Minister Faust's Blog, page 9

NOVELIST + SCREENWRITER TANANARIVE DUE ON HOW SCREENWRITING CAN MAKE YOU A BETTER NOVELIST, HOLLYWOOD RACISM BUT ANTI-SEXISM, + WHY SHE WON’T READ YOUR MANUSCRIPT (MF GALAXY 083)

WHY YOU NEED TO MASTER SHORT STORIES BEFORE TRYING NOVELS, HOW NOVICES MIS-USE WITNESS NARRATORS, ORIGINS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL REALISM IN SFF


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Here’s what Stephen King has to say about Tananarive Due’s best known novel, My Soul to Keep: It’s “an eerie epic [that] bears favourable comparison to Interview with the Vampire. I loved this novel.”


When one of the best-selling and most-loved novelists of all time praises your work like that, you know you’ve arrived. But success wasn’t overnight for Tananarive Due. After working for years as a journalist, she took a leave to co-write Freedom in the Family, a memoir of the 1960s US human rights struggle from the perspective of her mother, Patricia Stephens Due, who’d been an activist in it.


Due is the author of twelve novels, including The Living Blood, Devil’s Wake, and Joplin’s Ghost, and the short story collection Ghost Summer. Due has won the American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and the Kindred Award. In 2004, along with Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, Due received the “New Voice in Literature Award” at the Yari Yari Pamberi conference co-sponsored by New York University's Institute of African-American Affairs and African Studies Program and the Organization of Women Writers of Africa. In 2010, she was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism's Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University.


With her novelist husband Steven Barnes, Due writes the Tennyson Hardwick mystery series in partnership with actor Blair Underwood. She holds a journalism degree and an M.A. in English literature from Leeds, where she specialized in Nigerian literature as a Rotary Foundation Scholar.


She currently teaches screenwriting at UCLA and in the MFA programme at Antioch University ,Los Angeles.


In this episode of MF GALAXY, Tananarive Due discusses:


How learning screenwriting can make you a better novelistWhy anyone aspiring to be a novelist should master the short story firstWhy, even as a creative writing teacher, she won’t read your novelHow novice writers mis-use so-called witness narratorsOngoing racist barriers in Hollywood, but a surprising breakthrough in some writers’ rooms for women, and The origins of psychological realism in contemporary science fiction and fantasy


Due spoke with me on June 6, 2016 by Skype from her home in Los Angeles.


Writing blog www.tananarivedue.wordpress.com
Website www.tananarivedue.com



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Ghost Summer book trailer


“Danger Word” (Horror Short) starring Frankie Faison and Saoirse Scott
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LADY GEEK NIGHT YEG, AND HOW WOMEN FANS ARE UPGRADING AND LEADING SCIENCE FICTION, COMICS + FANTASY FANDOM (MF GALAXY 079)

