You've got three more days to help make SFF better ... and keep Crossed Genres going

Actually, writing isn't hard. It is mostly a goofily joyful experience.

Getting published, on the other hand, can be all kinds of miserable. Especially, if you happen to write speculative fiction that doesn't adhere to beloved (and worn threadbare) tropes, or if your writing style and protagonists are far from the default that the dominant culture assumes. Latino writer Daniel José Older has written eloquently about this and related topics on Salon and Buzzfeed.

As it happens, fairly early in his career, Older was published in the first iteration of Crossed Genres magazine, and subsequently the book side of CG published his acclaimed collection of short stories, Salsa Nocturna.

That first iteration of Crossed Genres magazine also published early work by Chinese-American SFF writer Ken Liu, whose work has gone on to be recognized with Nebula, Hugo and World Fantasy awards.

While Older and Liu may be some of the best-known of the magazine's alums, CG has a rare eye for talent, and many emerging writers have been published in the pages of its anthologies, its first magazine, and the newer version of Crossed Genres magazine (which is a Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America professional qualifying market), including Teresa Jusino, Priya Chand, Anthony Cardno, Shay Darrach, Athena Andreadis, A.J. Fitzwater, Kelly Jennings, Ibi Zoboi and many others.

All distinct and distinctive writers with one thing in common: they knock the default right out of speculative

by challenging expectations.

The thing is, it's not by chance that Older, Liu and the rest of the CG cohort have been published by the small, Boston-based press. Publishers Kay Holt and Bart Leib are committed to running a magazine and press that reflects the true breadth and range of today's speculative fiction. Because of Holt's and Leib's outreach to QUILTBAG, trans*, writers of color, international and non-Anglophone writers, CG has been labelled by some genre purists as "destroying SFF."

That alone is enough to endear them to me for the next several hundred years. But, the truth is, I'm already forever indebted to them. The first speculative fiction story I sold, Flying with the Dead, was to CG (version 1). Other stories appeared in their anthologies Fat Girl in a Strange Land, Menial: Skilled Labor in Science Fiction, and the upcoming Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, which will launch in May. They also published my novel, INK — half magical realism, half immigration-based political dystopia — written by an older Latina writer whose publication credits at the time were solely in journalism.... ¡Híjole! It still boggles the mind that they took the chance.

So, anyway...

Crossed Genres has three days to go on a Kickstarter campaign that will enable them to continue publishing the pro-rate magazine for another year and become self-sufficient. I don't tend to enjoin my friends and readers to support kickstarters, but I believe speculative fiction needs magazines and presses exactly like CG — you know, the ones that see the past, present and future with you and me in it.

I plan to support Crossed Genres and I really hope you will too. (Need that kickstarter link again? Here you go.)

Cover of Long Hidden anthology (and ToC) released

Cover by Julie Dillon

Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction From the Margins of History, edited by Rose Fox and Daniel José Older, and published by Crossed Genres Publications, will be released in May.

I'm thrilled to be included in this table of contents:

“Ogres of East Africa” by Sofia Samatar
Kenya, 1907
illustrated by GMB Chomichuk

“The Oud” by Thoraiya Dyer
The Shouf, Ottoman Empire, 1633
illustrated by Janet Chui

“Free Jim’s Mine” by Tananarive Due
Georgia, U.S.A., 1838
illustrated by Alice Meichi Li

“Ffydd (Faith)” by S. Lynn
Wales, 1919
illustrated by Daria Khvostova

“Across the Seam” by Sunny Moraine
Pennsylvania, U.S.A., 1897
illustrated by Eric Orchard

“Numbers” by Rion Amilcar Scott
Maryland, U.S.A., 1919
illustrated by Alice Meichi Li

“Each Part Without Mercy” by Meg Jayanth
Madras, India, 1746
illustrated by Kaysha Siemens

“The Witch of Tarup” by Claire Humphrey
Tarup, Denmark, 1886
illustrated by Daria Khvostova

