An Interview with Terese M Pierre about her Book Look Makeovers and Poetry

Interviewed by Derek Newman-Stille

Spec Can: To start our interview, could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Terese M Pierre: Sure! I’m a writer and editor, based in Toronto. At this point, I’m mainly writing poetry, but I also sometimes write essays, about my experiences in the writing community and my family. I’m also the senior editor of poetry at Augur Magazine, a speculative literature magazine in Toronto.

Spec Can: What inspired you to start doing Book Looks?

Terese M Pierre: I started doing book looks as a way to celebrate two novels that I had read and loved (Eternity Martis’s, “They Said This Would Be Fun,” and Tessa McWatt’s, “Shame On Me”) near the start of the quarantine. It was also during a time when I was feeling very down and fatigued, and wanted to use makeup as a creative outlet.

Terese M Pierre’s book look for Eternity Martis’ They Said This Would Be Fun
Cover photo for Eternity Martis’ They Said This Would Be Fun

Spec Can: Many of your Book Looks bring attention to books by marginalized authors. Can you tell us a bit about the importance of supporting marginalized authors and the way that your Book Looks highlight the important work being done?

Terese M Pierre: I didn’t start doing the book looks as a way to promote specific books or authors per se, but because it was fun and it made me happy. Later on, I chose to do book looks for marginalized authors to bring attention to the great work they were doing, their craft and skill and talent. Some people online would comment that they had never heard of the books that I was doing, which I found interesting. Since the pandemic started, a lot of in-person book launches were cancelled, so it was important for me to promote the books of marginalized authors at that time—maybe it was a kind of marketing, hopefully they found it helpful. Nowadays, I’m doing a lot of Black American authors, to show my support their art during a time of great turmoil.

Terese M Pierre’s book look for jaye simpson’s It Was Never Going to be Okay
Cover photo for jaye simpson’s It Was Never Going to be Okay

Spec Can: How did you come to be interested in make up art? What inspired you to get into make up art?

Terese M Pierre: I turned 19 and decided that it was time for me to start wearing makeup. I don’t know why—maybe I associated it with adulthood, like alcohol. Still, I barely touched the makeup I had for a few years, save for special occasions. I started watching YouTube tutorials to practice. I think my makeup book looks are quite conservative, to be honest, or perhaps, more wearable. At the time when I started doing book looks, makeup was the only thing I had around that I felt most comfortable using. It would have always been my first choice.

Terese M Pierre’s book look for Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearer
Cover photo for Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearer

Spec Can: Make up art is highly personal, literally using your own face as a canvas. What is that experience like — to literally be part of your art?

Terese M Pierre: While it is incredibly personal, I try not to see it that way. My face is very front-and-center, and it’s very easy for me to get caught up on my blemishes, how wide my cheeks are, how my skin tone is “clashing” with the makeup. There are makeup book looks I’ve shared that I didn’t personally like, but I knew that other people might not see it the same way I did. At the same time, knowing that my face is necessarily part of the art has made me more confident. I’m finding things about my face that I love.

Terese M Pierre’s book look for Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby
Cover photo for Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby

Spec Can: What is it like to have your own art work (in the form of make-up) in conversation with another artist’s work – the book cover artist? How do you decide what elements to pull out of the book art and adapt?

Terese M Pierre: As I like to make my looks a little more wearable, there are a limited number of eye shapes I can do. After I choose one, it’s a matter of picking which colour goes where. I love colourful covers for this reason. If there are other details on the cover, such as leaves, flowers, smoke, wings, and the like, I add them where it makes sense, to the best of my artistic abilities. I don’t think I go too off-base when it comes to interpreting the cover-artist’s art. I know I don’t—and can’t—get things perfectly. A few cover artists have reached out to say they liked my makeup look, and that meant a lot to me. I like that they still appreciate my iteration of their art.

Terese M Pierre’s book look for Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon
Cover Photo for Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon

Spec Can: What are some of your favourite colour palettes for your book looks?

Terese M Pierre: I like blue/purple palettes, and sunset (red/orange/yellow/pink) palettes. They’re really easy to blend, and I think they look great on me.

Terese M Pierre’s book look for Tade Thompson’s The Rosewater Redemption
Cover photo for Tade Thompson’s The Rosewater Redemption

Spec Can: What are some of the books that you were the most excited to create Book Looks for and what did these books mean to you?

Terese M Pierre: The book looks for the first two books I did (Eternity Martis’s, “They Said This Would Be Fun,” and Tessa McWatt’s, “Shame On Me”) were the ones I believe I was the most excited to make. It meant a lot to me to showcase the new work of Black women. I’m always most excited to do book looks for Black women authors.

