western ghosts have to do with unfinished business or revenge or you didn’t do this in your life so now this has happened to you, right? Like, this cause and effect. That’s a big deal in a lot of Western theology but Eastern, that’s not always the case.

Yes, you have different Japanese ghosts that, maybe haven’t finished what they need to in their life, but oftentimes you just have these very, very scary entities whose only purpose is to search and destroy. All they want to do is kill you because they want to. It may have nothing to do with you, and it may have nothing to do with anything that you’ve done in your life that deserves it or not. They just want to come after you.

And so that was one thing I thought a lot about prior to writing this book, was how to incorporate that level of fear for my characters. To think not only like, this is bad, we left our friend playing this game the first time, now we have to find him. Is it our fault? Is that why this is happening? Are we being punished? But then to also have this feeling of, it doesn’t matter if we’re being punished not. They’re coming after us.

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Johnny Compton on Understanding Why People Don’t Leave Haunted Houses:

It’s funny because I used to work in the banking industry, too (and I’ve written a short story that I haven’t had published yet) but like, that basically, I’m aware of like, you know, we’ve all got mortgages, and we’ve got kids, you gotta take into account, like, uh, well, what’s, what, if I do leave, where does that leave my kids, what school district might they be going to, some of these things are scarier than, I mean, it depends on — I, you know, kind of jokingly say this, but not even really, cause I’ve, I’ve known a lot of people who think their houses are haunted, say they’re haunted, I’m not here to tell them one way or the other.

But when they describe certain things, I’m like, I get why you don’t leave, because it’s like, yeah, you know, I get a cold spot here, or I’ll hear knocking in the middle of the night. And it’s like, oh yeah, well you’re not gonna leave your house for that.

I’m not gonna blow up my credit. And have my kids on the street Because, like, you know, like, oh, the pipes are knocking and stuff. Like, hey, if that’s all the ghost is gonna do. And maybe, like, occasionally, open a curtain when nobody else is in the room or something.

If it’s just a bunch of annoyance, like, it’s like you got an annoying roommate at that point. Just leaving is not really that simple until something dangerous starts happening at which point, often times that results in like something like Poltergeist, where it’s like yeah, well now we can’t leave because our daughter is trapped in the Netherrealm.

I always try to remember, I know what genre these people are in, they don’t know. The characters don’t know they’re in a horror story yet.

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Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre is a co-production with Lit Hub Radio. Hosted by Drew Broussard. Studio engineering + production by Stardust House Creative. Music by Dani Lencioni of Evelyn.

No Place Like London: V.E. Schwab, Lina Rather, and Oliver Darkshire

Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 08:07:14 +0000

In the episode, I sing a little Sondheim (as one does) but for this write-up, let’s imagine instead the opening slashing guitar chords of The Clash’s “London Calling” — because that’s exactly what London is doing in this episode. One of my favorite cities in the world and host to some of the most incredible stories ever (fictional and otherwise), let’s take a trip across versions of the Big Smoke that you might recognize — and a few you might not.

This week, V.E. Schwab welcomes us back to her four magical Londons in The Fragile Threads of Power and talks about picking up with old characters, the question of the monarchy, and how she structures her writing. Then, Lina Rather flings us back in time to the days after the Great Fire as she explains how research led her to A Season of Monstrous Conceptions, the wild world of historical midwifery, and how she put Sir Christopher Wren onto the page. Finally, Oliver Darkshire (Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller) ponders the longevity of London’s antiquarian bookshops and explains why people who care about one thing are bound to care about others, too.

See you in two weeks,
Drew

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

Read the full episode transcript here.

V.E. Schwab on Characters, and What It Was Like Returning to Hers:

I really believe that characters should be written so that you believe that they’re real people, meaning that their existence should not feel contingent upon you reading them.

You should believe that when you finish a story, when you put it down, those characters don’t cease to exist, you are simply no longer invited to follow. Characters, when I write them, even when I finish writing them, they don’t cease to exist for me. They kind of live in my head. I still see things and think, oh, what would Addie think about that? And so I had Kell and Lila and Ry and Alucard just kicking around in there for several years. And so, the question was, okay, I’ve got new characters and a new storyline, but for our existing characters, can I make you believe that they have been there for the seven years that you have not?

I wanted it to feel like coming home. That’s what it is. At the end of the day, getting to write the book, well, I mean, look, getting to write the book was a fraught experience. I thought Addie was gonna be this thing that ruined my career. Like, I was a fantasy writer. And then Addie was this departure, and I was like, what am I doing, this is a disaster.

And then coming from Addie back to Shades, I was like, what am I doing, this is a disaster. So I had all of this anxiety, my biggest fear was that people were gonna say, this is unnecessary, or the last books were better, all these things. And so for me, when I got that out of my head and I sat down to just write, the thing that I experienced overwhelmingly was this joy of coming home. When I finally got to write the first scene where Lila and Kell are shown to us again on this boat, I was like, I’ve missed you!

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Lina Rather on Some Historical Differences Between Obstetrics and Midwifery:

It’s super fascinating to look at books by men and by women in this period about obstetrics, because the ones done by men have these really weird– I mean, they’re very accurate and very kind of cool illustrations, but it’ll be, um, just a torso of a pregnant woman with, like, the skin peeled back for you to see the uterus.

And then if you go look at the women’s ones, it’s these really strange, like, bottles floating in space with little babies inside them. And you think, like, well, what use could that be? It’s just, like, a weird bottle.

But it’s because it’s trying to teach people who are doing this all by touch. And so you’re not actually going to see the uterus, because you’ll never be allowed inside of an anatomy room, but you will be using your hands to feel inside the body, and so that’s what they’re trying to get across in those illustrations, and it’s a really kind of kinetic way of getting this information across. Although there was actually a woman working at the turn of the 18th century, in France, who invented something called the machine, which was, a stuffed puppet torso the size of a woman with a real pelvis inside that you could have either a doll or potentially, we think, a mummified fetus that you could pull in and out and replicate different birth complications. And that was a real innovation in obstetrical training at the time. So you can imagine, seeing like, oh, here’s the layers of muscle, not super useful. Seeing here’s what it’s going to feel like when you are, you know, delivering this baby or trying to turn a baby, very useful.

