Aishwarya Subramanian: Right; I know we’ve both been reading a recent Delhi-based SF novel, Samit Basu’s Chosen Spirits (which we’ll get to!). I’m also cunningly using this opportunity to pick your brains for some research I’ve had planned. But perhaps we should start by locating ourselves with respect to the city. Where are you now, how long have you lived in Delhi, and what’s your relationship with it?

Gautam Bhatia: I’m temporarily living in the UK as a student, but I was born in Delhi and grew up there. Badam milk from Aurobindo Market, pastries from Rainbow’s, and twenty-percent discount on books from Midland’s Bookshop were constitutive of my childhood. 

I left at eighteen for college, and then came back eight years later, this time to work. All in all, I’ve lived twenty-one years of my life here, and so it’s home in a very simple and basic sense. In that time, I’ve both loved it (when I was away) and hated it (when I was working there), but now it feels too familiar for love or hate: it’s just settled into home—not the feelings you may traditionally associate with home (sanctuary, warmth, affection)—but just something ... constant. 

I should also say that I have three aborted speculative fiction stories set in Delhi—lying around in various stages of disrepair—so that probably sums up my relationship with the city! And you? 

AS: I’m in Delhi right now; partly as a result of the pandemic, as during normal term-time I teach at a university an hour or so outside the city. I wasn’t born here—my parents (who both grew up here) and I moved here when I was ten. But most of my formative growing up experiences were here, including some of those you mention (I spent more time at the South Extension Midland than the Aurobindo Market one—also at the bhel puri stand immediately outside). And even though I’ve left it a few times since, mostly to do various academic degrees, as you say this has become home. It’s not a comfortable city by any means (I laughed at “sanctuary, warmth, affection”), but it’s mine. 

I don’t think I’ve ever tried to write about Delhi though. As much as I call it my city, I always feel quite nervous about how authentically I belong to it; writing a Delhi story seems like something that would expose me as a fraud. 

Which, I suppose, brings me to another question—what writers, for you, have captured your experience of the city? 

GB: This is interesting, because I can’t actually think of a book set in or around Delhi that has “captured” it, for me. There are, of course, some writers and poets you associate with Delhi (Ghalib)—but I recall reading somewhere that Delhi’s literary heritage is in Urdu, and the loss of Urdu has meant a severing of links with literary Delhi (“Without Urdu, Delhi is a city eloquent only in its violence”). There is, of course, Samit Basu’s very recent novel, which I imagine we’re going to get to very shortly! 

I do feel, though, that Delhi can be a great site for SF writing—much what Beijing has become for contemporary Chinese SF (thinking of stories like Folding Beijing). There are, of course, the obvious dystopic features—the literal mountain of trash near Delhi’s northern border that sometimes spontaneously bursts into flame, the days when the pollution is so severe that the air turns half-opaque, the undefinable—but very brutalist—architecture of the colonies beyond the river (“Yamuna paar”), and of course the heart of the capital itself. Sometimes it almost seems too easy—as if Delhi is just built for an SF treatment—and then of course, there is the possibility of kitsch, or just bad portrayals—but I see a lot of promise, some of which is realised in Chosen Spirits. 

The Wildings, illustration by Prabha Mallya.

AS: I think any experience of Delhi has to be fractured and incomplete, and not just in the sense that experiencing anything obviously has to be those things, but because it is such a fractured history. There’s a very cliche way of thinking about it (“Delhi is built on seven or possibly eight cities!”), but it’s a city that is historically splintered across language, religion, etc. There are definitely writers who capture very specific and familiar things about Delhi for me—I really enjoyed (though uncomfortably!) Mahesh Rao’s Polite Society (2019), for example. Of SF that’s set in Delhi, I love Nilanjana Roy’s The Wildings (2012). And recently I reread Sarnath Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri (2015), in which Delhi’s current inequalities in access to water lead to all-out war; very bleak and very funny. 

I think one thing that Chosen Spirits does well is demonstrating how much our experience of the city is dictated by class, caste, and other forms of social positioning. I’m thinking of the incident quite late on in the book where Joey goes to Nehru Place (renamed in the book’s future, but always Nehru Place in my heart) and discovers some of the resistance work that’s being done by people quite outside the social circles she has access to. In a different sort of book this would happen near the beginning, and it would be the scene where she’s invited in and has access to this parallel social world; instead, Basu leaves her with the sense of how alien and inaccessible it is to her, and her to it. I liked that. There’s also that point where Rudra makes the typical savarna denial of “I don’t even know what my caste is,” and his brother (who is awful, but at least a bit more realistic about the ways in which power in Delhi works) points out that not only is this pure privilege, but that class and caste are deeply intertwined—all Rudra’s liberal, upper-middle-class friends are in jobs congruent with their place in the caste hierarchy. I think that the extent to which this social ordering frames all our lives, across Indian society but perhaps most intensely in Delhi, is something that's hard to explain to people outside that framework. For example, our Strange Horizons colleagues find it both comic and unlikely that you and I, from a city with a population of nineteen million people, went to school together, and eventually (and independently) joined the same SF magazine. And it is quite funny, but we both know that it's not that unlikely; that the operations of class and caste ensure that certain cultural spaces are actually quite small and incestuous. 

Regarding Delhi as current dystopia: there were several points as I was reading the book where I’d have an instinctive eyeroll reaction to something that felt a little too on the nose as dystopia, before realising that, oh, right, I remember a version of this happening recently. I do think there’s a lot about the city that lends itself to dystopian tropes; there’s also just an undercurrent of the surreal which I suspect is inherent to any place when its peculiarities are put on display. I had to explain to a friend last week that monkeys had punched a hole in part of my parents’ house, for example. 

(I understand they’re now planning to landscape the fiery trash mountain into a beautiful park, which really does feel like something out of fiction.)

An illustration from All Quiet in Vikaspuri by Sarnath Banerjee

GB: I like the fact that you bring up the issue of class. I’ve been thinking for a while now about how far too much SF—near-future, far-future, utopian, dystopian, and everything in between—has a massive blind spot when it comes to class. This is both in acknowledging that our societies are riven and stratified by class, and in accounting for the fact that any genuine transformation is impossible without reckoning with class. So, even in some really good contemporary SF—SF that is otherwise nuanced and layered—you keep falling back into the trope of individual heroic action that ultimately saves the day, saves the world. 

But if you’re of Delhi, and writing a novel of Delhi, then it’s kind of impossible to ignore class—as it’s something that hits you in the face every moment that you navigate through the physical and social landscape of the city. I think what I like about Chosen Spirits is the care with which it portrays all of that: you have, for example, the “Resident Welfare Associations” (RWAs), this really unique feature of the Indian city, these little islands wielding absolute power within their gated domains (something that’s happened a lot recently, during Covid), and you have a depiction of what happens when an upper-middle-class person with mildly progressive views runs up against the cussedness of the RWAs; you have the sprawling “farmhouses” of South Delhi, playgrounds of the very rich, that we all go to for weddings and enviously congregate around the swimming pools—you have the malls—and then of course, you have, as you said, sites of resistance. I think it’s easy to fetishise or valorise these sites as well—especially in light of the recent protests that we’ve seen—and one thing Chosen Spirits does well is that it avoids that trap. As you say, Basu’s protagonist is not of that world (and nor is Basu, or you, or me), so what we can get—and what we do get—is a sympathetic portrayal that doesn’t try to claim a familiarity that simply isn’t possible—again, because of the class divide. 

And lastly—and I think importantly—Chosen Spirits is also clear about the limits of individual heroic action, outside of class movements. I found that quite refreshing. I wouldn’t call it a dystopic novel, strictly speaking, but at the same time, it doesn’t try to do too much, if that makes sense. I do agree with you that some of the events felt a bit on the nose—but that could be because the book was, quite literally, taken over by events! 

 AS: As you say, the book was taken over by events. I’m generally not a fan of readings of SF that judge it by how well it “predicts the future,” but I think with near-future SF, which by its nature is extrapolating from the immediate present to some degree, it’s inevitable. (There’s a point towards the end of the book where a character, sarcastically, says “Surely if people were invading our country we would have known” and in the context of current events … [and who knows what will have happened there by the time this goes out into the world].) But I also think Chosen Spirits puts itself in that position by rooting itself so deeply in the present. The characters remember the anti-CAA/NRC/NPR protests of 2019-2020, and there are specific references to Shaheen Bagh and to particular events that one could probably put dates and times to. I know I attended at least one of those mentioned here. I know that Basu has said in his acknowledgements that this isn’t a dystopia but a “best-case scenario,” and while that’s bleak to contemplate, I think that there’s something important about the fact that it’s rooted in a revolutionary moment that is also in some ways quite utopian. I think about the definitely-utopian lyrics of “Hum Dekhenge” and other revolutionary poetry that we spent a lot of time thinking about and quoting to ourselves over the winter, and the sort of fierce pride in watching young people across the country organising, and it feels like there is a direct link between that moment and some of what is still visible in the Delhi of Chosen Spirits. 

I think this links back to what you say about the limits of individual heroic action—without wanting to assume too much about the author or his motivations, there’s an acknowledgement of collective action that feels built in at a foundational level. Perhaps it’s also why the characters with the direct, heroic arcs tend to be offstage once those arcs begin. 

Delhi's Ghazipur landfill on fire. Photo credits: The Hindustan Times.

GB: I like that you brought up the protests, which of course feature as an important historical memory in Chosen Spirits. I think that, like so many others, I watched (and occasionally participated) in those Delhi protests, suspended somewhere between hope and fear. Hope, because this kind of reclamation of the public sphere had seemed unthinkable for so long, right up until the moment that it actually happened. Fear, because of how fragile it seemed, and the consequences of failure, that seemed too momentous to even think about, let alone articulate. Ultimately, Covid-19, which also gets a mention in the novel—a post-proofs insertion, surely!—cut short that story, and so we’ll never know what would have happened had the protests continued. 

But it makes me think about how, perhaps, the best of SF (and the best of near-future SF, in particular) is actually suspended in that space between hope and fear. It illuminates what might be possible, but gives you no guarantees that we’ll get there (essentially, Heaney’s haunting poem on hope and history rhyming). That’s probably how I’d read Chosen Spirits as a “best-case scenario.” 

AS: Hope and fear, but also perhaps commitment? The book opens with a quote (translated from Urdu) by the poet Mir Taqi Mir, written (I think!) after he’d moved to Lucknow, after the repeated sacking of Delhi by Ahmad Shah Abdali. It ends: “Fate looted it and laid it desolate, / And to that ravaged city I belong.” My own love of Delhi is often mournful, but also quite stubborn. In the face of all the evidence (that the city is brash, rude, unsafe for women, so polluted you can barely breathe, so hot you can barely survive), I find myself wanting to defend it and claim it and love it anyway. And I think that claiming and being claimed can be a source of real power. 

GB: Well, I’ve always found that the SF that has moved me deeply has been, in different ways, about difficult loves: belonging and commitment through hostility. Two recent examples are Arkady Martine’s A Memory of Empire and Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire (damn, I hadn’t actually put them together and noticed the common word before!). I was up late at night, shivering, through both. To circle back to something we began with: maybe what makes Delhi such a wonderful terrain for SF is, above all else, that difficult love! 

How did you get your start on the editing team at Strange Horizons?

In 2015 and, even more so, 2016, I suddenly had a lot of work appear in SH, in multiple departments. I participated in a couple of book club roundtable discussions, wrote some book reviews and a few essays for a regular column, and sold not one but two short stories—”Sweet Marrow” and “Applied Cenotaphics in the Long, Long Longitudes”—which came out within a few months of each other. I think SH was quite saturated with me by mid-2016. I was everywhere, like an insidious jingle at the supermarket. I imagine this is how I got onto the shortlist of potential new fiction editors, which was happening at roughly the same time. Kate and Niall asked me if I wanted to try it and I said yes, because of course I did. 

Vajra Chandrasekera

What’s your take on the process of publishing a short story with Strange Horizons, and what parts do you play in the process?

The fiction editors (Lila, Cassie, Rasha, and me) and several dozen first readers all read incoming submissions, of which there are about six or seven thousand a year on our current schedule, and make preliminary selections. The editors then review those selections and make final decisions. Sometimes we ask authors to revise something and resubmit, but this is relatively rare. Once we’ve argued over the shortlisted stories and decided which ones to buy, one of us will handle it from that point onward for contracts, edits, prepping it for publication, and so on. I think this is a fairly typical workflow for a contemporary online magazine. 

Do you know how many pieces you’ve had a hand in during your time with Strange Horizons? What makes you excited to work on a story that comes in?

About a hundred stories so far, of which about eighty are published. I have probably sent ten thousand rejections. I like to think I’ve contributed to making SH’s fiction a little weirder during this time. I like odd, powerful, difficult voices, and the stories that make me happiest to read are the kind where I suddenly realize I’ve read the whole thing before even remembering to think critically about it. It’s fascinating to be an editor who is also a working writer. You get to see how very differently other writers handle scenes and sentences, or how they come up with lines or images that would never have occurred to you. 