“Marigolds” by L.S. Johnson
Paris, France, 1775
illustrated by Daria Khvostova

“Diyu” by Robert William Iveniuk
British Columbia, Canada, 1883
illustrated by GMB Chomichuk

“Collected Likenesses” by Jamey Hatley
New York City, U.S.A., 1913
illustrated by Nilah Magruder

“Angela and the Scar” by Michael Janairo
Ilocos Norte Province, Philippines, 1900
illustrated by Eric Orchard

“The Colts” by Benjamin Parzybok
Hungary, 1514
illustrated by Sasha Gallagher

“Nine” by Kima Jones
Phoenix, U.S.A., 1902
illustrated by GMB Chomichuk

“The Heart and the Feather” by Christina Lynch
Austria, 1589
illustrated by Janet Chui

“A Score of Roses” by Troy L. Wiggins
Memphis, U.S.A., circa 1968
illustrated by Eric Orchard

“Neither Witch Nor Fairy” by Nghi Vo
Belfast, Ireland, 1895
illustrated by Kaysha Siemens

“A Deeper Echo” by David Fuller
Winnipeg, Canada, 1919
illustrated by Aaron Paquette

“Knotting Grass, Holding Ring” by Ken Liu
Yangzhou, China, 1645
illustrated by Jennifer Cruté

“Jooni” by Kemba Banton
Jamaica, 1843
illustrated by Nilah Magruder

“There Will Be One Vacant Chair” by Sarah Pinsker
Ohio, U.S.A, 1862
illustrated by Kaysha Siemens

“It’s War” by Nnedi Okorafor
Aba, Nigeria, 1929
illustrated by Esme Baran

“Find Me Unafraid” by Shanaé Brown
North Carolina, U.S.A, 1905
illustrated by Kasey Gifford

“A Wedding in Hungry Days” by Nicolette Barischoff
Shandong Province, China, 1900
illustrated by Eric Orchard

“Medu” by Lisa Bolekaja
Kansas, U.S.A., 1877
illustrated by Esme Baran

“Lone Women” by Victor LaValle
Montana, U.S.A, 1914
illustrated by Eric Orchard

“The Dance of the White Demons” by Sabrina Vourvoulias
Guatemala, 1524
illustrated by GMB Chomichuk

My schedule at Readercon

At Readercon 23 with college friend Francesca Bewer

Funny how July seemed so far away at one point... These are the panels I'll be on at Readercon (Burlington, Mass.) from July 11 through 14. Now that you know where to find me, stop by and say hello!

Thursday July 11

9:00 PM  Apocalypse Then. Leah Bobet, Maureen F. McHugh, James Morrow, Romie Stott (moderator), Sabrina Vourvoulias. In a 2012 interview published in the Boston Review, Junot Díaz told Paula Moya, "I always say if people [in the Dominican Republic] know about anything they know about the end of the world. We are after all the eschaton that divided the Old World from the New." In this sense many worlds have ended, with a bang or a whimper. What can authors of post-apocalyptic stories learn from past apocalypses like the 1994 Rwandan genocide or the fall of Imperial Rome, and why are there so few works that present real-world events in this light?

Friday July 12
 

With Daniel José Older at Crossed Genres reading  Readercon 23

Latino Speculative Fiction Writers Collective Group Reading. Daniel José Older, Julia Rios, Sabrina Vourvoulias. Latino speculative fiction writers will read from their work.
11:00 AM 

12:00 PM  Writing Others I: Theory. Michael J. DeLuca, Andrea Hairston, Rose Lemberg, Maureen F. McHugh, Daniel José Older, Joan Slonczewski (leader), Sabrina Vourvoulias. Authors who want to write outside their own experiences of race, ethnicity, culture, gender, and sexuality face a multitude of challenges. How do we present each character's unique perspective while celebrating their distinctive identity and avoiding stereotypes and appropriation? How is the research and writing process affected by differences between the author's and the character's levels of societal privilege? Is it possible to write about future diversity without oppression, or does today's reality require us to write in today's frame? Which authors have handled this well, and what form does "handling this well" take?