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Oliver Darkshire on Why It Is Actually Cool to Care:

It’s nice when people care about things. And it sounds really silly. But even the sillier the thing, almost the nicer it is. And by caring about rare books, or something else that’s silly like mugs or ceramic honey cake jars which drip suspicious liquids, whatever it is that you care about, by caring about that, by extension you care about something else.

So if you care about your books, you care about the house that they’re in. And your community, and your bookstore, where that comes from, the people who work there. But caring about things is how you fix problems. Because you’re inherently invested in the people that are operating around them.

It’s nihilism and not caring about anything, and being tricked into thinking that everything’s hopeless that is the lie, because then you don’t do anything. But care about little things that don’t seem relevant, and you end up caring about everything else. So, it’s a stepping stone, you know?

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Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre is a co-production with Lit Hub Radio. Hosted by Drew Broussard. Studio engineering + production by Stardust House Creative. Music by Dani Lencioni of Evelyn.

Wham! Biff! Kapow! ACTION! with S.L. Huang, Julia Vee, and Ken Bebelle

Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 08:33:03 +0000

There is a particular kind of joy that comes from a really good action sequence. Your pulse starts to race, you feel yourself leaning forward in anticipation and excitement, and time seems to become elastic. This is true (for me, anyway) in books as well as live-action (be it TV/film or stage) — and so what better place than a genre podcast to get into some ACTION?

This week, we join S.L. Huang (The Water Outlaws) for a chat about writing fight scenes that flow, about re-telling a classic of Chinese literature, and the tricky ethical confluence of power and innovation and morality. Plus, Drew says “Barbenheimer” and nobody quite knows what to do about it! Then, our first-ever writing duo: Julia Vee & Ken Bebelle drop in to talk about rooting their urban fantasy on the West Coast, their dynamic-duo origin story, and taking inspiration from (while also critiquing) John Wick. Finally, no third interview this week — we planned and recorded a conversation with a stunt performer but because we don’t cross picket lines, we’re shelving it. Instead, some thoughts about why this strike remains important.

See you in two weeks,
Drew

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

Read the full episode transcript here.

S.L. Huang on stepping into & joining Water Margin‘s history of fan-fiction remixes:

I’m a big fan of fan fiction and remixes and have been my whole life, so this was very natural to me.

It was very natural to me to choose, oh, this is the story that I’m interested in telling, and I can move this other storyline. So it kind of overlaps, and I can reference this one as an Easter egg, you know, that’s very fun for me. I’ve written fairytale retellings and references as well, and reimagined stuff. To me it’s all in conversation. And, and that’s really, really cool. There’s actually a funny story in water margin’s history. There are four novels in Chinese history that are considered the classic Chinese novels, sometimes six, but always those four definitely and one of those is Water Margin and if you say there are six, one of the other two that you count is called Jin Ping Mei, and it’s a, I wanna say 17th century ish novel and it’s, it’s basically a fan fiction of Water Margin. Water M argin has almost no sexual content. And Jin Ping Mei introduced something like 72 ultra kinky on-page sex scenes between the Water Margin characters.

So fan fiction is way older than we think, right? So, I mean, this is a huge part of water margin’s history as well, the ways people have reimagined it, and I’ve, I’ve certainly seen many adaptations of it for television, there’s some very famous video games that have been based on it, trading cards, like, you know, this has been something that people have done for a long time. So that felt very natural to me and it’s just fun. It’s fun to, to do. It’s like a puzzle.

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Julia Vee & Ken Bebelle on the beginnings of their writing partnership:

Ken Bebelle: We were both those kids who always came to school with extra books because we would be bored and just be reading in the back of the class.

Julia Vee: We had all the same, you know, nerdy overlaps– Magic: the Gathering cards and Dungeons and Dragons and I was a huge Sandman fan. We had to rely on like ancient technology to collaborate back then too. We had a five and a quarter floppy disc we used to exchange, by our lockers at school, and Ken had this printer at home, like it was like a daisy wheel?

Ken Bebelle: Yeah, a daisy wheel printer that sounded like a Gatling gun when it was printing. we uh, we entered a contest. We wrote and sorcery novel that is little cringey, in retrospect. I had print it out at like 11 o’clock at night, I had to bury the printer under piles of bath towels, so I wouldn’t wake up the house. It printed out on perforated paper.

Julia Vee: Yeah, it’s a lot easier now ’cause we have Google Docs, right? So we can write at the same time.

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Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre is a co-production with Lit Hub Radio. Hosted by Drew Broussard. Studio engineering + production by Stardust House Creative. Music by Dani Lencioni of Evelyn.

How to Live in Nature: S.L. Coney, Ruthanna Emrys, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 08:30:02 +0000

What a summer it has been! In my neck of the woods, it wasn’t hot enough and then it was way too wet and then it was briefly nice before everybody decided it was an early autumn only for a brutal heat wave to swing through. Weird stuff, and that seems true for everybody. Even the people who were inclined to deny climate change seem to be coming around, which is a silver lining I suppose.

This week, we head off on three separate journeys that get our hands dirty, force us to breathe that good good oxygen, and which remind us that we are a part of the natural world and not separate from it. First, S.L. Coney puts us in the Wild Spaces of South Carolina for a coming-of-age tale like no other, featuring childhood memories and a very good dog. Then, Ruthanna Emrys imagines first contact on the Chesapeake in A Half-Built Garden and we discuss what it might take for humanity to survive, and why a novel is a very good place to argue with yourself. Finally, Alexis Pauline Gumbs (Undrowned) offers a meditation on curiosity and re-learning in order to be a more generous part of the natural order.

See you in two weeks,
Drew

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

Read the full episode transcript here.

S.L. Coney on Coming of Age and Family Secrets:

We all have things universal that we experience as we grow up. Anything I think that deals with coming of age is gonna resonate with us because it is a very powerful time in our life, and so we have strong memories tied to that. So first, there’s that piece. As far as like the mother and the father, the father is, I mean, he’s totally thinking about puberty for the boy, right? He’s totally thinking about things in the natural world. ’cause this is what he knows. so they’re all, yes, they’re all looking at the boy, but they’re all seeing different things.

