The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2022, pt. 21: Andrea Hairston

2022 Pleasures

by Andrea Hairston

 

Remember that song, Last night, a DJ saved my life?

The books I read in 2022 were all lifesavers! Spirit medicine for trying times. Usually (as in before 2020), we’d all be running into one another. We’d share breath, inspire each other live, face to face. I ached to be present with folks, but no matter the isolation, no matter the mess going down right outside my door or all across the world, I got to read beautiful books. Great writers rescued me!

 Daniel José Older cleansed my spirit and gave me hope in Ballad & Dagger (Book 1 of the Outlaw Saints series). The pirate, Santero, Sephardic characters and communities he created were thrilling and so was his engagement with science and religion. Daniel asks how people who come from different stories and who organize the cosmos in different ways might come together without eating each other or blasting each other to bits. His delightful, complex world-building spoke to who we can be, who we must be, and also to how we will bring ourselves through. He explored the devastating challenges and generative possibilities of our diverse humanity.

In fact, all the books that saved me did that.

 Sheree Renée Thomas’s Black Panther: Panther’s Rage captured the moods of civil war, of love, loss, and anguish as Wakandans face the enemies within. Sheree’s comparisons between Wakandan and African American experiences are revelatory. African Americans can love and ache for the Motherland and yet feel estranged from it when faced with the real thing, not the memories, dreams, and wishful nostalgia they might wrap Africa in as they wander the diaspora. Panther’s Rage is right on time for a world caught up in civil struggle and unrest. Nobody wins a Civil War except the guys manufacturing the guns. The fights we have with ourselves are exacerbated by unscrupulous players who capitalize on exaggerating difference. These dodgy characters keep us at each other’s throats while they steal the world. They turn us into zombies who can’t tell anymore what it means to be alive and feel empathy. Sheree breaks this down for us in the Black Panther world. High adventure—the villains’ asses get kicked—but more importantly, Sheree’s action-adventure poetry is about changing ourselves so that we might be stronger together.

 

Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future is an epic tale, jammed full of insight, analysis, speculation, and hopeful possibilities and dreadful necessities. Divided we fall—without question. However, humanity has tragic, self-destructive tendencies. So in the face of radical climate crisis, who will take the first steps to bring us together and save tomorrow? Like all the books that saved me, Ministry for the Future engages the utopia/dystopia spectrum. Robinson wants to explore what we do after the apocalypse. He asks what can we make of ourselves. Can we make a better world? Is there a post-capitalist existence, an alternative to profit as our central human value? Can we have joy, fun, love, friendship, kinship? Do the people who count run in the billions or just in the thousands or… Spoiler alert: this book is not tragedy!

These are also the questions Pan Morigan poses in her poetry book, Five Spirits in My Mouth coming in spring from Querencia Press and her forthcoming novel, The Wheel and the Song. She transports to us another world, shakes our minds loose of the indicative case and gets us to ask: What does the future we’re making look like? What if the world could be different? Who would we be? Her imagination takes us beyond the empire’s standard heroes, the ones who excuse atrocity by declaring it progress or who mock sentimentality because it’s not profitable or rational. Pan celebrates science and spirit, music and math, hope in the face of devastation.

 

I finally had time to binge on the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells from All Systems Red to Fugitive Telemetry. Thinking what you want to think is hard. We all have “governors” in our heads, programming beyond our control. We, like Muderbot, have to figure out how to hack the social programming and be who we want to be, our best selves, and then we can shift the shape of reality. That’s the program for 2023!

 

Andrea Hairston is a novelist, playwright, and scholar. Aqueduct Press published her first three novels, all of which are now forthcoming from Tor: Will Do Magic For Small Change, a New York Times Editor’s pick and finalist for the Mythopoeic, Lambda, and Otherwise Awards; Redwood and Wildfire, winner of the Otherwise and Carl Brandon Awards; Mindscape, winner of the Carl Brandon Award. Aqueduct also published Lonely Stardust, a collection of essays and plays. “Dumb House,” a short story appears in New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color edited by Nisi Shawl. Andrea has received grants from the NEA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her latest novel, Master of Poisons, came out from Tor.com and is on the 2020 Kirkus Review’s Best SF and F list.

