R.B. Lemberg's Blog, page 43

Stone Telling 5 (Mythic) Table of Contents

crossposted from stonetellingmag

Dear Friends of ST,
With apologies for the delay, here is the table of contents for Issue 5. We are now aiming for a Sep. 26th release date.  I hope you'll love the issue when you see it! 



Poems (in alphabetical order, the order in the magazine will obviously be different):

Mike Allen ( time_shark ), "Surviving Wonderland"
Erik Amundsen ( cucumberseed ), "The Lend"
Jennifer Givhan, "Stapler Poem"
Yoon Ha Lee ( yhlee ), "Immigrants"
Shira Lipkin ( shadesong ), "The Changeling's Lament"
Elizabeth McClellan ( popelizbet ), "Panikos"
Patricia Monaghan, "Tiddy Mun is Gone"
Koel Mukherjee, "Sita Reflects" (her first published poem - this makes us very happy)
Sofia Samatar, "The Sand Diviner"
Alexandra Seidel ( alexa_seidel ), "A Masquerade in Four Voices"
Delia Sherman ( deliasherman ), "Fathers"
J.T. Stewart, "Mirror Woman"
Sonya Taaffe ( sovay ), "Graffiti"
Eliza Victoria ( blissery ), "Prayer"

Nonfiction

Journal of Mythic Arts retrospective
Sara Amis ( scamis ), "Hard Times Everywhere: Ballads, poverty, and American culture"
Review by Mike Allen ( time_shark )
Roundtable with Julia Rios

Say YES on Queer YA

Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith speak up in Say Yes on Gay YA:

Our novel, Stranger, has five viewpoint characters; one, Yuki Nakamura, is gay and has a boyfriend. Yuki’s romance, like the heterosexual ones in the novel, involves nothing more explicit than kissing.

An agent from a major agency, one which represents a bestselling YA novel in the same genre as ours, called us.

The agent offered to sign us on the condition that we make the gay character straight, or else remove his viewpoint and all references to his sexual orientation.

Rachel replied, “Making a gay character straight is a line in the sand which I will not cross. That is a moral issue. I work with teenagers, and some of them are gay. They never get to read fantasy novels where people like them are the heroes, and that’s not right.”

Read more on the Publishers Weekly blog (or alternatively, on Rachel's Livejournal blog)

This article is of major concern to me as a queer person and an author of LGBTQ fiction and poetry.

What I want to add is this: when a beginning author writes a book with queer protagonists and  it gets form-rejected, it is often hard to know why the book was rejected. Sure, one can say that most beginning authors get rejected because their work is not up to industry standard. But surely, if two published authors are getting this crap while pitching a queer YA novel, how many more agents are immediately passing on a queer book by an unknown?

I might be completely off here. I might not be.

My first (now trunk) novel was a multi-PoV adult epic fantasy with queer and PoC protagonists. The book didn't sell for a variety of reasons; let's chalk it up to inexperience, "the first blin is always lumpy," etc. However, the feeling I got from marketing my book is that a book with odd PoVs from an unknown is going to be hard to market.

Many people told me that it would be a good idea to write something "mainstream" first, to get myself established. And yes, I want to publish a book, so I came up with a good idea for an urban fantasy YA without any sexuality whatsoever.

I wrote two pages.

During childhood and early adolescence in the Ukraine, I have been bullied and beaten for the combination of being the following: Jew; queer; fat; geek, I am not entirely over the feelings of shame and desperate desire to pass. I honestly only now am internalizing for myself that it is ok not to desperately try to pass.  My work as an editor of Stone Telling and the Moment of Change anthology helped me immensely in that, because I want to provide an outlet for diverse and boundary-crossing perspectives in speculative poetry. I wouldn't want my poets to try to pass. I want them to speak in their voices. And so I too must also speak in my voice.

What I most want to write is a multicultural epic fantasy novel with queer protagonists, because I love epic fantasy, I love the worlds I have in my head, and many people in my worlds are queer. And it has to be multicultural because of who I am, because I am an immigrant and I think this way and I grew up on multicultural stories; and if it is multicultural, then why should I whitewash it?

I am now writing a  multiple-PoV YA epic fantasy novel. Four out of six characters are queer. Only one of the characters is white.
This is not a 'problem' novel, this is a novel about cool adventures, and relationships, and difficult legacies... and well, stars.

I know it is not bad writing; the adapted first PoV of it sold to Beneath Ceaseless Skies, a pro market. My readers were excited about it, the editor was excited about it... But a novel is a different kettle of fish.