And if we think about the mother, if we think about her as a person who is coming from a past that she has run all the way across the country to get away from, she’s trying to start out new. If you have this sort of baggage, this kind of weight in your past, she’s probably not gonna tell people. Right? Even her husband, you know, she may tell him a little bit, we get the understanding that he knows a little bit.

But it’s not uncommon, especially if you have grown up in a family where there are secrets or there is some sort of shame, to perpetuate that. It’s kind of what we do in family systems. We perpetuate these same behaviors even if we don’t want to, or even if we don’t mean to sometimes, and so she is perpetuating this traumatic thing that happened in her past. She’s perpetuating the secrets of it even if she’s trying not to go down that same path and it doesn’t have to be some big, bad secret, It doesn’t have to be that, it can be a small thing that somebody might feel shame about, like shame is incredibly damaging. So it’s something that is not just experienced in families where there are abusive situations or this trauma. Any family can have secrets.

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Ruthanna Emrys on Imagining a Future Technology That Isn’t Bad for People:

One of my areas of interest is the psychology of technology and how we think about it and how we interact with it. I started using the internet when I went into college in the nineties and I loved it and I love having a big worldwide network that connects everyone, and I can see that it has gone very bad places.

And I tried and I tried and I was like, I cannot come up with a positive future in which we still have this internet. I do not see those as being compatible and I hate that. So the smaller, more sort of separated Dandelion networks were an exploration of what we would have to lose in order to gain something more human scale in our technology.

And one of the things I was thinking about as I wrote these technologies is what would it take to have technology that’s designed around having a setup that helps people maintain their mental health and to think better, rather than being required to shape our psychology around the technologies that are offered to us, technologies that we know are psychologically bad for us, even while they’re also psychologically good for us in some ways. There’s just no end to the good news and the bad news and the good news and the bad news. And so I was looking for a different balance, I wanted something that would feel more like a good fit to people’s brains and more something that you could customize to the way you’re comfortable thinking and the level at which you’re comfortable being thoroughly networked and that would give you connections to other people who could help solve problems. But it does have its downsides and it does, you know, it’s very much a cyborg set up in which, and we have this now when it goes away.

How much of your work can you do when your technology breaks down?

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Alexis Pauline Gumbs on Unlearning the Human Impulse of Separation From the Natural World:

I think at it’s root, what I am unlearning is an idea of separation. An idea that the natural world exists and I exist separately, and I can just reflect upon the natural world sometimes as a metaphor for what I’m feeling, and that’s a cop out. At the end of the day, I am a part of the natural world, right? It’s not a metaphor, what I’m feeling is relevant to nature because I am nature.

And this separation, I mean, it’s not like we invented it as a convenient cop out for our impact on climate change, right? This has a very old history. Sylvia Winter charts out a whole intellectual history of colonialism, like how could it be that people would imagine that there was something called humans separate from nature? And that’s a great question because we completely are intertwined with and interdependent with the entire rest of the natural world.

So I started to think about the fact, well, okay, so as a poet, am I complicit in regenerating this idea of separation by acting as if these images of nature are just convenient metaphors that could be useful in an idea that still says that I’m an individual and I have this subjectivity, and there could be parts of me, even my interior life, that are separate from the rest of the growing, changing, screaming, struggling, overheating–in the case of what’s going on right now–natural world.

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Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre is a co-production with Lit Hub Radio. Hosted by Drew Broussard. Studio engineering + production by Stardust House Creative. Music by Dani Lencioni of Evelyn.

Questioning Authority and Story: Emily Tesh, Vajra Chandrasekera, and Sophie Strand

Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 08:18:35 +0000

It’s near impossible, I think, to not question authority these days. Maybe that’s the wannabe punk rocker in me, or maybe it’s the fact that so many of the things I was taught as a child (about history, about economics, about humanity) are turning out to be made up and my generation (not to mention the ones younger than me) are left holding the bag while the teachers ride out their last days in relative continued comfort.

We’ve got to interrogate these structures that have been taken for granted, and what better way to do that than through fiction? Especially genre fiction!

This week, Emily Tesh takes us to Gaea Station for Some Desperate Glory and the necessary difficulties of writing about fundamentalism, the eerie feeling of watching the AI conversation arrive much more quickly at the novel’s related questions than she expected, and some lessons from human history. Then, Vajra Chandrasekera talks about blurring all of the expectations of genre in The Saint of Bright Doors, using his fiction to write an anthropology of the present day (even when it takes place in an alternate world), and telling exactly the kind of story he wanted to tell. Finally, eco-feminist writer and scholar Sophie Strand (The Madonna Secret) offers a new way of considering Christianity and urges a return to community in the way we encounter story.

See you in two weeks,
Drew

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

Read the full episode transcript here.

Emily Tesh on Trusting the Reader and Anti-Heroines:

A lot of it when I was writing it came down to asking myself, how much do I trust the reader? And of course that’s quite a big question cause you don’t know who’s going to read the book. You can hope that reader will be someone who’s heard of unreliable narrators, or a person who’s willing to give a unlikeable narrator a go.

And I got that word a lot. “She’s so unlikable.” “Are you sure she’s not too unlikable?” “I think it’s very brave to write about a girl who’s not likable.”

And I thought, Hmm, I bet you’ve read plenty of anti-hero books with a unlikable hero and never asked this question.

So some of it was spite a little bit, being like, you know what? I am just going to write an anti-hero who’s actually an anti-heroine, somebody with genuinely unpleasant dislikeable qualities but I was interested in how a person can be both a villain and a victim at the same time. Just because someone is a bad person–and I do think Kir at the start of the book is a pretty bad person–doesn’t mean they’re not a human being.

So I was interested in that compassion, if you like, for the person who is the worst.