You’ve published over 80 pieces since 2012—what got you hooked on writing in general, and speculative fiction in particular? 

My father was a writer, and simply assumed that I too would grow up to be a writer. He advised me only against making it a primary occupation, because there was no money in it. Get a regular job, he would say, but write your books in your own time. It was also his advice that I should write in English, not Sinhala (as he mostly did), and also that nobody cares about long flowery descriptions of the light of the sun on the water and that one should just get on with the plot. He was himself best known for a kind of acerbic, witty, fast-moving, contemporary realist fiction that drew heavily from his own (complicated, eventful) life and featured many caricatures of real people (family, acquaintances, co-workers) who hated this and wished he would stop—nothing at all like the kind of thing I write, really. He died a few years before I published my first short story. I don’t think he ever stopped taking it as a given that I was a writer, though. Even in the long years when I didn’t write a single word and was trying to focus on entirely different careers, he would ask me out of the blue what I was writing lately.

Speculative fiction was my own obsession. I was drawn to it young, for the usual reasons: the wonder and the sense of possibility; the pleasantly dizzying double-vision of reading something that is simultaneously exactly what it says it is but also obviously about something else altogether; the cool ideas, imagery, and aesthetic. I’ve grown a finer appreciation of style and other mysteries over the years, and every year my own sense of what is speculative is broader, but I think the reasons are still the same.

What are some of your current non-Strange Horizons projects?

I’m working on a novel. This is not the first one I’ve started, and if I finish it, it won’t be the first one I’ve finished. I’m yet to finish a book and like it enough to consider trying to have it published, though. I would describe it, but—well, I don’t subscribe to many writerly superstitions but this one I am a firm believer in: I try to never describe a work in any detail before it’s finished, preferably not before it’s published, and ideally, not even then. 

I’m also working on (*checks the drafts folder*) four short stories right now. There are always at least a couple in there.

What’s one thing you feel strongly about right now, in the writing community or otherwise?

I’ve been thinking about the uselessness and irreplaceability of art, more than ever in these apocalyptic times. There are so few things about our horrible species that might be said to have been good: that we loved, that we mourned, and that we had art. Those are all things that we can still learn to do better.

What fiction has inspired you recently? 

So far it’s been a year of reading mostly fantasy, including relatively recent books (I have enjoyed novels by Evan Winter, Fonda Lee, and Leigh Bardugo this year, among others) but also catching up on some classics that have been on my to-read stack for years. Earlier this year I finally read Bujold’s Chalion books, including the more recent Penric novellas, and am now midway through Delany’s Nevèrÿon books, which are exhilarating. I’ve read rather a lot of Bujold but I actually have not read much Delany. 

I’ve long had this problem with writers like Delany, Michael Cisco, M. John Harrison: I read their books and enjoy them too much, the sentences and the stories and the strangeness, because they are so good it seems that they ought not to exist. Books like that are beautiful and incredible to encounter as not only a reader but a writer, because they blow past the borders of what you thought was possible in prose fiction, never mind permissible, with such intent and power that you are forced to remember—and this is always like waking and remembering that you did know this already, but only in a dream—that those seeming borders of possibility, which will congeal around you at the slightest opportunity, are not real.

But because of that intensity and unreality, I then keep putting their other books off for a perfect day of reading, because they are surely too good to be read in a mundane fashion but must be ritually enjoyed only when the moon is in the correct phase, and so on. And of course this perfect day never comes, so these books don’t get read, even though they are the books that I most want to read. So now I am trying to … not do this thing, and part of that is that a week ago I just sat down and started reading Nevèrÿon, like an animal, on a deeply imperfect day. 

Last one: you use the same banner image across your social media and website: “Allegory of Death and Fame,” an engraving by Agostino Musi in 1518. What draws you to this image?

I love that it’s so stark and yet so unclear. Is it “just” a set of skeletons and desiccated nudes arranged in a fanciful way, intended for an unpublished book of anatomy? Is it an argument between winged death and the mourners for the dead? Is death pointing out something in his book like he’s referring to the manual? Also, it looks cool as hell.

“Allegory of Death and Fame,” Agostino Musi

Romie Stott: I think we may be in different time zones. (I’m on the US East Coast.) What is the room like where you are, when you are working on Strange Horizons? If I wanted to picture you at your computer, what’s the chair like? Are there windows? What color are the walls?

Joyce Chng: I am in the study room I share with my spouse. I face the window, so sunlight comes in bright and lovely. My walls are white, but I hang plants on them to make the room more cheerful. Also a lot of books. We have many shelves in the study room.

RS: I have … not enough shelves. I have books stacked in front of books, books stacked on the floor. What kind of plants? I have a lot of the usual suspect houseplants (ivies and polka dots and Spathiphylla), but am always also trying to grow things which are not at all appropriate for my fairly northern climate, like a very spindly and much-babysat key lime tree. Most of them are out on my balcony at the moment since I’m in one of the few warm-enough months for that. Rather than making me feel domestic, my houseplants make me feel like a discredited Victorian scientist (discredited because I will sometimes confidently declare that a tomato is growing when it is not a tomato).

On the subject of books, I’m currently mostly reading Authority by Jeff Vandermeer (middle book of the Southern Reach trilogy, the sequel to Annihilation), but am also varying stages of midway through Vicky Swanky is a Beauty, The Octopus Museum, Oceanic, and Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down? (poetry collections) and Red Orchestra (nonfiction), plus a book club re-read of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

My to-read bedside stack when I get to the end of Southern Reach is A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe, Recursion, and Children of Ruin, probably in reverse order. Then probably the Daevabad Trilogy, which I’m waiting to buy until I’ve read more of the books I already have, but am currently looking at a lot of fan art about and thereby reading vicariously. I don’t have a lot of time for reading right now that’s not work-related (I read a lot of news and current events stuff for my day job, and obviously read a lot of poetry submissions when I’m on desk), so it’s something I wind up approaching like a long-term strategy campaign.

JC: My spouse and I are geeks (nerds?). The books you see in the study are just a quarter of the number of books. We have the wall of books outside, where we keep our RPG books and other assorted stuff. Plus our shelves where we keep our favorite books and books that make an impact in our lives. I am currently reading Warhammer 40k books and nonfiction (horses and plants!) books.

I used to have air plants but they died … . So spouse got me plastic ones. They are pretty, but I’d rather have live ones (one day!). I have more plants outside. We live in an apartment block, and our unit fortunately occupies the corner, where we can grow container plants. I have a Norfolk pine—currently spindly, but growing OK. I am growing local herbs which thrive in the humid weather. The rosemary is bravely hanging on.

RS: I salute you. I still haven’t figured out how to behave appropriately toward pine or rosemary, or for that matter succulents. I suspect I don’t water them enough since I don’t see their leaves getting droopy. I suspect there is a parallel here to my style as a poetry editor, in that I find it very easy to tell people why their poem is good (giving them water when droopy), but am less helpful if they want advice on how a poem should be changed. I don’t know, small cactus in a pot. You seem to be going in many jabbing directions for reasons I don’t pretend to know more about than you do.

JC: I realize with plants, I work best with tropical plants who thrive in the humid temperatures. And I think you are right in saying that there are parallels to our styles as editors. I work best with strengths and will amplify the strengths (add more water, remove those weeds, etc.).

RS: I meandered through your blog a second ago (the one linked in your staff bio), because I love a personal blog. Discovering blog circles in 1998 is when I decided I liked the internet. It seems like in the last six months, you’ve released several YA dragon books (am I miscounting, because it seems like wow), had a cancer scare, and drawn a lot of mice (drawings which I like very much).

I was intrigued by this item on a May to-do list of yours: “2. Draw Mice. (Duan Wu Jie falls on the 25th of June).” What’s the connection between the Dragon Boat Festival and mice? Does it have to do with your books about dragon-racing, or is it something else I would immediately understand if I lived in Singapore instead of a Texan-Italian household in Massachusetts?

JC: Yeah, I have too many dragon books (LOL). Yes, I had a cancer scare (and thank goddess I am OK). The Mice? Well, one of my sidelines is illustrating Mid-Autumn Mice, inspired by Mid-Autumn Festival. The Mid-Autumn Mice was the product of me coping with stress at work (when I was teaching), and it took off from there. From there onward, I started drawing the Mice in all the Chinese festivals, not just Mid-Autumn Festival.

I love dragons, hence you see them everywhere. Not directly related to the dragon-racing YA I write—but did inspire a little. For my dragon-racing YA, I was more influenced by the Pernese dragons, a bit of RPG, and just … fun? I actually pitched (yet another) dragon-racing series to Serial Box—I should really stop my dragon thing and focus on werewolves instead.

Am wondering about editing styles? Should we talk about our editing styles?

RS: As poetry editor, my approach is mostly curatorial—it parallels running an art gallery. I spend most of my time choosing which pieces to accept. I read everything that comes in during my reading period, narrow it down to the poems I like best, and then make a further decision about what of that group makes an interesting mix—I’m not likely to accept three Snow White poems in the same batch even if they’re all very good, unless we’re doing a Snow White special issue.

Once accepted, it’s very rare for me to change anything in a poem unless the poet asks me to; my challenge during the galley/proof stage is often more about how I’ll code unusual formatting to override the website’s style sheets (when, say, a poem has an indented line mid-paragraph) without mucking up the experience of people who use screen readers or might need to resize the text.

It’s a balancing act. A poem is simultaneously words with literal meanings, an auditory experience, and a visual presentation. Poets may use things like line breaks and extra spaces as a form of punctuation (auditory) or to make a picture or symmetry (visual) or both. Poems often push the boundaries of language, or play with the limits of verbal or textual expression; they are often antithetical to the regularization of prose style guidelines. This means having to find bespoke solutions for a lot of our poems, and then having to figure out how to hook each of those up to the wonderful safety nets we use to keep the website accessible.

Accessibility editor Clark Seanor is almost a member of the poetry department, given how often Clark and I, together or separately, are sitting there looking at something and trying to figure out how to describe something or warn about something that’s deliberately ambiguous, or that’s supposed to have a secret puzzle meaning. I get a lot of messages from Clark along the lines of “is this broken or did you break this on purpose.” It’s a fair question and I usually have to go check.

What is your process as an articles editor? Are you picking topics and then finding people to write about them? Are you choosing between pitches that come in? How much shaping do you do of a piece that comes in, and how long, usually, is the journey from conception to publication? Have any pieces under your watch happened especially quickly or taken an unusually long time?

JC: Mmmm, what is my process as an articles editor? I pick topics and then find people to write about them. Likewise, I will also pick up any pitches given to me. The most recent I edited was an article for the Chosen Family issue. It came from a pitch/sub.

I use my background as a teacher when it comes to shaping a piece. I am strict but also gentle—that’s the same way I marked. Plus, I have an editing background from when I quit teaching the first time and I worked at a publishing house, editing textbooks. Each writer is different, so I have to be sensitive to them too.

The journey from conception to publication takes about half a year, or less than that—three to four months. The writer writes the article, sends it to me; I do a read-through and give feedback, send it back; writer sends back revised version. I will also develop the article if it has the potential to be so much better and impactful. (The joys of Track Changes—I make comments, highlight the portions that need tightening or elaborating.)

Most of the pieces under my watch (roundtables and articles) happen fairly quickly (give or take life intervening and throwing curveballs—so I do give leeway). Only one roundtable took an exceptionally long time, because one of the correspondents was busy (family/health issues).

RS: I’m looking forward to the Chosen Family special. That’s the end of this month, right? And then at the end of August, we have the big twentieth anniversary special, which has me thinking about how and when I joined Strange Horizons.

It was a while ago, in 2012, and I don’t trust my memory. I know it was before we switched to the current website layout, and I saw a little "hey, we’re looking to add another poetry editor" notice up in the corner of the main page, where memos from the editor in chief used to go. I’d showed up to read the current issue and wasn’t particularly looking for an editing job.

I pointed it out to a friend who I thought would be interested, and the friend said, "ummmmm, I think they’re looking for somebody more like you, person who has had a poem published in Strange Horizons and who just spent several years running the nonfiction half of a beloved and recently discontinued online-only science fiction magazine." Which, it turned out, yes.

(The defunct webzine, Reflection’s Edge, is now mostly lost to memory, partly because some ransomware took down the archive. It and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet were the main places to go for slipstream fiction in the mid-2000s. We did good work, at RE, but it was before Kickstarter, Patreon, Ko-fi, and the rest, and we could never work out a sustainable funding model. We made plans a few years ago to bring it back as a book imprint, but it’s another of those familiar "exceptionally long time because one of us had family/health issues" situations. I still think it could happen. We’ll see.)

I just pulled up my old archived application/interview emails, in which I say I think Strange Horizons publishes the best speculative poetry (still true); that I will make it my priority to improve our reputation with audiences that don’t yet realize that speculative poetry is great (still true); and that I’m a hard sell on Greek mythology poems because they’ve been overdone (still true).