Spec Can: How have authors responded when they have seen you perform your Book Looks on social media?

Terese M Pierre: Almost all authors who’ve seen the book looks that I make—I tag them on Twitter, but they don’t always see it—have responded positively, and have shared the looks with their audiences. What I always try to get across is that doing makeup book looks is that I’m doing this for fun, not for work.

Terese M Pierre’s book look for Amanda Leduc’s Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space
Cover photo for Amanda Leduc’s Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

Spec Can: I know I said that I was going to focus on Book Looks, but if you have time, could you tell us a little bit about your own poetry and your recent chap book Manifest?

Terese M Pierre: I write a lot about nature and romance, and the variations those themes could take. A lot of my poetry—like my first chapbook, Surface Area—deal with desire, tension and self-reflection regarding love and (in)dependence. My second chapbook, Manifest, is something different for me. It’s entirely composed of speculative fantasy poems, and it’s the first time I’m putting out something in that style—it’s sort of an experiment. I’d only started writing speculative/fantasy poetry in the past year, but when I performed my work at readings, they were well-received. Hopefully this chapbook is well-received, too.

Spec Can: In your poem “Fortune”, you focus on foods and the visceral quality of food, but food takes on meanings of space, place, and identity. What guided your interest in places and their relationship to food?

Terese M Pierre: For me, the focus of that poem was the relationship between the speaker and their beloved, and food was a means through which love was expressed. The fact that the beloved made the effort to find the brand of ice cream the speaker loves was part of that emphasis on connection and love. Food—the ice cream in this case—in this poem, is a path to learning about someone’s history, their fears, their desires, especially a person who is not immediately trusting. I try, whenever I can, to ground my poems in concrete things—physical places and foods, and the relationships they bring, are ways in which I can do that.

Spec Can: In your poem “Lines”, what inspired your linking of place and story? What do you notice about the way that places where we have lived are linked to the stories we tell… and perhaps have shaped our own stories?

Terese M Pierre: As someone who’s lived in 3 countries, location, narrative, and memory were interesting things to think about in the context of relationships. We are physical people—the way we move through the world is filtered through our bodies and where our bodies are, the space we take up. I think that the fact that different bodies can experience the same space differently is fascinating, and can definitely inform stories in unique ways. I try to consider that when writing poetry—the speaker isn’t me, so how do they move about the world? What space does their body take up? What stories can they tell? Trying to inhabit the world of the poem and the mind of the speaker in the context of bodies and space is a challenge that never gets old.

Spec Can: Are there any resources that you would like to point fans to so that they can support your work?

Terese M Pierre: I have a website, www.teresemasonpierre.com, and that’s where most of the links to my work are, as well as where to go to pre-order my chapbook. I’m afraid I don’t have anything else, but I’m always happy when others support my work.


Spec Can: I want to thank Terese M Pierre for taking the time to share some of her amazing Book Looks on Facebook and Twitter and for taking the time to chat here on Speculating Canada about her brilliant art work.


Terese Mason Pierre is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Canthius, The Puritan, Quill and Quire, and Strange Horizons, among others. She is currently the Senior Poetry Editor of Augur Magazine, a Canadian speculative literature journal. Terese has also previously volunteered with Shab-e She’r poetry reading series, and facilitated creative writing workshops. Terese lives and works in Toronto.

Interviewed by Derek Newman-Stille, MA, PhD ABD (They/Them)

On the Power of Language

Words have power.

There is a reason why in fantasy narratives (and in many actual cultures), words are believed to have the ability to shape and change the world – words can become spells. Yet, we, as authors, already know this. They shape the worlds we create in our heads, those realms of the imagination that can have the power to shape the minds of others. 

Words are in the perpetual act of becoming.

We add meaning to words as we speak them, as we use them. Words shift and change and take on new contexts and associations. They grow. Words are not flat, stable things, but rather they are chimerical, transformative creatures, changing over time and in new contexts. Words are perpetually on the cusp of becoming something, and that process of becoming is shaped by they history and experience (just like a character).

Words are acts as well, evocations to that history, that chimerical process that shaped them. When we use words, we call up the ghosts of their past and apply them to new settings, to new ideas, and they absorb and consume these new ideas. Yet words are also things that are felt, that have bodily resonance – when we speak them, our mouths shape them, resonate with them; when we sign them (for sign language users), our bodies move with them, shaping them through our dance; even when we read them, we shape the words with our eyes. 