I think as well, the thing I said about trusting the reader, one does occasionally see, and social media is terribly chilling for a writer, readers who give no grace at all. And I knew that some people reading Kir would give her no grace at all and would say, well, this is a book about a character with fascist beliefs and therefore I have no interest in seeing what happens or why it’s been written that way or what else there is but I hoped that most readers would be able to feel the dissonance between what Kir believes and what’s being done to her. I hope it’s clear that she’s an abuse victim. And she’s an abuse victim, so thoroughly indoctrinated that she can’t even bring herself to see what’s been done to her because it would be unbearable. It would start a cascade that she can’t face.

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Vajra Chandrasekera on the Blurring of History and Mythology, Our World and Another:

I think I set out more or less explicitly not to create a secondary world. I think it gets taken very much as a given of fantasy. Like this is how fantasy is supposed to work, you’re supposed to create a world that is different from ours and sometimes you may have like portals or like some kind of travel between our world and the other one, or else it’s a secret world hidden underneath ours. Like you have the vampires and the werewolves in the subway tunnels or whatever.

But I wanted to do something a little more, um, well for me, I began it with kind of a South Asian setting, right? ’cause I’m from Sri Lanka and, I’m actually not sure how much of what feels alien, strange to a Western reader, how much of that is just South Asia, and how much of that is fantasy?

For me it was an attempt to bridge the things in a fantasy which are supposed to be recognizable or supposed to be almost recognizable versus the things that are supposed to be entirely made up or fictional or imaginative.

There’s a kind of blurring of history and mythology, which I think is very familiar to South Asian readers because our histories tend to roll backwards. And if you just keep going backwards eventually, you’re in straight up mythology, right? Like, magical things are happening.

The line between the two can be very, very blurry and that blurriness is also highly politically significant depending on whose mythology is being forced onto who. It’s very much a book about history and the way histories are formed, structured, organized, and recorded.

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Sophie Strand on the Need for Oral Storytelling:

90% of human history was oral and in an oral culture, knowledge never belongs to a singular author or to a singular telling. It’s kept alive by a constant resurrection, vocally, relationally in a community of people. And every time it’s brought back, it’s told differently to suit a specific moment. The thing that happens when we switch into written text is stories become objects and they become objects that can’t respond, can’t adapt, can’t be questioned, and don’t change.

And for me, that’s the real danger, is that people somehow think that this one account could somehow be useful to us today in a different ecosystem, in an entirely different place. Storytelling needs to evolve, just like bodies need to evolve, and it evolves through bodies, through orality, through a kind of interstitial weaving between audience and teller.

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Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre is a co-production with Lit Hub Radio. Hosted by Drew Broussard. Studio engineering + production by Stardust House Creative. Music by Dani Lencioni of Evelyn.

Hope in Hard Times: J.R. Dawson, Chuck Tingle, and Durreen Shahnaz

Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 09:01:05 +0000

Looks like Team Genre is blasting off again! I’m thrilled to be back with a new season, off on new adventures, zipping through the genre-verse to chat with another incredible roster of Tor authors and featuring a jaw-dropping line-up of special guests.

From the moment we started putting together this season, an episode about hope seemed like an obvious inclusion. Then, the more conversations I had for the season, the more I realized it needed to be our lead-off episode. It’s hard times out there: climate change, political instability, runaway economic inequality, any number of things that hit the headlines seemingly every day of the week. But this is exactly the moment when we ought to turn to stories — for escape, and for possible pathways out of the darkness.

This week, we kick things off with J.R. Dawson and their debut novel The First Bright Thing, discussing writing about performance, the root of her Sparks, and having hope even in the face of a move out of a beloved home. Then, Chuck Tingle joins me to talk about his full-length debut Camp Damascus as well as something he calls the Trinity of Maligned Genres, what he means when he says ‘love is real’, and rooting demons in reality. Finally, entrepreneur and author Durreen Shahnaz explains the idea behind the title of her book The Defiant Optimist and how we can take oppressive systems and make them instead work for the good of us all.

See you in two weeks,
Drew

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

Read the full episode transcript here.

J.R. Dawson on Writing The Stage:

When I started writing the circus, I was like, oh, well the circus is just performance art, it’s so close to theater, it’ll be fine. And then the more that I looked into it, I’m like, oh no, this is a whole other thing. It’s like a second cousin to theater and having rinn be a theater kid and go into it with the lens and perspective of somebody who’s grown up in the theater, I was able to kind of show how they’re related while still respecting the closed community of the circus. I didn’t wanna pry too much in my research or like get up in people’s faces and be like, tell me all of your secrets. So yeah, I think, I think the circus for me, in my head was always like this is a cool version of a spectacle.

And in theater school, they get kind of stuffy about the word spectacle. Um, they’re like, well, theater and art are when there’s a catharsis and a plot and the character and all this. And well spectacle is when it’s just there for showmanship.

And I’m like, well, but as the 21st century moves on, like sometimes there’s catharsis in just having a piece of art and be like, Hey, this is fun and it makes people happy and it doesn’t have to be Eurpidies in order to have worth! Like, I really think that theater is super cool and important and that there’s all of this cool stuff that happens behind the scenes and there’s all of these amazing people making amazing art, and I’ve given tours to kids going through the different theaters that I work at and being like, this is where this happens and this is where this happens. And that’s kind of where my heart ended up being, is doing this introduction to this cool, magical place.

So I mean, it’s my life’s work and so it was kind of easy to write.

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Chuck Tingle on the Trinity of Maligned Genre:

I have something I talk about: the Trinity of Maligned Genre, which to me is romance/erotica, comedy, and horror. I think that these three genres are very looked down upon and I believe honestly it is because these genres are of the body. They elicit a reaction of, with romance/erotica, arousal; comedy, laughter; and horror, fear or, or a scream, which is fundamentally kind of outside the traditional structure of what a story is trying to accomplish.

To say, this is of the body, it’s lower class… I think that’s an unfair way of looking at things. I think that it has a lot of value because it is instinctual and therefore it’s, it’s very honest.

There is something primal about it, and I think that if you can combine that honesty with a sort of intellectualism, and in turn use them both together, that’s kind the most powerful combination there is. So going from erotica and romance to horror.