I also complimented a Strange Horizons poem by AJ, who I hadn’t met, and didn’t know was also about to be hired as a poetry editor. Their most recent book of poems is right this moment on my bedside table. So maybe I have a hard time remembering back then because it is identical to now and I haven’t changed at all, which is either depressing or a testament to my strength of character.

How did editorship at Strange Horizons begin for you?

JC: Way back in 2016, Ness asked me if I would like to be an articles/nonfiction editor at SH. I said yes, and we had a short interview with Niall. Then editorship began…

(My answer is so short!)

I wish, though, that there were more Southeast Asian editors—especially Southeast Asians from Southeast Asia! (Yes, this is a call for more SEA rep in editorial positions.) There is Jaymee Goh (at Tachyon) and Daphne Lee (Scholastic Asia). But I would like to see more!

RS: Well—agreed! Publishing industry, take notice.

Becca Evans: Hey Catherine! Let’s do some talking about some stuff! I figure we can introduce ourselves to the lovely readers and then go from there!

I'm a very recent graduate (just earned my master's degree) from the States, currently in job-search mode. I’ve been working with SH for … about a year now, first as an Accessibility Editor, then as an intern, and now as an AE and as part of the Development/PR team!

Catherine Krahe: Ugh, job searching is terrible and I wish you strength. I’ve been with Strange Horizons since 2011 or so; there’s a Staff Spotlight with Ness that has more timeline information. I’ve only worked with Fiction, though, so I’m really interested to hear what you’ve been up to. 

BE: Ooh, yeah! I started working with Clark, training up on AE stuff and adding content warnings to back issues last June. I love it—I get to read all the cool stuff and make it more welcoming for people who are meandering through our incredibly large repository of stories. My research focus in grad school was accessibility in online publishing spaces, and when I saw the call for AEs on SH’s website (while I was in the middle of conducting an accessibility study of twenty-nine different speculative fiction magazines' websites), I knew I wanted to get into that.

For my master’s program, we’re allowed (and encouraged) to do a three-hundred-hour internship, rather than a traditional thesis. Since I was already working with SH, and it was already perfect for what I was looking for (publishing, SFF, the works), I asked Ness if ve’d be interested in having me on for more stuff. I did a ton of stuff … I could go on for a really long time, but suffice to say I really enjoyed the work! Towards the end of everything, Ness, Kate, and I had a meeting about the fund drive, and I offered to help out with the drive, and Development/PR in general, because … I was bored, and anxious about job-hunting, and it was something I felt I could positively contribute to in the crazy that is the world right now. I could ramble on forever about what I do, because I really do love it, but the AE work is definitely the closest thing to my heart.

CK: What does accessibility mean in this context? I did a bit of that early in my time here—making sure that the alt text for illustrations embedded in a story worked—but have happily handed off that responsibility. 

BE: I think of it as making content, technology, and information available and usable for as many people as possible. This includes everything from making sure that web pages and text are screen reader friendly to having audio recordings of text (and transcripts of audio), to making sure that the colors used in websites have enough contrast to be easily seen by low-vision viewers, and more.

Content warnings are a tool we use to help our readers protect themselves from potential triggers, and I view that as a huge part of SH's work to keep our issues accessible and safe for our readers.

CK: Yeah, the first story we used them on was at the author’s request. What’s the most not-obvious accessibility tweak you’ve made? Not in terms of how it affects the site or the content, but in terms of how someone like me, who hasn’t given this a ton of thought, would be surprised that it’s a thing, I guess? (I used to work in special ed and part of my job was figuring out how to make jobs more doable for my students, sometimes in weird-to-onlookers ways.)

BE: Hm, I’m not sure. Most of what I’ve done so far is go in and analyze other websites for their “levels” of accessibility … but I’d say the thing that people just don’t think about, in terms of making their website accessible, are images that they are using to convey information. So a graphic, for instance, that lists an important event’s date or time—but they don’t have that date and time actually written out on the page in text, just in the graphic. If that information is not included in the ALT text, screen readers can’t read it, and low-vis users will miss it. 

CK: I ran into that some when I worked with a blind student who needed adapted graphics and such. It’s frustrating.

BE: It really is. And until people are constantly thinking about accessibility, and making their websites accessible from the start, it’s not going to get any better. 

CK: Because for able-bodied typical-senses me, the most annoying thing about the website is that I have to keep loading the archives to read further back. 

And it’s not actually that hard to do things like have adjustable font sizes in a program or shapes and colors in a game, or captions, or any of that. But here I am explaining your job to you. Solidarity argh?

BE: Ha, yeah, once I get started it’s hard to stop. And yeah, this stuff is relatively easy to implement, if you’re doing it from the start! But a lot of people tend to think “eh, we’ll add that in later,” and then you have a lot of work to do, and you’ve already done so much, so they quit. Argh!

CK: ARGH!

BE: Anywho, what about you? What do you do when you’re not staring in awe at fund drive numbers?

CK: Partly I want people to know what you do, which is why I led with that. We didn’t just luck into the accessibility we have, we (meaning you) made it happen.

Outside of my SH work, lately … not much? I swear, I used to be interesting, I used to do things, then *gestures at everything* and now mostly what I’ve accomplished this week is overdue fund drive work and reading submissions during my night shift work. Also adjusting to night shift. 

My work is essential and hospital-based (no patient care, but lab work) which means my daily life didn’t change much with the beginning of the pandemic. But my usual SH work schedule was to be outside my house, especially after meeting with a craft group on Saturdays, and I just couldn’t adapt for a couple months.

I like crafting, though like most people I’m better at coming up with ideas for projects than at completing them. 

BE: RELATABLE.

CK: At some point, I’m going to do a good-sized embroidery piece with little cute garden plots full of vegetables and flowers and one in the center with hummocks of dirt and a dead bird with LAY THINE EYES UPON IT AND SEE THAT IT IS BARREN as a banner.

BE: That sounds absolutely amazing! I cross-stitch (I want to get into embroidery, but the free-flowing aspect scares me; I like the x’s.), and finishing projects can be a chore sometimes. I haven’t been able to craft in a while because of everything going on and my own lack of energy, but I am working on a piece that will go to one of our lucky Grab Bag tier backers!

CK: Design is always the hard part with me—I’m a messing-with person when it comes to patterns and almost always change something. With embroidery, I haven’t found other designers that match my aesthetic perfectly, though some come close, so I end up doing a lot of doodling and trying to make letters curve the right way. 

BE: I’ve been playing with a design for a cross-stitch tattoo I really want, but I have a similar problem. The photos of cross-stitch tattoos I’ve found aren’t exactly what I want, but I’m having trouble translating what I actually want into a workable design (eventually, I want a whole sleeve of cross-stitch flowers/trees with at least two bees and a cat in there somewhere). 

CK: A friend of mine has an embroidery tattoo with stitched things she likes on it and the needle tucked into the work because it’s not finished yet. Cross-stitch might not be the best medium to translate to a tattoo because of the 'X'iness. I don’t know, I don’t have tattoos or any real knowledge of them.

BE: It’s so tricky! Translating thread work to permanent ink is weird … but cross-stitch has been part of my life for a really long time, and I just love the idea of it. One day I’ll figure it out!

CK: And I’d forgotten that not everyone goes for the tiniest possible stitches. 

BE: Yeah, I think it’s easier if you think of it as the pattern, rather than the product, if that makes sense?

CK: Super does.

CK: Besides the crafting, I read a troubling amount of fanfic—in the sense that it has had actual effects on my professional life, not in a moral sense—and haven’t managed a book in weeks. And that was a pair of mid-nineties Harlequins from a Little Free Library, picked up because they would not give me feels. 

BE: I’ve also been reading what is probably a troubling amount of fanfic for the past few weeks! But I also work at a local comic shop (super small, I get paid in books rather than money sort of deal), so I’m never short on anything to read. Lately I’ve enjoyed a contemporary King Arthur-mixed-with-fantasy-order-keepers books (Once & Future, by Kieron Gillen) and one of DC’s recent YA graphic novels, You Brought Me the Ocean (which, despite DC’s whole … thing, right now, is a neat queer comic).

CK: I keep meaning to try comics again, as more than a daily-update thing, but I am very, very text-oriented. I need practice to remember to look at the pictures. Ursula Vernon’s Digger is amazing—most things she does are—and I recently sent an eight-year-old friend Simpson’s Phoebe and Her Unicorn, which he thought was hilarious.

BE: The Phoebe series is a bestselling series for a reason! Kids love it. 

CK: I barely managed to get it in the mail because I started reading it. Then the library closed before I could check it out on my own.

BE: I miss the library so much *sobs*.

CK: Same. Not just because it was where I did my SH work and also had three Pokestops and a gym right where I could reach them.

BE: But those are definitely great bonuses! I stopped playing Pokemon Go after a bit, but I have been playing the phone version of Animal Crossing (Pocket Camp), because I don’t have a Switch. It’s the “friends” aspect that I think gives me the most joy; I haven’t been able to see any of my cohort from grad school in a while, and we were super close, so having the semester go virtual was rough. 

CK: I am still sort of playing Pokemon Go, but not as much as I was. The things that have been changed to make it still work with shutdowns make it harder for me to get into it. I have really enjoyed seeing people playing Animal Crossing and the low-stakes joy it’s bringing to the world.

Meanwhile, when I play video games, I play Don’t Starve, the Dark Souls of Animal Crossing.

BE: I don’t think I’ve heard of that one, what is it?

CK: You wake up on an island, you gather food, you make a torch or fire because the darkness will eat you, you avoid monsters and eventually build a camp and farms and such. Then winter comes. Then spring comes, which is worse. No lives, so if you die you die. I’m no longer at a point where I’m spending six hours a day playing it, but I still enjoy it some. If nothing else, there are adorable beefalo who only sometimes go into season and kill you.

BE: Aww, beefalo! That sounds like a ton of fun.

CK: THEY ARE FURRY AND MAKE MOO NOISES. 

BE: I’ve never seen them BUT I LOVE THEM.

 … I have now seen them, and I LOVE THEM EVEN MORE.

CK: This is my reaction to all dogs ever.

BE: I’m dogsitting for a friend right now, and the constant contact with a dog is a balm for the soul.

CK: Yeah, my cat has been thrilled at this night shift thing.

BE: My cat looooves that I’ve been home a lot more during all of this. She has some anxiety issues (and some medical issues on top of it) so it has also been really nice for me to keep a closer eye on her. Going back to “normal” after this will be strange. 

CK: Wait, what is normal? I don’t even remember any more. Some of that is that I’m still going out to work, but some of it is … when was March again? How many years have passed? Which near-Biblical plague are we on this time?

(Actually, can we get a rain of frogs? No, let’s go straight to bees. Rain of bees. We need more bees.)

BE: Yes, I agree. All the bees. Think of the honey.

CK: Now I’m back to being faintly depressed about the state of the world and my place in it. What’s a recent uplifting or favorite thing of yours?

BE: On a very small level … strawberries were on sale this week, so now my entire fridge smells wonderful! And on a slightly higher level, I got a confirmation email about my diploma mailing out this week!

CK: Congratulations!

BE: Thanks! What about you? Any lovely moments or funny memories?

CK: Weekends are tough for me lately because of the lack of structure, but it’s been good to see people remembering their favorite parts of SH on the Twitter feed. Especially because there’s so much variety with twenty years of archives to go through! 

BE: It really has! And it has been a wonderful excuse to read all of them. I can even say I’m doing it for “work”!

CK: There’s a great feeling when other people like something I’ve worked on—it’s not like we put our names on the stories, after all. I helped with that! I too think it is a great story! It was so much fun to work on you have no idea!

And then I think of things before I came on board, like “Tomorrow Is Waiting” from 2011, which is just … gentle, low-stakes joy. 

BE: *scurries off to go open it up to read later*

CK: How many tabs do you have open with recommended SH pieces?

BE: Between my laptop and my phone … about twenty! Which is really on the nose, but it’s true!

CK: I have a bunch of Spanish Samovar stories in tabs right now, mostly to see if I’ve retained enough of the language to be helpful as a first reader for our Mexicanx special issue. I do not hold out a great deal of hope.

BE: I failed so bad at high school Spanish I switched to Latin in college, and, uh, let’s just say foreign languages aren’t my strong suit.

CK: I love that Samovar publishes original and translated versions.

BE: It’s really, really lovely. I need to read more of Samovar, because I really admire what the team does with it! (hint hint, dear readers).

CK: Likewise. There’s so much good going on.

BE: Well, as a sign off for our wonderful readers, and a special thank you to our backers, who have helped us hit our stretch goals to maintain our pay rates in the coming year—

CK: —and special issues!

BE: (I’m so bad at endings)

CK: Our editorial meetings end with ritual call-and-response of "bats" so honestly, this is fine. 

Thank you, everyone who reads and supports Strange Horizons. You make this possible—you have made this possible for twenty years now, and every year, we try to make our genre wider and stranger and more inclusive. We couldn’t do it without you. Please take care of yourselves and each other.

For the Strange Horizons 2020 Fund Drive, a conversation between Art Directors Heather McDougal and Dante Luiz. They discuss speculative fiction, fashion, artistic dreams, and inspirations.

