Five days left to fund this kickstarter for an anthology of Latin@ speculative fiction

Hey folks, there are five days left on the Latino/a Rising kickstarter and they're just over half way there. Please, if you haven't yet, support this anthology which is the first of its kind and which is really needed to change the perception that Latinos don't write (or read) science fiction and fantasy.


Junot Diaz and Ana Castillo will be included in the anthology, as will be Nesto Hogan and Daína Chaviano, among many others (including me!) and they are still open to submissions.


At a $50 donation level, you'll get a cool Latino/a Rising postcard and equally cool print by Javier Hernandez, a Latino/a Rising Tee-shirt, and the book in two ways: ebook and the print copy signed by the editor and one of the authors.


If it would be an incentive for you to go support it at the $50 level, I'll offer any of you who do (and come back here and tell me in the comments that you have pledged $50 between now and Oct. 31) any one of the following:


1) I'll tuckerize you (name a character after you) in an upcoming story.


2) I'll send you a link to a soon-to-be-written storymap or gigapixel piece of fiction with visuals, links and maybe even audio or video.


3) I'll write a piece of flash fiction (1,000 words max) to your prompt.


Yeah, it means that much to me.


I love that the anthology We See a Different Frontier had three fabulous stories by Latin@ writers in it (Fábio Fernandes, Ernest Hogan and Silvia Moreno-Garcia), but it was the exception — most anthologies have one, if any. The Latino/a anthology will be an eye-opener about the scope and range of Latin@ speculative fiction. Please help make it happen.

Nuestras Voces, Our Voices: Emerging Latina writers talk about their work - Yvette Marquez

Editor's note: this is the 14th in a monthly (sometimes twice-monthly) series of guest blog posts in which emerging Latina writers talk about their work, their process and what inspires them.

Yvette Marquez draws culinary inspiration from her grandmother's old-world northern Mexican recipes and her mother's comforting south of the border home-style dishes. Though she writes primarily about her culinary adventures on her blog, MuyBuenoCookbook.com, she also contributes recipes to Betty Crocker and Parade.com. Her cookbook Muy Bueno: Three Generations of Authentic Mexican Flavor (Hippocrene Books), written with her sister Veronica and mother Evangelina, was published in October 2012. Besides her blog, Yvette has also been featured in Latina Magazine, and the websites of The Pioneer Woman, SAVEUR, Siempre Mujer, and Gourmet, among others. She lives in Colorado with her husband and two children. You can follow her on Twitter @muybuenocooking.

Words about food

I was a fulltime graphic designer and mother – always creative, but always working for someone else. I loved to entertain and I loved to cook for anyone who visited.

One summer my mother was visiting me and we cooked a lot of the recipes I grew up eating. Recipes my late grandma would make for us, favorite recipes my mom would make, and it inspired me to develop my own Latin-inspired recipes. I started writing down every recipe and I took lots of photos (not professional by any means). Then my 8-year-old daughter gave us the idea to write a cookbook. At first we were going to self-publish, but luckily got the nerve to send a proposal and our manuscript to a publisher. They loved our three-generation Mexican cookbook idea and especially loved the photos that were captured by my friend Jeanine who is a professional photographer.

Fast forward a couple of years later and we have a published cookbook and now I am self employed. I still love graphic design and even designed our cookbook and blog. I also am a full-time food writer for Parade Magazine and develop recipes for Betty Crocker, KitchenAid, and Clabber Girl just to name a few.

When my grandmother passed away in 2004 I was afraid her recipes would die too – thankfully my mother knew how to make every one of her recipes. And together, with my sister, we co-wrote a beautiful cookbook that not only shares recipes but the memories and stories that go along with them. It is a delicious family love story that I am so proud to leave behind for my children and future generations.

Nuestras Voces, Our Voices: Emerging Latina writers talk about their work - Lisa Bradley

Editor's note: this is the 13th in a monthly (sometimes twice-monthly) series of guest blog posts in which emerging Latina writers talk about their work, their process and what inspires them. 

Lisa M. Bradley writes speculative fiction and poetry. She has work forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Stone Telling, and Mythic Delirium. Originally from South Texas, she now lives in Iowa with her spouse, child, and two cats. Her latest project is a weekly blog series, "Writing Latin@ Characters Well." She listened to "Why We Build the Wall" (from Anaïs Mitchell's album Hadestown) nonstop as she wrote the following essay.

Borders

I think about borders. A lot.