I still see it as playing with this fundamental under appreciation or just lack of, uh, lack of believing in the power of it. And then once you turn it on its head, everyone says, “whoa, where did this come from?!” And you could see that happen over and over again with horror movies that have great social commentary, do very well at the box office and romance novels being one of the most popular genres, these things that on paper should be obvious to everyone. And everyone kind of pretends that these genres are just down in the basement, tucked away. We don’t talk about them because they’re not real. And I think specifically erotica and horror, you, you’re also outside of all the you know, high-minded things and theory I was just talking about in a very fundamental way. Um, you, you are playing with taboo ideas, things that will get you an R rating.

I think that a lot of buckaroos don’t realize, if you just say, oh, we’re gonna eliminate violence or sex or these different things. Those are fundamental parts of, of being human and you can certainly have stories without them, but, I think that you are limiting yourself when you don’t have that ability to just harness that primal thing, which, you know, I, I, I don’t have to deal with the fear of that in erotica, it’s very explicit, and then in horror also, I’m used to pushing past these boundaries as well.

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Durreen Shahnaz on the Work of Hope:

I think if you’re going to be defiant optimist — and I do really sincerely, hope that this term somehow makes people think, you know whether they buy the book or not, it doesn’t really matter — the whole point is just really trying to embrace this feeling that you need to have people to be able to interact, right? Any market, any sort of relationship, whatever it is. And I think I do feel the defiant optimists can be the people who can take on creating that bridge, right?

I come from (what was then, is not anymore) one of the poorest countries in the world. What gives me hope is when I go back home and I see the women that I worked with when I gave them the first $10 loan to start their business. And I go back and I see that my God, they have flourished. A few of the villages I visited a few years ago and they were just, when they saw me, they were literally like crying and they’re like, oh my God. See what I have. I have a fridge now. There’s movement, there’s momentum, you know, and yes, there’s momentum on the negative side as well, but, you know, reality is it is moving.

It’s like this glacier, it seems like slow, but fast forward 25 years later. I mean, these women are now literally helping the next generation and the next generation who are opening up their businesses and you see this thriving community. So I do think that, you know, when you see that, like just right there, you’re like, oh my God, this is possible, wow, it was so difficult to do that, but we did it.

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Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre is a co-production with Lit Hub Radio. Hosted by Drew Broussard. Studio engineering + production by Stardust House Creative. Music by Dani Lencioni of Evelyn.

The Heart of Genre: Regina Kanyu Wang, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Sheree Renée Thomas on Curating Anthologies

Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 08:50:13 +0000

For the last episode of this season, it’s time to think about collections—story collections! Even more specifically, multi-author anthologies of new (or new-to-the-readership) work! So let’s take a trip to China, to Africa, and to Pasedena, California, for some thoughts on collection and curation.

ITINERARY:

Regina Kanyu Wang (The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories) talks about the collaborative process of editing The Way Spring Arrives, considering non-dualistic ways of being, and the hope that springs from speculative fiction.

Sheree Renée Thomas and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki (Africa Risen) talk about their mutual appreciation, why it was time for a collection like Africa Risen, and just what it means when they say that Africa isn’t just rising but that it has risen.

Melinda McCurdy (Curator, British Art at the Huntington Library) explains how she views her role as curator and the unique opportunities presented by the change-up of a famous Huntington acquisition, and how curation can change an audience’s context and understanding.

Full episode transcript available here.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

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Regina Kanyu Wang on deciding to include essays as a part of The Way Spring Arrives:

Ken Liu has also included essays in Invisible Planets and Broken Stars. So when we were working on this anthology, from the very beginning, we knew that we also wanted to have some essays.

So we reach out to the five essayists asking them to share their knowledge. You will notice, some of them are more about the general background of speculative fiction writing in China, but some of them are about the translation techniques and the skills. And also one thing unique in this anthology is that we didn’t put the essays in the back of the book—we put them in between, and they kind of serve as a thread. And so when you enjoy some stories, having some direct feelings or sensations about the context, then you get a little bit more like analysis or background. I think these essays are really an organic part of this anthology instead of something that had to be there or we forced to be there.

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Sheree Renée Thomas & Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki on the role short stories play:

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki: I feel like if we bridge that gap more often, we might create magic. Like what’s happening in Africa Risen, it’s simply magical. It’s simply beautiful. I don’t know if I would’ve been able to do it with just people from my community. There are things that Sheree brings to the table—high experience, deft handling of things and navigation of the industry—that we just can’t get elsewhere. There are very few people on the continent who have that experience.

I see the future being in how we come together to work on projects. I wish that this had happened much earlier. We have created way more magic instead of just feeling like we’re doing well, we’re doing well. Not that we’re doing badly, but we could do much better.

Sheree Renée Thomas: For me, the short fiction form is a masterful form. Which is why I love it, I know that’s why Ogee loves it. For me, anthologies are the heart of our genre. It’s where you are able to find and discover new voices that you might not have found before. It is a place for experimentation. It is a space for emerging writers to begin building an audience. And it’s an opportunity for readers to get a taste of a multitude of ideals and aesthetics and themes and ways of storytelling, and it takes you around the world and across time, across geographies. So for me, short fiction, especially ones that are original short stories, that is where you can get a peep into what the future’s gonna hold.

Some of those writers that were in Dark Matter were unknown to most readers at the time, and now they are doing beautiful work in the genre and have influenced so much. I’ve got Pulitzer Prize winners that came out of that collection, National Book Award finalists, New York Times bestsellers, Science Fiction grand masters—people who have gone on to do amazing work. And that’s what you hope for when you’re editing a literary journal, a magazine, an anthology: you hope for the writer that you find over the transom or in the slush pile, the unsolicited writer who came to your open call.

That’s what I see the role of anthologies like Africa Risen doing. I’m hoping that some of these writers who may be new to readers are able to do other great work, and like Ogee said, collaborate on other projects that have not yet been imagined, because we do have a lot of different skills and resources. I feel like we are gonna have to look ahead after this book is published maybe five years and see where some of these writers are in terms of their own work and the new projects they create.