Heather McDougal: Dante, tell me about working at Strange Horizons. How did you get here?

Dante Luiz: I started reading Strange Horizons several years ago. My partner would read some of the stories out loud for me while I worked on our comics—we still do this to this day with any kind of story. Eventually, I saw that you were searching for a buddy in the art department and thought hey, I love this magazine, the aesthetics resonates with me, I could do this? I didn't really have any hopes of being chosen, but then you e-mailed me back and the rest is magic. I'm loving every minute of it.

HM: Yeah, I was hired when SH had never had an Art Director before, I had to do an interview with Niall Harrison and what felt like the whole staff. It was terrifying!

DL: I can imagine! Can you tell us a bit about yourself outside of Strange Horizons?

HM: Sure! I live in California, I have an MFA in sculpture from California College of Arts and Crafts, which was a very conceptual degree, lots of theory in among the welding and so on. I've traveled all over the world, and lived in the UK and Japan, and I like to make things.

Midsummer Night's Dream fairy, by Heather McDougal

I was raised in a craft school called Big Creek Pottery, where people came from all over the US (and sometimes further afield) to live with us for eight or nine weeks in the summer and learn pottery. It was a pretty crazy way to grow up, all these people making stuff and talking about it, singing and showing slides and reciting poetry in the evenings. We always had musicians and poets passing through, and lots of interesting conversation around the dinner tables. It was pretty terrible to go from that to school, where everyone was really conservative and had flat-top haircuts.

I started my art career by going to fashion school, which is why I know how to make patterns—and why I also make tents—and after working in the garment industry for a few years, I went back to school to get my BA. Then, when I was thirty, I went to grad school.

After grad school is when I started writing. I was in my mid-thirties and unemployed, sending endless resumes out. I had had a miscarriage, and it hemorrhaged for about six weeks, and I just felt like everything was going out, out, out. I felt like I was slowly fading away, but I hung onto a thing my advisors had said, that my thesis was the best one they'd ever read.

So I started writing. I'd always been a writer, even as a kid, but this was the first time I'd actually done it with any seriousness, and I actually started a novel that began with that sense of mourning. And it got me through. So that's how I ended up at the cross-section of art and writing. Nowadays, I mostly do graphics work and costume work, as well as my tents. And writing, of course.

How about you, Dante?

DL: What an interesting background, Heather! I can definitely relate to the intersection of art and writing.

“Saligia” by Dante Luiz

I was born and raised on an island in Southern Brazil, and always loved to draw, but my father was a great inspiration in this sense. He not only read a lot of sci-fi, nonfiction, and history, but he invented things—devices and small robots with pieces he found in the trash, as we didn't have the money to buy any of that. This led him to build his own computer in the late ’90s, in a time where most Brazilians didn't have access to the internet, and for me to begin writing and creating at a young age. More than having a particular connection with art, I was stimulated to read, create, and do many different things, never focusing on perfecting a single one. Today, I work mainly with comics, which is a perfectly multimedia enough for my tastes.

So, Heather, now that we both talked a bit about our stories—how did you start getting involved with speculative fiction? Is it an old passion, did it happen along the way?

HM: Oh, ha, I had a number of things point me in the SFF direction. Since I grew up way out in the middle of nowhere, I didn't have access to a lot of books, but I definitely had an early leaning to the more fantastic forms of storytelling. My dad liked science fiction, and read me The Hobbit when I was really young, which I loved. He also collected comics, and I read all his Carl Barks Donald Duck comics until they fell apart, to his horror. I liked the wild stories of adventure in those comics, and the way that things could be ridiculously fantastic.

At the time, American children's fiction was all about realism, and I hated it. I had these old books my parents gave me, Oz books and the Arabian Nights and Treasure Island and so on, and I read all the ones that had anything fantastical about it. And then someone gave me the Narnia books and I was lost.

But it wasn't really until I was in my early twenties that I really discovered genre. I never had the opportunity or understanding to get involved with fandoms, so it was super exciting in my thirties to find out that it was a thing, and that there were all these conventions I could go to and meet other writers.

What about you, Dante, what are your early SFF influences? And also, tell me, what kinds of art do you find inspiring?

DL: My first influences also come from my dad, who worked very briefly selling books when I was a toddler. During this period, he had access to books by classic SFF authors like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Douglas Adams, and I eventually read them as I was growing up.

Like many millennials, the Harry Potter series opened the gates of Fantasy for me, and I began reading and watching other speculative content through my teen years. I was particularly obsessed with The Songs from the Distant Earth, a book I reread hundreds of times, and a few old school animes from the ’80s that were popular in Latin America. I didn't really know at the time that there was a greater, broader genre of speculative fiction and a community attached to it; it was something I only found out as an adult, and since then I have realized how much this influenced my artistic views since the beginning.

HM: Does living in Brazil affect your art, do you think? Or do you find more inspiration online/globally?

DL: It's a complicated question because art is not seen as a serious profession in Brazil. On one hand, we have countless talented artists, inspired by each other, by popular music, by our surroundings, our architecture, our shared cultural baggage, and our nature. On the other, we are constantly told we cannot be artists; that only those who can pay will publish books (a tragically common scenario here), that you will never pay your bills just drawing, etc. There are few resources for young artists, and even fewer formal jobs if you're not related to anyone already in the field.

I feel like knowing this has shaped my views on how hard I have to (over)work and fight to make a living out of my art, which can be tiring and is one of the main reasons I started to find international jobs. I do love a lot of Brazilian art and feel very inspired by it, especially telenovelas.

What about you? How has the United States Influenced your background? Which artists inspire you the most?

HM: Well, you know, I've never really felt as connected to the US as I probably should. California is kind of a place unto itself, and being raised in such a weird artsy environment, and spending years working in other countries, made me feel like an outsider to "normal" American life. But studying art, and circulating among artists and, eventually, writers (and the SFF community) in the US has helped resolve some of this conflict.

What you describe in Brazil re: being an artist, I think is also true here in the US. People always ask, "But what do you really do?" In other words, you couldn't possibly be an artist full-time, so what's your real work? It's interesting, because when I lived in other countries like the UK, or Japan or Croatia, I found this was not their attitude at all.

Rosamond Purcell, photographer

I'm always attracted to things that are well-made (my crafts upbringing coming out)! But I'm also very interested in how people make things that we don't normally think of as aesthetic into art. For example, I love Rosamond Purcell's photography, especially the preserved things in bottles and the dried birds, things that we normally would find creepy or odd. Or Cornell's boxes: the juxtaposition of objects' color, shape, and meaning to create something out of what might be considered junk. I really love, in William Gibson's Count Zero, the wonderful tale of the art boxes that weaves through the narrative! It just … touches that part of me. I have an deep desire to understand how things are made, whether it's an engine or indigo dye or cosplay armor, and his resolution to that question was just beautiful.

On the other hand, the part of me that grew up in the woods and believed in fairies is still absolutely in love with classic illustrators like Arthur Rackham, Ivan Bilibin, and Kay Nielsen. And as I grew up I learned to love the German Expressionists' woodcuts, ukiyo-e prints, Indian folk art, and those old four-color travel and propaganda posters from Europe, Russia, and China. There is so much really elegant design out there! I try to bring some of that feeling into the illustration choices for SH, that sense of space and detail and Other Places. I remember as a kid how good illustrations were so endlessly fascinating to me as a reader, how they helped inform the story for me, and I still feel like a good illustration for a story should be something that one can come back to again and again and just get lost in. If I've commissioned art that captures the imagination like that, I've succeeded.

Tunico dos Telhados, artist

DL: I wasn't familiar with Rosamund Purcell's work. Loved her delicate portrait of decay, this kind of visual also resonates a lot with me too. I'm particularly inclined to the aesthetic of aging mansions, abandoned houses, and so on. A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to visit Ouro Preto, a Brazilian city famous for being almost untouched by time when it comes to its constructions. Most of the buildings there are dated back to colonial era, and I got particularly touched by the work of Tunico dos Telhados, who specializes in painting pictures of the rooftops of houses in the entire city. Ever since then, it's one of my favourite things to illustrate when I work with this kind of scenario.

“Sap & Seed” by Dante Luiz

HM: I had to go look up his work, but I love how much he captures the spaces of that town!
So Dante, in a perfect world, what would you like to do? What projects do you have in the works, and what have you done that you're most proud of?

DL: Not exactly a perfect-world scenario, mostly a when-I-have-the-time-in-the-distant-future scenario, but my absolute dream project is working on a biographical graphic novel about a particular duo of workers of the RMS Titanic. I love history, I adore historical nonfiction, the Titanic is a subject I'm particularly obsessed about, and since I began reading On a Sea of Glass: The Life and Loss of the RMS Titanic last year, my brain has been haunting me with this idea.

Out of my most recent work, I'm very happy with the result of a comic I drew for Toronto Comix's anthology Wayward Kindred called "Sap & Seed," written by H. Pueyo. It's a little short comic about two plant-like siblings trying to survive a deserted wasteland while their relationship slowly deteriorates, and it's one of those rare times in which you put into the world something that you say "That's it, that's how I envisioned it," which is something really rare for artists to think? Other than that, I have a longer comic coming out soon, but I can't reveal anything about it yet. What about you?

HM: Well, I think in a perfect world, I'd have a nice big studio and for part of the day, I'd make tents both as an artist and as (maybe) a company, and I'd write for some part of the day as well. It's funny, the part of my brain that comes up with detailed worldbuilding is the same part that is able to envision how to make, say, a house, or a tent, or a giant Questing Beast costume.

Spiral Tent by Heather McDougal

I'm working on a series of novellas right now that take place on the ranch where I grew up, except it's a portal fantasy, and the Other Side is really the alternate version of that home-landscape I used to visit in my dreams. So I have a big map on the wall in my writing shed and I've got this whole multi-generational family saga worked out. I'm fascinated with how magic, and being able to go through a portal for however long—and then come back to the same instant—might distort family interactions, roles, secrets, etc.

I think the things I'm proudest of at the moment are actually 1) a tent prototype I designed and made. Getting it to work was a really hard journey of trial and error and sheer design intuition. And it's beautiful! I'm super happy with it … and now I have to make one double its size, and I'm terrified.

And 2) I'm actually writing again after a three-year dry spell. I'm finally able to world-build and play with ideas again. Getting back in that saddle was hard, and I'm super proud of myself for doing it, even though I only write about a hundred words a day at the moment.

DL: I've been writing more, too! I'm constantly bubbling with ideas for stories, but rarely have the actual drive to write them. I'm doing now a little short story about a nineteenth-century trans man who has his left hand possessed by his deceased narcissistic mother, this time for a Brazilian project I was invited to participate in. I think I'm also reading more short fiction than ever since I joined SH, and it's helped me get back to business in this sense.

You can find Heather's work at heathermcdougal.com and Dante's work at danteluiz.com.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I am very curious to know more about the process of creating content warnings, and also to talk more about the philosophy of content warnings. These are something that are fairly recent in my experience (and not a thing I’ve encountered in my academic work), so I have, I admit, had to think my way into them as a concept. 

Clark Seanor: I think something I should say first is that I didn’t come up with Strange Horizons’ approach to content warnings—I was brought on as a person who would specifically deal with them, and the system was more or less in place by that point in time. So my role initially had a lot to do with learning the existing rules and how to consistently apply them to works. This process involved—and actually still involves, as the way we use warnings sometimes needs to be adapted to the material we have on the site—a lot of discussion with other members of the editorial team about the nature of content warnings and the ideas behind why we use them, as well as finer details such as how to phrase a warning that we’ve already decided to use.

The way in which we have decided to use content warnings at Strange Horizons is based on the idea that we want to give readers more choice over what they read. If reading about certain subjects is personally difficult for you and you’d rather avoid reading works that contain them, then being able to check a list of warnings allows you to make an informed decision about whether or not you want to read that work. Without content warnings, an issue can be—will I read something today and risk reading about something I’d really rather avoid, or will I read nothing at all? 

MKS: I think your point about making an informed decision about what you are going to read is really important in understanding their function, and something I didn’t fully grasp when I first encountered them. Which is privilege showing, though also perhaps, it not having occurred to me that it was OK to be forewarned about encountering certain things. And content warnings had somehow become entangled with spoiler warnings in my mind, which wasn’t helpful as those are an entirely different species of thing. 

CS: They do serve very different functions, and I have noticed that the Reviews department doesn’t seem to use spoiler warnings—at least, not commonly, and I am wondering what is behind that choice?

Some people do consider viewing content warnings to be spoilers, and that’s effectively why we make it a choice to view them or not. If you find them useful, they’re there so you can use them, and if you don’t, they’re hidden by default.

MKS: It’s true that Reviews doesn’t have an active policy about spoiler warnings. We’re happy if reviewers want to write a spoiler warning into the text as they go but we tend as a team to lean towards John Clute’s belief that if you can’t talk about the ending should you need or want to you’re doing a disservice to the work under discussion. 

