So Mayer: Into the queer quantum universe
On a new, extraordinary short story collection, 'Truth & Dare'
Talking to So Mayer about their debut short story collection - and about science and history and technology and theology etc - is like talking to a library. Not one of those forbidding ones of the ancient world, where scholarship was hoarded away from the barbarian hordes. Nor those scriptoria with their chained-down books which are referenced in the collection’s opening piece ‘green children’. Instead one of those well-stocked public libraries from a more civically enlightened age which seem to cover all curricula while at the same time harbouring rare and out-of-print texts, ambered life experience, microcosms of learning, paracosms—the sort of library you feel like you could use to reboot civilisation.
As far-ranging as So’s story collection is their career in the arts. On top of being the author of A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing, a book-length essay on queer films, bodies and fascism for Peninsula Press, and co-editor of Space Crone—Ursula K. Le Guin (Silver Press), Unreal Sex (Cipher Press), and Mothers of Invention: Film, Media and Caregiving Labor (Wayne State University), they are a bookseller, film curator and podcaster, working with Burley Fisher Books and queer feminist film collective Club Des Femmes and co-producing The Film We Can’t See for BBC Sounds.
In the second part of this interview I’m going to lay out the riches of Truth & Dare - out now from Cipher press; buy it here - and why I think it’s one of the most scintillating short story collections to come out of Britain in recent memory. For now, I hope it’ll suffice to give an idea of So’s achievement, and to red-carpet the way into our interview, by focussing on the second story in Truth & Dare, ‘Silicon’.
Narrated by a university library and its informational and physical tendrils, ‘Silicon’ riffs on the real-world debates about logic between Cambridge fellow Ludwig Wittgenstein and Cambridge student Alan Turing and what-ifs a sexual relationship between them.
Neither has spoken a word to the other: they exchange no names, no instructions, no devotions. Wittgenstein reverts to Weanarisch, his wetnurse’s dialect, sotto voce, followed by the harsh imperatives you’d hardly expect the officer class to know. Meaning is use.
They might not exchange names at first but as their paths and hearts cross so does the epic logical edifice of the older man with the prophetic computing logic of the younger. Enigma, Hitler, the wars, the silicon that’ll lead to the sort of digitised library that’s narrating the story, and the ore extraction that’ll lead to the flooding of the fens where the library stands—it’s the kind of refreshing scientific literacy and grand crypto-historical vision you get with Thomas Pynchon. And I don’t use such a comparison to domesticate So’s writing - the kind of journalese cliché Chris Morris would spoof, e.g. “Like Dante meets Bosch in a crack den”- but to give you an idea of the level they’re writing at.
In the first of our two-part interview, we talk about how to put together a short story collection, the way interrupting language calls attention to it, dramatising without dramatic conflict, alternative cinema, gender euphoria, Ursula K Le Guin and George W Bush. Read more over the fold.
ARTLESS: Could you tell us more about the inception of the book as a whole, creatively and professionally? What drew these stories together? Did you always envision them in this collection? What was your overall vision for it?
So Mayer: In keeping with the speculative nature of the collection, it both was and wasn’t envisioned as a collection, featuring these stories – a sort of Schrödinger’s Book. I wrote ‘Lyonesses’, ‘Silicon’ and a very different version of ‘Dune Elegies’ close together in 2019, and laid out a plan for a collection that would be a queer speculative remapping of Britain in climate chaos; there were already sketches of the stories that would become ‘House of Change’ (except it was about Brontë-like converso sisters) and ‘corpus’ (little more than the scene in the childhood library), and even a version of ‘green children’ (a piece about RAF Hendon being flooded that didn’t make it into the final cut).
There were several other story sketches in that original table of contents that didn’t work out, and a couple of almost-finished stories that ended up not fitting in to what became Truth & Dare—and yet, in a Thor’s hammer way, the conceptualisation of the collection as a whole was all there in that initial plan. What makes that all the more startling to me is that ‘Lyonesses’ was the first short story that I had finished in a decade. It was written very fast, literally between Women’s World Cup 2019 matches (at least, the first draft was), and ‘Silicon’ followed on shortly after. When ‘Lyonesses’ was accepted by the British Science Fiction Association’s anthology Fission for publication and translation into Spanish by Cristina Jurado, I was absolutely fizzing: I felt I’d found a form I could work with, and that it might find readers! Heather Parry’s incredible editorship of ‘Pornographene’ on submission to Extra Teeth in the depths of the lockdown was a lifeline that helped me return to the project from doing data analysis, and from the impact of writing A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing.