I am afraid. I've been afraid for a while. Finding out that Rachel and Sherwood, two established writers I respect and admire, are having to deal with this drek filled me with even more fear and anguish. But seeing them come out with this article fills me with hope. Not for my novel in particular, but for the field, because I want to see this field embrace diversity. There are readers out there who want, need, are hoping for the books we're writing. I'm not asking for automatic publication of all LGBTQ novels; I am hoping though that novels with LGBTQ protagonists be awarded the same consideration as novels .with straight protagonists.

Thank you for reading.

"In the Third Cycle" published

Today, Strange Horizons published my epic poem In the Third Cycle. This is the poem I wrote during the very strange "Ten Days in December," that resulted in two queer epic fantasy pieces (the other piece is my forthcoming novelette, Held Close in Syllables of Light.)

In many ways, everything creative I'm doing this year flows from the Ten Days in December.

In the Third Cycle is an epic poem about three characters, a mortal man and the two powers he is involved with. It's not their whole story. The Journeymaker in particular is a central figure in my private mythologies; she's been there always, though under different names – and sometimes in different worlds. I haven't yet written any prose about these characters – it feels too close to home.

I'm grateful to Shweta Narayan and Jenn Smith, who read the poem as it emerged, and Peer Dudda and Sam Henderson, who critiqued it when it was finished. I am also grateful to the Rannu fund folks, who thought this poem worthy of the first place in the Poetry Category.

And a bonus – an mp3 recording of me reading the whole thing. The reading is quite rough and lasts 10 minutes, so not for the faint of heart (but yes, you can pause it if you want!)

In the Third Cycle, by Rose Lemberg

If you feel so inclined, I would appreciate comments (on my blog or at the Strange Horizons website).

Originally published at RoseLemberg.net. You can comment here or there.

Polishing the burl

What normal lives are supposed to look like:

      


What my life looks like:




I'm learning that work is it's own reward.

Dreams come true (a note from Ursula)

Where did we leave off? After much agonizing, I inscribed the artist's book of Stone Telling 1 and tenderly sent it off to Ursula in Oregon.

On August 28, an email arrived in my mailbox.

Ever since I've read Rocannon's World and Left Hand of Darkness at age 13 (in Russian translation, back in the Soviet Union), it's been my dream to correspond with Le Guin. Her work means more to me than I can explain. Her work saved my life. It taught me that my strange culture-diverse worlds, the odd stories that sometimes spilled out of me and which my classmates ridiculed, my secrets and oppressions, my jumbled identities, it was all fine, because here she was, writing in my language, writing in a voice I didn't have, writing about the true things inside me. I would compose long letters to her, then painstakingly translate them with the help of the old Müller's dictionary. It ended there.

And now I'm in my thirties and edit Stone Telling, a poetry magazine named after a character in Ursula's book Always Coming Home. To correspond with Ursula (mainly through her agent) in the context of Stone Telling is a great gift to me.

So, on August 28th, this email arrived. Directly from her.

It said,

Dear Rose,

I sent a proper thank you for the beautiful first issue, but it was returned in the mail — I am sorry as I wanted to thank you "by hand" for such lovely handiwork.

I was devastated. Couldn't sleep. Talked to the post office, found out my mailman had been sick that week, and the subs made many mistakes. Of course, I begged her to resend it.

Today… today it arrived.

A handwritten note from Ursula K. Le Guin. Un the background: the two envelopes.

And the card itself shows two California quail by a Northwestern artist L.R. Messick, which is, of course, a reference to the Quail Song, the poem that opens Always Coming Home:

Two California Quail

in the fields by the river

from the meadows by the river

from the fields by the river

in the meadows by the river

two quail run

It is a beloved poem that is very close to my heart, and my heart is so full right now.

Originally published at RoseLemberg.net. You can comment here or there.

Five Questions

Ages ago, sovay gave me five questions to answer, and I'm finally getting around to it!

1. What do you drink by preference when it's cold out?

Mulled cranberry cider! Although I usually default to tea, because it does not involve as much effort as mulled cranberry cider, and I can have endless amounts of it. I drink Ceylon tea (which I brew in a little black clay teapot), with honey or "empty," depening on mood. When stressed, I  drink tea made w. teabags, but the question is not about that.

2. What season do you dream of most often?

Winter - the witeness of the snow, the stripped-down pin oaks, the fire in my fireplace, silence, stars.

3. What's the oldest game you know how to play?

Huh. Not sure. There is a children's tradition associated with Stryjski park - to bury "secrets," flower petals or leaves pressed under round flat pieces of glass, most often green or brown, but whatever can be found. Summer would be spent looking for such glass, and then the little flower-portraits would be buried in the autumn. In spring one was supposed to search for them, but that somehow never happened. I learned this from my mother, and she learned it when she was little, from the other children in Stryjski park . They learned it from someone, too; I don't know how old it is, and I've never encountered it elsewhere. Another very old thing - it's really not a game, but a children's folk tradition - is to come to the park in the early spring, when the thawing snow turns into rivulets and sings itself away, away, away. You release a boat - a paper boat you made, or a wooden boat, or perhaps simply a small flat piece of wood with a twig mast - and then you run after it, all the way after it downstream until it disappears from view; I don't remember if wishing is involved or not. That tradition is not local to the park; I did encounter it elsewhere in Russia and Ukraine, although I have no idea about other places.