CS: I mean, I find the idea that the ending of a work is the thing you must not hear about before engaging with a work kind of arbitrary. I may be personally biased toward this concept because of how by the time I got around to seeing Fight Club and Star Wars (two things that are commonly used as examples of times where you Must Not See A Spoiler Ever Or It’s Ruined), I had already known about their major twists, but I take umbrage at the idea that being surprised by the ending is the only way you can really appreciate a story!

MKS: Me, too. Admittedly, I speak as someone who is entirely happy to skip to the end of a novel if things are getting tense, to reassure myself that X survives. There is more than one kind of review, I think. A lot of reviews are read on the understanding that they exist simply to let the reader know enough of the plot for them to decide if they want to actually read the book. And those are fine. I have written plenty of those in my time, and they are entirely valid as a thing.

But I really like to read reviews that explore a book in some detail—it’s possible I may have already read the book, and want to compare/contrast my thoughts with those of the reviewer, for example. It’s a deeper, more critical engagement, rather than something that’s simply synoptic. But those kinds of reviews aren’t as easily come by within the SFF community, outside of the academic journals. Which is one of the things I’ve always liked about Strange Horizons, that it provides a platform for reviewers and critics to take the time to write a detailed commentary, explore themes and ideas. And on that basis, we want reviewers to have the freedom to talk about the whole of the book. 

CS: I suppose I tend to read reviews in two circumstances: if I’ve already read the work and want to read commentary, or if I’m on the fence about reading it and want to get an idea about what’s in it before I start. For both of those scenarios, surface-level reviews don’t necessarily help. However, this gives me another question: when you are working with a reviewer who takes a very different stance on a work than you do, is there anything you keep in mind as an editor?

MKS: That’s a great question. First of all, the review is their review and not mine, so as an editor usually I’m not going to ask them to rewrite simply because they love or hate a book while I have an opposing view. That would be simply inappropriate on my part, and I don’t doubt Dan and Aisha would agree with me. That’s never at issue. I might on occasion be encouraging writers to express themselves more clearly or more fully, and testing the strength of what they are saying, but I’d be doing the same if someone had written something deeply appreciative of a book I adored.

But what we do tend to be looking out for, as editors, are those moments when reviewers head into “if only the writer had done this” territory, lamenting the opportunities the writer missed because they stubbornly wrote the book they wanted to write, and not the book the reviewer wanted. Or they say something, and I look at it and think “really?” Mostly, it's quite unintentional—a poor choice of words, or a phrasing that is open to misinterpretation—and that's part of what an editor is for: to save people from embarrassing situations (and I speak as a writer who wishes her younger self had been saved from such situations). But I've had sample reviews that expressed opinions that really do not fit with the Strange Horizons ethos, almost as though they’d never actually looked at Strange Horizons before sending us something, and that's when I have have to say “Thank you, but no thank you.”

And after that there is the usual copyediting, checking that they meant to use that word like that, or asking if a character really did say this. The nitpicky stuff rather than the big developmental thinking. After which, the proofreading team in turn saves us from embarrassing situations. We are notorious for being rubbish at adding serial commas. (Shoutout to the proofers, who are among the best I've ever worked with.)

So, thinking about the relationship between editor and reviewer, when the reviewer loves something the editor hates, or vice versa, how does it work for you in generating appropriate content warnings for a story if you continually bounce off it? Or if you love it to pieces?

CS: I guess a good place to start is that it’s probably more difficult for me to become attached to (or begin to despise) a work than other editors, because the point where I write content warnings is the first time that I’ve ever seen it. I’m not involved in the development process—this is by design, and one of the reasons why the Fiction and Poetry departments pass their works to the Accessibility department to have content warnings added pre-publication rather than writing them in themselves.

As well—for me, personally (Becca Evans is also involved with content warnings, but I can only speak for my own mental process)—I’m a fairly pattern-oriented person and I don’t read stories and poems that I’m writing warnings for in the same way as I read stories for pleasure or other sorts of analysis. It’s very much more about the individual elements of language used and the imagery, events, and metaphors that occur in the work than their collective whole.

This doesn’t mean I’m totally detached from what I’m reading—content warnings by a human being are, by nature, going to involve a certain level of subjectivity. If I feel unsure about applying a warning to a work then I will ask other staff for a second opinion. This is sometimes because I’ve found a work particularly emotive, but it mainly comes up if I think a warning should apply but the part of the text that I think evidences its use isn’t particularly overt.

Where subjectivity definitely comes into play is when warnings need to be added that I have difficulty spotting because I don’t have the personal or cultural context to tell 100% of the time whether they are actually applicable. A key example is the casteism warning, which I will always ask for a second opinion before using (Thanks, Vajra Chandrasekera and Aisha Subramanian for weighing in on this particular topic when it comes up, and for giving me guidance on how to tell when to ask!)

In the end, the content warning system will never be perfect—its application will never be perfect, and it will never have perfect coverage in terms of the set of warnings it actually contains. But I would really like it to be good. That’s why the way that we implement it attempts to contain the effects of subjectivity rather than pretend to totally eliminate them.

MKS: It’s genuinely interesting to learn how collaborative the business of creating content warnings is. Similarly, we often consult one another on reviews if we’re struggling with the editing process, as another pair of eyes can often provide a much-needed fresh perspective when you’ve been reading the same paragraph over and over, unable to parse the whole. 

But in describing how you personally write content warnings I’m struck by that ability to … detach oneself? … from the prose as a thing with which you directly engage in order to see it in a different way. This is a familiar experience to me as an editor, professionally and working for Strange Horizons, but I had struggled to articulate it as such. Which takes me back, then, to your earlier question about how I engage with reviews when the reviewer and I have different responses. I take the personal out of it and engage with the artefact rather than the person, if that makes sense. 

Having said that, the toughest moment comes when I have to send back editorial notes. Nothing looks worse than a manuscript with splashes of red all over it and comments all down the right-hand side, so my emails almost invariably begin “It’s not as bad as it looks.” Luckily, Strange Horizons is very fortunate in its reviewers, as they seem to (mostly) enjoy the editorial process. It can be a pretty intense kind of scrutiny, but it does produce good results. Certainly, it’s what I would want for my own writing (and I’ve been edited by Dan and Aisha in the past, so I know how it feels). 

But thinking about collaboration, I see reviewing too as a very complex dialogic process, that starts when the reviewer reads the book, then writes the review, and we embark on the editing process, after which we publish the review, and people read it. The writer Robert Minto talked in his newsletter recently, about “readers who turn to criticism after they've read a book, who want to think with someone else about a shared experience, to contextualize their reading in a larger arc of history, ideas, and aesthetic forms.” I’d like to think that’s what we’re trying to do with the reviews we publish in Strange Horizons. 

CS: That is something I appreciate reviews for: I often come to books without full understanding of the conventions of the genre or subgenre they take place in or their general context. I think that the capacity of reviews to show new ways of understanding stories I have already experienced and perhaps interpreted only through my own context is pretty incredible. It’s for that reason that I don’t usually feel qualified to write them, to be honest: whether a relatively context-free interpretation of a story is worth reading about is a question I haven’t managed to answer for myself.

MKS: It depends on what you mean by “context-free,” I think. Unless you are planning to write an entirely synoptic review, the moment you start engaging with a book, you’re putting it in a context, the context of you responding to it. If, by context, and I’m just hazarding a guess here, you mean having a deep, intimate knowledge of all the science fiction and/or fantasy ever written, then there is no one alive who can do this, and nor should they try. No one has to know the entire history of SFF to write about it, and I really hate it when people suggest that you should. This is bullshit, and makes me very angry. There is a lot of SFF that can quite happily be left nowadays to those who are interested in SF history (nothing wrong with SF history, but you don’t need to read Asimov in order to review SF of the last five years, unless it’s explicitly referencing the Laws of Robotics or some such. And possibly not even then.) Right now, I’m much more interested in reading commentary from people who are familiar with contemporary currents in SFF, and who are able to set it in the contexts of the real world and lived experience. 

CS: I suppose that hits on part of what I was talking about—I actually think I’ve had a better experience with classics I’ve read after I’ve read more contemporary books that were influenced by them, because I feel like I can see: this is where that comes from, this is where people will take it in the future. Sometimes it feels somewhat detrimental because I feel like the more contemporary books did a better job with the ideas, but generally speaking it’s a more positive experience to me to see the root of something knowing that it leads up into something more.

Funnily enough, I think roughly the same thing goes for programming languages as well. There are a certain set of people who like to promote C as the first programming language you should learn, because writing in C forces you to think about why concepts in higher-level programming languages work. The thing is, you can also learn it after you have that context. Without that, you’re more or less relying on someone telling you “trust me, this is important” while never being granted access to the wider context of why. Part of it is that I think—people who grew up with C being the best thing around and saw other things grow around it want to emulate that experience for the younger generation, because it got them where they were. But I think there are multiple directions to take.

The other part is more—as an example, I rarely read military science fiction. It’s not the direction my interests tend to lead me in. However, I’ve been absolutely floored by Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade, which I read in terms of other time-travel novels I’ve read. When I eventually went to seek out reviews, they often spoke about how it connected to military science fiction as a tradition, with the time-travel aspect as more of a footnote. My view on it—though perhaps its difference might make it interesting—is without that context that explains why that book contains what it does and reminds me somewhat of what happens when people who don’t read mystery novels think that quite normal aspects of the genre are very fresh and clever and everyone who reads mysteries goes “NO! The person who was clearly written as the villain turning out to be the villain was utterly predictable!” So it’s a bit intimidating when you don’t know what you don’t know.

MKS: Picking up on your first point, about having a better experience with the classics after reading contemporary work, this, so very much, this. And, to be honest, the contemporary novels are doing a better job with the ideas because they’ve had the chance to look at what’s gone before and thinking “Yes, I can do something with that, or about that.” It is another form of dialogue, if you like, and a lot of writers are very clear that this is what they are doing. Kierkegaard said that “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards,” almost as though he had foreseen this difficulty for readers and commentators. He makes a good point. I mean, we can’t even agree what the first true SF novel was so we can hardly start insisting people begin at the beginning!

It is, though, really important to have reviewers and commentators who are able to take a left-field approach in dealing with a novel, in the way you describe above, because that opens up whole new areas of discussion. And it really is all about the discussion. That collaborative thing again.

We’re all building on what has gone before to make something even bigger and better rather than trying to put up barriers to understanding. 

AJ Odasso: I’m going to start with “Your Oysters,” mostly because, aside from the piece of yours I published in Strange Horizons, it captured my attention first. It’s the final two lines that really did it (“a spasm of hunger open to the current, / a hinged house that anchors the shoreline to itself”), the first time I read through it—made me go back to the beginning and reread the entirety right away.

Rasha Abdulhadi: I’m still at the place in my writing life where it’s a small miracle to me that anyone reads my poems, much less has thoughts and feelings and questions about them, so this is already such a treat! My poems are honored by your thoughtful inquiry and attention. I was pleasantly surprised when you chose “Your Oysters.”

AO: The metaphor of beautiful things often having a less-than-pleasant core is definitely at the forefront, but there are subtleties to certain lines that make me think about them almost in isolation from the piece as a whole. I’d really just love to hear about what you were thinking when you wrote this, and what circumstances led to it.

RA: I tend to think of it as one of my “lighter” poems, but yeah, beauty is probably always endangered and embattled in my writing. Where it came from: as a young overachiever, I remember a high-school guidance counselor telling me that the world was my oyster. After I’d left her office having gotten absolutely no help whatsoever. I feel like so many folks have looked at me in different eras of my life with a hunger for the achievements they long for through me. And I’m a scientist at my core—it’s so early in my training, and I think about the reality of things that are used as blithe metaphors. What I know about that metaphor is that the counselor wasn’t getting sparkly-eyed about oysters: she was coveting pearls. And pearls are not produced for beauty or mating shows or for anything other than protecting the tender oyster body against a tiny irritant that can’t be expelled. So beauty comes from pain, the attempt to protect the self. I think a lot of queer and trans folks, and other folks who feel stranded on the shores of family or other conditions, know something about that move of attempted self-rescue. What I also know about oysters, not internally but in their function in the wider ecosystem, is that they help reduce shoreline erosion in some conditions. And that’s the kind of survival I long for, to be an anchor for everything around me. Not closed around pain, not producing something to be coveted and sold, but open and anchored and in relationship. That’s the story of that little poem which I usually read for laughs in the middle of the war poems before the last two lines. I’m curious what else comes to you through the poem, though, because what I mean is just the departure point and not by any means the limit of what the poem knows or can do in collaboration with a reader. What struck you about this funny little poem in particular?

AO: I actually don’t find it funny at all! The gravitas of it, at least to my perception, is what struck me the most. That, and I’m an inveterate beachcomber, but ... I felt the impact of the expectation that’s put on those of us in marginalized communities, or in multiple, to make something beautiful of our pain. Most of the time, I just flat-out refuse to let beauty be my first consideration when I’m writing poetry about the things I’ve been through. The sound of the language might be beautiful, but I’m aware that I’m daring people to look at hardships, or even agony, and not flinch. So, I think ... poems about hardship that turn expectations about what should be done with hardship always impress me. I was curious if the “anchor[ing] the shoreline to itself” bit was a reference to the erosion prevention function! I remember reading about that in an article and thinking, wow, cool. We hold our communities together whether we realize that’s what we’re doing or not.

