some professional news
i'm writing a book about science fiction
I’m really excited to share this news! Weird Sisters was an idea I had back in 2020 (!), but at the time, I thought the smart thing to do was to work on an essay collection. Getting sick clarified for me that I should do the book I’m a little scared to write.
This is also a project that is going to bring together a lot of my pet interests, which, I mean, any book of mine ought to do! One thing I stressed in the proposal for this book was that women are very present in SFF before the period I’m focusing on. And there are going to be a lot of women I can’t include because I am king of only a finite space. I understand the temptation to say “oh, so-and-so was the first woman to do…” as a shorthand for importance, but declining to do it opens up a lot of possibilities. Some that I hope to realize in Weird Sisters are:
putting women’s writing in continuity with tradition, but also
preserving the ways in which they sharply differed from one another, and finally
writing about them as major artists and / or players in their scenes, not minor ones in need of rescue; also
Additionally, we have
art that also wants to be entertainment, and
the possibilities inherent to genre
Finally, I also want to say thank you to all the people who read draft copies of this book proposal and gave me comments on it or encouragement. Thank you! You will all achieve literary immortality in the acknowledgements. And a big thank you, too, to Will, my agent, an infinitely patient man. And while she did not read my proposal and does not know I exist, I would also like to say thank you to Chappell Roan, for this specific performance. I don’t know if Joanna Russ, actual person, would have loved this… but Joanna Russ, “person that exists in my head,” certainly does.
I’ll take some questions now…
I came here to find out who the hell you are?
Here are some things I have published that are directly relevant to the book:
“Joanna Russ, the Science-Fiction Writer Who Said No” (The New Yorker [dot com])
“Ursula K. Le Guin was her own toughest (and best) critic” (Washington Post)
“The Soul Should Not Be Handled” (The Point [dot com])
And here are some things I’ve written over the years that I really like, in no particular order:
“Summer, Glorious Summer!” (Lapham’s Quarterly)
“Full-Length Mirror” (Paris Review)
“What Is Miss America, if Not a Beauty Pageant?” (New York Times Magazine)
“The Bad Patient” (The Drift)
“Monumental Woes” (The Hedgehog Review)
“Thunder Entered Her” (Commonweal)
“What exactly do we want from the author of ‘Cat Person’?” (The Outline)
“American Gothic” (The Baffler)
“Enough with the ‘forgotten’ writers” (The Week)
“Teaching a Dog to Talk” (Full Stop)
So, that is who the hell I am. You can also see some science fiction blogging I’ve done by click on this tag, though I need to go through and straighten out my archives.