It's probably natural, considering I grew up in South Texas, just minutes away from the international border. Once when I was young and living with my grandparents, a couple of men came to our door. Wet, ragged. Exhausted, wary. I fetched Gram and after speaking with them for a few minutes, she went to the kitchen and put together leftovers in aluminum foil for them, then tersely sent them on their way. I remember being surprised that my grouchy grandmother was giving food to apparent strangers. She didn't even like it when I served myself too large a glass of milk. I asked her who those men were, and she said they'd just crossed the river. She was pensive the rest of the day.

"The river" was, of course, the Rio Grande. I was amazed that the men had crossed a river without a boat, that they were on the run. I tried to imagine how scared and excited they were to be in another country, to be doing something illegal. I hoped they got away.

Another time, I went to Bentsen State Park with my family. The river runs right alongside the park, and when I looked across the sunny water, I saw sparse trees, some happy, relaxed goats, some people. I remember thinking, "That's Mexico. Those are Mexican goats. Those are Mexican people." I had to tell myself, because otherwise I wouldn't believe. The land over there looked exactly the same as on the American side. So did the goats. So did the people. We waved to each other. "That's Mexico" I told myself, trying to make it real. Trying to believe.

Living in Iowa hasn't diminished my interest in borders. If anything, the physical distance has brought the concept of borders into sharper focus. The novel I'm revising now is set in a west Texas town that's been quarantined after an industrial accident. The town is surrounded by watchtowers, an electrified fence, and a trench. The residents trapped inside protect themselves from violent neighbors by building barricades and booby-traps. Before long, it's impossible to tell who is fenced off and who is trapped inside, who the walls protect and who they keep out.

Even when I'm not writing about physical or geographic borders, I'm thinking about the hazy lines that divide one community from the next, one cause from another, one persona from the multiple voices inside our heads. I like to find chinks in the fences. My blog series "Writing Latin@ Characters Well" is an attempt to help non-Latin@ writers nudge under the fence of Thou Shalt Nots that discourages them from writing the Other.

A friend asked me to write specifically about the differences between what (conversations) the Latin@ community shares among themselves and what it shares with outsiders. This is the kind of question I love, but perhaps I am the wrong person to answer it. After all, I am so fond of transgressing. Is there anything I keep solely to mis compadres? Or even mis comadres? And if I can't keep private matters private, am I likely to be trusted by the community I seek to represent?

In How to Tame a Wild Tongue, Gloria Anzaldúa wrote, "being Mexican has nothing to do with which country one lives in. Being Mexican is a state of soul — not one of mind, not one of citizenship. Neither eagle nor serpent, but both. And like the ocean, neither animal respects borders."

By this definition, I am Mexican through and through, from one liminal "end" to an infinite number of other quasi-endpoints. My fascination with gaps in the walls, with crossing rivers fences laws, is not a barrier to but an illustration of my belonging to this group.

So maybe I'm a fine person to ask "what is shared and what kept hidden in Latin@ communities?" I'll poke at the question the same way I do all the fences blocking my view. I may not find an answer, but man…

It'll be fun tearing down the wall.

Nuestras Voces, Our Voices: Emerging Latina writers talk about their work - Teresa Jusino

Editor's note: this is the 12th in a monthly (sometimes twice-monthly) series of guest blog posts in which emerging Latina writers talk about their work, their process and what inspires them.

Teresa Jusino is a New Yorker who  lives and writes in Los Angeles. Her pop culture criticism has been featured on websites like Tor.com, GirlGamer.com, Al Dia, ChinaShopMag.com, PinkRaygun.com, Newsarama, and PopMatters.com. 2012 saw Teresa’s work appear in two Doctor Who anthologies: Chicks Unravel Time (Mad Norwegian Press) and Outside In (ATB Publishing), and she was also published in Mad Norwegian’s Whedonistas. Her fiction has appeared in Crossed Genres, and she is currently writing a webseries based on the short film, Incredible Girl, by Celia Aurora de Blas, which is coming in 2014.

Writing as escape

I got my first, and only, detention in the eighth grade. In English class. For writing too much.

I was working on some story the way I always did in every class — furtively, with a notebook hidden underneath whatever book we were supposed to be looking at, taking passes at writing words during a lull in class discussion, or when my teacher wasn’t looking, or when someone was asking a question…

I was good at listening to what the teacher was talking about and writing short fiction at the same time. I got straight “A’s” in English. Lay off.

In any case, I was working on some story or other and one of my best friends was sitting next to me and wanted to read it. So, I passed it to her at the exact moment my teacher decided to look in our direction. Thinking we were passing trivial schoolgirl notes as opposed to the literary genius that was actually taking place, Ms. Lind gave us both detentions.