 

 

 

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2022, pt. 20: Sarah Tolmie

 

Pleasures, 2022

by Sarah Tolmie

 

I taught Piers Plowman, the fourteenth-century dream vision poem upon which a shocking amount of my life’s work to date is based, for the first time in a decade in 2022. Reading a poem as complex as Piers with the view to teaching it tends to eclipse much other reading for pleasure. And it’s worth saying here — and everywhere in our hard-book-hating-world — that re-reading Langland’s magnum opus, on which he (probably) spent an erratic lifetime in the later Middle Ages, remains a pleasure. Re-reading it after multiple go-rounds (it’s a circular poem) is actually a supreme pleasure: it’s the kind of work, as one critic put it, “that should never be read for the first time.” The fact remains: Piers Plowman is the most gripping, bizarre, immersive and cognitively real book/experience (one that is so fucked up that it feels like your life) that I read this year. This will be true, I can almost guarantee, any year that I read it.

 

Closer to the contemporary world, I discovered Shirley Jackson. This is as belated a claim as Columbus’s discovery of America, I realize. Shirley was already there. Oh yes. I’d just like to add my voice to the thousands of living writers who are in awe at her mastery, particularly at the novella length. We Have Always Lived in the Castle was a revelation to me. It certainly showed me the lineage of all the spooky spunky YA heroines with which our age is littered, and was a wonderful riposte to Welty’s Why I Live at the P.O., a story I have always felt was overrated.

 

Three books by people I actually know were influential on me this year. One is the collected works of the Caribbean-Canadian poet Pamela Mordecai, A Fierce Green Place, which came out in 2022 with New Directions. It should be on every best-of list this year. In fact, it’s weird that it isn’t. She has hitherto published mostly with small presses. We have a lot of shit-hot Caribbean writers in Canada, especially women, and I think that Pam gets drowned out by some of the bigger names (Dionne Brand, Olive Senior, and so on) when, in fact, she’s better than any of them. 

Helen Marshall’s collection The Gold Leaf Executions, which was due out in October but was delayed by her publisher and should be out soon, was a work I read as an ARC. It spans about the last decade of her career as a short story writer and it is terrific. It was also a work that hit me, personally, at exactly the right time: I have never really written fiction set today, nor anything autobiographical (though I do so all the time as a poet, now that I think about it). Several of Helen’s protagonists in Executions are medievalists, editors, and/or itinerant learned people generally (which designations reflect my background as well as hers) and suddenly I felt that it was okay to do that kind of reveal; I set straight-off writing a new collection of short fiction, Sacraments for the Unfit, which Timmi will be publishing on July 1, 2023. 

 

Also crucial to this just-completed book was my friend Tanis MacDonald’s hilarious memoir Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female. This book, typical of everything of hers I have ever read, is both hard-hitting and a total scream; it takes a sardonic poke at rugged, male, outdoorsy memoirs of the hill-walking-and-existential-musing type. I recommend all three of these very different books wholeheartedly to all.

 I am watching the new episodes of His Dark Materials with great happiness. I feared that The Golden Compass would become a CGI action nightmare but so far, so good. There are some casting decisions that I can’t get behind (I don’t need to see Lin-Manuel Miranda ever again, frankly) and they have had to dumb it down for people who haven’t read Milton, but aside from these inevitable problems, it’s great; the young leads are doing a great job carrying the can on what is, after all, a superb story.

 

 Our family Christmas re-watch this year, controversially, is the 1966-7 Soviet War and Peace. This remains one of the best movies (film series, I guess, really, though it feels more unified than that) I have ever seen, and the single best book-to-cinema adaptation. While being interestingly stylized in itself, and of its own moment, it is absolutely note-perfect to Tolstoy’s original, a feat all the more remarkable given its completely morally unacceptable status to the regime. My husband’s family is Ukrainian and nobody is feeling anything less than loathing for Putin and his oligarchy right now, but at the same time we decided that boycotting great works of art of the past because of insane contemporary wars makes no sense. This great Russian-language Soviet showpiece was directed by, and stars, a Ukrainian (Sergei Bondarchuk), after all. Best we can do in the moment.