3:00 PM  What the Other Sees as Other. Barbara Krasnoff (moderator), Maureen F. McHugh, Julia Rios, Vandana Singh, Sabrina Vourvoulias. Maureen F. McHugh gets us so deeply into a character's head that while the character may be "other" to the reader, what really registers as "other" are the people who are "other" to the character. For example, in McHugh's short story "Special Economics," otherness is not about being Chinese, because all the characters are Chinese and in China; it's about being old, having ideas that are no longer current or relevant. We'll discuss this and other (ahem) examples of the depiction of otherness.

7:00 PM Sociolinguistics and SF/F. John Chu, Rose Lemberg (leader), Alex Dally MacFarlane, Anil Menon, Sabrina Vourvoulias. Sociolinguistics studies the ways in which language intersects with society. It looks at issues such as interactions of language with power, prestige, gender, hegemony, and literacy, bilingualism and multilingualism, translation, language birth, and language death to name but a few. We will look specifically at the kinds of tensions that are created in societies where people speak different languages or dialects depending on social and racial/ethnic status. We will also discuss genre books in which those topics have been explored, and consider sociolinguistics tools and concepts that may be useful to writers.

Saturday July 13

12:00 PM Friendship Is Magic. E.C. Ambrose, Rose Lemberg, Kathryn Morrow (leader), JoSelle Vanderhooft, Sabrina Vourvoulias. Heroes have friends and companions, while villains only have minions. Stern protagonists can be softened by romantic attachments that draw them back into the community, but the plot also requires that they be special, isolated by some terrible burden of privilege or unshareable secret. Loner stories are episodic (the gunslinger rides off to the next town, the gumshoe slouches off to the next case) while going from solitude to connection is perhaps the most common character development. This panel will examine how cultural narratives and values around heroism, personal development, sex and gender, class, family, and community affect the ways we write and read about being alone and being connected.

Reading: Sabrina Vourvoulias. Reading from my novel Ink.
6:30 PM

7:00 PM Women's Bodies, Women's Power. Athena Andreadis (leader), Alex Dally MacFarlane, Kate Nepveu, Vandana Singh, Sabrina Vourvoulias. In many times and places, cisgender girls and women have been evaluated by their bodies, including their choice of dress, sexual behavior, virginity, and fertility. Juxtaposed with this are the mystification and taboos surrounding menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause. This outlook has migrated wholesale into speculative literature. It's still standard fare in fantasy for women to lose (or be thought to lose) any extranormal powers they possess when they first have penetrative sex, menstruate, or become pregnant, from André Norton's Witchworld adepts to Zamia in Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon. Athena Andreadis will explore the tropes and assumptions around this issue, including variants applied to trans* and non-binary characters.

Sunday July 14

10:00 AM Gender and Power in Literature and Life. E.C. Ambrose, Cathy Butler, Eileen Gunn, Rose Lemberg, Daniel José Older (leader), Sabrina Vourvoulias. This workshop, led by Daniel José Older, is a critical look at different ways that gender and power shape our realities and experiences of the world. With examples from the writing process and fantastical literature in particular, we will deconstruct dynamics of power and privilege on the gender spectrum.

9:00 AM Enclaves and Conclaves: Subsocietal Safe Spaces. Gwendolyn Clare, Shira Daemon, Resa Nelson (leader), John Shirley, Sabrina Vourvoulias. People often form societies of commonality to act as safe spaces: LGBT community centers, religious social groups, Girl Scouts, D&D campaigns, speculative literature conventions. We rarely see this sort of sub-societal safe space in speculative fiction, finding instead more tangible safe spaces of domed cities, post-apocalyptic enclaves, or rails over a dangerous earth; and often, in fiction, the perimeter is breached. What does this say about our perceptions of safety and danger, our establishment and perpetuation of in-groups and out-groups, and our ambivalence toward purported utopias?