Even honor students get in trouble sometimes. Still, it’s pretty funny that the one time I did get in trouble at school was for sharing writing in English class. That’s how big a nerd I was. I wrote so much that I got in trouble for it.

But that moment captures just how important writing has always been to me. It’s not something I can stop. It’s something I’ll willingly get in trouble for, because the alternative is worse. It’s either write or go crazy. It’s either write, or die.

However, there’s a huge difference in how I approached writing before and after I made the decision to do it professionally. I’ve been a writer since I could pick up a pen, but when I was about 10 or 11, I decided that I wanted to be an actress. I was a huge fan of Beverly Hills 90210 (the original, not the stupid new one), and I loved reading articles like “A Day in the Life on the Set!” I thought to myself, That’s a job?! Hell yeah! I like pretending to be other people! I like dressing up! I wanna do that! And I did, I joined drama club in junior high, and continued in it all through high school, eventually becoming the club’s president. I went to NYU and got a BFA in Drama from the Tisch School of the Arts. I spent a good six years after college trying to make a life as an actor.

But the writing was always there. During all my free time (and even time that wasn’t so free, as illustrated by my detention story) you would find me with a notebook and a pen, scribbling for dear life. In fifth grade, I wrote reams of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Alien Nation fan fiction, and friends would accost me during recess to read the latest “episodes.” In Junior High, I created a world of cartoon characters I called “bug people,” which eventually led to the comic strip, Cutsie-Wootsie and Friends, which told the story of Cutsie-Wootsie, her boyfriend, Hungry Boy (never w/out a hot dog in his hand to show you how hungry he was), her best friend, Maggie, and a cast of characters that lived surprisingly soap-operaesque lives for people who looked like little bugs. I drew that comic on looseleaf and passed it around to friends during French class. One of those friends STILL has them. Throughout high school, I was writing short stories and a “novel,” I submitted pieces to our literary magazine, and during my Junior and Senior years, I was the editor of the school newspaper. I was the girl who secretly cheered when teachers assigned essays, when all the other students were going “Awww, man!” In college, I was primarily there for an acting degree, but I double-majored in English Literature, because I just couldn’t let writing go.

This continued after college. I would write during auditions and play rehearsals. I would write in line for movies and museum exhibits. I would write on my commute to and from work. I would write at work the same way I did when I was at school - furtively, when I was supposed to be engaging in other things.

Writing was the best way I knew how to express myself. Despite my acting ability, I was never more clear, or more honest, than when I wrote, even when I wrote fiction, so I always sought it out and craved it.

Then I got older, and I decided to try to make writing my living.

Fiction doesn’t pay right away, so I decided to go the non-fiction route, and built a name for myself in geek pop culture journalism. For a while, I was passionate about that, as I got to write about things and people that excited me. It was thrilling, too, to chase interviews, and come up with new angles through which I could examine the sci-fi and fantasy that I loved.

But after several years of that, I was burnt out on trying to come up with new ways to talk about the same limited sphere of interests. I’d written myself into a box, and what’s worse, that writing sapped my energy from the writing I wanted to be doing.

I missed telling stories.

And yet, even now, as I work two part-time day jobs that allow me the flexible schedule I wanted so that I’d have more time to write, the writing doesn’t come as furiously as it used to. It used to be that I couldn’t contain my writing. It was how I spent all my free time. I had boxes and boxes of notebooks of things I’d written. I had several stories constantly going on at once.

Now, I wrestle with finishing one at a time.  

Writing was my way of escaping other parts of my life. Now, though, there’s less that I want to escape. When I was younger, I did a lot less participating in the world around me, and when I did I was always on the periphery, never wanting to get too involved. I was afraid, insecure. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown into myself, and become the kind of person that wants to experience everything. To me, it’s more important to tend to my relationships or try new things than it is to have a successful writing career. Don’t get me wrong, a successful writing career is my biggest goal - but not if it comes at the expense of the rest of my life. And maybe that means that success will come more slowly for me, if at all. But I can live with that.

Yet writing continues to be my truest, most long-lasting love. It’s just that our relationship has evolved. It’s not only the way I best express myself, but the way I best process my thoughts and feelings. For example, I’d never really thought about my writing in these terms before I was asked to write this guest post and talk about my writing. Suddenly, as I started to put words on a page, my feelings started making sense. More than talking, or drowning my sorrows in food and drink, writing is how I best understand myself and the world, which is strange considering that it used to allow me to hide from those things.

