Kassandra Jo Tomaras's Blog, page 2

Gender Trouble: A First Pass at a Few Frequently Asked Questions

If your pronouns are "he" or "they," does that mean you are still in some sense a man?

I never was a man. "Man" was an identity marker that I tried to live with and up to for a quarter century, at the expense of my sense of self and well-being. Including "he" in the options is a preemptive concession: I have been called "he/him" long enough that I am used to it, and if you are used to calling me that, I am signaling that I will not fight you over it. I will fight over other things. To be fair and...

A Full (Re-)Introduction

I have been out as bisexual, to most people and for most purposes, since I was 16 years old. (A salient exception to this would be my father. If he happens to stumble across this post, here is my personalized message to him: Yes, your eldest son is a faggot, a poustis, to use a word you used so often and freely in both English and Greek. If you're fine with that now, I still have many other reasons to hate you and not want you in my life, so fuck off and die.) Yet I have not identified publicly,...

Against Ism

Is there anything more frustrating than to live to see what one has been waiting for one's whole life, only to be mostly sidelined by circumstance? The event I had been waiting for, apparently, was a nationwide uprising against racist police terror. And circumstance refers here to COVID-19, my own asthma, and thus my mortal fear of the former in relation to the latter.

More frustrating could be this: To recognize, through discourse tangentially related to such events, how one has left behind what...

Human Dignity and the Law of the Land

Rabbi Marcus Rubenstein is the rabbi of Temple Sinai, an egalitarian Conservative synagogue about half an hour from where I live. We came to each other's attention when he organized the first Never Again Is Now action in our area--which I unfortunately found out about too late to attend. He has been hosting a series of iyyunim (roughly translatable as, lecture and discussion on topics of Judaic interest) at his synagogue, which fortunately for me one need not be a congregation member to atten...

Thoughts on Surveillance and Narcissism

If you have been reading my fiction, you know that surveillance often figures into it. I would count it as having a central or plot-determining role in more than half of the stories I have published to date, a good 11 out of 17, in fact. More than the mere fact of surveillance, though, each such story poses the implicit question of why the characters would invite surveillance into their lives? I do not claim that the answers implied by the stories are all good, that is, convincing answers. Th...

Meta-Anthology 2018

Repeating myself from last year, with slight modifications: I make no pretense to this representing the best short stories of the year 2018. First of all, because they are not of that year, having all first appeared in 2017. But also, since I could not possibly keep up with all short fiction publications of interest, I have culled them from four key anthologies, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's Best American series, in its Short Story, Mystery Story, and Science Fiction and Fantasy instances, and...

2018 Nebula Ballot

Novel

My vote goes to: Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller. A sexy and urbane thriller set in the aftermath of climate catastrophe, which deftly handles multiple viewpoints, including technologically mediated shared human-animal consciousnesses. I would say that it was the best novel that I read of any genre that was published in 2018, but I fear that, because my reading list over the last year has been lighter than usual on contemporary fiction, that might seem like faint praise. Let me say then...

Introducing: Just Outside the Eruv

In our return to New York State my family ended up living in one of the towns adjacent to the village of Kiryas Yoel. When I share this information with fellow New Yorkers and fellow Jews it triggers nods of recognition, and often furious warnings and denunciations, but it means little to anyone else, so let me explain. Kiryas Yoel was founded in the 1970s by the Satmar Hasidic Rebbe Yoel Teitelbaum, as a place where his followers could live in a more rural setting yet still be surrounded by...

O Maine, addio

In the last week, I ended my seven-year sojourn in the State of Maine, a period that had, until now, been coterminous with my literary career. After several years of unemployment and underemployment, my spouse was offered a good position in her field at an institution in Poughkeepsie. This also opened the possibility of living much closer to her parents, that is, two of the beloved grandparents of my two children. (The third beloved grandparent, my mother, is in Florida, a state I avoid as mu...

2018 Nebula Nominations

My literary income this year was good enough (mostly from translations) to justify rejoining SFWA, which means I can nominate things for the Nebula award. But I have not read quite as much contemporary science fiction and fantasy this year as in some recent years, and with my upcoming move I do not have much time for catch up reading, so my nomination slate is full in only one category, Short Story. Here we go:

NovelBlackfish City by Sam J. MillerThe Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana HeadleyThe Emiss...