COVER REVEAL, NEW POEM, and poem notes!
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
I've got some really cool news for you today! First, feast your eyes on the OFFICIAL COVER for my upcoming collection, RESURRECTIONS:
The planned release date is December 19. If you want more about RESURRECTIONS, I've made an official page on my website; more detail will be added as we get closer to the date.
Second, I have a new poem out: “The Fox’s Lover” in Orion’s Belt. It’s the tale of a person who falls in love with an Arctic fox-shifter spirit, but reacts strongly to their unpredictable comings and goings. More on that in a bit, but you can go read it right now.
Third, my old friend RB Lemberg is giving a talk on September 22 at the Sturgeon Symposium: “Representations of queer neurodivergent communities in Ada Hoffmann’s The Fallen and Andi Buchanan’s The Sanctuary.” I am, no joke, extremely excited about this; “someone writes academically about my fiction” was always one of my secret career goals. And if you’re talking about queer neurodivergent communities then Sanctuary is absolutely the perfect book to pair with The Fallen. Chef’s kiss!
If I find a transcript or recording of the talk later, I’ll let you all know.
That’s all the news (and that’s probably plenty for one week!) but behind the cut, for paid subscribers, I’ve included some poem notes giving a little more insight into the process behind “The Fox’s Lover.” Probably read the poem first but then, if that interests you, please click on through.
I wrote "The Fox's Lover" several years ago when I was on the tail end of a complicated, on-again-off-again relationship. I'm pretty sure this comes through clearly in the text. This particular person was very sweet, but also terminally unable to commit, either to staying or going. (In their defense, I was also a huge mess at the time.)
So this poem is about the old idea, present in many cultures, of the fox as a trickster spirit; but also about longing for someone else to validate you. When the narrator's fickle, intermittently-available partner is around, they are able to see the good in themselves; but they are beginning to understand that if they see it with their partner around, they ought to be able to see it the rest of the time, too. Nonetheless they're not quite at the point of being able to let go, or to handle their partner's absences with ease. As appropriate for a poem about shapeshifters, it's an in-between state, a process that is still underway.
The introduction to this issue of Orion's Belt says:
Reductive ideas about the self and others inevitably fail when confronted with unexpected and uncertain occurrences. Still, what comes after this rejection?... our poem and story for the month, both about longing for warmth and assurance in a fragmentary and diffuse world, exemplify this careful, contemplative observation needed.
This is a lovely and generous reading of the poem. It's certainly about longing for warmth and assurance. And when I hear I'm being careful and contemplative, as opposed to simple and reductive, I always feel like I must have succeeded on some level. It's not necessarily goals for this poem any more so than my others, but it's Writer Goals.
I think both partners in the poem are genderqueer, although I wrote this several years ago and the language I use to express the fox partner's androgyny is not necessarily the language I would use today. It's very tricky to get suitable language for some of these feelings about gender, even when you are nonbinary yourself (and there are many ways of being nonbinary, each with very different sentiments behind them; there's no one single correct set of nonbinary poetics. If there was one, it probably, on some level, wouldn’t be nonbinary anymore.)
The other elephant in the room is, of course, that this is a furry poem. (Though I've tried to make it clear that everyone is more or less in human form when anything sexy happens.) The person I wrote it about was a furry. I don't talk about this very often, but several of the people I've dated are furries. I have a somewhat complicated relationship to furry fandom - not from any qualms about the community itself (I think dressing up in a cute fuzzy animal suit is basically harmless, and ethically fine) but because whenever I hang out with furries, I have this sense that they're almost what I'm looking for, but not quite. I have no idea what that actually means. Maybe someday I'll write a full length urban fantasy about werecats, or whatever, and figure it out.