One of the activities that I do with my writing students is to introduce them to words that they aren’t familiar with, words that are new to them, and then invite them to explore the resonance of words in their bodies, examine how the words make them feel, what they are associated with in their minds. I use English words that are no longer used, words from other languages that don’t have adequate English translations, and ASL signed words to get them to feel words in different ways and to see the narratives that can come from word play. I then ask them to look at English words in a way that defamiliarizes them, looking at their sounds, their interplay, and the feel of them. 

Words become stories.

My writing students quickly discover that there are whole stories within words and that stories can spring from a particular word. Certain words can be touchstones for a character, aptly describing them in a single utterance. Certain words can be environmental, shaping a setting by their resonance with place. Certain words can contain an entire narrative because words have entire worlds inside of them. 

I frequently ask students to explore how words can create a character, looking at the meaning in a word and how it shapes a personality, a thought pattern, or way of being. 

Words have the power to shape the way we think – language patterns shape our process of thinking and the way we codify information. Words can be played with to inspire new ways of thinking, new ways of viewing and understanding the world around us. I often suggest that people play with words, play with their sounds and the ideas that they evoke in order to create narrative, to build new ideas. 

Consider the words that you use every day. Think about what ideas they embed in your consciousness, how they reflect you. Think about the way that the language you use shapes certain codes of thinking and understanding. Think about how words create you. 

When we write and when we read, words bounce around inside, bringing up images, patterns. Words change us. Consider the extra dimension a consideration of words brings to your reading process and think about how words can inspire a new way of writing. Consider the poetry of words and the magic that they evoke in us.

Speculating Canada on Trent Radio Episode 67: A Discussion of Sandra Kasturi’s The Animal Bridegroom

In this episode of Speculating Canada on Trent Radio, I explore the folkloric poetry of Sandra Kasturi’s collection The Animal Bridegroom. I explore Kasturi’s poetic re-imagining of several fairy tales and the power of the spoken word.

You can listen to this episode of Speculating Canada on Trent Radio at the link below.

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This audio file was originally broadcast on Trent Radio, and I would like to thank Trent Radio for their continued support. I would also like to thank Dwayne Collins for his consistent tech support and help with the intricacies of creating audio files.

Make sure to allow a few minutes for the file to buffer since it may take a moment before it begins to play.

Fairy Tales Estranged

Fairy Tales Estranged A review of Sandra Kasturi’s “The Animal Bridegroom” (Tightrope Books).

By Derek Newman-Stille

  
“The Animal Bridegroom” leaves a breadcrumb trail of poems to bring the reader through cultural myths and legends to a place of self-reflection. Sandra Kasturi uses fairy tale themes to open a pathway into the deep woods of myth, where she explores the changeable power of stories, their ability to shift and change like the seasons. 

In her poem “The Gretel Papers”, Kasturi invites the reader to look at the impact of fairy tales on the characters. Fairy tales normally don’t explore beyond the happily ever after, but Kasturi invites us to ponder what would happen to the young protagonist of Hansel and Gretel after Gretel has killed the witch and has to live with the long term effect of her actions. Here we encounter a Gretel who has experienced a lifetime of depression and post-traumatic stress.

In “Chaos Theory”, she explores the way that we live surrounded by myth, enwrapped in a w world of words and stories that shape us and that we can’t escape from. We are made up of the cultural stories we are told.

In “Verses for the Lost”, Kasturi uses the Red Riding Hood myth to remind all of us that we are lost in the forest and reminds us that there are no final destinations in life and that everything is always changeable (including grandmothers who wear their wolf suit on the inside).

In “Five Cantos from the Prayer Book of Aphrodite”, the reader is drawn into questions about love and its complexity, invited to imagine the diversity of love and the notion that some people’s horror is the adoration of others.

“Carnival Perpetuel” highlights that the Cinderella tale is a tale about time and the passage of time. It explores the way that we imagine ourselves into the future and, especially, highlights the way that women’s time is structured in a patriarchal world, exploring the demands on women’s time, the devaluing of women’s work, and the notion that women are always structured as existing in a temporal framework, always at risk of running out of time since women are told in our society that their value only exists so long as they are young. Kasturi teaches us about the dangers of wishing for a better life and that these wishes often serve to continue current oppressions of women.

“The Animal Bridegroom” reminds us of the significance of fairy tales and the power that narratives have to shape our lives. She brings attention to the changeability of the world and its tendency to shift the narratives we tell ourselves. Sandra Kasturi weaves a spell of words around the reader, performing a difficult type of magic – the magic of transforming the way we think about the world around us.