 Merry Christmas under all this snow, and best wishes to all for 2023!

 

 Sacraments for the Unfit, which Aqueduct will be releasing in 2023, will be Sarah Tolmie’s sixth book with Aqueduct Press. Others include The Stone Boatmen, nominated for the Crawford Award in 2015, and The Little Animals, winner of the Special Citation at the Philip K Dick Awards in 2020. In addition to publishing short fiction, novellas and novels with Aqueduct, she has released two novellas with Tor.com, The Fourth Island and All the Horses of Iceland; the latter was listed as one of the top fantasy books of 2022 by The New York Times. She has also written three volumes of poetry for McGill-Queen’s University Press; the second one, The Art of Dying, was a finalist for the 2019 Griffin Prize for Poetry. In her other life, she is a Professor of English at the University of Waterloo. Her website is sarahtolmie.ca.

 

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2022, pt. 19.: LaToya Jordan

 

Reading, Viewing, and Listening

By  LaToya Jordan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read:

Amari and the Night Brothers by B.B. Alston

I read this with my 10-year-old daughter. It’s very exciting to share a love of fantasy and sci-fi with her, and I love finding books with young protagonists she identifies with. Amari is a 13-year-old Black girl who wants to find her missing brother. Most people think he’s dead, but Amari gets a special message that sets her off on an adventure at a summer camp for the supernatural that introduces her to a world where all the magical creatures people think are fake do exist.

 I didn’t read as many novels as I wanted to this year because the pandemic stole my attention span for long-form fiction. I’m hoping this is temporary though I’m enjoying my deep dive into short stories.

 

One Story

I bought a subscription to One Story, a literary journal that publishes one story a month, during the pandemic. I enjoy receiving my monthly chapbook instead of junk mail. The issues fit in my purse and are the perfect companion for my commute to work. I haven’t read all this year’s issues yet, but my favorite story so far was Issue No. 290, “From the Comfort of Your Own Home” by Lincoln Michel. I read this one by flashlight on a camping trip with my daughter’s Girl Scout Troop. It’s a horror story told in email format about a virtual reality writing residency gone creepy. I do not recommend reading this at night or when camping. I also caught up on issues from 2021 I hadn’t yet read. I keep returning to Issue No. 283 “Naturale” by Carrie R. Moore. The story is about how a woman deals with who she becomes dealing with her pregnancy and her husband’s affair. I’ve read it at least three times this year because the writer does an amazing job at backstory and moving through the past and present in a short story.

 

Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Stories of Horrorby  Lincoln Michel & Nadxieli Nieto

This collection of flash horror was weird, creepy, and scary. So many good stories in the collection but as a New Yorker, “Carbon Footprint” by Shelly Oria, stuck with me. It’s about a way to prevent the destruction of the Earth by mass murder via pushing people off subway platforms to thin the herd. As a mom who’s made mom friends online, “Human Milk for Human Babies” by Lindsay King-Miller made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It’s about mothers who cultivate an online relationship with one donating breast milk to the other in need that ends up with a bad outcome for one of the mothers when they meet in real life.

 

Uncanny Magazine

 I love the stories in Uncanny and I hope to be published there one day. I enjoyed  "Our Love against US" by DaVaun Sanders in Issue Forty-Eight. One of my favorite lines from the story is “It’s using our love against us.” Even though it sounds painful, I love the idea of an alien parasite spreading via love. 

 

Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories

I’ve read “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House, but since I’ve been writing sci-fi and horror, I felt it was my duty to read more of her work. I especially enjoyed the uncollected and unpublished stories.

 

 

Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping by Matthew Salesses

Even though I’m no longer involved in traditional writing workshops, this book caught my attention for how teachers and writers need to rethink teaching craft to reach writers with diverse backgrounds.

There are so many dog-eared pages in my copy of the book, especially in the back section with 34 revision exercises. I’m currently using two to help revise a short story I’ve been having trouble with.

