Destroying Horror, Week 2

This week's story is Alyssa Wong's nightmarish "Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers," and the nonfiction is Nightmare's H-Word column with a twist: Stoker Award winner Lucy A. Snyder's "A Good Story," which asks what "caring about the quality of the story" means in the context of a genre where a publisher requesting that a writer 'straighten' a queer protagonist is not out of the question.

Horror is the literature of fear. And if you’re queer, and if you write fiction about your darkest fears while also doing your very best to tell a good story, a funny thing happens. Many of those readers who claimed to just care about story are now all squirmy. Sure, the plot’s exciting . . . but you made it all weird! Why couldn’t you just write a good old-fashioned entertaining story where the monsters are uncomplicatedly monstrous and the heroic guy gets the trophy girl at the end? Why couldn’t your story be straight, darn it?

Read, enjoy, and keep spreading the word!

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Friday, October 16, 2015

editing, horror, nonfiction, queer fiction

I Destroyed Horror - AMA

The first story and nonfiction piece from Queers Destroy Horror! went live at Nightmare Magazine this Wednesday. The story is Matthew Bright's phenomenal "Golden Hair, Red Lips," which drops the protagonist of my favorite novel into an AIDS-crisis era San Francisco, and ends on an absolutely chilling note. The nonfiction is the editorial introduction, including a few words from guest editor-in-chief Wendy Wagner, poetry editor Robyn  Lupo, and yours truly:

As queer writers and readers, we find ourselves feeling both at home and deeply unwelcome in the horror genre. Sexual and gender nonconformity are in the genre’s DNA; queer people began writing horror long before it was a recognizable fiction category, and our ranks include some of the biggest names in the contemporary horror scene...It makes sense that many of us are drawn to fiction that tackles [sex and desire] in unexpected and often unsettling ways. But, as the essays and interviews in this special issue demonstrate, if we often see ourselves reflected in horror stories, it can also feel like the genre wants us gone—or dead.

If you don't want to wait, or if you want to read the full slate of fiction and nonfiction in this oversized issue, it can be purchased in paperback or e-book.

Also, the QDH team is doing an Ask Me Anything on r/Fantasy on Tuesday, October 13. Unless dire circumstances arise to prevent me, I'll be dropping by in the afternoon. Come and ask us questions, or lurk your way through the answers.

Final, unrelated note: Mirror Dance will be closed to submissions until January 15, 2016 so that I can clear out the backlog. Exam reading has not been kind to my slush schedule,and too many authors have been waiting way too long for a response. If this is you: my apologies, and thanks for your patience.

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Saturday, October 10, 2015

editing, horror, nonfiction, queer fiction

Five Things of various shapes and sizes

Looking at the archive of this blog, there seems to be a pattern: in January, I resolve to work harder on my internet presence, and there are a fair number of blog entries; then the winter quarter catches up with me, and between teaching, research, and writing, I fall off the internet-planet until something happens that demands to be blogged about. The question of whether this particular post fits the pattern or not if left open as an exercise to the reader.

1. Reprints! "Final Exam" is being reprinted in John Joseph Adams' Wastelands 2. Read an interview with me (and other interviews with the other fabulous contributors) here. "The Minotaur's Wife" appeared in Pantheon's Persephone issue at the end of January, and "All the King's Monsters" will appear in Airships & Automatons at the beginning of next month.

2. The Spring 2015 issue of Mirror Dance is all ready to go! I'm also getting a lot of awesome submissions for the summer "Animals and Humans" - more so than usual. Just an especially popular theme? Or is everyone getting a lot of writing done now that they're cooped up for the winter?

3. I finished a story! Yes, that is important enough to get its own bullet point. Horror stories are easy to start and hard to finish, in my experience, so I'm giving myself credit on this.

4. I am not at all caught up on reading. However, as a reward for myself for achieving something like a word-work balance (like a work-life balance, but for people who do two different kinds of work), I bought a copy of Caitlin Kiernan's The Red Tree and re-devoured it in one sitting.

5. And finally, speaking of horror: I am going to the nonfiction editor for Nightmare's Queers Destroy Horror! special issue! Ridiculously excited about this. More news as it comes.

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Saturday, February 14, 2015

horror, Mirror Dance, queer fiction, the writer in its natural habitat

On Twitter!

As I continue to ease my way into the second decade of the twenty-first century, I've finally signed up for Twitter. You can follow me at @meganarkenberg. Feel free to let me know who else I should be following!

In other news, my sister has a story up at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Sunny Moraine released a new novel on Tuesday. The Kickstarter for Lightspeed's Queers Destroy Science Fiction is in full swing, and you should definitely be reading the personal essays by An Owomoyela and others.

My students have their midterm next Monday. I cannot believe how fast time flies on the quarter system.

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Thursday, January 22, 2015

Lightspeed, queer fiction, recommendations, the writer in its natural habitat, Twitter

Wiscon 36

Despite being a lifelong Wisconsin resident, I hadn’t made it out to Wiscon until this year. I know, I know, where are my priorities? The convention was capital-A Awesome. Getting the program was like being handed a menu where every entrée is chocolate, or a course catalogue where every literature syllabus includes M. R. James. Unfortunately, due to that work-thing that pays the bills, I could only stay for Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning.

If you were there and are wondering if you saw me, I was the young woman with long, very straight brown hair, wearing a waistcoat and carrying a black-and-gold brocade bag. My companion, the other young woman with long, very straight brown hair, was my sister, novelist Therese Arkenberg.

