Aqueduct's Creating Inclusive Narrative series will launch in 2027

 For immediate release

 

 

Aqueduct Press, in association with Writing the Other, is excited to announce a new book series launching in 2027. The Creating Inclusive Narratives series will feature a new, updated edition of Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, followed by books written by WtO’s online class instructors delving into the craft of writing respectful, representative fiction.

The books in this series will help writers of narrative fiction in any genre build on the foundation laid by Writing the Other. The series’ topics will range from research to writing historical fiction to character relationships to neo pronouns and more, with the aim of helping writers at any stage in their careers advance their skills and broaden their understanding of how to write characters and cultures different from their own.

“Nisi and I and the whole WtO team are always looking for ways to make learning this crucial skill more accessible,” says K. Tempest Bradford, Executive Director of Writing the Other. “For writers who may not be able to take a class due to timing, finances, or other reasons, we hope this book series will offer greater accessibility.”

The first three books will be released in 2027 in trade paperback and eBook editions:

Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, revised, 2nd edition by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward will be released on Feb. 15, 2027.

This is an updated version of the classic text on representing demographic difference in literature. After more than 20 years of praise for their groundbreaking work, the authors and publisher are ready to offer new tools for new troubles as well as refreshed connections with familiar territory ripe for activist ways of creative expression.

Writing the Other in Historical Fiction by Alaya Dawn Johnson and Nisi Shawl will be released on April 15, 2027

People from the entire spectrum of human identity have always existed, despite what the media or the culture says. LGBTQIA+ folks, BIPOC, and folks with many kinds of disabilities and differences are all a big part of human history. Writers can use this book to learn techniques for finding and accurately interpreting historical sources, review ways to interrogate the dominant paradigm’s versions of the past, and learn how to focus their narratives on the lives of the formerly marginalized.

Research for Creative Writers by Melody Steiner will be released on July 15, 2027

Research is a necessary part of the creative process for every fictional narrative. Some writers avoid taking the plunge, intimidated by the very prospect of falling down a rabbit hole or not knowing how to even begin digging one. Writers don’t have to be scholars or university students to learn how to find the information they need to craft great stories. In Research for Creative Writers, reference librarian Melody Steiner walks writers  through research resources and techniques and explores ways in which research can be an engaging process for narrative creators.

More books in the series will follow in 2028.

To keep up to date with news about books in the Creating Inclusive Narratives series, visit Aqueduct Press (https://aqueductpress.com/) and Writing the Other (https://writingtheother.com/) and sign up for their newsletters.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2025, pt.8: Nisi Shawl

 

 

Where and When the Livin Is Easy

by Nisi Shawl 

There is a magic land, a land found in a once-upon-a kind of time.  For me, a favorite portal to this magic place is music.  This soundtrack for the film Porgy and Bess transports me there immediately, in multiple ways, with referential touches landing layered and feather-light.

The opera’s overture is an announcement of intent, a compact gloss of Gershwin’s gorgeous melodies, a prescient recitation of the drama about to unfold.  And then, sinuous as a garden snake, the clarinet line descends from its tree in the orchestral forest and oscillates between two notes.  Quick, then slow, the notes repeat: first at the speed of life, then with the slow swing of a lullaby.

It has begun.  “Summertime.”  Perhaps the most frequently covered song in history.  While these two notes rock us carefully, lovingly, in their cradling arms, a soaring soprano takes flight.  Like a bird rising to the sun, it sees all, hears all, sighs and sobs with sinking acceptance of beautiful inevitabilities.  The lyrics promise joy, protection, release--earnestly or sarcastically, depending on their delivery.

 

“Summertime’s” deliverers have been many, from Billie Holliday’s 1936 hit (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYUqbnk7tCY), through Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald’s 1959 version, to this instrumental soundcheck version by Prince: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVd1zZTbG9E  I was shocked, shocked I tell you, to learn that this song had been written at a specific point by a specific pair of human beings.  It felt more like a natural accretion.

Recently I began talking with one of my middle school friends and discovered that this musician whom I admired then as a rock-n-roller and admire now as a meditation music maestro was influenced early on by that selfsame soundtrack.  How?  Why?  Wasn’t that our parents hung out together. They were a university family, we were working class.  They were white, we were Black.  But somehow our childhoods sounded partly the same.

Porgy and Bess was first performed in 1935.  Perhaps not the wisest move to present the public with a challenging new opera in the midst of an economic depression.  With its lead roles, at least, performed by African American singers, Porgy and Bess was born controversial.  On tour in 1936, the cast protested against the racially segregated seating enforced at Washington D.C.’s National Theatre--and won.

Sometimes the controversy ran more along the lines of accusing the script of promoting racial stereotypes. And it is true that it delivers an account of Black lives which is based on white perceptions.  Yet it’s also true that its focus places Black lives center stage.  Just two white men appear, playing minor roles with barely a line each.  The rest of the cast is us.  In the mid-20th century, that focus on performing Blackness translated into unprecedented opportunities for classically trained Afrodiasporic singers.