Kay Holt and Bart Leib at Readercon 23

There are lots of great panels and readings I look forward to attending — you should check out the full program  and some of the amazing people scheduled to take part. The other thing I learned at my first Readercon last year ... the bookshop is a fantastic (and financially dangerous) place to frequent. If you are there, stop by the Crossed Genres table, where INK and many other books will be available. Plus, Bart Leib and Kay Holt are fun to hang out with.

See you soon in Burlington!

Casting Lord of the Rings, the gender swap and POC version

A week or two ago, I posted Annis' "PicSpammy Casting the Lord of the Rings, the genderswap version" on my Facebook page, after someone I follow on Twitter posted it with the comment that seeing all the women cast in men's roles and vice versa really re-emphasizes how few women roles there are in Tolkien's book and Jackson's movie.

It's true. It does. And it is both interesting and frustrating to note Annis' choices. Because all of the women and men she chose for her gender-swapping version are, like the movie and book, very white. I commented on that in my Facebook posting, and writer-editor Kay Holt soon responded: "Might be fun to put together an all-POC version of this. (Keep the gender-swap, though. It's 100% better this way.)"

So, I did. Here goes — in the same order as Annis' PicSpammy, and retaining its strange omission of Bilbo, my gender-swapped, POC version:

Now, I expect you all to comment (what's the fun of this otherwise?) and signal boost it if you like it. 

Updated to correct the PicSpammy/Annis conflation I fell into originally. 

The Next Big Thing - Work in Progress

I was tagged in a chain blog called "The Next Big Thing - Work in Progress." It gives blog readers a bit of a glimpse into the writer's world and the upcoming novel/collection/book that writer is working on.

I'm delighted that speculative fiction writer Morgen Rich tagged me.

She was tagged by TS Gwilliams.

I've linked their blogs, and at the end of the post I'll link the blogs of the two writers I've tagged. So, here we go:

1. What is the working title of your next book? Walking Spanish

2. Where did the idea come from for the book? Midway through writing my first novel, INK, I took a break and wrote a novella that centered on a young Mexican-American woman in Philadelphia who was grappling with two horrifying things at once: one, that her brother — an undocumented immigrant — disappeared off a train platform as he was on his way to work. The other, that a childhood monster from Mexican tradition was alive and preying on people in the protagonist's city.... The narrative got me thinking about the way those of us who immigrate from elsewhere bring our monsters over the borders with us. What happens to them?  Do they prey only on those who know their stories? Do they want to slip their stories as they slip the border?  Do they *gasp* become acculturated? So I decided to write a series of linked stories exploring just that.

3. What genre does your book fall under? I write across genres, but I think dark fantasy or magical realism are probably the easiest fit for most of my work.

4. What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?  Since it is a collection of linked stories it is tough to say. But I write Latino protagonists and characters in a fairly wide range of ages .... I quite like Rachel Ticotin for the sexy older protagonist of “The Emporium of Crossings;” Elpidia Carrillo for the artist-witch in “Bad Blood;” and Tyler Posey as the young lead in “With Syringe and Four Reales.” Edgar Ramirez and Gina Rodriguez would be a pretty terrific pairing as Elvis and Kat in "69th Street" (the novella that started it all). There's more, of course. Like, who would I cast as El Cucuy? Or, La Siguanaba? Lots of fun to be had casting monsters. ;)

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? Do monsters cross borders with the immigrants who believe in them?

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? I’ll probably shop it around when it’s a little closer to finished. Story collections are a tough sell, I’m told. But there are some amazing small presses out there, so maybe one of them will be interested.

7. How long did/will it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript? I’m a slow writer, so if I finish a first draft by this winter I’ll be really pleased.