HOW LADY GEEK NITE EMPOWERS WOMEN AND GIRLS, SEXIST SNOBBERY AGAINST COSPLAY + THE EVOLUTION AND DEVOLUTION OF WONDER WOMAN OVER THE DECADES
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The core contradiction of North American science fiction and fantasy fandom is that while often describing itself as a bastion for people who faced rejection from small-minded people, for decades it offered plenty of rejection of its own. North American fan culture was dominated by European men and boys, predominantly middle class and straight, with Western, Northern, and ancient Southern European cultural reference points.
While obsessed with physical sciences and militarism, it was largely ignorant of social sciences and popular struggles for justice. Even to this day, as plenty of fans attest, fandom was a closed shop where alleged outsiders could ride the starship in small numbers, but could never by the helmsman or the captain.
While some abusive and oppressive fans still cause havoc for others as with the Gamergate and Hugo Award Rabid Puppies scandals, many fans have brought many changes. And inside that fan-vanguard are feminist participants and creators who are changing the culture and changing the content. Cosplay has moved from mass-produced and monotonous Star Trek uniforms to superbly hand-crafted costumes from thousands of storyworlds.
Convention artists tables are no longer simply sales-spots for a few men, but rows and rows of women with outstanding art, particularly of female characters in exciting, fun, and non-sexist portrayal. Women are creating science fiction, fantasy, and superhero comics, graphic novels, documentaries, feature films, costumes, video games, conventions, and more. They’ve evolved the scene from what it used to be, into where it’s going for the 21st Century.
In E-Town, that leadership belongs to the Lady Geeks Unite. On the first Thursday of every month, they meet at Happy Harbor Comics for Lady Geek Nite. They host a range of events that include table top gaming and role-playing games, documentaries and discussions, and costume creation workshops, and annual events such as a Christmastime fan-craft sale.
For a few months I was embedded at Happy Harbor Comics to write a play about it for Workshop West, and I got to attend many meetings of the Lady Geeks and learn of their mysterious ways. So on May 14th, 2016, I sat down at the store with lady geeks Sylvia Douglas and Sylvia Moon to talk about what they do.
Sylvia Douglas is an arts administrator, writer, and indie filmmaker who works for FAVA, the Film and Video Arts Society of Alberta, and she’s a board member for the Alberta Media Artists Alliance Society. Sylvia Moon is a graphic designer who helped organise Lady Geek Nite since its inception; she even designed its logo. She was one of the artists who created the World’s Biggest Comic during the final two days of the Royal Alberta Museum’s original location.
In today’s episode of MF GALAXY, the two Sylvias discuss:
How Lady Geek Nite began and why it’s so importantHow Lady Geek Nite empowers women and girls who’ve otherwise found themselves silenced in male-dominated fandomThe illogic of sexist snobbery against cosplayThe debate of self-expression vs. objectificationWho’s better: Ripley or Barbarella, andThe evolution and devolution of Wonder Woman over the decades
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SPEAKING OF HAPPY HARBOR COMICS... check out the THIS IS YEG Salon. I speak about the play that Workshop West commissioned me to write about it: What It Is podcast, Saturday April 23, 2016. 
And please enjoy this fine interview by Robin Shantz with me about science fiction, movies, politics, and my own books, on the Invaders from Planet 3 podcast. https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/invaders-from-planet-3/id1085399917?mt=2
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MILTON DAVIS’S AMBER AND THE HIDDEN CITY IS AN ABSOLUTELY DELIGHTFUL CONTEMPORARY FANTASY ADVENTURE.

Milton Davis’s Amber and the Hidden City is an absolutely delightful contemporary fantasy adventure. It’s the story of Amber Robinson, a teenager from Atlanta who crosses the Atlantic with her grandmother because of their supernatural connection to the ancient, hidden city of Marai, located in Mali. Their aim is to use their ancestral divination power to choose Marai’s next ruler, while fighting against the usurper who wants to dominate the city for himself and the shape-shifting villainess he sends to stop them.
I write Africentric fantasy fiction, and Amber and the Hidden City inspires in me the very emotions and intellectual curiosity I hope to inspire in my own readers. Davis combines relatable contemporary characters and dialogue with fascinating denizens and magic systems from an ancient world. What a delight to be learning about classical and medieval West African civilisations inside the world of a thrilling fantasy novel.
Final note: I love finding novels I can share with my daughters. I read the entire book to my six-year-old, who loved every bit of Amber and the Hidden City. The hero is a girl, and her mentor (her grandmother) is a woman; one of the two main villains is a woman, and various other entertaining characters are girls and women. Add it all together, and Amber and the Hidden City belongs on countless “must read” lists.
Buy the bookHear the interview  

INVESTIGATOR KARL EVANZZ + EDITOR A PETER BAILEY COUNTERING MANNING MARABLE ON MALCOLM X (MF GALAXY 078)

MARABLE CLAIMED ALEX HALEY WAS AN FBI INFORMANT WORKING AGAINST MALCOLM X, THE MISSING CHAPTERS OF THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Malcolm X is an icon of Pan-Africanism. Born May 19, 1925 to a Pan-Africanist family active in Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, Malcolm survived the racist murder of his father and his own descent into crime and prison. He emerged as a minister for the Nation of Islam, one of several organisations born from the US government’s destruction of Garvey’s UNIA.

While committed to the NOI’s religious doctrine, Malcolm X developed a secular, revolutionary, political ideology that combined Garveyism with the Original World liberation struggles raging against imperialism throughout the 1950s and 60s. So respected was he that after he broke from the NOI in 1964, Malcolm X formed the united front Organisation of Afro-American Unity and won observer status on behalf of African Americans at the newly-formed Organisation of African Unity. While Nation of Islam assassins murdered him in Harlem on February 21, 1965, extensive evidence points to involvement of the United States government as Karl Evanzz details in his monumental work The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X.