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Melinda McCurdy on the way curation can challenge expectations:

We just happen to have this very famous painting that a large portion of our public really wants to see on the wall. They want to know it’s always going to be there. So we wanted to be able to have it on view for them as much as possible. As a curator, as a historian of British art, I am 100 percent okay if The Blue Boy is not on view all the time, because it is a British painting, it’s probably not our most important British painting—it’s probably not even our most important British portrait. Maybe that’s blasphemy to say, but it is a painting that’s beautiful. It is a highlight of the artist’s career. It’s a highlight of our collection, but it is one painting.

And there are other things that we can talk about. So we did recently send Blue Boy to London on the 100th anniversary of its acquisition. And in that instance, we knew that some people wouldn’t be happy that we did that. And then other people would be happy, just depends on your perspective. But we wanted to make sure people understood that we were doing it for a reason. There was a real educational opportunity here for us to have the painting be seen in a different context, within the collection of The National Gallery as opposed to within the Huntington collection. And there’s a whole publication that came out of it.

We also, on that same occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the acquisition of Blue Boy, commissioned Kehinde Wiley to do a portrait using Blue Boy as the model. And so that took the place of Blue Boy while it was traveling to London. And it was a revelation for people to see this figure that wasn’t Blue Boy, it was a young black man from Senegal standing in place of Blue Boy, and to understand what they were seeing, how it was different, what the different impact of it was versus what they expected to see or what they normally would’ve seen.

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Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre is a co-production with Lit Hub Radio. Hosted by Drew Broussard. Studio engineering + production by Stardust House Creative. Music by Dani Lencioni of Evelyn.

The Epic and the Individual: Neon Yang and Tamsyn Muir on Building Worlds and Narratives

Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 08:39:07 +0000

It’s time to go long and think about epics! But actually, we’re thinking about the people who make up those epics. The Epic and the Individual, the best of both worlds: you get the big space battles and also the interpersonal conflicts, the questions of morality and justice alongside mistakes and goofs. How like life!

ITINERARY:

Neon Yang (The Genesis of Misery) talks wanting to write a historical epic and writing a space epic instead, about finding truth in storytelling, and about how trying to make sense of Q-Anon helped frame some of Misery’s world.

Tamsyn Muir (Nona the Ninth) talks about the delightful(?) surprise that is Nona, taking cues from Greek drama, going against the rules, and writing books like they’re everything-burritos. Also, what is simping? (Seriously, can someone help explain to both of us?)

Justice McCray (City Councilmember, Beacon NY) talks about moving from activism to running for office, and what it means to reimagine things like safety and community.

Read the full episode transcript here.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

Neon Yang on cults, QAnon, and belief:

It’s something that I think about a lot because I come from Singapore, which has very strong traditions, shall we say, of national narrative building in the not very fun way. I come from a country that has basically manufactured its own national myths in a very short period of time, because Singapore as an entity has existed only since the 1960s, which is when we got independence from the British. It’s been a very strange compressed way of nation building, and there’s reasons why we are basically at the bottom of the international press freedom index. We don’t really have press freedom in Singapore because it’s part of how the government controls the narrative.

There are so many various things that it does insidiously to prime people’s—I don’t want to say personalities, but the psyche of the public, to accept what people tell you, and don’t question it too much, and worry more about your own life. It’s a theme that I come back to a lot in my writing, but for this book in particular, what I was drawn to was actually cult beliefs. Cults have always fascinated me, but as I was writing this book, QAnon became a thing, which was equal parts terrifying and fascinating to me because of the beliefs they hold that defy absolute common sense and should be easily debunkable. But those beliefs are beliefs that are held deeply and sincerely by a lot of people. And it was fascinating to me why that happened and the realization that people can be led to believe almost anything if they are psychologically primed to do so. Because when people believe something it’s very difficult for people to let go of a belief that has been formed within them.

There was a lot of writing and analysis done on why QAnon was so prevalent and how did it capture so many people in its net? It’s just a bunch of crazy conspiracy theories, and it’s partly because of the way people who are desperate or people who are at their wits end, lots of things are going wrong in their life and they need to have something solid to cling onto. And the fact that a lot of it is self-generated belief. A bunch of random clues dropped to you, and then you’re supposed to make a narrative out of it yourself. And once you’ve got that narrative, it’s very hard to let go of it, no matter how many people try to tell you that no, the narrative you’ve created is wrong. Psychologically, we tend to reject these voices of reason because we are so attached to beliefs that we have created for ourselves.

This is something that I wanted to explore in The Genesis of Misery. Obviously there are some really unbelievable things that happen in the book, and people believe unbelievable things in the book. I wanted to explore how they can make it convincing to themselves.

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Tamsyn Muir on building sets for building worlds:

Drew Broussard: There are these interstitial moments in Nona where we get a bunch of history. We get the backstory, and obviously whether or not it is entirely trustworthy continues to be a great theme of the books. But I would love to know about putting together the sets that then allowed you to put these characters in and let them do their thing. The magic, the necromancy, the connections to our present—how were you churning all of those together to create this world of these books?

Tamsyn Muir: I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard anybody refer to world-building as building the sets, and I actually really like it because I have such mixed feelings about world-building qua world-building—you know, world-building as she is understood—because I think that world-building has become this huge industry, especially in the SFF genre. If you want to write an SFF book, first things first: write a hundred-page bible of the numismatics of the back culture. Frankly, a lot of stuff that’s never gonna make it on the page.

Whereas if you look at reading as theater, you don’t make sets for stuff you’re not going to see on the stage. You only ever make the sets for the important parts of the storytelling. And I think that world-building is less storytelling, which is why we get ourselves into the weeds of “Yes, but what is the music like of my people?” That’s cool when you’re 12, and I love doing it too, but I also sometimes think it’s a way to not have to write your book, because writing books is very scary, and writing down “These are the festivals my people do” is cool. And it can be useful, but that’s not putting words on the page that the reader’s going to read.

