So yeah, sometimes all the public conversations being had feel a little too small and like fakery, and what I actually have to deal with in my life is a little too large for the format, so I just don’t talk.

(Which is not a call for a wellness check: I am talking just fine with individual human people. Hanging out all night on Zoom, long emails, finding the right stationery for each of the correspondents, or dragging people to the all-night art show is fun! I’m just not broadcasting into general silence. One-way communication is exhausting.)

So, well. This is interstitial. But: a few relevant things to report — a few small ones, and at the end, something bigger.

things to read

In poetry news, a small interview we did for promo on On Occasion went up ahead of the book release. It’s just a little quick hit of book publicity, but has a hat tip to the people who used to leave silent rude phrases on my fridge poetry for me to find later (hee hee) and we link it as completists.

There’s a poem in the next issue of PRISM International, which drops next week: it’ll be available here when the issue releases. It’s prompted off a quote from a Pamela Anderson interview and I think tips the hat to something quite insightful she said.

That review of Garry Thomas Morse’s Retcon is live at Prairie Fire. This one to the special attention of readers who like unreliable narrators, deep-cut film references, dark academia, stylefuckery, and farce. It’s a biting, funny book.

And, caught right after I sent that last issue out: a new review live at Plenitude, of Jeff Miller’s Temporary Palaces. I am generally not in the habit of issuing mixed or negative reviews to first novels — I think it’s unkind — but I’d already committed irreversibly to the piece when the writing in my review copy took a turn, so: well, shit.

Maybe there’s a value in saying this: sometimes that negative review isn’t malice, politics, or some worldview about the place of criticism. It’s just sheer deadline logistics, having to turn something in to keep your promises, and being a person who needs her copy to be honest. So it goes.

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And the bigger one: Some time ago I pitched a column idea to Reactor, or Tor.com that was. Would they be interested in a monthly column about books and projects that show where the stuff we talk about or play around with in speculative fiction actually finds its practical application in the world? Applied Speculative Fiction, basically?

Could we talk about what lives in the place where my arts practice and the community organizing practice touch?

They were indeed into it, and after some planning and ramp-up and whatnot, the column debuts tomorrow at noon, with Rob Hopkins’s How To Fall in Love With the Future and a short analysis of his whole working practice of applied imagination. It’s a good introductory piece for the concept, but where this is going is, so far, a lot of places: thinking about how we conceptualize and use the past via alternate history; thinking about climate action through the lens of the mythic. I am very likely to get the editorial go-ahead for the Heinleinian approach to right-to-repair and a repair cafe.

I am very pleased with this whole project — both proud of it, and also really hopeful for it having some potential for impact, because sometimes, when you describe a door people go oh, and walk through it.

Please check it out tomorrow, and also take it as a given that I am taking suggestions if there’s a book or project or situation that you feel really needs to be here. I’ve got at least a year’s worth of ideas ready, but am always happy to have better and more, and yes, if you suggest something I end up using, proper citations/shoutouts will be provided because academic honesty is a lifestyle, not a frill.

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Not sure when we’ll have a next full issue here: Either when one-way communication becomes less of a personal irritant, or there’s a better way to set this up so it’s more reciprocating. It’s a systems problem, as usual. As usual, the work is in progress.