On today’s episode of MF GALAXY, we’ll hear from Evanzz and also from Malcolm X associate A. Peter Bailey, who was the editor of Malcolm X’s newsletter The Blacklash, later the editor of Ebony magazine, and eventually the co-author with Malcolm X’s nephew Rodnell Collins of Seventh Child: A Family Memoir of Malcolm X. I spoke with Evanzz and Bailey in 2005 for the 80th anniversary of Malcolm X’s birthday. They’ll offer their responses to the then-unfinished final work by Manning Marable, later published as the controversial Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. 

Marable claimed, among other things, that Alex Haley, the author of Roots and co-author of Malcolm’s Autobiography, was collaborating with the FBI against Malcolm X’s interests. We’ll also hear Evanzz and Bailey on three chapters deleted from the Autobiography, whose contents Marable claimed were explosive.

Karl Evanzz is one of the planet’s leading Malcolm X scholars and also the author of The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad. He was once an online editor at The Washington Post. Both men spoke to me by telephone from Washington DC in May 2005.

But first we’ll an excerpt from a February 21, 2005 Democracy Now! interview with Manning Marable, former head of Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies. He authored a dozen books, including How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. We’ll then hear Bailey’s and Evanzz’s reactions.

For links to Malcolm X books, including a discount ebook offer for The Judas Factor, and a video of editor Jared Ball discussing his book A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X, visit mfgalaxy.org.

And to hear the half hour patrons-only extended edition of this focus on Malcolm X, visit mfgalaxy.org to click on the Patreon link to become a sponsor for a dollar or more per week.

By funding MF GALAXY, you get access to all extended editions of the show, plus video excerpts from selected interviews as they become available. This extended edition includes:
Malcolm X discussing his political ideology and why he urged people to keep their religious life privateKarl Evanzz on Malcolm X’s final political evolution and how he thinks some biographers have misrepresented it.The disturbing case of an attempt to auction an item literally stained with Malcolm X’s blood for $50,000, andDirector and cinematographer Ernest Dickerson discussing the aesthetics and effects of the 1992 Spike Lee feature film Malcolm X, starring Denzel Washington, for which Dickerson was director of photography

Malcolm X.com - The Malcolm X Estate Homepage
Buy the ebook of The Judas Factor for under $3
A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X
Pathfinder Press Malcolm X books
Malcolm X: The Man and His Times, edited by John Henrik Clarke
Third World Press
Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall
Jared Ball on Correcting Manning Marable
Finally, if you’d like to hear the tables turned on me, listen to Invaders from Planet 3 podcaster Robin Shantz asking me questions about science fiction, Dune, my own novels, politics, religion, movies, and TV.
INVADERS FROM PLANET 3 Episode 7: Interview with Joe Haldeman

 

ACTOR + POET SONJA SOHN ON KIMA GREGGS, THE WIRE, THE POETRY SCENE, THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE + BEING A BADASS (MF GALAXY 077)

LET THE WRITER BE THE BOSS, RACIAL INCLUSION + ALIENATION, GREGGS WAS A KITTEN NOT A DOG, WALTER MOSLEY, DAVID SIMON + BEING THE MORAL COMPASS
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Although best known for her role as the Baltimore homicide investigator Kima Greggs, Sonja Sohn is also a performance poet; her second film role was in Marc Levin’s 1998 indie film Slam, which she also co-wrote. She went on to appear in John Singleton’s Shaft reboot, and in Martin Scorcese’s Bringing Out the Dead. Of combined African-American and East Asian heritage, she won a 2008 television supporting actor Asian Excellence Award for her work on The Wire.
In 2008 she campaigned for Barack Obama, and in 2009 she founded reWIRED for Change, a Baltimore-based NGO that seeks to help at-risk youth. In 2011, she won the Woman of the Year award from the Harvard Black Men’s Forum.
In today’s episode of MF GALAXY, Sohn discusses:
How she as a writer responds to the scripts she’s given to actThe experience of inclusion in and alienation from African Americans and Asian AmericansHow her character Kima Greggs was a badass at work but a kitten at homeHer opinion of author Walter Mosley’s self-appointed mission to create what he calls Black Male Heroes, andHow The Wire characterises African American women
Sohn spoke with me by telephone on September 11, 2008. She began by discussing her experiences and influences as a poet, and the poetry scene in the US as she knew it in 2008.
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WRITER-DIRECTOR JOY LUSCO KECKEN ON HOMICIDE, THE WIRE, BEAT SHEETS, RESEARCH, AND CAREER BUILDING (MF GALAXY 076)