RA: Yes, exactly! And that is the precarious, maybe even undocumented, beauty I long for. No pearls to show for it, but delicious. Maybe: it’s also about how messy it is to find beauty, how unpleasant it can be if beauty’s what you’re insisting on looking for, in making art or making work or making life. Hmm, let me not over-dissect this butterfly, but there’s maybe a lot about what I think about life in this poem. You took a sharp knife-point to it!

AO: It feels like a survival poem, too. So much of the verse I’ve written over time, I’ve written just to survive. People say survival is beautiful, but I can’t necessarily say I believe that about survival all the time, either. I truly appreciate art that’s realistic about things like this. It’s not comfortable art, but it’s true art. I don’t like art to make me comfortable, really, at least not most of the time. I don’t want it to sound like I look for suffering in everything, but I look for meaning in suffering. Making art about suffering and survival is about finding meaning, or imparting it. This poem isn’t depressing to me, though. Far from it. I enjoy art that reminds me life is only meaningless if we don’t make our own meaning.

RA: It absolutely is a survival poem. And I, too, absolutely read and wrote poetry as a young person to keep myself alive. Starting at the age of eight! I work with young people who say that poetry has saved their lives, and though it sounds like something we’d tell to funders as a sales pitch, it’s much deeper than that. I used to keep a tiny-font copy of “Life is Fine” by Langston Hughes in my wallet in high school. It became my litany for staying alive. I didn’t tell anyone about this practice until I was much older and the poem had already passed from my wallet to my memory.

AO: When I teach poetry units in writing classes, that’s one of Hughes’s poems that I almost always use! It’s such a fantastic piece. I know “The Weary Blues” is probably on every reading list out there, but students respond incredibly well, incredibly thoughtfully, to that one, too. Also: “Let America Be America Again.”

RA: Yes! “It never was America to me.” A very good antidote to some poisonous contemporary slogans. Hughes has been actively sanitized in textbooks, but his catalogue is so rich, including his very radical communist writings!

AO: It’s a pity that’s been done to his communist writings. I like giving students Emma Goldman excerpts, too, on that note—but that’s not poetry, and I’m getting off on a tangent. Although, no, that’s not true; Goldman’s prose is remarkably poetic. I really regret not being able to read it in anything but translation, at least the pieces not first written in English. Hughes is a writer whose works always take up more than one class session, and that’s as it should be.

RA: Before we move on, let me recommend that Hughes’s “Beaumont to Detroit: 1943” is a very timely poem. “Looky here, America / What you done done— / Let things drift / Until the riots come.”

AO: I feel like all of Hughes’s work is timely. Go read Hughes, everyone reading this, please. Preferably everything he’s ever written. Time beyond well spent.

RA: Here is the point where I feel responsible to offer some queer troubling, though, right? I also give honor to Zora Neale Hurston (herself a very complex figure, whew!) who was really not treated well by Langston Hughes. All the gender-troubles through history and into the present!

AO: Absolutely, it’s imperative to include discussion of Zora Neale Hurston in a discussion of Hughes. Gender trouble is something present in our discussion already to begin with, so I feel like ALL THE INTERSECTIONALITY is warranted. Or at least as much intersectionality as we can fit! How has the work of Black poets influenced your work as a poet?

RA: I owe a great debt to Black poets, and really, we all do. For me, the words of Hughes, Cullen, Giovanni, Amiri Baraka found me as a little brown kid, with a name no one could pronounce, who didn’t yet know their dad was Palestinian but who definitely needed some extra support figuring out how to be a person in the deep South. The expressive, theoretical, and historical work of Black writers and mentors (past and contemporary) still very much guides me, even as I reconnect to my own lineages and senses of indigeneity.

AO: We do, and I’d add to Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks, on my list, a Black British poet named Patience Agbabi. Her work has had such influence on what I’ve produced since about ... let me think, when did I first encounter her work while I was living in the UK, probably 2008? We owe Black poets a debt we can’t repay.

RA: I would like us to try. I long for material reparations to Black folks for all those debts. I think we are in one of those cycles where we’ll find out how much we can win!

AO: Speaking of debt and reparations, the other poem I wanted to ask you about is “Monsoon on Diné.” I live in the Southwest—New Mexico, specifically—and this poem captures the landscape, as well as the effects of colonialism on it and on the Native peoples to whom this land rightfully belongs, with such evocative clarity.  On moving here almost four years ago, I learned more about this region’s struggles from taking a single course on Diné history and culture than I could have learned from an entire, generic Southwest-focused history degree. The viewpoint that matters here is one that you speak to and honor poignantly in “Monsoon.” I’d like to know more about the conversations you had with Brett, whom you thank at the start of the poem, as you must have learned a great deal from him, too.

RA: Where to start? This poem is an unpaid IOU. It feels tender to talk about it from a place of wanting to be in good relation with the folks who offered so much. Brett is a member of the Iowa tribe of Kansas and Nebraska and was visiting our host on Diné nation, Robert Johnson, then a youth leader in food security movements. I was in a national cohort of youth leaders in the food security field(s, literally), organized by the Food Project in Boston, who were visiting to learn about Diné and Hopi nations’ work to reclaim traditional agricultural methods and crops, and through those, to reclaim sovereignty. From visiting Robert and Brett, I learned to have a different relationship with the deserts in my own lineages, to feel safe and well-resourced in the desert, to be angry at anyone who used the desert as a metaphor for a lack or absence. There are a couple of other unpublished poems I wrote during that visit that map these understandings. Those poems would need to be revised carefully before publishing. I feel very responsible not to write about something that is not my part to share, and I’m still not sure if I got it right here. Some non-Diné folks have written about traditional bioecologies and plant medicine of the Southwest using what they’ve learned for free from folks on the reservation, and then those folks haven’t shared that work or that money back with Diné people. This poem is also tucked inside the folds of another poem of mine, “is Palestine,” in the deep pocket of my anger at stolen water across landscapes and indigeneities.

AO: I offer my thanks to Robert and Brett, too, for their generosity to you (and everyone with whom they come in contact, I’m certain). Poets and writers from the Pueblo Nations here in the Southwest are people whose work I’ve attempted to support to the greatest extent I can afford (and that my bookshelf can hold). Desert landscapes are anything but barren.

RA: Indeed! AJ, I’d love to turn to your work—thank you for sharing it so generously with me! I’m curious about The Sting of It as a book—this is your third book-length collection of poetry, yes?

AO: The Sting of It is my third poetry collection, yes, although I’ve lately been questioning where my first two collections stand in comparison length-wise! Lost Books and The Dishonesty of Dreams were published by an independent UK imprint, Flipped Eye, in 2010 and 2014 respectively. Each of those volumes is only 50-60 pages in length, which I guess is the lower end for classification as a collection (what I’m starting to wonder, though, is if they’re actually more like long chapbooks). The Sting of It is my first book with a US imprint, Tolsun Books, and it’s just under one hundred pages ... ninety-six, or something like that. So, as a starting comparison, it’s definitely much longer than the first two!

RA: The line between chapbook and book feels like a place of creative interpretation, and I am of the opinion that you get to count them as you deem fit. Would you talk a bit more about the character of this third collection in the context of the other two you’ve published?

AO: The Sting of It was more consciously crafted as a cohesive volume over a much shorter period of time, the 2015-16 academic year when I was simultaneously pursuing my MFA in Creative Writing and on a teaching fellowship at Boston University. The back half of the book, roughly, is my MFA poetry thesis; it started out with the title Things Being What They Are. The first half of the book, I added after the fact, but those poems are definitely the ones I was writing in the couple years immediately leading up to my MFA. The previous two collections, in contrast, sort of batch together more disparate poems written over 3-4 year periods of time. These books carry thematic similarities across the board—retrieval of lost texts and artifacts, the body as a site of excavation and inscription, anomalies of biology and their intersection with gender identity, and miniature reworkings of/allusions to myths.

RA: Those mythologies definitely peek through into the stories of personal life.

AO: The Sting of It really tightens its focus on the body as a text, a place where illnesses and anomalies are interpreted for better or for worse. It tells a more cohesive story of who I am, who members of my family are, and how the past five years or so have been incredibly challenging at both the level of my personal life and at the level of family life. Mythologies hold it all together.

RA: I appreciate how the speculative becomes so personal in this collection. You have three poems that were published in Strange Horizons before you became editor (or at least were selected for publication). Of those, I was really taken with “The Book of Drowned Things” in particular, which felt like maybe a seed crystal or a thesis statement poem, one that has within it the themes, images, or elements that a whole book or even a whole body of work might wrestle with. And then, when I read The Sting of It, I found this poem nestled between the other two Strange Horizons poems in the book! How does this poem relate to the other two and to the book? Are there things you feel comfortable connecting?

AO: Quite a number of elements in these three poems connect, actually! “The Book of Drowned Things” appeared first, in September 2011, and then “Returning Song” and “Fairy Beekeeper” were published in June 2012 and December 2012, respectively. These poems may be the three oldest poems in the book, as all of them were written in 2011. All three of them were accepted by Strange Horizons well before June 2012, which is when I saw the call for new poetry editors and applied. By all logic, they should have appeared in my 2014 collection, The Dishonesty of Dreams, but they felt somehow “ahead” of the rest of the poems in that book. I felt like maybe I should save them for something better, something more momentous, and The Sting of It turned out to be just that. If nothing else, a poem about a mentor of mine who’s a beekeeper, and who has helped me through some of the hardest years of my life, belongs in a book with the word sting and the silhouette of a bee on the cover! “The Book of Drowned Things” shows the first seeds of disquiet, in my estimation, which makes sense if you consider that it was written right before I left the UK to return to the US. Quite a number of things went wrong for me there, not least of which were a hostile, discriminatory postgraduate academic environment and a (now ex-)spouse beginning to turn abusive. “Returning Song” was written within that same window of growing isolation, with the growing knowledge that my increasingly visible, vocal queerness was the factor to which my abusers were increasingly reacting. Derek Jarman’s films and writings were a comfort to me then, and they still are.

RA: I’d love to talk about some of those other poems that came later. Throughout The Sting of It, there’s a voice that is simultaneously intimate and perhaps prophetic or transcendent at the same time, a voice very grounded in the specificities of life’s wounds and sweetnesses while also speaking from outside of time. I wouldn’t call it quite confessional because of this otherworldly register that speaks to bodies and ecologies, loves and griefs, lineages carried and broken. I am thinking of poems like “What Stays,” “Bone House,” “Fireflies Gone,” and “Treasure.” Can I invite you to talk about either any of these poems and/or how you think about the poetic voice and the register you write in as a poet?

AO: I’m fascinated by the groupings of poems you’ve chosen, likely because some of them aren’t necessarily connections I had yet consciously drawn myself. “What Stays” is definitely a poem about bodies as artifacts and what we might learn about lives and loves on the basis of bones’ positions in a grave. I recall writing that one in response to a news story about two skeletons that had been excavated just outside of Verona, Italy; they’d been dubbed Romeo and Juliet because they were turned toward each other and embracing. I had never seen anything like this before, and I’ve spent quite a lot of my life fascinated by archaeology. I’ve never been that comfortable with looking at human remains, although skeletons seem to be a notable exception to that rule. I feel more at ease with bone than flesh, and that these skeletons expressed more emotion in their positioning than I had experienced in a very long time pushed me to speculate about what their relationship to each other might have been in life. I wanted to imagine what one might say to the other if they could speak, what they might have said to the other while they still could. From there, “Bone House,” “Fireflies Gone,” and “Treasure” definitely dig more into my experience of growing up with the knowledge that I was different somehow, both in body and in orientation. Queerness was certainly present in me from early childhood, when I was far more comfortable identifying with male characters like Ernie from Sesame Street, yet at the same time I took great pleasure in playing with gender ... and the one time of year I could do that was at Halloween. “Fireflies Gone” documents how it blew my mind when my grandmother told me that the old Red Riding Hood costume she’d dressed me in was my dad’s. He’d gone as a girl for Halloween when he was about my age, which at the time was seven or eight. Tomboy that I was, dressing up as Red felt like being in drag, and I delighted in the knowledge that I could present just about any way I wanted. “Bone House” and “Treasure” are more painful than the other examples, if only because one speaks of feeling trapped in a relationship as the walls were closing in, and the other speaks of growing up as one of four AFAB kids in a family of five (my sisters and I have a brother), and how I was both spoken of and treated differently than my three sisters, who are all younger than I am. Sometimes the different treatment resulted in positive things; other times, not so much. I must have been a difficult firstborn to navigate. I suspect that I still am. My health and neurotype have both made it difficult for me to stray too far from particular types of ties and support, which I’m lucky I have even though my family doesn’t always understand my experiences.

RA: There’s one more poem I’m curious about: “Katadesmos,” which feels like a small trans/queer epic. It has a scale to it that moves beyond the page. How did this poem come to be and take the form that it did?