 

Watch:

I’m not ashamed to admit I love TV.

Paper Girls, Amazon 

This series features many of my favorite things: the 80s, the 90s, girl protagonists, and time travel. It’s about four newspaper delivery girls who end up caught in a battle between people from the future. The girls end up time traveling to the 90s and meet their future selves as they work to figure out how to get back to their timeline. Watching the girls — who had high hopes and plans for their futures — meet the adult versions of themselves and reckon with dashed dreams made this a poignant coming of age vignettes for each girl. There’s a lot of cursing in the show, but more cursing from me after I learned Amazon didn’t renew the series for a second season. Since it’s based on a comic book series, I picked up the complete story collection, issues 1-30, for me and my daughter to read together.

 

Stranger Things, Netflix

Paper Girls led us to watching Stranger Things. My family (minus my four-year-old) finished all four seasons in about a month. This sci-fi and horror series has 80s pop culture, the paranormal, secret government experiments, and has become a new cult classic. I was drawn to the series because it reminded me of Stephen King books. My least favorite season was 3 because it veered more towards gross horror with exploding rats.

 

Travelers, Netflix

Another series about time travel. A team of “travelers” from a post-apocalyptic future world travel back to our present day to complete missions to try to alter the course of humans destroying their future. The way they time travel is by sending their consciousness into present-day people at the exact date and time of deaths. Travelers need to pretend to be their host. Unfortunately, the show went the way of most popular Netflix series and was canceled by the streamer.

Wednesday, Netflix 

A dark and funny series featuring Wednesday Addams investigating murders in the town where she attends school. It was great to share with my daughter and have the Wednesday I grew up with from the 90s (Christina Ricci) as a character in the series.

 

White Lotus, HBO Max
It’s not sci-fi, but I like to think of it as fantasy since it’s about the lives of rich people at a luxury resort, with a dash of murder.
 

Everything Everywhere All at Once

I went to see Everything Everywhere All at Once twice in the theaters. As background, I’m not a fan of going to the movies. I prefer watching movies in the comfort of my home. But this movie hit every mark for me: sci-fi, weird (hot dog fingers, a raccoon chef, and butt plugs), female lead, and the exploration of a mother-daughter relationship and a husband-wife relationship. Experiencing the movie in the theater the first time was a profound experience and made me realize why people enjoy going to the movies. I remember looking over at the woman seated next to me who was crying when I was crying, laughing when I was laughing. At the end of the movie, I wanted to know who wrote it (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert and aka The Daniels) because it is the type of exploration of motherhood I want to write. This will be a movie I rewatch with my daughter when she’s a teenager.

 

Listen:

 
Ursa Short Fiction Podcast 

Ursa is a podcast dedicated to short fiction by underrepresented writers co-hosted by Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, and Dawnie Walton, author of The Final Revival of Opal & Nev. The podcast features short stories and interviews with short story writers. I especially loved the “Book Club: The Secret Lives of Church Ladies” episode where Dawnie interviews Deesha about her debut short story collection to mark the two-year anniversary of the book being published.

 

Lofi Girl on YouTube

This is my go-to when I’m doing personal writing or writing for my day job. Lofi hip hop with no vocals and the animated girl who sits at her desk continuously writing while her cat looks out the window makes me feel like I’m having a virtual writing date.

 

 

LaToya Jordan is a writer from Brooklyn, NY. Her work has appeared in Anomaly, Literary Mama, Shirley Magazine, Mom Egg Review, Raising Mothers, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, and more. Her flash story “Offering” was a spotlight story in Best Small Fictions 2021 and named in Wigleaf’s Top 50 2021. Her essay “The Zig Zag Mother,” appears in My Caesarean: Twenty-One Mothers on the C-Section Experience and After and another essay, “After Striking a Fixed Object,” published by The Manifest-Station, was notable in Best American Essays 2016. She is also the author of a poetry chapbook, Thick-Skinned Sugar. Aqueduct Press will be releasing her novella To the Woman in the Pink Hat as a volume in the Conversation Pieces series in March 2023. Follow her on Twitter @latoyadjordan.