HOW BEING A SCRIPT COORDINATOR BUILT HER WRITING CAREER + MESSED WITH HER DIRECTING, RESEARCH WITH RIDE-ALONGS AND IN JAILS, DRAWING ON LIFE EXPERIENCE FOR POWERFUL SCENES

Joy Lusco Kecken began her professional screenwriting career as an intern and script coordinator for NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Street, and went on to freelance for the show. She served as a script coordinator for HBO’s The Wire, for which she also directed one episode and wrote three; she served as a story consultant on the 50 Cent bio-pic Get Rich or Die Tryin’, wrote for Standoff and The Division, directed the documentary We Are Arabbers, and wrote and co-directed the award-winning short film Louisville starring Andre Braugher.

In this episode of MF GALAXY, Lusco Kecken discusses:How the multifaceted role of script coordinator on Homicide and The Wire helped her build her writing careerHow her experience as a script coordinator partly interfered with her work as adirector for The WireHow a teleplay “beat sheet” worksThe research she conducted with police, in the community, and even in jails, inorder to serve her material faithfullyHow she used her own life experiences in some of the most powerful moments of her scripts, andWhy a beloved character from The Wire was slated to die and who stopped the killing
Along the way, Lusco Kecken cites Wire series co-creators and writers David Simon and Ed Burns, both of whom I’ve interviewed about their work on The Wire. Keep listening for those conversations on upcoming episodes of MF GALAXY. She also cites The Corner, the controversial collaboration between Simon and the late David Mills whom I also interviewed, the miniseries that depicts the miseries of people with addictions on a Baltimore street corner.

Lusco Kecken spoke with me by telephone on January 25, 2008. She begins by discussing the work of a script coordinator and how it shaped her career.

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To hear 40 minutes of the patrons-only extended edition of my conversation with Joy Lusco Kecken,become a sponsor for a dollar or more per week.  This extended edition includes Joy Lusco Kecken discussing:

Gender imbalance in Hollywood screenwritingThe multiple dramatic and social significances of The Wire’s Detective Kima Greggs, as played by Sonja SohnThe research into LGBTQ issues that Lusco Kecken performed to write for Greggs, a character who was part hero, part role model, and part scoundrelA scene from The Wire in which Detective Greggs manhandles a fratboy for Driving While White, and the reasons why Lusco Kecken says she would never have written the sceneHow novelists such as Dennis Lehane, George Pellecanos, and Richard Price wrote teleplays differently than TV writers would, andHow close The Wire comes to being cultural appropriation and anti-Africanpathology porn SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON iTUNES SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON STITCHER SUPPORT MF GALAXY ON PATREON  
 
 

CATHLEEN ROOTSAERT ON WRITING MASS EFFECT, THREE DEAD TROLLS IN A BAGGIE (MF GALAXY 075)

HOW IMPROV HELPS WRITING, THE DIFFERENT KINDS OF LAUGHS WRITERS MUST UNDERSTAND, THE GAME MECHANICS OF IMPROV, FACING RESISTANCE TO HUMOUR ON MASS EFFECT 3
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Cathleen Rootsaert is a remarkable creator. She wrote plot and dialogue for the video game Mass Effect 3 by BioWare, and edited dialogue for the studio’s Star Wars: The Old Republic and Mass Effect 2 games. In the late 1980s, along with rising improv stars Wes Borg, Neil Grahn, and Paul Mather, she co-founded the legendary Edmonton comedy troupe Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, which had a brief run as a CBC television series.