AO: “Katadesmos” is something I’d been waiting to include at least since I wrote it in early 2014. The Dishonesty of Dreams had gone to print just before I wrote this one. I’m playing with the concept of katadesmos, those curse tablets found all throughout the ancient world. This poem is, in fact, one of those, or as close as I can get in a modern context. I had grievances to air against someone who mistreated me and a handful of my friends, and at the community level, that mistreatment had terrible repercussions. I can be vengeful, and I don’t think I hide that fact. I’m patient, but only up to a point, and the fastest way to incite my wrath is to wrong people close to me. Writing that mini-sequence was cathartic, but it’s notable that the instigator just ... vanished, dropped off our virtual radar, not long after I completed the piece. I spent a few weeks on it, which is unusual for me; I write prose quickly, but verse even quicker.

RA: I’m curious what role, if any, queer or trans experience had in composing this ritual curse?

AO: What my friends and I had in common in that situation was certainly queerness (neurodivergence most notably, but several of us are trans and nonbinary in addition). Being a shapeshifter from childhood onward felt like it came in handy, if only because I played difficult to pin down in some of the social interactions. I also served as the central point of contact for others who’d experienced similar, and once we knew how many of us there were ... yes, as the poem suggests, that tower fell. I can’t help but feel this poem resonates in our present circumstances, as we see so many people banding together to say: enough is enough. The poetry world’s response to Black Lives Matter has also, out of necessity, become a response to the Poetry Foundation’s inadequate stance and long history of unethical treatment of BIPOC. We are stronger together than apart. Hopefully we can tear down this tower, too, and then rebuild it.

How did you join the Strange Horizons team? What were the circumstances, the process?

In early 2012, an acquaintance who worked for Strange Horizons told me that the magazine had lost several poetry editors, and that they would be advertising to recruit new ones before the year was out. I responded to Niall Harrison's call for applications in May or June of 2012. I heard back in July that I'd been chosen as one of two new editors; Romie Stott was the other. At that point in time, the Poetry Department team consisted of Sonya, Romie, and me. The department needed rebuilding and revitalization given that they'd lost several editors in a short time. There hadn't been generational turn-over in quite a while. I've done my best to lead the department in a new direction for the past 8 years. It's actually hard to believe it's been almost a decade.

Characterize the Poetry Department and the way SH approaches poetry.

Even though we're a genre magazine, Romie and I don't let genre constrain our publication choices.

AJ Odasso

The department has a long history of being somewhat eclectic, publishing everything from experimental to genre to literary poetry, and I consider the work we've done as continuing that tradition. However, I can say that my approach has been different in that I prioritize new and under-represented voices to the fullest extent I'm able. That doesn't mean I haven't published the same poet's work more than once; there are a handful of poets who I personally have accepted and published multiple times. I make sure that any given reading period of mine results in mostly acceptances of poets who haven't been published in Strange Horizons before. A few years ago, Romie and I caught some passive-aggressive criticism for our move away from emphasizing the work of established genre poets. That lets me know we're doing our job right!

What's a favorite story about your time as an SH editor?

I don't know that I have one yet, as unlikely as that sounds. My entire tenure at SH has been filled with severe hardships, all of which have been entirely out of my control. I'm coming out of the most recent of these; after several months of mystery illness during the summer of 2019, I was diagnosed with colon cancer on the first of October. After a number of harrowing exploratory procedures and major surgery in November, I'm still recovering. I won't need chemo as my doctors initially thought, though, so that's a start! In spite of the grief, I've refused to relinquish my work at the magazine. My role at SH is one of the few truly wonderful things in my life. There are so many high-points in the realm of writers being overjoyed to learn they've been accepted that I can't choose just one.

Explain what publishing new writers means to you.

Given that my identity sits at the intersection of several marginalized communities (disability, ethnoreligious, and LGBTQIA+), publishing new writers gives me the ability to make dreams come true for others that couldn't come true for me as early as I would've liked. I'm not 40 yet, but the fact that my work didn't pick up traction until I was nearly 30 really drove home how difficult it is for people in my position to achieve recognition. So many of the writers I've published since 2012 have experienced the same struggles I have. If being able to say their first poetry publication was at SH gives them a running start, then I'm content.

Tell us about your published work.

I didn't start submitting work for publication until 2005, which was the year I graduated from Wellesley with my B.A.  Between 2005-2009, part of my time spent living in England, my first work started to appear in genre magazines and anthologies. By 2010, I had enough poems to put together a first collection; Lost Books was published by UK imprint Flipped Eye. It got a couple of award nominations, People's Book Prize and London New Poetry Award, but didn't win either. I continued to accrue publication credits between 2010-2014, still predominantly in genre contexts. Any time a literary venue picked up my work, it was an incredible shock. My poems defy categorization, and the establishment continues to favor writers whose work is easily categorized. My second collection, The Dishonesty of Dreams, was published in 2014 by the same imprint as my first. My first two books don't come close to accomplishing what my third collection, The Sting of It, does. After revising and adding to my 2016 Boston University M.F.A. thesis, I submitted it to a number of US imprints now that I'm based here. Tolsun Books took a chance and published it in July 2019, and it's already won a major regional honor (Best LGBTQ Book, New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards). Next, it's up for the Lambda Literary Awards and National Jewish Book Awards. I'm kind of holding my breath.

You have frequently written about found families. Why do you like exploring this topic? 

For a long time, it was the only sort of family I could rely on. As a result, I've always been drawn to media in which characters end up building families of choice. This feeds back into my fascination with monstrosity, rejection, and reclamation too. I've been writing transformative prose works on this particular subject for almost as long as I've been writing poetry. Fandom is the first place I ever met other people like me, queer and autistic people in particular. The closest friends I have are friendships I formed there. My longest-term fandom friends do, indeed, count as family. Happy endings are impossible enough to find in real life, which is why I persistently dismantle, rebuild, and extend narratives that deny their characters the relationships they deserve.

You are a member of several neurodiverse writing communities. Tell us about why you sought them, what they do for you, and one of the major things those communities are currently focusing on.

The fandom and genre writing communities have huge overlap, and they are indeed incredibly neurodiverse. I feel like I answered this when I addressed found families/families of choice, to be honest! Fandom has always focused on what mainstream storytelling refuses to take seriously and/or treat kindly.

In "Our Queer Roundtable," you mentioned "they/them" and "queer" as some of your favorite words. What words are you into now, and how do they reflect your current interests?

Confessional as a category/descriptor of verse isn't new, but it's never meant more to me than it does now. The Sting of It refuses to flinch away from everything about myself that I didn't feel free to explore in my work prior to 2015-16, which is when I started writing that book. Confessional poetry isn't strictly literary; I've been able to successfully employ features of genre-writing to express the personal. I think that's always been true of speculative writing to a degree, but I'm not so much using the specific language of genre work as I'm using its frameworks. History treated people like me as curiosities, freaks, and monsters of legend. Human monstrosity is something we've been writing about in SF/F/Spec for as long as genre writing has existed, and that's forever. Writing about myself in those terms, at least in my verse, feels like both reclamation and rebellion. I'm not supposed to disclose the things about myself that I disclose in TSOI, especially not on a mythic scale. After the deadly, unbelievable things that have happened to me between 2010-2020, I refuse to believe my existence, my survival, is ordinary.

What poetry has inspired you recently?

I haven't gotten far due to my illness, but I'm rereading the complete works of Emily Dickinson.

Structurally and thematically, she was so far ahead of her time that I feel her work will never lose value to me, as a poet whose work continues to be never quite spec enough for the genre community, and never quite literary enough for the establishment. If Emily had been living and writing today, I suspect her work would fall into the same liminal space. That's an odd comfort.

How did you get your start at Strange Horizons?

In the distant past, when Niall Harrison was reviews editor, I expressed interest in reviewing a book that looked likely to be terrible (it was). That was in 2010, and I’d already been reading Strange Horizons for some years. At the time, there weren't many online magazines that did the sort of genre-focused nonfiction that we did (there still aren't many), so it was exciting to me that this space existed, and that not being in the UK/North America/Australia didn't prevent me from being part of it—I'm still slightly amazed that anyone was willing to send a hardback, that no one really needed a review of, from the UK to a reviewer in India. For the next few years I did occasional reviews and roundtables for the magazine, as well as participating quite loudly in broader online conversations about SFF criticism. And then in 2014, when Abigail Nussbaum stepped down as reviews editor, I was asked if I wanted to be a part of a new reviews team, with Maureen Kincaid Speller and Dan Hartland. We've been working on reviews together for just over four years now.

How would you explain the way Strange Horizons approaches reviews?

We assign reviews in a few different ways—most often by sending out lists of available books to people who’ve reviewed for us in the past and matching reviewers with books we know they’re interested in, or by accepting pitches from reviewers. In some cases we’ll feel strongly that we’d love a review of a particular book by a particular reviewer and will approach them directly first. Once a review has been sent in, one of us will take charge of it. Eventually, after a few rounds of edits and correspondence between the editor and the reviewer, the review goes to the proofreaders and is readied for publication.

What the editing process involves depends largely on the review—an argument might benefit from restructuring, a reviewer might need to be nudged to go a little further, another may be so ambitious that they need to be reined in a bit to make a relatively short piece seem manageable and coherent. As a team, we're generally flexible about things like format and voice and style, and we don’t draw a clear line between reviews and criticism as long as the result is interesting and insightful.

(There’s more information about the reviews department here, if anyone has been inspired by this to contact us!)

What makes a good review? What’s one of your favorite reviews that you’ve either written or edited?

What I look for in a review is, primarily, a way into a book (or film, television series, etc.) that I might not have had. Good reviewers bring their own context, or interest, or expertise to the text, and locate it in a wider world—and convince you that these contexts matter. As a reviewer, I know I've always felt happiest with the reviews that allowed me to get on my own particular hobby-horses (such as the spatial politics of adventure stories); as a reader I love a reviewer that can carry me along on theirs. (For example, this review—incidentally, not one I edited.)

I also think that the best reviews are fundamentally ethical. This might sound a bit silly to some people—and most reviews probably aren’t unethical—but I like to see integrity and kindness (to the world, if not necessarily to the book), and a sense of what’s at stake. What I’m getting at is something that Phoebe Salzman-Cohen (who is a great reviewer and this is probably why) described in a recent review, as “a book that asks questions honestly, with an investment in doing right by its world and in our own.” A review can do that, too.

The reviews I'm proudest to have edited are some of those that were most difficult to edit—often because a reviewer is trying to do something genuinely big and complicated. It would probably be unfair to name names, but there's a real sense of, not just personal achievement (this piece of writing is good and I helped make it so), but of collaboration and shared purpose when you're working with a reviewer who cares about making the review as good as it can be, and who trusts you enough to work with you.

What do you feel has been exciting in children’s literature lately?

My focus, academically, is children's literature from the UK, which as you're probably aware has often been pretty terrible at racial inclusivity (and other sorts of inclusivity, but race and empire are what I work on). The last few years have seen some hopeful signs—writers like Alex Wheatle, and Catherine Johnson and Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Patrice Lawrence, who are doing things that are ambitious and stylistically innovative, and are actually being recognised and rewarded for it, and (of particular importance to me) we’re seeing a number of works of historical fiction that attempt to deal more honestly with Britain’s imperial past. It's been exciting to watch this progress, and sometimes participate in it. I'm only cautiously optimistic (children's publishing has made these advances before, only to revert to its former state), but it's been a difficult few years, and so I'll take cautious optimism.

What’s one book you liked as a child that you still love as an adult, and why?

I don't think I've ever actually stopped loving a book I loved as a child. Most of them I now read very differently (I did an entire Ph.D. thesis on the children's fantasies I grew up reading; it was bound to happen), but knowledge of, say, a book’s awful politics has never come with the kind of intensity that would kill my feeling for the book—in many cases I probably enjoy the book more now that there’s more to get my teeth into.

But a book I liked as a child that I still love in exactly the same way: that'd have to be Joan Aiken's The Last Slice of Rainbow. This was the first collection of Aiken's children's short stories I read; I think I was about 5 or 6 when I borrowed it from somewhere and never gave it back. (Whoever you are: I'm not sorry.) Aiken is as close to a perfect writer for children as I can imagine—she's both so clear and so strange. I lost my stolen copy of the collection years ago, but managed to track down one of the same edition and when I reread it, with Margaret Walty's illustrations, I responded to it with the same sense of joy that it has always given me.

So, about that 1980s Bollywood thing...