To discover more about “The Animal Bridegroom”, visit Tightrope Books at http://tightropebooks.com/the-animal-bridegroom-sandra-kasturi-w-introduction-by-neil-gaiman/

Chilly Renewal

A review of Dominik Parisien’s “My Child Has Winter in His Bones” in Tesseracts Seventeen: Speculating Canada From Coast to Coast (Edge, 2013)

Cover photo for Tesseracts Seventeen courtesy of Edge

Cover photo for Tesseracts Seventeen courtesy of Edge

By Derek Newman-Stille

In My Child Has Winter in His Bones, Dominik Parisien evokes his characteristic blend of the human and the landscape, amalgamating a child with the icy lake where his parent fishes. Like much of his poetry, this piece evokes the horror and beauty of a body modified and the child in this poem is described as being almost fish-tank-like, clear and full of aquatic matter. There is a beauty in the image of the body as a living landscape, an ice-scape imbued with life and yet always temporary, doomed to thaw in the spring. Parisien evokes the beauty of the permeable body, a body that is revealed as being integrated with its environment even though we spend so much time as a society creating barriers around our bodies, trying to suggest that they are separate from their environments.
Although a temporary body, the child’s body evokes the image of renewal, a body that is forged from the ice and then melts in the spring to be re-formed.
Unlike most poetry that is obsessed with images of youth symbolised in spring and growth, Parisien reverses this paradigm by equating youth with winter, with the freeze, and with a season that we tend to think of as inherently liminal, frozen, between times: the Winter. Parisien invites his readers to question why we associate youth with the Spring and asks us to look at the shallow way we observe youth and the passage of the seasons.
To discover more about Dominik Parisien, visit his website at https://dominikparisien.wordpress.com/
To discover more about Tesseracts Seventeen, visit Edge’s website at http://www.edgewebsite.com/books/tess17/t17-catalog.html

Speculating Canada on Trent Radio Episode 19: An Interview with Dominik Parisien

When I mention Speculative Poetry to most people, they respond with a bit of confusion. I often think this may be because they are seeing poetry as the quintessential example of  high culture and anything “genre” as the pits of low, popular culture… then again, maybe they just picture poems like this:

Roses are Red
Aliens are Green
Space is vast and largely unseen.

But, that isn’t what speculative poetry is like (unless I am attempting to write it).

Dominik Parisien is a master wordsmith, able to play with language in such a way that all communicative forms become weirded. He shows both the potential of language to push boundaries, and also the inadequacy of non-poetic forms of communication for capturing the complexity of an emotional situation.

In our interview Dominik and I discuss aging, disability, poetry, high versus low culture, the human body, sexuality, and so many things. For some of the answers, Dominik realised that poetry was the only way to answer the question adequately and that conventional speech was too limiting to express the full body of emotion, thought, feeling, philosophy, and ideal that poetry can bring together with clever word play and evocative image intermixing.

A brilliant editor, author, and scholar, Dominik will fascinate you and inspire you to open the world up to questions. I hope that you enjoy our interview as much as I did!!

Explore Trent Radio at www.trentradio.ca

Explore Trent Radio at http://www.trentradio.ca

 

This audio file was originally broadcast on Trent Radio, and I would like to thank Trent Radio for their continued support. I would also like to thank Dwayne Collins for his consistent tech support and help with the intricacies of creating audio files.

Make sure to allow a few minutes for the file to buffer since it may take a moment before it begins to play.

You can explore some of my reviews of Dominik Parisien’s poems at:

https://speculatingcanada.ca/2013/09/12/hidingrevealing/

https://speculatingcanada.ca/2012/10/01/the-green-in-the-human/

You can explore Dominik’s website at https://dominikparisien.wordpress.com/

Speculating Canada on Trent Radio Episode 16: A Discussion About the Author Readings of Ian Rogers and Sandra Kasturi with Leif Einarson

In this episode of Speculating Canada on Trent Radio, Dr. Leif Einarson and I discuss the works of Ian Rogers and Sandra Kasturi. We play audio files of author readings by Ian Rogers and Sandra Kasturi and then follow up with a discussion of these works.

Dr. Einarson researches medieval literature, Norse literature, and Canadian literature.

Ian Rogers is the award-winning Peterborough author of Every House is Haunted and SuperNOIRtural Tales. His work “The House on Ashley Avenue” has recently been optioned for television.

Sandra Kasturi is the award-winning poet, writer, editor, and co-publisher of ChiZine Publications. Her poetry collections The Animal Bridegroom and Come Late to the Love of Birds combine the poetic with the speculative.

Listen to these wonderful author readings and hear the nuances of the authors’ voices and then enjoy discussions of their work and insights into some of the ideas evoked by their work.