She’s the playwright behind Mimi Amok, After You, Legacy, Make Me and Mama Mia! Me a Mama? which won the Sterling Award for outstanding new work. She also won the 2005 Alberta Playwriting Award for Abigail in Twilight. She appeared on the Ken Finkelman series The Newsroom and the Winnipeg Comedy Festival special I’m Becoming a Mother. She’s a core member of the two-decade strong live improvised soap opera Die Nasty!
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In this episode of MF GALAXY, Cathleen Rootsaert discusses:
How improvisation helps writingUnderstanding body mechanics of speaking and how actors talkHow to develop the ear to find the voiceThe different kinds of laughs writers must understandThe mechanics of long-form improv, whether stretched over a theatrical season or in one 50-hour showThe game mechanics of improvThe Three Dead Trolls experience of working in TV comedy and facing the proverbial “suits”How sketch comedy prepared her to write video gamesWhy she wishes she’d had more stomach for failure when she was youngerHer advice on editing scripts and relationshipsHow, despite not being a science fiction fan, she writes for one of the most successful science fiction video games ever made, andHow she dealt with resistance to including humour in Mass Effect 3Along the way, Rootsaert refers to “beats” in a script, which is a specific stage playwriting term referring to how long it takes characters to seek their goal for a scene before changing their tactics.


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VERN THIESSEN, GOVERNOR GENERAL AWARD WINNING PLAYWRIGHT, ON SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT, WHY THEATRE BEATS NEW MEDIA, AND REVISION STRATEGIES FOR WINNERS (MF GALAXY 073)

LINK BETWEEN IMMERSIVE THEATRE AND VIDEO GAMES, EFFECT OF EDMONTON INTERNATIONAL FRINGE FESTIVAL ON THEATRE ACROSS CANADA, WHY THIESSEN IS A DEVOTED PANTSER

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Vern Thiessen’s plays are among the most produced theatre in Canada, and his work has delighted audiences across the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. His many dramas include Lenin’s Embalmers, Apple, and Vimy. He’s written for young audiences, worked on a commission for the late Leonard Nimoy, and created an adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. He’s won the Elizabeth Sterling Haynes Award, the Alberta Playwrights' Network Competition, and Canada’s highest literary honour, the Governor General’s Award.

Despite coming from a Mennonite family in Winnipeg, Thiessen spent seventeen years in E-Town and won the Canadian Jewish Playwriting Competition for Einstein’s Gift.

For seven years he also directed youth and community engagement theatre education in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. He’s since returned to the Big E where he’s the Artistic Director of Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre.

In this episode of MF GALAXY, Vern Thiessen discusses:
His experience of community-social theatre engagement in New YorkHow, despite competition from other media, theatre endures and in some ways triumphs over those other formsThe link between immersive theatre and video gamesThe effect of the Edmonton International Fringe Festival on theatre across CanadaWhy Thiessen is a devoted pantserWhy he wants to leave audiences inconsolableThe imperative of revision and his dynamic strategies for it, andWhy writing plays is easier than writing novelsVern Thiessen spoke with me in November, 2014 at Workshop West about his aesthetics and writing strategies that have made him one of North America’s most celebrated theatrical voices.

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TOM FONTANA, SHOWRUNNER SUPREME OF OZ, HOMICIDE, THE BORGIAS + ST. ELSEWHERE ON CREATING ICONIC, UNFORGETTABLE CHARACTERS WHILE “COLOURISING” US TELEVISION (MF GALAXY 072)

 

EPIC FANTASY AUTHOR CHRISTIAN A. BROWN ON WORKING WITH EDITORS, INDIE PUBLISHING, AND THE NEED FOR MALE WENCHES (MFGALAXY 071)

CLICHES OF THE  GENRE, FANTASY IGNORES LGBTQ, BUSINESS ADVICE FOR WRITERS, WHY YOU MUST OWN  YOUR ISBNs
Christian A. Brown is an epic fantasy author and indie publisher who’s earned the praise of Kirkus Reviews, Clarion Reviews, The Huffington Post, and a former supervising producer of The Oprah Winfrey Show.
LISTEN/DOWNLOAD The former fitness trainer is also an active blogger on numerous topics, including gender and sexuality, and on his mother’s experience of cancer.
Christian Brown spoke with me by Skype on December 30, 2015 via Skype. We discussed:
How he distinguishes between cruelty and clarity in an editorThe clichés of high fantasy, including sexism, and what he calls “the need for male wenches”How fantasy fiction ignores LGBTQ issues, how his own writing employs psychological realism, and why he needs to surprise himselfThe business of writing and indie publishing,handling returns as an indie publisher, and why you need to own your ISBNs
During the discussion, I alluded to the concept of hypomania and mentioned the theory of multiple intelligences, but forgot the name of its framer— Howard Gardner (https://howardgardner.com/multiple-intelligences).
We began by discussing Brown’s preferences for how an editor should work with him.
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www.christianadrianbrown.com


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