Category: Editorials

November 25, 2015

The Speculating Canada Website and the Speculating Canada Radio Show on Trent Radio BOTH Won Aurora Awards

Thanks to the support and encouragement of fans, followers, friends, and interviewees, BOTH the Speculating Canada website and the radio show Speculating Canada on Trent Radio won Aurora Awards. These awards wouldn’t have been possible if all of you weren’t willing to go on this adventure into speculation with me, creating a space where we can all ask powerful questions,...

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November 2, 2015

A Love Leter to Can Con

A Love Letter to Can ConBy Derek Newman-Stille One of the things being talked about in academic circles currently is the issue of the “all male panel”, which happens far too often. I often expect academic conferences to be ahead of a lot of public conferences, but was increadibly excited when I heard Can Con planners talking about the issue...

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June 17, 2015

2015 Aurora Nominee

Dear Speculating Canada fans,    Speculating Canada has been nominated for a Prix Aurora Award again this year, which is extremely exciting news… and all of this is thanks to you and your support and participation in the project of speculating the Canadian fantastic. I want to thank all of you for all of your insightful questions, for reading the site,...

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April 14, 2015

The Ad Astra Experience: A Reflection on Ad Astra 2015

By Derek Newman-Stille As an educator who engages in fandom, I see fandom as a teaching space, by which I mean it is a space for developing new ways of looking at the world. Ad Astra is nominally a Canadian SF writer’s conference, but there is some magic in the slippages between writer and fan, and in my case between...

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October 6, 2014

Superheroic Sundays Throughout October

Canada has often had a complicated relationship with the idea of the superhero. We often see comics as a genre from “away”, not “of here”. Our comics have historically had a fairly short run, been overwhelmed by an American market, and have experienced our Canadian view that pop culture created in Canada is always going to be second rate. Superheroes...

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September 19, 2014

Sexist Con: Geek Gatekeeping and the Convention

By Derek Newman-Stille The topic of geek gatekeeping has been discussed a lot recently, and I have previously discussed it in my post “My Cane is Not a Costume” http://speculatingcanada.ca/2014/04/07/my-cane-is-not-a-costume-convention-exclusions-and-ways-to-think-about-oppression-at-cons/ , but I wanted to talk a bit about how the structures of fan conventions can sometimes add to the specific incidents of sexism that are perpetuated by fans. Much...

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April 7, 2014

My Cane is Not A Costume – Convention Exclusions and Ways to Think About Oppression at Cons

An editorial by Derek Newman-Stille On a regular basis at speculative and other fan conventions, I get knocked around, shoved, pushed out of the way. People assume that because I am using a cane, I am taking up more than my fair space, after all, I have THREE whole legs on the ground (two legs and a cane). I hope...

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March 14, 2014

Humour and Subversion

By Derek Newman-Stille How many people take humour seriously? Can humour say things that we wouldn’t say in polite society? Can humour ask us to think about things that we normally wouldn’t? Humour has a subversive potential. Good authors of humour can wield it as a microscope on society, a lens of the absurd through which we can see how...

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February 23, 2014

Writing Girls

Writing Girls by Derek Newman-Stille I have been reading a lot of teen lit recently and thinking about the representation of girls in literature, particularly teen lit written by middle aged men. One of the things that I keep noticing is that the representation of girls is often continuing to be enmeshed in tropes and assumptions about girls rather than...

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February 3, 2014

Speculative Poetics

By Derek Newman-Stille Speculative poetry tends to be largely ignored, cast between pages of short stories deemed superior by those who crave narrative hegemony, treated as filler. But there is a power in speculative poetry, a question forged not just of content but of resistance to the hegemony of grammar. Poetry speaks to me as an artist. Used to pulling...

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