I don’t feel the physical need to write that I used to. It isn’t compulsive anymore. But perhaps that’s a good thing if it means I’m happier with the rest of my life. I have a balanced, healthy, adult relationship with both my life and my writing at the moment, and I’m very grateful.

Nuestras Voces, Our Voices: Emerging Latina writers talk about their work - Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Editor's note: this is the fifth in monthly series of guest blog posts in which emerging Latina writers talk about their work, their process and what inspires them.

 Mexican by birth, Canadian by inclination. Silvia Moreno-Garcia writes speculative fiction (from magic realism to horror). Her short stories have appeared in places such as Imaginarium 2012: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing. Her first collection, This Strange Way of Dying, is out this summer. She is raising funds to complete a novel, Young Blood, about vampires in Mexico City. Go to to find out more or visit http://igg.me/at/youngblood/x/166963 or her web site silviamoreno-garcia.com/.

Predisposed to lies and subterfuge

There are two sources of inspiration for my writing: my personal life and my great-grandmother. I know it sounds dull to admit that what I write about is what I see around me, but it’s true. Fragments of conversations, moments from my childhood, people I’ve met, they all filter into my stories.

My great-grandmother is the other big engine behind a lot of what I do. Born into poverty, she never learned to read beyond the second-grade level. She couldn’t write without copious mispellings. She also told stories. Stories of her childhood, of what it was like growing up in the Mexican countryside. The fantastic often mingled with reality. There were witches in the shape of fireballs cackling from the trees. There were nahuales and serpents with feathers.

Although she provided solid facts (I’m still surprised discovering that some of the things she said were very accurate, such as descriptions of life during the Mexican Revolution), she filled the cracks with fantasy.

I believed everything she said until I was a teenager, at which point the stories of ghosts and spirits just didn’t make sense.

To this day, I’m not sure who my great-grandmother was. Her story of her marriage to my great-grandfather was a tale of great love, but she failed to mention the man who had impregnated her when she was a maid working in a wealthy house. There were other omissions, fabrications, half-truths and question marks. My grandmother always complained her mother was a cold and distant woman, but great-grandmother was always warm to me, brushing my hair and telling me stories.

On the other side of the family, I also have liars and tall-tellers. My grandfather was, for lack of better words, a swindler and a cad. Also a radio announcer with a booming voice. He left his family one fine day, just vanishing into thin air with his mistress.

My father is also a liar. Also charming in his own way. Also an asshole.

I am genetically predisposed to lies and subterfuge. Rather than becoming a con artist, I prefer to tell stories.

I think every good story has a kernel of truth to it. That is what makes it beat and draws people to it. We connect with the truth and recognize it. You take that truth and swaddle it in a bunch of lies. That’s a story. A storytellers is nothing but a liar who allows you to see a fraction of her naked heart.

That’s pretty much what I am.

Ink makes Latinidad's "Best Books of 2012" list

Woo, hoo! Incredibly honored and delighted to say my novel, INK, has made it on Latinidad's "Best Books of 2012" list.

"If Margaret Atwood were Latina..." the recommendation starts and it's enough to make me dance a little cumbia as I type it. Click here to read the full list.

Order INK on Amazon here, or Barnes and Noble here.

Dystopia, magic realism & immigration: INK is available for preorder on Amazon

INK's release date is Oct. 15, but you can...

Preorder from Amazon
Click here to to to Ink's page on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Ink-Sabrina-Vourvoulias/dp/0615657818/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349884504&sr=8-1&keywords=sabrina+vourvoulias

Sign up to win a copy from Goodreads
http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/34404-ink

Advanced Reading Copies of INK are in the house

Well, not my house — but at Crossed Genres Publications. I'll get to see my first perfect bound copy at Readercon 23 (where I'll be part of the Crossed Genres reading on Saturday at noon).

Excited doesn't even begin to cover how I feel...

For review copies of INK please contact publicity @ crossedgenres . com  

Format: Paperback (240 pp.) & Ebook
Release date: Monday, October 15, 2012
ISBN: 0615657818 / ISBN-13: 978-0615657813
Cost: $13.95 (print) / $5.99 (ebook)

Life is a carnival

As we race toward the end of the year, we're racing also toward the end of the decade.

What were you doing when the calendar rolled over to 2000? How much has your life changed in the ensuing 10 years? (I'm really asking, by the way.)