 

Explore Trent Radio at www.trentradio.ca

Explore Trent Radio at http://www.trentradio.ca

This audio file was originally broadcast on Trent Radio, and I would like to thank Trent Radio for their continued support. I would also like to thank Dwayne Collins for his consistent tech support and help with the intricacies of creating audio files.

Make sure to allow a few minutes for the file to buffer since it may take a moment before it begins to play.

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 together myths in images into a frame, poetry is, in many ways, the closest parallel in words to what I try to do with paint. It is a blending flow of word into word, creating a snapshot moment of beauty.
There is a play with words that a poet can evoke, a teasing of meaning and potential from phonemes, speaking to more than the assemblage of letters and sounds. Because of their economy of words, poets need to pack a multiplicity of meanings into each syllable, encompassing often contradictory potentials in each word. They play with the cultural history of semiotics, questioning the ontology of language.
Some poetry has to be spoken aloud, tasted on the tongue as it rolls forth made of breath and myths and worlds formed of licks.
Poetry reminds us that words are worlds, myths built in themselves, and they shouldn’t be cast to the fringes of speculative works, but find their own position of interest, inviting the reader to speculate in a different way, explore those spaces and Spaces between letters (galaxies of meaning in themselves).
I would like to see speculative poetry find a place more central in the genre, not treated as a dirty secret cast into the dark spaces between short stories, closeted in dirty laundry. I would like to see more anthologies, speculative magazines, and other collections search for powerful poetry, rather than often defaulting to that which resembles a short story cut off too soon, and instead bring attention to poetry that plays with words, speculates about meaning, and constructs worlds inside of words.

Original Art By Derek Newman-Stille  http://www.dereknewmanstille.ca/

Original Art By Derek Newman-Stille
http://www.dereknewmanstille.ca/

Poetry Reading from Sandra Kasturi – reading “Reschedule the Zeppelins”

Happy New Year! I have a gift for you – a poetry reading by the brilliant poet and my friend Sandra Kasturi. This is one of her unpublished poems, Reschedule the Zeppelins, which I had the pleasure to listen to at Trent Radio when she read it on air. Sandra has an absolutely wonderful reading voice, so I am excited to share one of her readings with you. This poem has quickly become one of my favourites (and not just because it is about zeppelins and I adore the idea of airships).

Click on the image below and allow a few moments for the audio file to buffer.

Explore Trent Radio at www.trentradio.ca

Explore Trent Radio at http://www.trentradio.ca

I am so honoured that Ms. Kasturi was willing to share her poem with us here on Speculating Canada, and I hope that you enjoy “Reschedule the Zeppelins” as much as I did.

To find out more about Sandra Kasturi, you can visit her website at http://sandrakasturi.com/.

Interview with Ada Hoffmann

An interview with Ada Hoffmann
by Derek Newman-Stille

Ada Hoffman describes herself as a queer-oriented, autistic author of Canadian Speculative Fiction. She has an interest in portrayals of autism in SF, and does critical readings of these portrayals on her website http://ada-hoffmann.com/autistic-book-party/ .

I am very excited that Ada is willing to do an interview since I am interested in both portrayals of queerness and disability in Canadian SF, and Ada is a wonderful author.

Spec Can: To begin our interview, could you tell us a bit about yourself?

Ada Hoffmann: Oh no, the dreaded open-ended question! Well, I’m twenty-six years old, I’m studying for my PhD in computer science, and I live in Ontario. I made my first four professional fiction sales in 2013, though I’ve been writing for pay since 2010 and writing in general since I was five. I love cats, roleplaying games, and music. Most other facts about me are either incredibly boring or classified.

Spec Can: What first inspired your passion for Speculative Fiction?

Ada Hoffmann: I grew up around speculative fiction. My parents were both huge nerds who taught computer science for a living, and the house was full of bookshelves, many of which were solely devoted to science fiction and fantasy. As a child I started with the usual fairy tale picture books and graduated to Narnia, Tolkein, Star Wars, Susan Cooper, Heinlein juveniles, and stealing my dad’s issues of Analog every month (which, in retrospect, were not always appropriate for children). I got into fantasy roleplaying games pretty early in life, too, mostly because my dad had giant boxes of them under his desk and I was curious. (Also, there were So Many Interesting Tables to roll dice on! You can’t go wrong with dice. I got fascinated by using the random tables long before I started to actually play.) When I hit my teens, it was like, “yay, you’re old enough for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Babylon 5 now!” It was how we entertained ourselves and bonded as a family. I hear stories of people who “discovered” speculative fiction and had to hide it from their parents, or got shamed for not reading “real” literature, and I’m just baffled. It was never anything like that for me.