Again, that’s why I find the idea of sets really interesting, because the way I’ve thought about these books is where we’re going to be, what the reader gets to see, what am I going to have to build? If you think about it as a story, as a narrative, which I guess is all history is, then it gets a heck of a lot easier because all you’ve got is what you need. That sounds incoherent, but you talk about these interstitial moments about what happened. And that was one of the first things I knew about the books: what happened, what the story was that showed up before. Obviously that was really helpful, and I knew I needed that to be in there. And it has been in the books in a huge way, and it’s so much fun to say, okay, we’ve seen the set in shadow, now we are here! I finally let you go to this planet.

The more that I think about it, the more that sounds like game-building. I mean, it is world-building, but I think there’s a lot of confusion over what world-building is. You see people be like, “I like the world-building of this book.” And other people say about the same book, “The world-building was crap.” So I think we’re coming towards a question of what do you mean when you say that? Is it about being present in the world? Because that’s all I want people to be. I want people to feel as though the story is real, as though this could have happened, and that they are seeing it as it should be seen.

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Justice McCray on showing up for community:

Part of what grounds me is that Beacon is small enough that every time I leave my house, I see people that I know, and I’m engaging in conversations with people I know, or people that know me. And we’re just talking about what’s going on.

I wouldn’t have put myself in this position if I didn’t have hope. My community wouldn’t have put me in this position if we didn’t share hope. I fervently believe in a future that we can build. I don’t necessarily have hope in the systems and structures that we are working within, but I do have hope that we can build something better. And that hope is built upon the fact that we are building something better.

I ran on this platform of reimagining community safety and what that means, and talking to people, holding forums, getting an understanding of what safety means to people. Safety is community, safety is knowing your neighbors. The feeling of safety exists when you have that grounding, when you have community to hold you.

I think it’s as simple as showing up as much as you can, in a way that’s also nourishing to yourself. It’s really just as simple as showing up for each other. That takes a million and one different forms, but it is not hard to be kind. And it starts with knowing each other. That makes it so much easier.

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Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre is a co-production with Lit Hub Radio. Hosted by Drew Broussard. Studio engineering + production by Stardust House Creative. Music by Dani Lencioni of Evelyn.

Sunyi Dean and Olivie Blake on Letting Go of Perfection and Writing Through Ethical Dilemmas

Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 08:50:21 +0000

It’s time to go back to school, which means we’re reading to figure out who we are! Let’s get thinking about the books—and the people—that shape us, teach us, and define us.

ITINERARY:

Sunyi Dean (The Book Eaters) talks about whether its possible to be a good person, letting go of perfection, and her book-devouring vampires. (Recorded live at the 2022 Jericho Writers Summer Festival of Writing)

Olivie Blake (The Atlas Six) talks about being a reformed pantser, writing from a place of fandom, and the appeal of teaching through fiction.

Valerie Broussard (Grammy-nominated singer and songwriter) talks about the importance of genre in her own education and how it might help serve the education of others.

Read the full episode transcript here.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

Sunyi Dean the structure of The Book Eaters and letting go of perfection:

Sunyi Dean: Most of my books I’ve written out of chronological order. Well, I say most of them—the first two I wrote were out of chronological order, and I would drag and drop chapters to put them in the right story order. For this one, I did have to start from the beginning. So that first chapter is the first chapter. And then as I got through the draft, I wrote different synopses—one synopsis for her present timeline, one for her past. There’s always that difficulty with multiple timelines because each timeline, the tension arc has to build individually, but when they’re staggered like that, they also have to build together.

You get a lot from the structure, I think. The structure gives you twists and turns for each. The past is flipping what you know of the present and vice versa. So you think, what’s going on in the present? And then the past shows you something different. You think you know what’s going on with the past, and then the present shows you something different, and they don’t line up. That builds intrigue, but the downside to that structure is it does kind of get bogged down at the 75 percent mark. The book is a little bit sticky, and I was never fully happy with that. It’s just laboring under its own structure a little bit to get to the point where they meet.

Drew Broussard: That’s really interesting. Would you say more about that? Was that something you were feeling during the editing process? Was there a moment where you and your editor were like, we have to deal with this in order to get the payoff? Because the payoff is fantastic.

Sunyi Dean: I felt it the whole way through. When I finished the draft I was working on, I sent it to my agent apologetically and said, “I feel like this isn’t working, but I am tired. I don’t know what else to do with it.” And she worked on it a bit, but you know, she’s not an editor. She does edit, but her main job is being an agent.

So we sent it out. She thought it was ready. And Tor picked it up, so I guess she was right. But we did three heavy developmental rounds, and I think about a third of the book got rewritten across ten months; it was structure and world-building stuff.

I don’t know if we ever fully fixed it, but we fixed it to the point where we felt like it was doing its job to get people to the end. If you read two thirds through there’s no refunds. But more seriously, I think it didn’t have to be perfect in the end. It just got to the point where it told the story as best it could.

If there’s a way to get it smoother than that, I don’t know. I think there are things I could have done to make the plot flow smoother, but then I would’ve lost something. I could have picked up the pacing by cutting some of the character conversations, the character development. But to me, that was an exchange I was happy to do. All books, you pick that line sometimes. You just have to make those decisions for what you want from the book versus how it’s going to work for other people. It’s a hard line to draw.

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Olivie Blake on reality, relativity, relationships, and writing through ethical dilemmas:

Olivie Blake: I wanted to write this particular story because I was wrestling with the ethics of having a child. I wrote this in the winter of 2019, and I was really battling with myself about whether or not I believed that birth is a curse and existence is a prison, quoting The Good Place there.

Not that politics are ever that good, and they’re certainly not good right now, but they were particularly challenging in that time, in that I couldn’t really see how things could end well, and I didn’t see how I could bring a baby into the world. I just couldn’t promise anything. I couldn’t promise some glorious, bright future. So I was like, well, what can I promise? What can we say here? What can we look at about the world?

And it just always came back to, in the moment it feels like the world is ending. It always feels like the world is ending. And the only way to really get through that is like, the world isn’t gonna end. The world is bigger than we are. Maybe our world will end. But what does that really mean?

The bigger and broader things get, these big questions about meaning and purpose and ethics, they all come down to something very, very small, which is your relationship with other people. And the important thing in saving the world is not about the world and the people you’ll never meet and never know the experiences of, it is always about the people that are closest to your life.