But the process of turning a 2000 word essay into that 15,000 word book that centred ethical speculation as a tool for writing critical non-fiction, then turning that book into a docudrama metafictional podcast with Adam Zmith, The Film We Can’t See, gave me the missing piece of Truth & Dare: the dare of truth-telling, especially where objective/conventional forms of evidence may be missing or erased; and the truth of speculative fiction’s daring, especially speaking to gender expansiveness and to ecological awareness.
And so the book became a hybrid of speculative fiction, the stories mentioned plus ‘to the light,’ which came out of writing critically about the film at the heart of the story’s speculative conceit, ‘verde te quiero verde,’ which I wrote on Notes walking home in a rush, ‘goes to see,’ which blends a grieving fictional character with citations from critical writing on contemporary Black artists, and ‘Hot Mess Observation,’ which was the final piece written and felt less written than channelled, and speculative fact. That term refers to the interspersed first (and second, in the case of ‘Changing =>’) person pieces, many but not all of which started out on my tinyletter Disturbing Words – although the original tiny letter of ‘vampire’ was never published, and that piece is a compilation of about 20 different attempts at the same set of themes and images.
I think the urgency of speculation as an ethical act where facts and feelings have been suppressed is what draws the stories together, in keeping with the effervescent energy of playing ‘Truth or Dare,’ a game that was a big part of my adolescence, where the truth was less in what people said, I think, than in the feeling in my chest about what might be asked or said or done: as an adult, I’ve worked on letting that feeling guide me to what needs to be written.
From the table of contents alone you can see the stories speaking to each other: ‘ghost ‘is followed by ‘goes to see’, ‘House of Change’ by ‘Changing=>’. What was your and your editors’ process in arranging the structure of Truth & Dare?
What got called ‘the murder wall’ (no actual murder occurred). I was incredibly lucky to have a residency last summer at Arteles [ed. no relation] in Finland: a month of digital detox during midsummer, 20 hours a day of sunlight, 12 artists in a rural schoolhouse (no actual murder occurred). The majority of residents were visual artists, and the three writers including myself were fascinated by (deeply envious of) their embodied and material practices, i.e. messing about with stuff, externalising thoughts through sketching or making. In turn, the visual artists were obsessed with the question: what do writers do? Where does it happen? Why are you weird loners? (no actual murder occurred). So a gradual exchange took place where the three writers began externalising our work, mostly by sticking it to the wall in one way or another, to at least externalise the process of editing and ordering, and in my case, this involved a pack of coloured index cards I found in the art cupboard, some tacking pins and string, creating a version of the ‘clues wall’ beloved of TV detectives (no actual murder occurred).
During the one hour a week I could access email, I sent Jack and Ellis (who are collectively Cipher press) a photo (taken with my laptop camera, so very blurry) of this tinfoil hat-inducing map with the phrase “the collection is a spiral.” To which they said, “hahahaha, try again.” My prior experience was in structuring poetry collections, so a more intuitive and associative logic did remain paramount, while accepting the limits of the codex form. But that spiral plan, with each story title on an index card that listed its voice, its themes or keywords, its rough length, and its mood/tone, helped massively towards finishing the unfinished stories, seeing where there were gaps and imbalances, and then moving toward the eventual structure, which was adjusted judiciously by my publisher, Cipher’s, suggestions during the editing process, so that the mood of the first second wasn’t too doomy, and that the embodiment that’s prominent in the first half remained more present, even with a story that begins, “There is no body.”
Many of your stories are, to borrow their etymological cap, analytical of language, that is “a breaking up, a loosening, releasing” (OED). Could you talk in particular about the familiar two-word phrases you split with commas or full stops, such as “Bored, now.”; “Case, closed.”; “Keeping. Going.”? Similarly, what was the significance of using ampersands throughout the book as section breaks?
It’s very piercing when a close reader points out a trait in your writing: an honour to be seen, and also it’s being seen. I’m currently working on a manuscript called Bad Language for Peninsula which goes in-depth into my endless beef with the formalities of British English and hierarchical, colonial Eurowestern conceptions of language (trailer: don’t mess with dragons): those dropped-in commas or periods go deep. They are interruptions hopefully calling attention (it worked!), and also bringing the rhythms of speech and breath back into contention – one argument for punctuation is that it’s a breath marker. I’m asthmatic and have anxiety disorder, so my breathing pauses in different places to some other people’s, and is shared with some people. I love a cliché handled right: as a punchline, as something that can call readers into the experience through a familiarity. The issue is when they’re used to direct readers away from reading closely, when they’re just a smooth surface over which attention slides. I like writing that I feel in my face and lungs.