Spec Can: What, if anything, is different about Canadian speculative fiction?

Ada Hoffmann: I don’t think we can really pin down Canada that way. It’s a big place. Lots of room for contradictions. I’ve heard that the Canadian SF community is different from the American one, but I’m too much of a social hermit to really comment on that one way or the other.

Spec Can: You have a strong interest in representations of autism in speculative fiction. What first got you interested in representations of autism in SF?

Ada Hoffmann: Just seeing the same kind of fail repeated multiple times. I didn’t set out to be The Autism Lady, but when I found autism stuff that frustrated me, I blogged about it, because I was frustrated. Then I realized no one else was blogging about it this way. It was a side note in social justice discussions, if it was mentioned at all. Which makes sense – there are fewer of us than there are of, say, women, or POC, plus it’s not always safe to be “out”, so the discussion space is going to be smaller – but it is frustrating. So I kept going. Eventually I had so much to blog about that it had to be organized, and I started doing an official book review feature, etc. I’m not sure if this is an abiding interest, or if I’m just going to keep going until I run out of new things to say and then stop.

Spec Can: What was the first SF work that you encountered that dealt with the topic of autism or featured an autistic character? What was the portrayal like?

Ada Hoffmann: Oh, gee, I can’t even remember. Maybe Robert Charles Wilson’s Blind Lake, which is actually pretty good. It’s hard to say because I didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate these problems until a few years ago, when I started publishing short fiction and a social justice-minded editor took me under their wing. I didn’t connect with the autistic self-advocacy community until even more recently, and to some extent I still feel like an outsider to that community. I’m still learning a lot.

The first portrayal that really frustrated me in a way I could articulate was Nancy Fulda’s short story “Movement”, which was nominated for a Nebula Award. And it was so bad on multiple levels. I think what frustrates me most is when an NT (neurotypical) writer produces something which is nothing like autism, or which is insulting, but NTs who don’t know any better think it is a good portrayal and therefore it gets lots of attention and praise – even in the face of actual autistic people trying to point out why there are problems.

Spec Can: What are some common errors or misconceptions that authors make when portraying characters with autism?

Ada Hoffmann: Not doing the research. (You have to look at what’s being said by autistic people, not just our doctors and caregivers; otherwise you’ll miss a lot.) Not giving an autistic character feelings and concerns of their own, or only giving them feelings when it relates to a special interest, cure decision, or other stereotype. Over-focusing on the odd behaviors that are most visible to neurotypical people and under-focusing on cognitive and sensory differences, especially when trying to write from the autistic character’s point of view. Trying to draw some sort of moral conclusion from autism, like by using a character with autistic traits to teach NT characters about the dangers of social withdrawal, and not noticing that this implicitly demonizes the autistic person. Forgetting that most of us work very hard to look “normal”, and that many of us succeed – but at a cost.

Spec Can: What can speculative fiction do to shift the way readers think about the world around them? How can SF encourage readers to question their assumptions?

Ada Hoffmann: I am struggling to come up with a good answer for this question. It seems to me that there are as many answers as there are potential stories. Also, not every shift in thinking or questioned assumption works the same way, nor is every shift in thinking equally valuable, though to some extent the ability to question one’s thinking is always valuable.

It also isn’t as simple as setting out to shift assumptions and thought patterns with a single story. We are made of the stories we tell about ourselves and the world, and the commonalities between stories form larger structures. Tropes, worldviews, cultures, archetypes. A single story might explicitly question or subvert an aspect of a worldview but with enough of these questions and subversions, a new substructure with its own rules and tropes forms. It’s not possible to do away with the structure as a whole, because this would take us to a place with no comprehensible narratives and no thought. We can’t dispense with all assumptions, but we need to replace some of our current ones with broader assumptions which help us understand and care for each other.

Spec Can: What do you hope readers will take away from reading your SF?

Ada Hoffmann: Oh, that depends on the story. It would be super boring if I was trying to make the same point with all of them! My goals are a little bit different every time.

Spec Can: You tend to write a lot of short stories. What are some benefits of the short story medium?

Ada Hoffmann: It’s short! Which makes it a wonderful place to learn and experiment. It’s short to write, which means you can try all sorts of risky things without such a steep penalty for failure. You can switch settings, genres, characters, themes, or anything else about your writing whenever you want to. And it’s short to read, which means it’s easy to get feedback and figure out where your weaknesses lie. Maybe I’m just a really impatient person, though?

