1. Appearances and news
2. Pep talk
3. Extras

Appearances and news

Amplitudes is on the longlist for the BSFA Awards for Best Collection! I’m very excited for all of us at how much positive reception this anthology continues to receive. It’s truly heartening in these dark times.

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Applications for Futurescapes (Mar 12–15) are open for just a few more days! Last day to apply is Feb 7. I, for one, LOVE geeking out about openings and query letters, and the faculty is extremely stacked. Looking forward to seeing some of you there.

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Reminder I’m teaching a two-part workshop with Metrowest on March 24th and 31st. It will be at 7:30 EST, virtual, and it is $50. We’re going to get into the nitty-gritty of your novel and characters, and I promise you will come away with an iron-clad method of using archetypes and character to solidify your world and justify how it lays on the page. I have worksheets!!! Come play.

They are trying to destroy your imagination

If you have received a newsletter from me, you are accustomed to (or begrudgingly accepting of; tolerant of skimming) my Asian Gemini millennial exclamation marks, ascii art, and uncomfortably placed lol’s.

So please pardon the tone shift. We’ll get back to our pep talks and chuckling lizard memes, but the reality is, I am tired. I can only imagine if things were more materially difficult for me on a daily basis. Still, I am tired, all the time. I know many of you are, too.

I needn’t recount the news. You know what’s going on in Minnesota, to our friends, family, and neighbors, in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, all over the world. Bad stuff is happening so often that it feels darkly comedic to call it bad stuff.

Bad stuff! a category of crimes against humanity (and human dignity) so varied and wide-ranging that labeling it deletes all gravity.

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I have my Trials, of course, but I have largely lived a sheltered life. While I continue expanding my understanding of our world, however ugly, I have the nervous system of a 9lb shelter dog. I genuinely find so many (even mundane) situations shocking and distressing, to the point of freezing up. This is largely not an admirable trait in 2026 America—needing time to think, to digest, to understand what is happening before me—though I won’t be so unkind as to call it useless. Even admitting this makes me, frankly, unlikable.

There are many among us who are competent, confident, and so extremely useful. When things go wrong, we flock to them. If there were an emergency, they would instruct us confidently. This is our ideal American leader. Someone to rely on in a crisis.

I’ve always drawn back and thought, I’m not built like that. There’s lots of talk about how every person is suited to serving society differently. Some of us are naturally more reserved or brash, thrill-seeking or anxious. But as the world around us evolves, we, too, have to try to meet the moment, no?

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It’s fair to pooh-pooh limp, performative action. Recently, the red Melt the ICE hat has taken the knitting world by storm. A decent number have criticized it as just another pink pussy hat (which was exclusionary, no question; an empty symbol, debatably). However, the knitting pattern has raised over $250,000 dollars for Minnesota last I checked, so it is quite disingenuous to say it’s merely performative.

As a writer, artist, and semi-designer, my most compelling value-add to most situations feels like a line of text, a nice site, or, god forbid, a poster/sticker. I do believe these things can be important in movements, but I’ve seen enough self-serving, smug, ‘karma-farming’ content that I, like many, have become cynical about the actual impact of art activism, of simply speaking up. Combined with my naturally high-key personality, that makes it very easy to think I am of little use to this era we live in, that I am fated to be an inferior activist.

Many of you are probably also artists of some stripe. And I’m sure we all struggle with wondering what the hell our work actually does in a material sense, while our neighbors are being bodily kidnapped and disappeared from smashed cars, pepper sprayed, shot in the street. What’s the point of spending time resisting through art when the moment is urgent? We surely must be out on the literal front line. We should be saving our energy to literally, physically fight and somehow unilaterally win, decisively sending these assholes cowering back into their mancaves, instead of making little memes. All other action is of no use.

That’s called ennui. That’s depression.

That’s cynicism.

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When I feel generous, I can resist the notion that we have a limited, set capacity for activism, for doing. I resist the idea that if you stand witness/drop a donation/repost important work, you suddenly don’t have the energy to ‘do something larger’. No. We can’t afford to think simplistically. We can’t leave anything on the field. We are not filling up a mana graph in an RPG. Energy doesn’t work like that. Sometimes it is multiplicative. Sometimes doing something objectively small creates capacity within us, gives us the courage to do just one more thing, to be a little more for each other.

Yet another vinyl ‘fuck ICE’ sticker might induce cringe in some, but the same thing that fuels the impulse towards art as activism (imagination) is necessary for a better society. A lot of people want us to be too tired and cynical. Optimism is at heart an act of imagination. A lot of people benefit from all of us lacking imagination, because without it, we can’t fathom a better society where people don’t have to skip dinner to pay off hospital bills, or lose a job to avoid being rounded up in black vans.

Look. Look how hard they are trying to take our imaginations from us. Keeping us in debt, one medical crisis away from bankruptcy and eviction, so we are too afraid to step out of line. Threatening us with a new age gestapo for reporting on the truth. Pushing addicting, short form content as the only reasonable respite from frantic, captive jobs quickly approaching 996. Beige-ifying our makeup, our clothes, our logos, our homes. Even the act of making art, exercising our full imagination as is our human right, is on their agenda. They push genAI slop upon us, try so hard to convince us that envisioning something new is better left to machines we didn’t build (that stole from us unblinking). Those machines undoubtedly know better as they have all the leisure time in the world in their infinite machine wisdom.

Who benefits from the destruction of your imagination? Not us. Not me.

The sad truth about this moment is there are crises and tragedies everywhere. Turn your head, and there’s ten things you can help with. I have come to believe, unfortunately for my introvert tendencies, that the solution isn’t abandonment of art, but rather a preservation of what makes that art feel good. It is a dogged expansion of imagination, it is growth—this time, for what I believe I can accomplish as a holistically better community member, friend, and person.

Today I took my first CPR/first aid class (…didn’t realize there’s a proper way to take off disposable gloves…). My heart literally started pounding at the very idea of a person collapsing in front of me, at picking a bystander in the crowd to call 911. But maybe I could be a person who helps like that, I suspect I actually have a pretty high gore tolerance. I could try and make that person real, just the same as I have called down nothingness and air and made a 476 page novel real. And once I feel like I could confidently stab a stranger with an epi-pen, I’ll move on to something scarier.

I am choosing to engage in this act of fantasy, even if I don’t feel very good at it. I hope you will join me. I am choosing to imagine my best self, and then figure out the tools I need to make that person real, just as I would manifest a novel, a painting, a website. You were built for this moment, as someone who can dream up something better and bring it down to existence.

You need only turn your head.

Extras

Welcome to the best time of year in the Bay Area, dramatic skies season.

The season’s first roses. Do I need to get nineteen rose bushes? Asking for a friend.

Additionally, a continued thank you to everyone who replied to previous newsletters, it means a lot. I’m always happy to hear from folks (especially ones I haven’t seen in quite some time), so don’t be shy LIKE I AM.

xoxo Ash