With “Case, closed,” the comma made me feel the polyvalence of case: why is an investigation or project called a “case”? How does it relate to a physical container? What is being contained or carried in that ambiguity, and closed down? In that example and “Keeping. Going.” the punctuation disrupts the sense: the case clearly isn’t closed because the comma opens it up; keeping going is hard, the additional period between the participles (or participle and gerundive) shows that work.
I like interruptions, tangents, diversions: what the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein called in relation to their cinematic editing ‘montage.’ They theorised that the impact of two divergent images edited together engaged critical thinking by audiences who were then primed to question the established associations or narratives they were being shown in conventional media. I also like making or finding perhaps unexpected connections across an associative break, which is what we do when we read two divergent images edited together: that spark gap feeling of neuronal work. Punctuation both interrupts and joins, a bit like Puck’s epilogue that appears in the story ‘fairy’ – it breaks through the fourth wall, and recreates it as a shared space.
The & is a marker of that, and a reference to two different ideas of additive narrative: the ‘yes, and’ with which a performer enters a scene in improv comedy and theatre, which is such a generative and generous speculative act; and the idea of paratactic rather than syntactic narration or argumentation. Syntactic narration is the supposedly more sophisticated, linked together by conjunctions that describe causality (because, wherefore, however), while parataxis might either list things in a temporal order ‘then… then… then’ or simply agglomerate them ‘and… and… and.’ Given that I do believe in a queer quantum universe, and in an expansive historical narrative, I’m not that sold on linear causality – I like accumulation. Maybe, say, in a carrier bag.
Distinguishing types of narration the way you do I find fascinating. It reminds me that not all stories involve conflict actually, sorry screenwriting manuals. You seem to be going a step further though, that stories don’t have to be narrative in the sense of causal either. In stories like ‘fairy’ what are the other threads you’ve used to draw the reader along beyond cause and effect?
Screenwriting manuals are indeed mostly sorry—but the idea of physical conflict as a driver of conventional narrative serving dominant power goes back through epic poetry (tbc in Bad Language, involves dragons), with the logic ‘poet wins [praise and money] by defeating older ways of making story/song, telling the tale of hero/king defeating dragon/monster, AKA older ways of being in the world.’ It’s an exactly vicious circle, and it’s dependent on the idea of winners over losers, profit from others’ loss. BORED, NOW.
Hmmm, so following that logic, it hopefully becomes apparent that ‘conflict’ (caaaaaahnflict, I like to say in workshops in an exaggerated studio boss accent) is a narrow concept, and is not the same as drama: I think brilliant narratives arise, especially at shorter lengths, from tensions between different ideas or feelings or desires, either between people or within a person, or within the narrative form itself. I also think that there’s a similar difference between causality and accountability, as demonstrated by the legalistic (and Newtonian) language of causality which – therefore, wherefore – abstracts actors and agency. Accountability, response-ability, awareness: these are under-represented narrative forms for the most part in contemporary culture (and I thank Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, edited by Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown, and brown’s subsequent, beautiful novel Grievers for calling me to accountability on this), missing from how we mostly live and struggle as well as from cultural texts.
In ‘fairy’, part of the forward movement of the narrative is in holding myself accountable against and for the silences and obfuscations inside myself—‘zeus’ was probably the most high-wire example of this, in the sensations of writing it which make my heart pound in retrospect, and in the mood of the writing, whew. Calling out God, critiquing the Holocaust industry, refusing prayer, naming the cisheteropatriarchy of orthodox religion all still feel dangerous to me, both internally and externally, and I think that… well, dare, gets into the writing voice in terms of sentence structure and argumentation. Most of the pieces are, to be honest, me arguing with myself about something, often whether queer joy and gender euphoria are possible within a violently phobic society, and whether it’s possible to show both the joy and the terror. That’s a genuine conflict in my philosophy of storytelling, and I think it’s the wire on which the book is strung.