And they didn’t just sing.  They negotiated their appearances and argued for changes.  Anne Brown is responsible for Bess’s expanded role in the opera, much more central to it compared to her limited part in the play on which Porgy and Bess was based.  Black musicians helped with choral and orchestral arrangements.  Pearl Bailey reportedly stipulated that she was not going to wear a headrag.

Listening to the results of these drives and maneuverings as a child, I felt awed by the rich panorama they opened up to me--an undiscovered country where familiar strangers came and went about mysterious, grown-up business.  My parents approved.  So did their friends and neighbors.

So did Miles Davis, who famously took shit from no one.  He recorded an entire album of highlights from the opera’s score.  Here’s a sample cut, his version of the heartrending “My Man’s Gone Now”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MUaf0pNNJ4

And here, because even Miles can’t do justice to the eerie glissando at this song’s finish, is the vocal version, which always, every time, lifts the hair on the back of my neck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYFTp_8NkGE&t=20s

One accusation made, often fairly, against outsider takes on the lives of the marginalized is that they consist of tragedy after tragedy, sorrow after sorrow.  Not the case with Porgy and Bess, though the songs that attract me the most powerfully are salty and sad, or at least, bittersweet.

To my mind, the song that commits the unforgiveable is an allegedly happy one.  “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” Porgy declares in trumpet-like tones, boasting of his equanimity and absolving his oppressors of their crimes.  But the chorus’s commentary put a helpful slant on this song’s lyrics: Porgy’s over-the-top talk is all because “that woman come to stay with him.”  He’s spouting foolishness; love has turned his mind to mush.

Love is powerful.  It powers the swirling sweetness of the duet “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” the sound of half-dissolving hearts melded together in bliss.  It supports the reassuring cry of the strawberry vendor: goodness is the norm.  Contentment is due us and available.

All that’s part of what the music conveys.  But what’s the action?  What happens?

The opera’s plot, briefly, concerns the inhabitants of Catfish Row, who are divided between the town’s respectable folks and its riffraff: Bess, her abusive lover Crown, and her drug dealer Sportin’ Life.  Crown kills one of the locals and runs to evade arrest.  Bess resists Sportin’ Life’s advances.  During a community picnic Crown kidnaps Bess and forces himself on her.  Soon after she returns to Catfish Row and disabled beggar Porgy’s welcoming arms.  Crown surfaces again.  A storm rises and kills two more locals and, it’s assumed, Crown.  But really his cause of death is Porgy.  Porgy murders him.  And when Porgy gets taken off for questioning, Sportin’ Life tricks Bess into believing Porgy’s gone for good.  The pair leaves for NYC and a week later, released from his contempt jail sentence, Porgy follows in his goat cart, vowing to bring home “his” Bess.

That’s right.  This opera ends with one of the principals heading out for what can only be described as a guaranteed failfest.  The same fevered over-optimism he exhibited in “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” powers us through the climax.

Into what?  Into where?

In synch with the 20th century’s Great Migration (the mass exodus of Black people from the South), Bess and Sportin’ Life are headed North, to the land of opportunity, with Porgy close behind them.

Part of that upwards flow, some of my forebears on my mother’s side came to Chicago from down in New Orleans.  Many of my father’s people settled in Vandalia, Michigan, a stop on the Underground Railroad.  My father and my mother spoke and acted as if the freedom promised by the factories and offices and schools of the North, was a certitude.  If not for them then surely for their children.  Hush, little baby.  Don’t you cry.

“Don’t you be downhearted”: that’s the chorus’s admonition to the spirits of Clara and Jake, lost in a hurricane.  A simple melody descending to rest, then climbing to hope, candle-lit faces chanting against an accompaniment of querulous flutes and majestic deeps.  Jesus is walking on the water, they sing.  You can do it too.  Rise up and follow him home.

I’m not a Christian.  Neither was George Gershwin.  Where do we go when we go home?

Gershwin is already gone; I can’t speak for him.  But where I go is also a particular when.  A magic land I’ve seen before, thanks to this music.  I see it clearly now as I spread my wings and take the sky.

 

 

Nisi Shawl’s first novel, Everfair, was a finalist for the 2016 Nebula Award. In 2009 their Aqueduct story collection Filter House received the Otherwise Award. They have published three other short fiction collections—Something More and More (Aqueduct, 2010), A Primer to Nisi Shawl (Dark Moon Books, 2017), and Talk Like a Man (PM Press, 2019). Shawl is, with Cynthia Ward, the author of Writing the Other: A Practical Approach (Aqueduct, 2005), and has edited numerous anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award-winning New Suns: Speculative Fiction by People of Color (Solaris, 2019), Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler with Rebecca Holden (Aqueduct, 2013), and Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany with Bill Campbell (Rosarium, 2015). Their most recent fiction publications are Kinning (the sequel to Everfair published in early 2024), Speculations, a middle-grade novel, and The Day and Night Books of Mardou Fox (Rosarium, 2024).  Aqueduct released Nisi's novel-in-stories, Making Amends, in earlier this year.    