There are benefits to longer forms too. With something like a novel (or a long-running RPG campaign), it’s easier for me to really get into the characters’ heads and fall in love with them all. But it’s a different process and a different way of constructing a plot, and I’m still figuring out how to make that work for me.

Spec Can: On your website, you mention that you are both queer and autistic. As a queer, autistic author, what can you suggest to encourage other queer authors or authors with disabilities to write further?

Ada Hoffmann: I’m not sure if this is specific to queerness or disability, but one of the most important things is to find beta readers who “get it”. Not just people who are good at dissecting a story (though these are valuable, and rarer than you would think). But people who understand the way your individual creative mind works, who are excited to see the things that you are excited to create, and who understand your goals well enough to help you figure out what’s gone wrong when you’re stuck. Everybody who’s good at something gets impostor syndrome, but marginalized people get it worse. To survive as a writer, you need people who will help you bounce back from the bad times, people who will keep believing in you and your work even when you don’t, and who are smart enough about it that you’ll take their opinion seriously. Doesn’t matter if they are fellow writers, fans, family – just find those people and cling to them, because their support makes you strong.

My other advice would be learn to trust your own voice. If your own underrepresentation pisses you off, great! It’s worthwhile to talk about that, and to talk about what other writers are doing wrong. But don’t stop there. You are a writer yourself (if you aren’t a writer, this advice is not for you). You have the power to make books of your own, to your own specifications, so do it.

(I can say this as forcefully as I do only because it is a lesson I have had to teach myself, time and time again.)

But also remember that you are more than the sum of your identity labels. Being queer and a writer doesn’t mean you have to write a specific amount of queer fiction to someone else’s specifications (or queer fiction at all). Likewise with disability. There’s a lot to do in these fields. Chances are that some of the required tasks will set your imagination on fire and some won’t. This is okay. There’s far too much of this for one person anyway. Do the tasks that speak to you, and don’t feel guilty if you want to write stories that aren’t about your identity labels, too. Your voice matters, even when you aren’t talking about those. Don’t stop educating yourself, because there is intersection and variety within your own labels that you probably don’t know about. (This was certainly the case for me!) But don’t let anyone in your group make you feel guilty for writing from your own lived experience, your own fascinations, your own deeply held beliefs, and not theirs.

If you’re asking for advice for others in the community, and not just advice to disabled/queer writers themselves, then I have some other suggestions. Explicitly welcoming diverse submissions in your submission guidelines, if you’re an editor, is a wonderful thing. It’s easy to do and it really helps with the impostor syndrome, and the feeling of “no one wants to hear my story anyway,” which can be pervasive. Making sure that conventions and other science fiction spaces are accessible and that accommodations can be made – I can’t stress this enough. (This conversation often focuses on wheelchair access, which is important. But for autism specifically, having a quiet room to retreat to is often VERY helpful. There are certain conventions I will never, ever attend, because I would not be able to bear the crowds long enough to do anything useful or enjoyable there. I’m thinking especially of the very large, commercially-oriented ones.) And making sure that there is an actual policy to prevent and investigate harassment, which disproportionately targets all sorts of marginalized people, not only women.

Spec Can: Can you talk a bit about the under-representation of queer characters in SF?

Ada Hoffmann: Maybe! I feel like I’m the wrong person to talk about this in depth, because I’m dating a man. (Bisexuality is a thing, yay.) That doesn’t make me straight, and the emotions and experiences that make me different from a straight person are important to me. But it does mean that there are very wide swathes of queer experience which are not actually my experience at this point in my life, and I have to respect that.

What I’m finding these days is that there are a fair number of queer characters around if you know where to look, especially in short fiction. But it’s still hard to find queer characters who turn out happy with each other the way the straight characters do, as opposed to dying, or having a crush on a straight character who dies, or getting into an abusive relationship and turning evil, etc. Which is ironic, because hope is a thing that real queer people badly need.

I also have an absurd amount of difficulty finding depictions of polyamory that don’t suck. (Even Stranger in a Strange Land doesn’t do it right, IMO.) Same with power exchange, and with trans* and nonbinary characters (although Crossed Genres at least has a fair number of those lately), and also asexuality. All of which are important parts of what sexual diversity means. I’m realizing as I type this that I haven’t done enough of this in my own fiction, either.

Spec Can: What can SF do to give voice to people who are traditionally under-represented in society and in fiction?

Ada Hoffmann: First, we can imagine futures (or magical, alternate pasts and presents) in which under-represented people actually exist. This step is more of a mandatory basic minimum, but it’s neglected too often. Second, we can actively look for under-represented authors and find the SF they are already producing.