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? That’s the thing about genre-hopping, it doesn’t really give you an easy basis for comparison. Maybe if you took the stories of Augusto Monterroso, Angela Carter, Geoff Ryman, Ana Castillo and Demetria Martinez and put them in a blender together ....

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book? The folktales of Guatemala and Mexico are, of course, my first inspiration for these stories. But it’s also a book of stories about immigrants. So the experiences of my parents, my family, my friends and some of the people I’ve interviewed in my newspaper work all inform the narratives in both big and small ways.

10.What else about the book might pique the reader's interest? There's creepy, grotesque, sexy and bittersweet in this book. And lots and lots of teeth.

Time for tag.

I'm tagging Shay Darrach to post on May 2. I think Shay's a wonderful storyteller with a distinctive voice and beautifully textured prose. Also just a really fine human being. (Fun to hang out with at Arisia, too.) I have it on good authority that one of Shay's upcoming publications is a truly award-worthy piece of short fiction. I can't wait to read about it and his other writing projects.

I'm tagging Kay Holt to post on May 9. I fell in love with Kay's characters in the short story "Parent Hack" in Crossed Genres' anthology Subversion, and later found out it was part of a novel in progress. Like Shay, Kay is a sweetheart. But she's also a terrific editor and publisher and writer. When I was studying fiction with Allan Gurganus, one of the pieces of advice he gave us was: honor everyone in your story. It turns out to be a horribly difficult thing to do, and some writers don't even try. But that is one of the salient features in Kay's work — she honors every character and so produces some of the most nuanced and deeply compassionate SFF I've read.

Be sure to check out their "Next Big Thing" blog postings, and Morgen Rich's, and come check back here and tell me what you think of all the upcoming book projects (yes, mine too)!

Nuestras Voces, Our Voices: Long Hidden

Editor’s note: Elianne Ramos is the scheduled “Nuestras Voces, Our Voices” writer spotlight for March, but as she has been swamped and hasn’t been able to send her guest blog post yet, I wanted to introduce you, in the interim, to an anthology very much in the spirit of “Nuestras Voces, Our Voices.”

"¡Alumbra, lumbre de alumbre, Luzbel de piedralumbre! Como zumbido de oídos persistía el rumor de las campanas ...."

I read this in Guatemala more than three decades ago.

And while some of my memories of the country I called home during my earliest years have faded (or healed or diminished or become distant and pale as old photographs) the opening of Miguel Ángel Asturias’ seminal magical realist novel, El Señor Presidente, never has.

Because books shape us.

I read it as a form of resistance. It was, after all, about Manuel Estrada Cabrera, an early 20th century Guatemalan dictator heading a regime very much like the ones that would follow his. The ones that would put the country through thirty-plus years of armed internal conflict and genocide. The ones I was living under when I read the book.

I read it as an incantation against forgetting. I was young when I read it, but even my juvenile, half-formed conscience knew what this book did: it called out the present by looking at the past. It saw the dispossessed, the marginalized, the invisible. And if it could do that, couldn’t we all?

I read it as magic. Because words are the beginning of magic, and with them, we learn to make and unmake. To spell. To create speculation about what could be, or might be — if only we conjure it true.

Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History is an anthology that sets out to conjure  history true. Writer Daniel José Older, editor Rose Fox and publisher Crossed Genres describe the book (slated for release in early 2014) this way:

“Most written chronicles of history, and most speculative stories, put rulers, conquerors, and invaders front and center. People with less power, money, or status—enslaved people, indigenous people, people of color, queer people, laborers, women, people with disabilities, the very young and very old, and religious minorities, among others—are relegated to the margins. Today, mainstream history continues to perpetuate one-sided versions of the past while mistelling or erasing the stories of the rest of the world.

There is a long and honorable legacy of literary resistance to erasure. This anthology partakes of that legacy. It will feature stories from the margins of speculative history, each taking place between 1400 and the early 1900s and putting a speculative twist—an element of science fiction, fantasy, horror, or the unclassifiably strange—on real past events.”

