As a teacher, I spend a lot of time talking to my students about failure—what it is, and isn’t, and why it has value. Often, I find myself paraphrasing this story from Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s Hagakure, about a councilman advocating a promotion for a man who had previously disgraced himself. Confronted with the question of why […]
When last we left you, my stalwart heroes, heroines, and genderqueer unicorns, I was writing about the life-hacks used by some well-known sff authors in writing effective dialogue. You can use these tricks to help get words on the page (consider Caroline Yoachim’s bracket-and-move-on-hack) or to improve their tone, pace, character, and style (as Sarah […]
In my work as a teacher and author, I’ve found few things more polarizing for readers than dialogue, excepting perhaps how to spell the word itself. (I am “Team Dialogue With a UE,” though I respect those who prefer its amputee cousin. Sort of. It’s a clash of worlds that may never rise to the […]
There are few writers whose name creates as immediate and profound a sense of recognition among my students as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s. I would be surprised if it were any less the case. It’s not just that nearly every one of my teaching colleagues includes “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman’s disturbing tale of a young woman […]
Years ago, I worked as an assistant martial arts instructor. This is an excellent fact to share in a moment of seeming far-off reverie when one’s foundations of British lit students are raising inexplicable ruckus. Give them half a moment to process the fact and you’ll be able to hear a pin drop. Human beings […]
I have a confession to make. Honestly, it’s a confession that shouldn’t be hard for a fan of sff to make in 2018, but there’s still value in coming out publicly on the right side of an issue: I love fanfic. I encourage my students to write and read fanfic, for all the reasons so […]
When LSQ offered me a seat at their blog’s table and let me choose any theme for my recurring column, “A Place Where It Rains” came to mind immediately. It’s a reference to Italo Calvino and his assertion that “Fantasy is a place where it rains,” a gloriously simple way of saying speculative worlds must […]
My six-year-old daughter’s idea of a good night starts in her bed and ends with sneaking into mine. Both my children have been consummate bed-invaders, going back to their first forays parkouring out of the crib. They’re cuddlers. They long for physical presences around them, prone to sudden, deep pangs of loneliness. They’re also graduates […]
(*contains multiple spoilers for The Last Jedi) For a certain sort of fan, no return to the Star Wars cinematic universe could satisfy expectations. Their perfect text would have to be a recognizable cog in the larger Lucas-founded universe, narratively indebted to its predecessors and moving smoothly within it. And yet, it would also need […]