I rang in the year 2000 with my husband, daughter, parents and Wally Reinhardt, a good family friend, on beaches of the Mexican Riviera - dancing on the sand to live music and watching a "torito" of fireworks burn the first few minutes of the 21st century away. There seemed nothing, nothing at all, that would make a better beginning.

A week or so later, my family would troop to Mexico City for my daughter's belated baptism and the subsequent party - notable for its food and the canary who picked my daughter's fortune from a basket. "You will be happy," my daughter's fortune read. "And although destiny has made you pretty, do not be conceited. Work to keep a noble heart." We were all happy. I remember it on our faces. And around the table, some very noble hearts.

My husband, daughter and I returned from Mexico to our snowy cabin in the woods outside of Hamilton, N.Y. It was - and still is - the little corner of the world best loved by my heart. Coy-dogs and wild turkeys and deer were our closest neighbors. We awaited the yearly crop morel mushrooms, gem-studded puffballs, mayapples and trout lilies on the ground; the crayfish, little jeweled frogs and brown trout in the stream; and the tiny hummingbird nests hidden halfway to the sky.

We settled back into our routines, the day-to-day lives that now, in retrospect, stand as the best of times. Then, little more than a month into 2000, my mother died.

It was the opening salvo of a decade that when it comes to an end on Dec. 31, will have included more sorrows than joys, more destruction than creation, more heartache than heart's ease.

I miscarried a child. And then another and another. We moved away from our beloved woods. My father got sick, suffered, died. Friends I thought I'd never lose, I did. My husband was unemployed for half the decade. We went from poor but solvent to poor and insolvent and worried about just making it from week to week. Depression, PTSD-like effects of childhood sexual abuse, health concerns, surgeries. It seems like the litany of darkness might go on until the end of time.

And yet.

My brothers both married in this decade, as did one of my brothers in law. I have six nieces and nephews now - all amazing little beings as distinct from one another as the leaves I see changing outside the window today. My daughter has grown from an amazing 5-year-old to an amazing 15-year-old and guess what? She's survived my parenting just fine. My husband is employed at a job he loves. Friends I never thought to seek have made their way into my life. I've discovered social media in this decade, and rediscovered every kind of writing I ever loved and had set aside - from journalism to poetry.I also rediscovered the peculiar joy of seeing my words paid, and in print.

Rediscovery has, in fact, been the hallmark of this decade for me.

The social justice activism I set aside after college has re-emerged in advocacy for immigrants. The religion I also wholly set aside is now part of my everyday life. The assimilated Latina gave way to something just a little different - a woman in community. A mucha honra.

I don't think my ups and downs are unique to my decade. We need only look at the highs and lows of the economy; the ways both the best of the American Dream and the worst have taken center stage in our collective lives; the ways we have lived, in Dickens' words, the best and worst of times.

Not too many months ago my family attended the carnival at St. Joe's Parish in Downingtown. Yes, the ferris wheel photo at the top of this post is from that outing. I have always been an adrenaline junkie - no person in news business can be otherwise - and have done my share of facing down fears. Scared of snakes? Then, let me drape myself in them while on a trip to Thailand. Scared of heights? Let me jump out of a plane at 10,000 feet with nothing but a thin tissue of nylon to stop my fall. And still, at the parish carnival, I refused to go on the ferris wheel.(My husband went on it with my daughter.) I had to be coerced, in fact, to go on a horrid pirate ship ride that pitched me forward and backward, with my eyes firmly shut. I'm told the child in the seat in front of me laughed through the whole ride. So, the question is, has this decade birthed fear in me?

The answer is undeniably, yes.

And yet.

I was working on my novel a few days ago (I'll post some other time about how this decade also swallowed whole my last novel). One of the characters is like I was before the calendar page turned in 2000 - seemingly fearless. She climbs as high as she can to get close as she can to the stars. Her explanation? The stars cast their light on us without regard for whether we deserve the illumination or not. Without regard for our fears, or our small, brave stands. Without regard for whether we have become what we imagined, oh say, a decade ago.

This decade has also birthed a sort of awareness of the significant synchronicities in life. The way, if you want (and I do), God sheds light on us. The way, for example, as I'm writing this, my eyes fall on the words of one of columnists in our Catholic newspaper this week:

You know the number of the stars and call each of them by name.

It is a line from the psalms intoned in Morning Prayer - the Divine Office prayed across the globe, every day. I like the rest of the psalm, too. The way it speaks, the way it illuminates the step that bridges closure and beginning:

Heal hearts that are broken, gather together those who have been scattered....

No canary could pick a better wish for a new decade than this. No person could pray for better.