They have enough funds to include approximately 20 stories in the anthology, and have asked a number of very accomplished speculative fiction writers to submit work to be considered for it. But they are also planning to have an open submission period, and would like to be able to gather enough supplemental funding to include 10 additional stories.

If you are a reader of this “Nuestras Voces, Our Voices” series, you already know that there are many fine, undiscovered writers that deserve to be heard. In fact, some of you are those writers. If fully funded, Long Hidden will be a book of stories of resistance, of incantation, of magic. Please help make it a reality by clicking here and pledging your support.

Ink and La Gorda and the City of Silver are eligible for Hugo, Nebula awards

People in the SFF world are starting to talk about Hugos and Nebulas - the big awards where speculative fiction is concerned. As it happens, I'm not eligible to nominate or vote in either (having just made my first pro rate sale recently) but I do have two works that are eligible to be voted in and on.

If you are a SFWA or WorldCon eligible voter please consider voting for my novel INK (published by Crossed Genres Publications in October 2012)  in the best novel category, and for my short story "La Gorda and the City of Silver" (which appeared in the anthology Fat Girl in a Strange Land in February 2012) in the best short story category.

Neither of them is available to read online beyond Ink's "Look inside" feature on Amazon, but the Los Angeles Review of Books reviewed it on Dec. 27 (click here to read); as for "La Gorda and the City of Silver," if you'd like a copy of the short story to read before you cast your vote, email me at svourvoulias (at) yahoo (dot) com and let me know so I can send you one.

Yes, I absolutely know there is only the remotest of chances my work will be looked at seriously in these categories given the amount of competition out there, but that Latina hope-and-stubborness mix is kicking in, so here you have it.

If you can, please vote.

Link to Hugo awards: http://www.lonestarcon3.org/hugo-awards/index.shtml
Link to Nebula awards: http://www.sfwa.org/nebula-awards/

SF Squeecast, the Skiffy and Fanty Show and the Outer Alliance podcasts

Who knew that podcasts would be one of the best ways to hear about books you might want to read?

I've recently discovered three podcasts that do that (and more), each in quite distinct ways. Truthfully, I discovered them because they've each provided a mention of my novel, INK, in one of their podcasts, but I've stayed because they've already augmented my "to be read" list.

SF Squeecast - brings together four or five SFF writers to talk about books, films and TV shows that have caught their attention. In episode 18 "You can't put your finger there"  you can hear author Elizabeth Bear talk about INK; along with Paul Cornell on the British TV show Quatermass; Seanan McGuire on the U.S. TV show Mockingbird Lane, Lynne M. Thomas' take on Love and Romanpunk by Tansy Rayner Roberts; and Catherynne M. Valente's delight in the novel Seaward by Susan Cooper. As you can see, it's a nice combination of very recent and classic SFF, and the discussion is in-depth enough to really make you want to read (or watch) the works discussed.

The Skiffy and Fanty Show - Shaun Duke and company deconstruct films, subgenres, the writer's process, anything and everything. In the interview with me, Episode 117, Shaun and Paul Weimer asked questions that were, for the most part, so out of the norm no one had yet asked them of me. So we delve into translation, for example, and the ways poetry, journalism and fiction intersect. There is a charming informality about the Skiffy and Fanty show podcasts, underpinned by intellectual and academic engagement, and a truly encyclopedic knowledge of the SFF genre. Plus, when they interview writers they give them nicknames. For future reference I am Sabrina Vourvoulias, a.k.a. the Octopus (hence the image on this post) because the book I issued is titled INK. They've recently interviewed writers Jay Kristoff and Cat Rambo, and it is worthwhile to trawl the archives. I really enjoyed an interview they did with Tobias Buckell (a.k.a. Captain Planet) in February.