Regarding film montage, when I read imagery like “copper bowls whose tones ghost the high ceiling” from the story ‘House of Change’, or “oak trees with leaves like dark, reaching hands” from ‘zeus’, I’m thinking of Tarkovsky and German Expressionism. I’d like to ask how your work in film - writing for Sight and Sound, curation for Club Des Femmes, campaigning for Raising Films - has influenced your writing, of course with the story ‘to the light’, partly as it is about cinema, and more generally.
I love being part of a vibrant cohort of cinematic literary writing in the UK that includes Ali Smith’s The Accidental, Niven Govinden’s Diary of a Film, and Juliet Jacques’ Variations (Juliet also makes films), and seeing Derek Jarman’s poetry chapbook and novel published! Is it incidental that all these examples are of queer writers? I don’t think so. As well as being more up for blurring boundaries, I think that for queer writers, film and literature become each other’s supplements—like, where queerness and transness aren’t visible in film, we supplement with and through literature; and vice versa.
But this is a small cluster because I think there’s a peculiarly puritanical Anglophobia of the interrelation of word and image that sees film and creative writing as two separate strands, except where connected by the most point-for-point form of narrative adaptation—another aspect of the centrality of narrative realism. Andrei Tarkovsky’s father Arseny was a poet and renowned translator of poetry from Arabic, Farsi, Turkmen, Armenian, Georgian and Polish. For Tarkovsky and Eisenstein (who wrote a poem in tribute to poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poster design skills), this question would have been a bit mystifying because of course experimental writing and film are in direct conversation with each other, exchanging techniques like montage, and engaged in similar projects of awakening audiences. Federico Garcia Lorca wrote an unproduced Surrealist film, Pier Paolo Pasolini was an outstanding poet, and even the UK manages a few examples: HD (American-born but spent her entire adult life in or affiliated to the UK) made films, and wrote proto-cinematic visions into her epic poem ‘Helen in Egypt’; Sally Potter wrote an entire film, Yes, in iambic pentameter, deeply informed by her experience as a songwriter and musician; Isaac Julien centred poetry as part of queer cabaret in Looking for Langston; and Margaret Tait fused film and poetry metaphysically in both media.
Being close to the work of filmmaker-poets and filmic writers has been incredible for allowing the exhilaration of sensory immersion that I can experience in cinema to liberate my syntax and my descriptive writing: it’s not ekphrastic or scene-setting (or “an auction catalogue of furniture,” as a professor at uni once described Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton), it’s a technique for moving the reader’s body. It was, in some ways, about getting away from the institutionalised criticality of writing for film publications, the supposedly objective tone de haut en bas, while still valuing analytical thinking and visual awareness, and honouring the incredible access to transnational cinema that I’ve been privileged to have, which I hope comes across in ‘to the light’: the sense of experimental and alternative cinema as a community and conversation through which intellectual and affective world-travel is possible.
And, in that story too, a reminder that cinema and literature are not abstractions, but sites of labour—and therefore, under capitalism, of exploitation and injustice. That’s what Raising Films made forever uppermost in my consciousness (current working title for my potential next collection is Dirty Work): workers’ collective struggle takes place within the making of culture, as well as within the narratives that culture produces. The SAG-AFTRA/WGA strike (WGA strong!) makes that palpable in ways that are all too rare in the Angloverse. So I’d say that part of what I learned from film, through both positive and very negative experiences, was solidarity. I like the idea that my writing is in solidarity with filmmaking.
A recurrent theme and device is your use of tense - “a bookstore-cum-bar that will be going to have been opened by my former student in Weimar Berlin…”. Is this an homage to Ursula K Le Guin’s opening line of Always Coming Home: “The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California”? How does this tie in with the, to steal a Dr Who line, timey-wimeyness of such stories as ‘House of Change’ and ‘oestro junkie’. And what is the tension in Truth & Dare between remembering and rewriting history?
It is indeed a direct homage to Always Coming Home, although in a story that makes the opposite proposition to that title (and in some senses to Shevekian physics in The Dispossessed), as ‘corpus’ makes extreme hay with linear temporality in both conventional physics and conventional narrative: you can’t go home again, because there’s no such place as home.
