First of all, you’ll want to come. It’s virtual, so it’s easy. And since you’ll want to come, here is where you sign up for (FREE) tickets on the Eventbrite page:
What it is: a night of readings by speculative fiction writers and poets (and long-time friends): Nicole Kornher-Stace, Caitlyn Paxson, Patty Templeton, T. L Trent / Tiffany Trent, Amal El-Mohtar, Ysabeau Wilce, C. S. E. Cooney, and Jessica P. Wick.
We will be hosted by Mike Allen and Sydney Macias of Mythic Delirium.
After the readings, we will do a Q&A with the audience!
Re: the Q&A! Our expert guests—writers, poets, editors, reviewers, publishers, professors, archivists all (sometimes several at once)—might be able to answer some of your questions on the following subjects, or other SFF/literature-related ones you might think of:
from poems to short stories to novels: publishing!
self-publishing, small presses, bigger ones
reading & reviewing SFF
Speaking of our expert guests, let me introduce you!
Nicole Kornher-Stace is the author of the enemies-to-besties journey-into-the-underworld Norton Award finalist Archivist Wasp and its sequel, Latchkey, as well as the anticorporate SF thriller Firebreak and the middle grade SF/horror space adventure Jillian vs. Parasite Planet.She lives in New Paltz, NY with her family. She can be found online at www.nicolekornherstace.com or on Twitter @wirewalking, where she is probably semicoherently yelling about aspec representation and platonic relationships in fiction.
Caitlyn Paxson is a writer, reviewer, performer, and storyteller. She lives on Prince Edward Island, where she keeps a witch’s garden, manages a haunted museum, and moonlights as a fake spirit medium.
Want to know more about Caitlyn? Caitlyn’s AMAZING newsletter “Book and Bramble” Caitlyn’s MAGICAL P.E.I.-based Instagram: @caitlynpaxson
Patty Templeton is a writer, Certified Archivist, and itinerant kitchen dancer. Find her on Twitter via @PattyTempleton.
T.L.Trent is the author of the new series from Moonhare Press, RISE OF THE IRON LOTUS. The first book, BLOODSWORD, will be available in August. As Tiffany Trent, she is the author of the young adult dark fantasy series Hallowmere and The Unnaturalists duology.
Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism and the co-author, with Max Gladstone, of This Is How You Lose the Time War. She teaches creative writing at the University of Ottawa. You can subscribe to her newsletter at amalelmohtar.com
Ysabeau S. Wilce is a graduate of Clarion West, and has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and won the Andre Norton Award for the second volume in her Flora Segunda series, FLORA’S DARE. Her short stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, F&SF magazine, and various collections, including the Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her most recent work, PROPHECIES, LIBELS & DREAMS, is available from Small Beer Press.
C. S. E. Cooney is a writer & audiobook narrator. She won the World Fantasy Award for her collection Bone Swans in 2016. Her new collection, Dark Breakers, featuring stories and novellas set in the same world as Desdemona and the Deep, and came out from Mythic Delirium in February. Her new novel Saint Death’s Daughter debuted with Solaris in April. Currently, she and her husband, author Carlos Hernandez, are co-developing a TTRPG about “Inquisition and Aliens” called Negocios Infernales, forthcoming next year from Outland Entertainment.
Want to know more about YOURS TRULY, C. S. E. Cooney? Well, you’re HERE, aren’t you? But also, here’s my LINKTREE with ALL THE THINGS! (Where to find my books, where to find my songs, where to look out for the game that Carlos & I collaborated on, etc…)
Jessica P. Wick is a writer, poet, and editor. She co-founded Goblin Fruit with Amal El-Mohtar, a quarterly e-zine of fantastical poetry, and is a passionate advocate for the reading aloud of poetry and fiction. Her poetry has been nominated for the Rhysling Award and received honorable mentions in Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies. Her short fiction can be found scattered across the internet.
Want to know more about Jess? Links to her Poetry and Fiction found here!
AND OF COURSE, MEET THE HOSTS! Editor/Publisher/Poet/Writer Mike Allen of Mythic Delirium, and his Assistant Editor, writer Sydney Macias!
Mike Allen edits and publishes Mythic Delirium Books in Roanoke, Virginia. His short stories have been gathered in three collections: Unseaming; The Spider Tapestries; and Aftermath of an Industrial Accident. His first dark fantasy novel, The Black Fire Concerto, appeared in 2013, and publisher Broken Eye Books plans to release his second novel, Trail of Shadows, in 2023. A two-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award, Mike has also been a Nebula Award nominee and a three-time Rhysling Award winner for poetry. By day (and most nights!) he works as the Editorial Page Editor for The Roanoke Times.
