actually the best session I've been to so far was one with Maya Deane / Jeanne Thornton / M. M. Olivas / virtual-Clare-Sears that was all about the absolute necessity of careful historical research (very thoughtful remarks)! the people are here, just have to find them <3
thanks, & godspeed! the talk is just a condensed version of the blog post (which is, ridiculously, 100% true, down to me spending years feeling a deep urge to write a story where Virgil escaped hell & after transitioning immediately no longer needing to. my subconscious is basically play-doh)
A workshop panel on teaching premodern texts w personal essays—where YOU get to think abt a premodern text you love! Saturday at 12.10, S163. I’ll be talking abt how Dante transed me in this piece: www.bpladek.net/2022/05/05/v...
Proxima arcanum reading, current space at 421 north Howard, doors 5.30 pm
1. offsite reading on Thursday night w a ton of rad SFF writers:
hey AWPers, I’d love to see you if you’re around! Baltimore will only be my 2nd AWP & I’m still a bit intimidated (it’s Too Big, like mega-MLA), so friendly faces will be welcome. I‘m doing 2 events:
I just read Little Dorritt and it’s secretly a novel about why speculation is bad & explains it shockingly clearly, also the evil financier dies in a bathhouse, A+
idk man, the US doing this obvs isn't new, it's the rule not the exception, but the way our mainstream media & the "opposition" party object to it feels so gamified now; we've ceded morality entirely to tactics, to the q of "do kids dying make number go up"
wake up to more of our death cult murdering children & media op-eds stating in firm adult voices that This Isn't Necessary, as if murdering kids *could* in some other universe be necessary, as if necessity is an appropriate argumentative ground for this level of gleeful evil
comment jinx
idk why this got under my skin so much but it does. policing genre boundaries is already fraught; policing the boundaries of what gets to be considered "realistic" & defining the real by a quietist status quo & everything else as "non-realistic fiction" makes me feel some kinda way, politically
"litfic" also shades into an account of realism that seems underthought, whereby any story that documents a meaningful change in reality cannot be "realist" bc it isn't a static reflection--& troublingly, "meaningful change" only happens at the level of the nation-state
back from AWP haircut and finally got a chance to look this up; need to read this Whaleship book at once--love a well-researched historical about execrable men that places their foulness in its proper historical context
yes, & underpinning the static definitions is a static account of realist fiction as that which can only ever reflect an *unchanging* world (which is why the essay exempts historical fiction & SFF from the charge of non-change: once anything changes, we've slipped out of mimesis into imagination).
I read Hyperion when I was real young & primarily remember being icked bc it seemed to be a novel about just how much Dan Simmons wanted to fuck John Keats, whom he misunderstood & whose very good poem Hyperion I will never forgive Simmons for stealing/misreading.
also the racism has bonus sexism
Like if the answer is "change must occur at the size of a nation-state to count," maybe the recursiveness of "realism = no change" is actually an imperial inheritance; anything smaller than global actors doesn't matter.
Yeah! & the inheritors of social realism who write about people trying to better their communities--thinking of Sarah Thankam Mathews's All This Could be Different (2023), where the characters build a communal house. So: how much of the world must fictional change *change* to count as "change"?
but yeah otherwise I like a lot here, especially the discussion of how the historian's tools for examining the deep causes of social change must be the SFF writer's tools if you're meaningfully invested in worldbuilding
It's a fascinating instance of painting yourself into a corner: if anything that changes reality is by definition speculative or historical (since writers can describe *past* change), all realist fiction (aka lit fic - another unfortunate fuzziness here) can ever do is passively reflect reality.
lots to like here, though the definition of lit fic as "books where powerless characters simply accept rather than change the world" relies on a narrow reading diet in contemporary lit fic & a circular account of realism as "that which merely represents & doesn't alter the world"
thinking today abt all the well-meaning ppl I've talked to about trans kids/sports who say "I'm supportive but maybe we went too far in trans XYZ, there's nuance!" & I don't know how to explain calmly that kids/sports is a wedge to open the door to eliminating us, & the other side dgaf about nuance
it’s definitely one of her balder rewritings of her own escape from Switzerland in 1940. very odd, brief, gestural, with a surrealist ending uncharacteristic of her novels generally
thinking abt the awful Kansas news & how much Bryher hated personhood-legitimizing documents; she even wrote a dystopia satirizing how borders & bureaucracy kill called Visa for Avalon. gender borders, national borders; related violences.
this is just my Bryher dump thread now I guess
both a de facto mobility ban on trans people in Kansas--drive anywhere and risk arrest--and an easy way to incarcerate many people very quickly. only a few steps, now, behind the concentration camps where ICE/DHS is already imprisoning anyone non-white or undocumented.
the kids (specifically at my place of employment) are all right
when even the edgelord barstool insta account is mocking your commencement speaker choice, you've made a grave error
I mean obviously it's a false binary; writing/communal good are not mutually exclusive. I'm immensely lucky to even get to handwring about this. but hours/energy/days-left-on-this-green-earth are real limits, even laying aside the drumbeat of capitalist productivity culture.
this year testing the small bright nugget of self-regard transitioning gave me, as I've written a great deal of stuff I love that no one will ever see. is it selfish to spend my energy writing when I could be doing more clear, actionable good for the world? idk.
also this whole sonnet sequence:
"Dear someone who has chosen just to rust
instead of breathe—here’s how they lied to you:
Your child will keep on dying, and you must
keep punching play to watch him blue and blue
until he trends. Then he’s a photograph
who laughs at you and rips himself in half."
I feel like I’ve been collecting answers to the question "what good can poetry do?" for years now, as I think about it a lot and even wrote a historical novel (RIP never sold) kind of about it. It's striking how so many poets respond with some version of Auden's "poetry makes nothing happen." This is Smith's version, from the penultimate poem in her magnificent 2025 collection The Intentions of Thunder: "On the F train in New York, a woman was set on fire. Click for the photo. She stands in the train car, sways like a bone-tired commuter, fully aflame, alone. It was decided that the controlled burn was best. All I am is poet. I am small, just one enfeebled fist, a whimper beneath the weight. I am seventy years of witness that poetry can change your life, but changes nothing else. No unleashed havoc calms to my quatrains, no ghazal coaxes our earth from her cliff's edge. I write because it's contrary to kill. Because anemone sounds the way it does. I write because George Floyd cried out for his dead mother. I write because she answered him."
The end of "Scars Poetica," the penultimate poem in Patricia Smith's magnificent 2025 collection The Intentions of Thunder:
feeling real feral here