 

Public Discourse and Resistance

 The liberal news media in the US continually reports on this or that European country going autocratic or being threatened by blocs of voters supporting autocracy. More sporadic, though, is their coverage of political ferment and expressive dissent in the many places in the world that are already autocratic (albeit with paper democracies). One of those places is Peru. Reading a Reuters article last weekend about a particular direct action organized by a group named “Gen Z,” I was struck again by the chasm between the language used by the liberal media (and, therefore, in liberal public discourse) and the reality of events they are either purporting or honestly trying to describe. To its credit, the Reuters article cites information that can provide at least some context for interpreting the impoverished language used for description: that Peru’s president has a 2.5% approval rating and its congress a 3% approval rating, and that the “protest” as they call it is just the latest event in an ongoing struggle (not a word that the article uses) against an oppressive government (and no, they did not of course use the O-word).

 

"There's been a low, simmering level of discontent in Peru and it's been that way for actually quite some time," said Jo-Marie Burt, a visiting professor at Princeton University's program in Latin American studies who has researched Peruvian politics for decades.

 The discontent, Burt said, has been fueled by corruption scandals, economic insecurity, rising crime and anger over a lack of accountability over dozens of protesters who were killed by security forces when Boluarte assumed power in late 2022 after former President Pedro Castillo was removed from office and arrested. [quotes from the Reuters article]

 

Searching on “protests” in Peru, I found reports from other news organizations on a massive transportation workers strike, including video footage featuring scenes of violence. For me, interpreting such videos is difficult; my experience of street actions has all been in the US, where peaceful protest is the rule and most violence is perpetrated by the police rather than by participants in the action. Visual news media finds peaceful activity boring and of no visual value, and so they inevitably seek out scenes that show or even simply imply violence, no matter its relevance or significance, and duly declare the action to have been a riot or a “violent protest.” (Anyone remember the Subway sandwich incident that got thrown out of court?) Riots, in the US, tend to be police rioting, not civilians. The late anthropologist and veteran political activist David Graeber has an excellent essay anatomizing the power dynamics of political street action in his posthumous collection The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World. I recommend it for anyone interested in reading between the lines of mainstream media coverage.

 

So. One of the things bothering me about the coverage (which in the case of this Reuters article is as “objective” as it ever gets) is the inadequacy of talking about “protests” when street actions (what half a century ago were called “demonstrations”) are constant and ongoing and the political conditions in which they occur are extreme, such as in the case of Peru. “Protest” is a word that implies weakness and reflects an attitude that considers it as something like a tantrum. Street action is taken in order to amplify political speech that is either going unheard or is being drowned out by money (which according to the US Supreme Court is a form of protected “speech”). Putting one’s body into the street in the face of possible state violence requires powerful determination and willingness to risk one’s physical, social, and economic well-being. (Yeah, there are a few people who love risk-taking, but it’s not characteristic of most activists.) 

 

“Protest,” to be clear, is a belittling description for an important form of public speech. But it’s in common parlance, so we tend to use it without thinking. (As I mentioned above, “demonstration” used to be common parlance.) Our discourse, I believe, needs to recognize that resistance against oppressive policies and actions, a form of struggle against the status quo, is not simply “protest.” Rather, it’s an assertion of public speech that is not being heard by the people who are running things and so requires amplification.  

 

So now, to the US. Contrary to the perceptions of the New Yorker political round table folks who recently lamented the lack of “protest,” every day there are “protests” all over this country, a response to the regime that is constant and ongoing. Such demonstrations are being made all over the US, not just in “blue” cities like Seattle, Chicago, and NYC. A ferry ride away from Seattle, across the Salish Sea in rural Kitsap County, for instance, at least three small-town organizations have had weekly Pro-Palestine demonstrations since January 2024 and other groups have mounted at least three anti-fascist, anti-regime actions a week for the last several months. 

 

Such public demonstrations of resistance are necessary because the current regime is forcing deadly, impoverishing, antisocial policies on us that the majority are seriously, deeply opposed to. Interestingly, mainstream Time magazine offered an alternative to the dismissiveness of “protest” (and thus makes it headline more powerful): “The Growing Resistance to Mass Deportation. “Resistance,” yes, says all that “protest” cannot. Sometimes semantics are more important than we are aware of in the moment of speech.

 

I’d like to conclude with Nisi Shawl’s manifesto for resistance, recently posted on Bluesky.

 

“Strategies and Qualities of Unstrained Resistance”

by Nisi Shawl

Transparency - We will be surveilled and infiltrated.  Let them know we know and that there’s nothing to hide.  I realized this fifty years ago, when I found out the government had a file on me.

 

Withdrawal - Rather than confrontation: maybe a general strike or evacuation or self-imposed lockdown is in order.

 

Fullness - Or maybe the opposite is called for: peaceful occupation.  Thousands of visitors and tourists.

 

Art - This has consistently been favored via divination. Any forays into shared or public space or time should be framed as art.

 

Kindness - We need to pay attention to one another’s needs and do our best to meet them: food, medicines, labor, supplies, knowledge.

 

Entanglement - We want to recognize our kinship with those deployed against us.  We greet their highest selves with our highest selves.