Going further than this, of course, we can naturally use SF for subversive purposes. We can imagine worlds in which we overcome oppression in new ways, or in which people flourish in new ways because oppression does not exist as it does here. Or we can build worlds in dystopian and satirical modes in order to point out the workings of oppressive systems in the real world.

But it doesn’t all have to be overtly political. There’s nothing wrong with SF serving more individual purposes: wish-fulfilment, catharsis, escape, validation, emotional regulation, education (in many senses), or just being a heck of a lot of fun to read. In a perfect world it would serve these purposes both for the majority and for the marginalized. Which means that as well as political stories we simply need a larger amount of awesome fiction which happens to be inclusive, and which doesn’t scare all the marginalized people away through casual prejudice and erasure.

Spec Can: You are able to write both science fiction and fantasy – in what ways do these two genres support each other and in what way do they challenge each other?

Ada Hoffmann: I’m not sure I even believe in a distinction between science fiction and fantasy. There’s just so much good stuff in the gray area in between. I like SF with magic-y bits and fantasy with science-y bits, and stuff like a China Miéville novel that doesn’t fit neatly into either category because it’s its own thing.

I think the idea of a clear distinction between science fiction and fantasy comes from the very 20th century idea that “science” and “magic” are incompatible. Modern people think this rule is so obvious that it has to apply even in imaginary worlds. And that’s so incredibly boring to me. It’s not even consistent with the way most people intuitively classify the genres. Most science fiction uses handwavey technology that isn’t plausible to modern scientists anyway, and series like Star Wars are full of outright mysticism.

I should note here that I don’t think mysticism is a bad thing. Or even an “unscientific” thing. It’s complicated.

But basically, rather than drawing lines telling people where science ends and magic begins, I’d rather look at the whole thing as one big umbrella genre where the imagination has free rein to do whatever it likes.

Spec Can: Magic and the mythical frequently shows up in your short stories and poetry. What continues to be powerful about magic and the mythical for readers?

Ada Hoffmann: For this sort of question I have to refer back to Carl Jung. The mythical will always be a part of the human mind at some level. “Realism” implies a certain set of rules for what is real, what it means for a thing to be real, and how the world works. But huge swathes of human experience, particularly the unconscious, do not conform to these rules. There are some truths that we can only tell through symbols, and through magical and mythical thinking. This is difficult for some people in mainstream Western culture to accept, but it will continue to be the case no matter how many shiny computers we have.

Spec Can: What do you do differently when you write poetry instead of short stories?

Ada Hoffmann: Poetry is a very different beast from short fiction. It’s not only structured differently, but it feels like it comes from a different place for me. With a short story I have to lay out exactly what is happening, where are we, who is in this place, what are they trying to do, how is this resolved, why should we care. Poetry is not laid out in this way. It can purport to tell a story (or not), but the story doesn’t need the same kind of scaffolding. Things sometimes come out of the depths of my brain and demand to be written as poems, whether I like it or not: there’s no use in laboring to contrive a full setting and plot to support them when they’re already strong enough to stand on their own. But in exchange for this kind of independence, poems have a desperate need for attention to imagery, rhythm, the impact of individual words. It’s detail work in a way that is often superfluous to short stories. Without this kind of attention a poem is just a splat of words on a page, or at best an anecdote or thought experiment, and it can’t survive.

Spec Can: What can poetry add to speculative fiction?

Ada Hoffmann: I’m having trouble answering this question. I assume you don’t mean literally putting poems in the middle of fiction. I’m in a bit of a bind here, because if a device from poetry can be used to good effect in fiction, it’s probably already been used in this way, and we can just continue to use it in fiction with no further recourse to poetry. And if it can’t be used in fiction, then by definition it’s not a useful addition to fiction. So there’s never a need for poetry in fiction, per se. But reading and writing good poetry brings our attention to imagery, to the details of how words are used, to beauty and other spectacular uses of the senses, to structures other than the typical linear narrative, and to the kind of ephemeral truths that fit best into these alternate structures. These are all things that I’m happy to see in fiction, too.

Spec Can: Is there anything further you would like to add to this interview?

Ada Hoffmann: No, I think I’ve talked your ear off already! But thanks for having me, and thanks for asking such interesting questions. I’ve enjoyed this.

I want to thank Ada Hoffmann for all of her insights and thoughts and for her work advocating for traditionally under-represented groups in Speculative Fiction. I hope that you have enjoyed her insights and thoughts as much as I have.

To find out more about Ada Hoffmann and her work, check out her website at http://ada-hoffmann.com/