Timey-wimeyness indeed, as wibbly-wobbly as the linearity of written text allows (that loopy ampersand a reminder to go back and start again). While I was finishing the book, I realised that what you describe as a tension is for me a lived experience: I do not exist, or rather feel very uncomfortable existing, in linear time and causality. Some of that is a direct relation to personal histories as a survivor of sexual abuse and familial and cultural histories as a queer and trans diaspora Jew. ‘green children’ and ‘House of Change’ make the point fairly unsubtly that it is dominant culture (the so-called victors) who rewrite – not write – history, so that the expansive bandwidth of occurrence and imagination are erased or put out of our reach. So remembering is never wholesale: we don’t know a tenth of our own histories, as individuals or communities. Maybe not a hundredth. Like many readers, I have found Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments a transformative intervention and incitement to challenge what is meant by writing history or testimony, to hold open a space where possibility can resonate as it is exactly possibility that is what is taken away from marginalised and oppressed people.
At the same time, it’s important to me that – for example – ‘to the light’ is clearly a speculative fiction story, in that there is a technology that exceeds our current aptitudes, of teleportation through a cinema projector. That casts the story’s historical interpolations (women joining and prolonging the General Strike, the Witchcraft Act of 1927) as also speculative, although they mingle with often-neglected or obscured historical details such as the torture of suffragettes or the Second Eastern Women’s Congress in Tehran. Ethically, it’s a very complex and compelling line to manage, and I’m incredibly, massively grateful to Adam Zmith for the collaborative work we did on structuring The Film We Can’t See, thinking about how to shape interpolations that were not only plausible but did no harm, while also opening out that awareness of possibility.
When you say that it’s the dominant culture who rewrite history, it puts me in mind of Michael Wood’s Landmarks of Literature book on One Hundred Years of Solitude. He writes of the Latin American history that backgrounds the novel that it:
conjured up a deep suspicion of professed realism, both in and out of fiction. Carpentier spoke of the marvels of Latin American reality… which a dutiful realism necessarily misses, and the critical catchphrase magical realism, although full of muddle, does suggest a significant shift in literary perspective. There are considerable philosophical and historical complications here, and perhaps it will be sufficient for the moment to say that the writers of the [Latin American literary] Boom discovered, as if for the first time and all at once, that the world is a fabrication and full of delirious improbabilities but, alas, still real enough; that the imagination is nearly always right, either because someone has already done what you have only imagined or because you have imagined a fitting metaphor for someone’s need; and that fiction in these circumstances is both a playground and a battlefield, the place where a culture’s central quarrels may be fought out and seen to be fought out.
Lost history seems central to your collection too. Do you see your role as a fiction writer as a rescuer of lost facts? Would you agree it’s so-called reality that is escapist and fantastical while it’s fiction that restores reality? Further on, Wood defines the despairing Latin American experience of 20th century history as the reason why a “feeling of unreality, in other words, is a part of local reality, best reported by versions of the baroque.” What is it about your own historical perspective in 21st century Britain that works with/through a feeling of unreality?
Thank you for the recommendation, I’m going to read Michael Wood’s book asap. It really resonates with (and he may well cite) Suzanne Jill Levine’s wonderful study The Subversive Scribe, about her experience of translating some of the less frequently-acclaimed in Anglophonia writers of the Boom, like Severo Sarduy, whose language as well as narrative structures are (and she uses that exact word) “baroque,” often configured through characters subject to slippages of identity such as transitioning gender – and Sarduy sustains the ambiguity of transition as a material reality and a fictional/metaphorical device.
The current UK Government, parroted by the supposed opposition, is doing the opposite: trying to verbally deny that gender transition in all its forms is a material reality, and to make even the imaginative possibility illegal, in order to shore up their position; the same is apparent with their denial of citizenship for non-white and/or non-Christian arrivals of all kinds, including those such as members of the Windrush generation who hold British citizenship papers. There’s a theatrical verbal denial, then an attempt to retcon reality by legalistic means. It’s all too deliberately reminiscent of the still jaw-dropping statement by an unnamed senior official in George W Bush’s administration to journalist Ron Suskind, who reported it in The New York Times magazine in 2004 as follows:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality”... “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
As Wood reminds us, and as the phrase “We’re an empire now” captures, this was hardly new news: the Americas, since 1492, are a “new reality” forcibly created by colonial actors speaking it into being against an existing lived reality, using words to justify and in fact mandate genocidal violence (and I think that long, brutal history entirely and palpably drenches the Latin American 20th century that Wood discusses). I think it is important to study that history judiciously: that is, to study it as a language act under colonial law, i.e. a fiction backed up by guns. And it’s equally important to intervene into that history through language—through drawing attention to that violent language act by analysing it, and by attempting to undo it on some level of verbal reality, even if it’s just that writing the stories and reading them aloud undoes a little of the hold of that colonising, derealising language act over my mind, and I hope it can for others too. So I don’t know that fiction can rescue the current political or ecological situations, but I think it can take part in a bigger project by recognising that it is a political actor.