Sydney Macias is a practicing novel writer whose interests take form in metaphysical settings. Her work explores large casts of ambiguous characters dealing with themes of grief, identity and power. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an Emphasis in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her experience includes being a Senior Editor and contributor to Mouth Magazine, judging the Writer’s Games for Writer’s Workout, and being an Assistant Editor for the speculative fiction publisher Mythic Delirium.
My 1st D&D game was about 5 years ago in the mountains. It was a one-off. I was anxious & confused. Everyone knew what they were doing. I didn’t know how to play. I don’t learn well that way. So I came out of it no more inclined to want to play D&D or understand those who do.
I’ve always been a person willing to play games but I always ask if I could watch one first. Many people are disinclined to allow this. That whole “throw them in and let em learn on the job” mentality. People say you should learn D&D like that. It didn’t work for me.
But, see, Carlos has been playing D&D for decades. A lot of my friends play. My brother & his wife DM 3 games a week. People kept saying I would love D&D, being a professional actor & writer myself. I said, right, well it sounds more like work than play to me.
Enter Critical Role last fall. Watching terrifically smart voice actors (they do a lot of video games & cartoons; I do almost exclusively audiobooks, but we’re all actors!) gave me a sense of the mechanics, fun, love & potential of this mind-blowing collaborative medium.
Anyway, I’m so damn grateful. It took me almost six months of watching before I shyly asked Carlos to DM a solo campaign for me.
Now, after 3 months of that, I am playing it with another person FOR THE 1st TIME TODAY (a memoirist/musical theatre composer/professor).
Later this month, I play with a group of at least 5–all family members.
And in August, at GenCon, I’ll play in front of a live audience with people who’ve loved D&D for as many decades as Carlos has.
That’s the difference a year makes. And that’s a story about how everyone learns things differently. And how a fantasy writer and voice actor came, at last, to play D&D at age 40.
Or perhaps I was careless with it, or clumsy like I get when I’m about to have my period,
Or a wind knocked it down,
Or it was tired of being stuck in orbit without any friends closer than Brooklyn.
Anyway, it broke into two terrible pieces,
And I cried
Because it was the Moon, and my father gave it to me, and I broke it.
And one feels great guilt in the destruction of celestial bodies—
Even if you are only one small body stuck in a relentless system of waste, still it is all your fault, all the time, and life isn’t long enough to first learn this and then make all the necessary reparations.
Well, to continue my story, I broke the Moon and cried, and my husband Carlos cannot stand to see me cry.
Filled with the carnival glee of desperation, he turned cartwheels, wore a red nose and rainbow wig, did handstands, conjured silk handkerchiefs from his sleeve, showered me in flowers and confetti, threatened to eat his own nads, whatever he had to do to keep me from weeping.
But I was inconsolable; I had broken the Moon.
Nothing would ever be right, and, you see, my father, my father had given it to me.
So Carlos, who is clever and loving, went online—
And with the frictionless ease of technology, with a pulse of electricity, with kindness and fossil fuels, and corporate machinery, with all the history of knackerhouses and patents and plastic packaging, and workers strikes and rare materials mined from the earth, and strange planetary systems behind him,
He bought me some gorilla glue
So I could fix my Moon.
So I could plug it into my computer, and charge it up
Here’s the Mc section of our home library. When I was 13, 14–early high school–it was the first section of the public library I’d always go to, just in case there was something new by McCaffrey, McKinley, or McKillip. I barely registered the names of any authors back then, but those three I knew by name, by flavor, by savor. I read and re-read them relentlessly, but the older I grew, it was mostly McKillip I returned to.
Oh, I want to write this, you know? I’ve been yearning to write this, ever since I heard that McKillip passed from us. Tina Connolly told me over Zoom, and I think I said, “No!” in that voice we always use when there’s no other word to say, no other voice to use. “No.” The most useless word in the world, under those circumstances. But I was glad I heard it from a friend, and not just read it on the internet. I don’t know why. “Glad” seems the wrong word anyway.