The first panel we attended was “Considering the Female Villain,” which discussed such varied issues as sexuality and sexualization, maternity, mental illness, and the all-important motive and motivations. The panelists hit on pretty much everything that an author has ever done to annoy me with their (mis)handling of a female villain: tracing her villainy back to some man who had done her wrong, overseuxalizing her, redeeming her through her relationship with the (male) hero. Allison Moon raised the excellent point that a female villain’s sexuality makes her less dangerous, since it offers the male hero a way into her affections, while a male villain’s sexuality (if it ever occurred—outside of the fandom-generated “Draco in leather pants” phenomenon, I can’t think of many sexualized male villains) would make the villain more dangerous, since the accompanying threat of sexual violence would be, in Moon’s words, “capital-S Scary.” Why, in this equation, female sexuality is seen as humanizing while male sexuality is violent and de-humanizing is another topic to consider.

The only academic panel I made it to was “Theorizing Vulnerability in Feminist Science Fiction” (Kathryn Allan) and “The Tribe of the Maiden and the Tribe of Monsters: Reconfiguring the Monstrous Feminine in Cathrynne Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales” (Suzanne Boswell). Both panelists were wonderfully articulate. The first paper dealt with a number of cyberpunk texts, a bit outside my area of interest, but the second offered an astute reading of Valente’s reimagining of the maiden/monster spectrum (not dichotomy!) and reminded me how badly I need to reread The Orphan’s Tales.

Saturday evening was the Tiptree Auction with the hilarious Ellen Klages: highlights included Ellen auctioning off her own shirt and Mary Robinette Kowal’s erotic reading of an early twentieth-century children’s book. Then off to the Outer Alliance reading, where Therese read a passage from her epic fantasy The Last of the LesserKings; Catherine Lundoff read from her werewolf novel (with a mature adult protagonist!) Silver Moon; Julie Andrews read a story about an alien robot invasion; Julia Rios read a modern extension of Hansel and Gretel; and Keffy Kehrli read an awesomely disturbing story about suicide. The reading went to well past my bedtime. At the end of it, I seem to remember turning to Rose Lemberg, brilliant poet and editor of Stone Telling, who happened to be seated next to me, and mumbling something inarticulate like “totally love your magazine.” At least, that’s what I meant to say. It probably came out “askdlfjlsStoneTellingyay!”

Sunday morning, I got up bright and early (well, definitely early—your mileage may vary on “bright”) and attended “Steal Like an Artist” for a spirited discussion about influence, fanfiction, deconstruction and cultural appropriation. No one actually mentioned the Anxiety of Influence, but that was definitely an undercurrent in the discussion: when all art participates in a dialogue with previous art, how do artists assert their originality? Highlights included Alexandra Erin’s concise rebuttal to the obnoxious “there’s only three/seven/fifteen/four-hundred-eighty-six-point-three stories in the universe” accusation/defense: “If you squish everything down to a nutshell, it’s going to look like every other nutshell.” Also, did you know Fifty Shades of Gray was originally Twilight fanfiction? I didn’t, because every time I get within thirty feet of a copy, the hair prickles along the back of my neck and greenish waves of nausea wash over me like the tsunami that will one day herald the rise of Cthulhu. (To be fair, similar waves of nausea washed over me when I saw there was a panel on rape fantasies at Wiscon. The whole topic of male-dom/female-sub is a Cthulhu-sized squick for me, in the classic and non-moral sense.)

Therese persuaded me to accompany her to the panel on “Writing the Singularity,” which is something I’ve never done but something she is interested in doing. I entered with no idea what the Singularity was or how I would go about writing it; I left with a slightly better idea of what the Singularity is and a very long reading list. *Adjusts Monocle-of-Fantasy-Writing* I say, what funny things you science fiction writers come up with!

My last panel of the convention was “It’s Actually Quite Hard to Rip a Bodice,” a panel on research and historical fiction lead by Vylar Kaftan, Lucy Adlington, Ellen Klages, Elizabeth Bear, and Alex Dally MacFarlane. (Side note: MacFarlane’s ““Numismatics in the Reigns of Naranh and Viu” in The Mammoth Book of Steampunk was perfect. You should go read it. Yes, now. I’ll wait.) The panel addressed the proper use of research, the challenge of stopping research, how to record and map out one’s research, and the difficulty of bodice-ripping. Conclusion: research is considerably more seductive than the ripping of bodices.

Next year I’ll hopefully be able to make it down for the full three-day weekend. I’ll also hopefully remember to bring a notebook so I can jot down and remember all the clever things people say at eight in the morning when I’ve been up until one the previous night. My human frailties aside, it was a fantastic, enlightening experience.

Now, off to find everything this weekend has added to my reading list.... 

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Tuesday, May 29, 2012

conventions, feminism, historical fiction, outer alliance, publishing, queer fiction, research, writing

Roses in December

The Winter 2011 issue of Mirror Dance came out this morning. We have some lovely retold fairy tales, surprising takes on folklore, entirely original pieces, and an insightful interview with Mike Phillips. I'm particularly pleased with the poetry in this issue, so be sure you check it out!

My pseudo-Jamesian secondary-world ghost story "The Gardens of Landler Abbey" appears in today's issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and the very queer "Portrait of a Courtesan" appears in Crossed Genre's final issue. As a bibliographic note, "Landler Abbey" is my most recently finished story, having been drafted, edited, and submitted this September. Make of that what you will.

In other news, please think positive thoughts for my mother and aunt, who lost their beloved mother (my wonderful and elegant grandmother) on Saturday.

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Thursday, December 01, 2011

Beneath Ceaseless Skies, editing, ghost story, Mirror Dance, No Exit, publishing, queer fiction, short fiction