Oh no, you've clearly seen me talking about this on Twitter. Some backstory here: My family moved back to India midway through the 1990s, and for the first several months we lived with my grandparents. They had one TV, and only had access to the state-run channels, and so my earliest consumption of Indian media was somewhat streamlined. But so much of it was fantasy: at the time, the most popular/widely accessible TV channel in the country had at least two major fantasy shows—my grandparents were regular viewers of Alif Laila and Chandrakanta. (Last April SH had a roundtable discussion as part of its India special issue—someone mentioned Chandrakanta and the book it was based on, and I was genuinely shocked that it hadn't loomed as large in the participants' 90s imaginations as it had in mine.) I was a child, and none of this struck me as particularly unusual. Since then, I've not only developed a sense of history, but I've discovered and loved some of the weird, camp, epic fantasies that Bollywood occasionally produced from the late 70s onwards (incidentally, I loved this recent piece on Ajooba, a film in which Amitabh Bachchan is the lost heir to a fantasy kingdom, who is raised by a dolphin and becomes a vigilante superhero)—it seems to me that there's a tradition, or an aesthetic, there, of which the cultural moment I walked in on in 1995 is a sort of tail end, and which is separate from the genre histories and personal canons of a lot of Indian fans, even those of us who remember it. And I want to understand this and find ways to think through it.

This isn't to say I want any sort of 80s Bollywood revival—like most things, it's linked to a particular moment in culture, and would likely not work outside it (and honestly, whether it worked inside it is debatable). But a critical return, yes—it's so different from current mainstream Indian mythological fantasy, and there's so much to unpack by someone with the interest (which I have!) and expertise (which I could acquire!) to do so.

It's possible that all of this is just a pitch for a book-length critical piece on Alisha Chinai's "Made in India."

Choose three objects that someone who knows you might find on a shelf, and think immediately of you.

1. A particular make of rollerball pen, with green ink. I don't like to think of myself as fussy about what I write on/with, and these pens are pretty widely available, but I still live in fear that they'll stop making them someday, or I'll run out of them. Before I moved to the UK to do my Ph.D., I made a group of my friends wander all over Delhi in search of a stationer's that would sell them by the box, because what if, for some reason, they didn't have them in England? (They did.)
2. Sea glass. I've spent most of my life in a landlocked city (we do have a river, but we've treated it very badly), so the sea and anything that comes from it is still astonishing to me. I spent the last few years in a place where the sea was only a short distance away and immediately accessible, and spent a lot of that time staring longingly at it and collecting anything I could out of it (sea glass, shells, stones); now that I'm back in Delhi those tangible reminders feel important.
3. Probably owls. I like all birds, but owls are a) good; b) everywhere in souvenir shops, so that about half the gifts friends give me are owl-themed (presumably they saw them on a shelf and thought immediately of me). I should probably try and get them to stop, or develop a great love of some bird less ubiquitous (maybe herons)?

This week, I interview senior fiction editor Catherine Krahe, one of our longest-serving staff members, and the first Strange Horizons editor I met in person. Cassie is precise, insightful, and playful, with a strong sense of justice. Writers often tell me how much they like working with her.

You started as a first reader at Strange Horizons. When did you join? How you become a senior fiction editor?

Back in 2011, I attended Clarion West with a bunch of ferociously skilled writers. Because anxiety and self-sabotage, among other things, I am one of the unlucky ones who basically stopped writing entirely … but I did get a lot of praise for my critiquing skills, and people mentioned that I should be an editor. Accepted wisdom was that good critiquers should be editors, and the way to do this was to be a first reader for some magazine you liked and then eventually you would metamorphose into a serious business editor, and maybe someday, I don’t know, profit?

This is not how it works, just so you know.

Anyway, I applied to be a first reader and really liked being able to talk about my favorite SH stories in the application process.  I know I mentioned “Waiting on Alexandre Dumas,” which I read very early in my binge-on-all-SF-available-online freshman year of college, and “Tomorrow Is Waiting.”

Once I was a first reader, I read … um, a lot? Lots. I have a pretty healthy competitive streak, and Rahul Kanakia and I very quietly tried to dominate the slush. I also kept at it quite a while longer than our average first reader: I think our typical reader stays between a year and eighteen months.

A few years after I started as the world’s most terrifyingly productive first reader, Julia Rios asked if I’d be willing to audition as a senior fiction editor, and I joined the team. My first edited story was “Vacui Magia,” but I had been part of the discussion for some time before then.

People sometimes ask how to become an editor, or they’re advised to become a first reader because obviously that is the first rung on the ladder and the path is straight up from there, but it doesn’t work that way for most people. There is no typical path to Serious-Business Editorhood.

Describe the fiction acquisitions process at Strange Horizons.

A story first comes in via Moksha, and a first reader will grab it. The first reader will read, summarize, and comment on the story, then send it to the senior editors if they think it’s for us. If they don’t send it up, we hold it for about a week so the senior editors can review the summary and comments and grab anything we think is particularly interesting. We also ask the first readers to flag representation in comments, like people of color, genderqueer, nonbinary, and trans authors and characters, things like that. In no case will we buy a bad story because it meets a certain number of representation tickyboxes—we won’t buy a bad story even if it’s by a seriously famous person, and trust me, writing those rejections is terrifying— but knowing that representation is important. We got a lot of Little Red Riding Hood retellings when I was a first reader: those stories had to work against a serious seen-it-before-please-stop reaction.  A story drawing from a less prevalent non-European folkloric source is more interesting and may be worth further revisions with the author or an encouraging rejection letter.

At our weekly meeting, the senior editors decide which stories we want to accept, request rewrites for, or reject. This can take a while—we have different tastes and backgrounds, and we all catch different flaws. We generally come to an agreement about which stories we’d like to buy, but if we don’t, any of us can make an editor’s-choice pick and take it.

One thing you’ll note is missing here is any kind of detailed analysis of cover letter and publishing credits. When I was FRing, I never read them. I don’t pay much attention, if any, to authors when I’m reading submissions. I’ll catch names I know, but quite often forget that they were in the stack by the time I get to their stories.

So yeah, that’s How a Bill Becomes a Law How a Submission Becomes a Story.

What do you feel are some of the best stories you've edited at the magazine?

Finding a story I really adore is just fun. I’ve written comments about it to authors along the lines of "this ending, it made me want to bite my hands, it was so good" and "I want to roll around in this paragraph." Writers often seem to think that editors laugh as they reject stories and have an adversarial relationship to the slush, but really, we want stories to be amazing.

We all have gimme-buttons of sorts; stories about motherhood or water have historically appealed to me a lot.  Lately, I’ve been enjoying some weirder, less classifiable fiction.

Stories about art forms that we don’t have yet are great—“Applied Cenotaphics” and “The Troll Who Hid Her Heart.” I love the weirdness of both of them, how there is clearly a culture and a story going on in the background, but since we don’t have the medium of the art, we can only guess.

Alien narrators like in “The Visitor,” “We Have a Cultural Difference, Can I Taste You?” and “Utopia, LOL?” are huge fun to edit. It’s a balancing act between human enough to be comprehensible and nonhuman enough to be weird.  Giant tentacle alien, medium-sized slime-monster exchange student, personification of Tumblr? I love them all.

You're a regular presence at WisCon. Tell us why you love the con, and about the Strange Horizons tea party you run there.

I’m typing this between panels, actually, having taken too much time to get it wrapped up beforehand. WisCon was the first con I went to on my own—I found roommates, my brother drove me up to Madison because I didn’t have a car yet, and I immediately latched onto an author I particularly liked who was willing to be a social anchor. It was, in a lot of ways, the transition between college and adult life (or grad school, in my case). It was exactly the right time for me to step into WisCon.

As for the tea party, well before I was involved, Strange Horizons had started the tradition of having tea parties in the afternoon at cons rather than evening parties. I do my best to make sure that people know about the party, can find something to eat, and have good conversation throughout, plus tea. All the food is vegan, gluten-free, or both, and I try to cover other common sensitivities when possible.  It’s a lot of fun for me to perform as hostess.

You got married recently--congratulations! What's your favorite thing about the partnership?

Well, he’s a gigantic dork who thinks I’m awesome, so that’s good. He’s not in my part of fandom in general, more a gamer-type who reads things that I don’t read—actually, one sign of high-quality gentleman was that he read the Kate Elliott Cold Magic trilogy on my recommendation. Those are not small books, and while he didn’t enjoy them, he had reasons for not enjoying them. (A lot of my judgment of high-quality people boils down to “shows their work.”)

What's your favorite celestial body, and why?

I generally like what I can identify, be it stars, birds, or minerals. Like Scorpio: a constellation I recognized and identified with no information whatsoever. “That must be a constellation. It is probably Scorpio.” I’d never seen it before, but it has such a thingness to it.

What are some of your current non-SH projects?

ALPHAAAA!

The Alpha Young Writers’ Workshop is an eleven-day residential writing workshop modeled on Clarion. Four professional guests come in for two or three days each to teach twenty teens. The students write and workshop a short story, attend and give readings at Barnes and Noble, and submit work to professional markets.

Imagine twenty students in a dorm, furiously networking and writing and critiquing and yelling about whatever they’re reading or watching. The students are amazing: it’s taken me about a decade to get over my inferiority complex around them as a group. The passion, the drive, the incredible weirdness of the ideas they come up with, the dedication to inclusivity, the ferocity with which they defend each other against internal enemies—seriously, Alpha is phenomenal.

I’ve also been reading for the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Older Writers Grant. It’s been interesting contrasting the teen submissions for Alpha with the older adult submissions for the grant. Alphan submission stories are single complete short stories rather than excerpts of novels or screenplays or collections of poetry, and the protags are understandably younger, but not by as much as I’d expected. There’s also a lot more genderqueer content in Alpha stories.

Write about one thing you feel strongly about right now regarding the SFF community.

I am really looking forward to the next BlackSpecFic Report because I want to know if what we’ve done to improve our demographics has had any effect.

This week, I'm interviewing Joyce Chng. Joyce is a Singaporean author and artist whose commitment to social justice and marginalized representation is paralleled only in the cuteness of their mouse drawings. 

Vanessa Rose Phin: When did you join Strange Horizons, and what is your job here? 

Joyce Chng: I joined Strange Horizons in 2016. I am a non-fiction/articles editor. I acquire and commission articles from authors and writers. So I work closely with them to help them bring their voices out and have them heard.

Vanessa: How would you characterize Strange Horizons nonfiction? What sorts of things does Articles like to focus on?

Joyce: Exciting, progressive, thought-provoking, broad to span across the genre (because genre is huge). Articles likes to focus on things that are relevant and current, matter to people (and to the editors), things that make people think. Diversity, awareness of the changes and shifts in genre fiction and SFF in general, willingness to explore issues fearlessly with sensitivity and compassion, the knowledge that SFF is more than just UK or US-centric: World SFF is also important to the genre as a whole.

Vanessa: What is your favorite project or event that you'd been involved with for Strange Horizons? Why?

Joyce: Wow, so many. My favorite project to date is the "Water Is Life" roundtable with Rebecca Roanhorse, Ishki Ricard, and Kate Elliot. I am a firm believer in climate change and that it affects Indigenous coasts and waterways. The roundtable was mostly prompted by the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline and for many other continuous fights against intrusion into Indigenous lands all over the world. Climate change is not due to just the planet changing, but because of the thoughtless actions humanity has carried out over generations.

Vanessa: You've had many other hats, including teacher, parent, artist, and writer. What do you enjoy in your work? How do you balance your interests?

Joyce: Flexibility, versatility, and creativity. All these hats require these skills. Initially (when I was much younger), I used to worry that teaching would eat into my creativity, and teaching in Singapore was exhausting as we ended up wearing more than one hat—we were also administrators, counselors, parental figures, etc. Now, older and more circumspect, I just do what I can within my limits and not beat myself up for not meeting goals. Even my goals now are smaller, more tangible and achievable.

Balancing is a skill I am learning and unlearning daily. Learning to be kind to self (easier said than done!) is key to this. You can't balance spinning plates all the time, 24/7. You are not a superhero with super powers. Be kind to self, do one thing at a time.

Vanessa: I hear you use broadswords. When did you get into that?

Joyce: I am a trained medieval historian and I always love knighthood/chivalry. Always wanted to learn how to use longswords. So when I learnt that a school had opened up teaching Renaissance Italian longsword (Fiore), I jumped. And around that time (a decade ago, gosh!), it was relatively rare to have a HEMA school teaching that!

Vanessa: When you crave something sweet, what do you usually go for?

Joyce: These days I watch my blood sugar. I am not diabetic, but at risk (according to my doctor, since my chronic illnesses come in trios). So, I tend to go for…cheese tea. Which is basically melted creamy cheese on top of Chinese tea (unsweetened, of course). Cheese tea is a once-in-a-while treat. Bodies after a certain age protest much with dairy products.

Vanessa: What are some of your current projects and recent publications?

Joyce: Current project is grimdark wolves (an RPG thing I am writing for a publisher). Another (picture book) is still percolating at the planning stage. My two space opera books with werewolves with Fox Spirit Books (yes, there is a theme) are going to be published soon. My YA fantasy with swords and girls using them under Scholastic Asia is in the copy edits phase.

Recent publications include Water Into Wine (recced for Tiptree Award 2017, longlisted for Saboteur Award 2018) and Starfang: Rise of the Clan. Short stories include "The Thing You Feed" (The Future Fire) and "The Bridge" (Anathema Magazine).

Vanessa: What's something you're looking forward to this year?

Joyce: I know it's mundane and boring, but I look forward to a clean bill of health.

And hopefully, the publication of the YA fantasy.