I’ve been meaning to write something all day today. I’ve been waiting all week till today, when I knew I had some time. I had a certain tone in mind. It was going to be so beautiful. I was going to tell you things about what McKillip meant to me, but with such subtlety, with such grace and wit and wisdom that you wouldn’t even read words on a screen anymore, but instead find yourself at the Cloisters gazing at one of the unicorn tapestries, only each thread was suddenly become a living luminous thing, and then the unicorn would turn her head and stare back at you, and you’d fall headfirst into the dark pool she was drinking from.
That’s what I meant to do, not just tell you about it. I meant to give you what McKillip means to me. So that’s why I hate writing this right now. Because it’s hard. Because I’m crying. Because I can’t do my more than a quarter-of-a-century’s worth of feeling the justice it deserves. Nor honor her, who shaped so much of my mind into what it is today, as I wish.
I didn’t know McKillip, but her mind utterly occupied mine.
And I’m not the only one, not by orders of magnitude. I don’t know how many blogs and articles and reflections and memorials are being written right now, in private or for the public. I don’t know how many of you have candles lit, like I do now. I don’t know how many of you are rereading your precious hoard of McKillip’s works. I know my engineer Judy is. I know several friends on Instagram are. It’s what I’d be doing right now too if I didn’t have stacks and towers and piles and heaps of books to read for the award I’m helping to judge. But right now, all I really want to do is read all my McKillip books again, and get the ones I don’t have from the library.
And even though I’m crying now, I want more time to cry. I don’t want another week, another month, to pass me by again, full of busyness and trivialities and cookies and tweets and just, you know, going on. I don’t want to go on right now. I want to go in. I want to go back into McKillip’s arcade of cathedrals. She built them for me. She built them for us. Luminous palaces. Living tapestries. There are dragons there that are never the dragons we think they are. There are cygnets. And firebirds. And Corbet Lynn. And Morgon of Hed. And Raederle of An. And the pig witch. And the harpist named Deth. And a woman named Saro.
I didn’t know McKillip. Not like the people who knew her knew her. I think we passed by each other at one or two conventions. I might have said hello once? But I think she was very shy. At least, that is my distant impression. And I know I was very awed and also shy. And I’m not sure if we did ever meet, or if I imagined we did, or if we did once smile at each other and make actual eye contact. I don’t know. I can’t remember. I hate that.
I have a Zoom appointment with a dear friend in just 45 minutes, and I don’t regret or resent it, but, you know… I also just want to go away for a month and be with these books and no one else. I want to do McKillip that honor. I want to give myself that gift. But perhaps time like that–time to read, time to dwell, time, even, to drown–perhaps that kind of timeless time only exists in childhood or Faerieland. All we’re left with, in adulthood, is yearning. And maybe that’s the cathedral I have to enter instead. It, too, seems appropriate for this moment of McKillip’s passing.
I can’t even tell you… When Ellen Datlow accepted my novella Desdemona and the Deep for Tor.com, and I told her I would maim or kill or possibly die to have Patricia A. McKillip blurb me (only it was all in a very professional email, I’m sure, with only a few ALL CAPS and maybe only intimations of violence instead of just putting it all out in writing like that), and then she did, I don’t even know the sound I made.
No. I do. The day I got the email with that blurb, I’m sure I made a sound that sounded like one of those Great Shouts that sometimes get wizards in trouble at the College of Riddle-Masters at Caithnard. I’m sure it shattered windows and scared the hiccups out of our local black hole. And then, to see her name on the cover of my book, HER NAME, paired with mine, how I was filled with an abiding joy (that lives in me yet), a feeling of forever, of immortality, of impossibility… Well, I can’t tell you. I mean, I just tried, but you weren’t there. Just imagine me dancing.
The cover of Desdemona and the Deep, with a blurb by Patricia A. McKillip
The whole quote was:
“Desdemona and the Deep is a wild romp through the lives of the rich, the perils of the poor, and a stupefying, complex underworld through which the champagne-swilling, shoe-loving heroine must find her way to right a wrong in her world. The writing is dense with poetry, festooned to the eyelids–occasionally to the gills and other body-parts–with fantastic imagery that comes together in the end in unexpected and entirely satisfying ways.”
Patricia A. McKillip
It was the phrase “occasionally to the gills and other body parts” that got me. Because it was funny. It wasn’t just a blurb about poetry, it was poetry and gills. I felt understood. I felt, I don’t know, hugged or something. And she… SHE… wrote that for ME.