Nobody thinks they are the villain, everybody is their own unreliable narrator, and that’s a major theme of the series overall and also of book two. It was really interesting for me to look at it from even a physics lens of let’s talk about relativity. Let’s talk about how you cannot understand something objectively, you can only understand your relationship to it.

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Valerie Broussard on how reading genre has shaped her life:

Valerie Broussard: I am dyslexic and so reading for me was not promised. When it began as something that was a part of my life, at the time that we were growing up, the Harry Potter books were very zeitgeisty. And so that was one of the first things that I was able to engage with in terms of a book, even though I was unable to read at the time.

You actually, if you remember, recorded the first two for me with little voices and everything, and that was massive in me beginning to read and read along and all of that stuff. The third one was the first book that I read on my own in big print, and I still have the big print one.

And then fast forward to fifth or sixth grade when I did the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy in small print. That was my first small print triumph. These books, that came very much from you and from Mom, are fantasy. And I think that my love of sci-fi and fantasy has absolutely shaped who I am.

This need for adventure, wanting to be Bilbo Baggins, wanting to strike out on the road and not knowing where the wind will take you, the main-character thing that you always want to have after reading books like that. And Discworld was a massive part of my reading as a young person, mostly because of you and because of this love of fantasy and sci-fi. But Discworld has this amazing ability to combine music and magic.

They’re very much intertwined. And when I was thinking about it, I was like, wow, that really strikes me as something that was definitely ingrained from childhood and now is such huge part of my life as a music professional.

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Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre is a co-production with Lit Hub Radio. Hosted by Drew Broussard. Studio engineering + production by Stardust House Creative. Music by Dani Lencioni of Evelyn.

Foz Meadows and Alexandra Rowland on Falling in Love with the Romance Genre

Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre — Wed, 24 Aug 2022 08:50:11 +0000

Today is a true journey into the unknown, for me anyway: romance fiction. In the space of two books, I go from not thinking it was for me to absolutely adoring what Alexandra Rowland dubs “fealty and feelings” novels—so let’s go, let’s get into it, let’s get our hearts messy! And we’ll think a bit about the politics of romance, too…

CW: some discussion of sexual assault and depression/anxiety

ITINERARY:

Foz Meadows (A Strange and Stubborn Endurance) talks about finding romance through the classics and fan-fiction, learning through points of view, the fun of language and translation, and writing about sexual assault.

Alexandra Rowland (A Taste of Gold and Iron) talks about their discovery of romance as a genre, writing anxiety, and why they always want to include economics in their books.

adrienne maree brown (Fables and Spells) muses on the balance of love and power in the speculative fiction she reads—and writes—and how we might find that balance in our world as well.

Read the full episode transcript here.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

Foz Meadows on how she found the kind of romance she likes:

I’m very sympathetic to this thing you’ve said about having to take a while to realize that romance is a thing for you; that’s definitely a trajectory that I personally have been on, because particularly when you are AFAB growing up, the assumption is that you must love romance, that you must love this particular genre.

And I’m a very contrary person. The more somebody tells me something, particularly when I was younger, that I was told, “this is for you and you will like it,” the more I would dig my heels in and say, no, I will not. And the thing is also, Hollywood romcoms, particularly through the 90s? Not very good. There’s a few standouts, and then the rest of it kind of makes you want to walk into the ocean and never emerge. So I would get really, really angry at this idea of romance, because my baseline concept of it was very heteronormative, often really badly constructed Hollywood romcoms.

Whereas I really loved the romances in Shakespeare and Austen and that felt not rebellious, exactly, but it felt like aha, they are doing it correctly and this is doing it wrong. It left me in this position. And it took me a long time to work through what was going on there and realize, oh, okay, it’s not that I dislike tropes, it’s that I dislike tropes being done in a sexist and bad, annoying way.

And then I discovered fan fiction. I was like, oh, this is so much better when it’s queer! Oh, now I see us leaning into the tropes and I understand why I like this one so much, but not this one! Or I like these two together, but not these two together. And suddenly it just made sense.

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Alexandra Rowland on their discovery of romance and subgenre:

Alexandra Rowland: I had a similar kind of thing happen to me a few years ago, coming up on the better part of a decade actually—I’d been trying to read romance for a long time and I just wasn’t clicking with it, and I loved fanfic.

I loved romantic fanfic, and I have a friend who’s super super into romance, so I kept saying, recommend me favorites, I really want to see what the allure is and why so many people love this genre so much. And she recommended me three or four books and I read all of them and they just didn’t click with me. And a couple years later, another person recommended one to me. And what I discovered was that I don’t have any interest in reading about heterosexuals falling in love. I love, I love queer romance novels with all of my heart. That was a wonderful discovery to make, that awareness that it’s such a personal preference, and the kind of romance novels that you like are so dependent on what your heart is hungry for.

Drew Broussard: It’s so funny too, because of course that is a widely accepted thing about most other genres. Like some people don’t like space opera, but they like a little bit of science fiction.

Alexandra Rowland: There’s subgenres. Wow! Which is such a funny thing to realize in hindsight. But I think that the mainstream culture does have a tendency to lump all romance together into one thing, often in a kind of derogatory way. Because so many people just do not respect the genre of romance, which is a shame and a crime because there’s some really amazing stories out there. But I think that is a contributing factor into why I was struggling so much to get a foothold in it.

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adrienne maree brown on balancing love and power in her own work and life:

What does it look like to hold power in a way that neither person, or none of the people involved, own each other, where they just really get to love each other? These are some of the things I think about, and as I’m beginning my own journey of writing longer form fiction, it’s one of the things I keep coming up against. Can I even notice the power dynamics that feel so normal to me? And can I make them seem abnormal, and can I normalize a different kind of power dynamic, a power dynamic where power is held with and between and at the center of relationships of care and community and love—where love means the willful extension towards collective growth?

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Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre is a co-production with Lit Hub Radio. Hosted by Drew Broussard. Studio engineering + production by Stardust House Creative. Music by Dani Lencioni of Evelyn.