(entrance to Stryjski Park; to the left towards the viewer, there is a beautiful grating in which my brother got stuck as a todder; to the right towards the viewer, Parkova street and the house in which my mother grew up. Entering the park and straight ahead, a lake with swans.)

4. What's your favorite item of clothing? (Worn by you or anyone else.)

All my favorite items of clothing are too small now. Argh, body image issues! Right now I am much less attached to clothing than I am to jewelry, or perhaps it's true that clothing was always secondary to jewelry for me. On others I probably admire hats and vests the most.

5. What single song would you ensure is not forgotten?

I think I've posted this already somewhere; Kol haOlam Kulo, attributed to Rabbi Nachman of Breslav. Here is a performance of it that I really like (link to youtube video).

kol haolam kulo
gesher tsar meod
ve haikar - lo lefakhed klal'

the whole world
is but a narrow bridge
and the main thing - not to be afraid at all.

Bonus:
Which fictional language would you most like to be real?

One of my own, probably Takiritalë, the Flowing (i.e. language) of Two-waters; I worked on it a lot as a teen. Excerpts from prayers in Takiritalë appear in my poem The Three Immigrations (currently not on submission anywhere). Second after that I'd probably choose Maro,  the language of a small tribe of Grayblood people that used to live in the north of Birdverse. Maro is a verbless language and is described in my trunked novel.

Perhaps this is a bad answer, because these languages are real for me. 

(I'm afraid I'll have to bow out of offering to ask you five questions - spoons).

State of the MoC

This is just a quick note to say that I've sent all responses out for the Moment of Change anthology. If you are still waiting and have not heard from me, please contact me ASAP either at rose.lemberg at gmail, or feministspec at gmail.

Still waiting for two people to get back to me, and a number of people to send me bios, etc, so cannot post the ToC yet.

Have a great weekend!

Joanna Russ

So, there exists published poetry by Joanna Russ. Tell me about it - how do I put my paws on some of it, aka read it?
*perplexed*

Moment of Change: do you know of any poems...?

As many of you know, I'm editing The Moment of Change, a reprint anthology of feminist speculative poetry, for Aqueduct press. I'm almost there. Very very close. The last biggish batch of acceptances/rejections went out yesterday; I am still pondering a few poems, and hope to send out final emails this week.

And now a question to the community. I've found an acquired poems featuring a variety of perspectives, but one thing I am still missing in the anthology is trans, genderqueer and/or gender-change themed work.  I am looking for poems with such content (this is not limited to poets who identify as trans or genderqueer, although of course I would love to receive work from trans and/or genderqueer-identified poets ).

Please recommend specific poems, rather than poets; I don't have the spoons or the means to go through the whole oevre of poets who are new to me. I'd rather not receive comments like "X is a major literary poet, maybe ask him/her..." because from my experience working on this and other projects, major literary poets tend to ignore my emails. I am hoping that if I specify a particular poem and go through the major figure's literary agent it might work.

To summarize, looking for:

- a poem or poems with trans, gender-change, genderqueer content 
- speculative, that is, featuring a fantastic element; SF, fantasy, magic realism, slipstream, horror, surrealism, weird and other spec genres are all fine.
- both the trans and/or genderqueer content and the speculative element should be on the page, rather than implicit. Minimal reference is fine, but it should be there.
- feminist (no queer-bashing or name-calling please) - poetry should be previously published elsewhere - this is a reprint anthology.

Thank you very much :) and yes, feel free to spread the word if so moved...

(Edited to change some ambiguous wording; I've slept for 3 hrs tonight due to pain, so if something else jumps out at you as badly phrased/inappropriate, please call me on it.)

Gevalt

There is something very strange about working in this nice coffeeshop/bookstore I found, and realizing that it's a Christian Inspirational Coffeeshop/Bookstore.* A guy sitting close to my table was trying to convince someone to embrace Jesus (he seemed to be misquoting Scripture, too), while I was chatting with skogkatt about queer speculative poetry.

They do have wonderful notebooks here. When I feel frazzled I crave a new notebook. Alas, 30$ for a notebook I don't have. And yet it's the same exactly as the one I had in 2004-5 and could never find again. And I guess this is where I exclaim, "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from expensive Italian leatherbound notebooks."

*they're displaying Bristol Palin's book under "Inspirational Memoirs"...