As I’ve been thinking of McKillip these last few days, I think mostly of the word “shaped.” I don’t know when it was, or on which re-read of which of her books, that I noticed McKillip’s use of the verb “shaped.” It was in every book. Sometimes it occured several times a page. Things were shaped out of air, out of light, of water. Things came into being, or were called, deliberately, by forces we could not understand. And that act of calling was always understood as “shaping.”
McKillip shaped me too, and continues to do so. I picked up one of the Riddle-Master books last year and experienced an intense pleasure, both familiar and alien, as I read a story I knew but with a different understanding. She was like a potter, but instead of clay, she sat at a wheel of creation, her hands full of electricity, whirling lightning into worlds that she teleported directly into my brain. Yes, she shaped me. She shaped my very haecceity.
The Changeling Sea was so slim a book. So slender. I read all the character parts aloud. I cried and cried. I inhabited the main character. I fell in love with both the sea-dragon-prince and the wild sea-eyed prince and the tousled wizard who seemed sometimes more like a jester. I loved and wanted them all. I wanted to fling my heart off every sea cliff, after every trail of moonlight. I will never forget her queen, bowed down by pearl. Or perhaps I will, in time, as I deteriorate, but when I do, I will be losing an integral part of myself.
Winter Rose? Winter Rose. Those sisters. That journey into the snow and ice and darkness. That journey into depression and personal history and the desperate love of family going far from you, and you would step into any mushroom circle, any fall of light, to save the ones you love. Winter Rose. One of my absolute favorites. It lives in me. I feel it on the bottoms of my bare feet. It muddies me. It makes me want to never comb my hair again.
I feel like a wild-eyed sea prince writing that down. I fear all of this sounds dramatic and… I don’t know “so much too much,” as Dickens writes. But it’s what’s sitting in my chest right now. “His heart is a bird on a spit in his chest,” as Persephone sings to Hades–and that is the feeling in my chest–and while Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown may have nothing to do with Patricia A. McKillip, I can only say, at least I have a song by the goddess of death I can sing for one of my holy muses of fantasy, who is gone from us.
when they tell you “all men,” remember how he rushed in, having seen your wet footprint on the bath mat, rushed just to embrace you, so full of tenderness his feet were dancing. remember him, in red Ball State hoodie, washing dishes and singing, “Wait for me!” in his best Orpheus tenor, weeping for tenderness, or pulling you from your sleepy nest with a garland of kisses at your hair line, whispering, “You get umbels.” he is not all men, or most men, but one man who cares for a cloudy sky so much he renames it “the inside of a pearl,” who cares for his students so much he wakes before dawn, eager for the teaching day to start. easy, to read the headlines and think “all men.” easy to forget the gummy vitamins he leaves out every morning, how he responds to every distressed grunt with heroic chivalry, easy to take for granted the tea he brings you joyous as a wagging tail.
oh, yes. I see you on this ordinary Friday morning.
Two things that the wonderful people at Rebellion Publishing (Solaris) offered for me to try for my book-launch week was: a listicle for SciFi Now on any topic of my choosing, and a short piece of Gizmoda’s i09.
Other than blogs–and that one article I wrote for Apex a few months ago–I rarely write non-fiction. It’s this whole new world for me! It takes hours!
For my listicle, I wanted to do something more than “Five Books About Necromancers I’ve Loved” which, you know, has already been done. And also, I don’t read that many books about necromancers. But I do recognize, in my long relationship with fantasy novels, games, and movies, that there were acts of “death magic” (or death-adjacent magic at least) that have come to influence me in ways I haven’t even begun to parse!
After that, I wrote something called “A Map of Ladies Death,” which just went live yesterday at Gizmodo. This one took longer, and I deleted a lot and rewrote a lot, and I still feel I have left too much out, and I have so much more to say, and really, I wish I were a cartographer!
Taking a page from Rebecca Solnit’s “City of Women” (and with the help of many of YOU), I pieced together an imaginary subway map of female Death figures in fantasy. Everything from Niki de Saint Phalle’s Death sculpture, to Nnedi Okorafor’s Onyesonwu Ubaid in Who Fears Death to Neil Gaiman’s Death of the Endless in The Sandman, from Terry Pratchett’s Susan Death in Soul Music to Seanan McGuire’s Nancy in Every Heart a Doorway to Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom books, etc. I had so much fun writing it!
In the comments of the article, someone mentioned “Come Lady Death,” by Peter S. Beagle, which I wish I had known about to mention, so I’ll do that here.
C.S.E. Cooney 