Before facts can be rescued, the lies have to be cleared out of the way so there is space to hear them. That’s what I’ve learned a lot from my work as a queer feminist film curator and as a teacher: dismantling and mantling have to take place together and interweave each other. I like the idea of being a rescuer of facts, though – like Bernard and Bianca in The Rescuers (1977), a kind of anti-Indiana Jones who gathers and cares for the previously neglected, the used, the ignored, then sends them on their way in the world.
Before facts can be rescued, the lies have to be cleared out of the way so there is space to hear them… dismantling and mantling have to take place together and interweave each other.
Speaking of tenses and Le Guin, there are diffuse references - the opening story’s “Write is the left hand of darkness” - and direct ones - The Dispossessed quotation in the story ‘zeus’ - to her work throughout Truth & Dare. Le Guin is dearly departed in both senses, dear meaning beloved and her loss being a great cost. Can you speak a bit about her influence on you, the impact of her death, her example to your work and her legacy in your eyes?
Co-editing Space Crone—Ursula K Le Guin with Sarah Shin and the Silver Press team ran concurrently to writing and editing Truth & Dare, and the whole collection is absolutely an homage. Le Guin was an incredible artist of the short story: ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ is well-known enough to have become subject to The Discourse on Twitter this summer, and that’s just a fraction of her contribution. Both The Left Hand of Darkness and the Earthsea series started as short stories published in SFF magazines, and science/speculative fiction, fantasy and horror magazines and anthologies continue to be seedbanks and greenhouses for many, many writers. ‘verde te quiero verde’ is inspired by Le Guin’s ‘The Direction of the Road,’ as well as her novella The Word for World is Forest, ‘to the light’ is a tribute both to Sylvia Townsend Warner’s lesbian French Revolution of 1848 novel Summer Will Show, and Le Guin’s Malafrena, which it inspired. I could probably link many other pieces directly to Le Guin stories, essays, novels and poems. Working with her non-fiction and her “feminist fabulation” for Space Crone also gave me the confidence to blend speculative fiction and speculative fact, to stand up to the border between realism and imagination, which supposedly equate fact and fiction, that she wrote against her entire career.
That’s the easy bit: the literary influence. Not shallow, but easier to describe. There are some writers and thinkers whose influence goes through language, narrative, form, diction, content and into lifeways. There’s lots of different words for that—teacher, for example, or seer. Elder. When Le Guin died on 22nd January 2018, there was a sense of an elder passing on, felt across many writing and reading communities: for her perspicacity and her generosity, for her willingness to change her mind and practice in public, for her outspokenness (she didn’t initially plan to give *that* speech at the National Book Awards) and her absence of self-promotional puffery, combined with a clear sense of the value and significance of her own work. Passing on in the sense of passing on to the next phase of (non-)existence, and passing on those tasks and modes of interacting with the world to those of us still in this phase or plane. As a queer feminist cultural historian, I feel that as a great debt rather than a great cost: I am indebted to every artist, writer, maker, thinker – known or unknown – who has been through this world before me, and a great responsibility to participate in the ongoing braid of their work. Le Guin was someone who articulated that responsibility to writing so beautifully, and I learned it from her among others, and from others who have been and are in or coming to conversation with her writing.
On that note, co-editing Space Crone was yet another Schrödinger situation, with Ursula as the cat (a role I think she might have appreciated?): in focusing so intently on her words across her career, re-reading and retyping and proofing and discussing them, there was a real sense of being part of a present conversation—and yet we would not have been editing the book in that way were she present to intervene (as she would have done!). That non-duality or concurrence was an incredible blessing, and I want to say, once again, the hugest thank you to Theo Downes-Le Guin and the Le Guin estate for allowing us to put the book together, and all their support for it; and all they do with the Le Guin Prize, supporting Le Guin scholars, and advocating for the poethics of her work.
Return next Wednesday for part 2, where I’ll be looking more in-depth into Truth & Dare and speaking to So about slipstream as both genre and swimming technique, how to write through and not around the broken internet, the value of specific language and the salvage of the language of community, and what the Dream might be in Judaism… To borrow the quantum tense of Truth & Dare, and in the words of the old time travel serial: Tune in last week!