Outer Alliance podcast - The Outer Alliance is a group of SFF writers who have come together as allies for the advocacy of LGBT issues in literature. The podcast is only one of many ways they focus attention on LGBT issues in SFF. Julia Rios conducts the podcast interviews, and she has something of the quality of NPR's Terry Gross — if Gross focused on SFF, diversity and representation in literature, that is. My first listen to the podcast was OA Podcast #23, which was an interview with Bart Leib and Kay Holt, the publishers of Crossed Genres (who published INK), which delved into their philosophy of publishing, among many other topics. In addition to interviews with writers like Elizabeth Hand and Tansy Rayner Roberts, Outer Alliance has conducted some fascinating topic-centered podcasts of panels at SFF conventions, like the "Heteronormativity in YA Dystopians" panel from WisCon and a "Changing the Conversation" program recorded at WorldCon.

If you listen through the end of the Skiffy and Fanty show podcast, you'll hear Shaun and Paul and I discuss one of the great advantages of indie bookstores — the way an informed bookseller can guide you to books you haven't heard about but that dovetail with your preferences, or even blow your preferences wide open. No algorithm on Amazon or Goodreads that picks "you might also like" suggestions can do what that informed bookseller in love with genre literature can. But I'm convinced that the sorts of genre-centered, literary podcasts I've highlighted here are as close to the virtual equivalent of that informed bookseller as you can get, and as such they perform a very, very valuable service to the genre and to us individually as readers and writers.

SF Squeecast, the Skiffy and Fanty Show and Outer Alliance are the three I've found, but I'm sure there are other podcasts out there worth discovering. Leave me links to the ones you like (and why) in the comment section.

Fox News Latino: Sabrina Vourvoulias releases novel Ink

Thrilled to have Fox News Latino showcase my novel, INK! Read about its immigration theme, its link to Guatemala and my love of magical realism:
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/lifestyle/2012/11/01/sabrina-vourvoulias-releases-new-novel-ink/

Crossed Genres Publications releases INK, a Latino novel with immigration theme

Al Día News editor Sabrina Vourvoulias’ novel, “Ink,” highlights news media and anti-immigrant sentiment in novel combining dystopia and magical realism

On Monday, Oct. 15, on the last day of the observance of Hispanic Heritage Month, Crossed Genres Publications of Somerville, Mass., releases Sabrina Vourvoulias’ novel, “Ink,” a fictional look at what happens when rhetoric about immigrants escalates to an institutionalized population control system. (To read a portion of the first chapter and order on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Ink-Sabrina-Vourvoulias/dp/0615657818/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1350269229&sr=1-1&keywords=ink+by+sabrina+vourvoulias)

The near-future, dark speculative novel opens as a biometric tattoo is approved for use to mark temporary workers, permanent residents and citizens with recent immigration history - collectively known as inks. This “chilling tale of American apartheid, and the power of love, myth and community” (Reforma: The National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish Speaking) has its main characters grapple with ever-changing definitions of power, home and community, and perceptions of “otherness” based on ethnicity, language, class and inclusion.

Set in a fictional city and small, rural town in the U.S. during a 10-year span, the novel is told in four voices: a journalist; an “ink” who works in a local population control office; an artist strongly tied to a specific piece of land; and a teenager whose mother runs an inkatorium (a sanitarium-internment center opened in response to public health concerns about inks). Vourvoulias, of Guatemalan-American descent and the managing editor of Philadelphia’s largest Spanish-language newspaper, Al Día, has described the characters as “complicated people in complicated times trying to live their lives as best they can. You know, us.”

“Readers will be moved by this call for justice in the future and the present.” (Publishers Weekly)

“The conflict driving the novel will fill readers with dismay, seeing parallels between what has already taken place—Japanese locked in concentration camps, narcos controlling swaths of territory in Mexico, rednecks with power—and the novel’s permutations of today’s ugly commonplaces.” (Michael Sedano, La Bloga)

 “In Ink, Vourvoulias masterfully weaves an increasingly complex parallel universe at once fantastical and eerily familiar: a not-so-farfetched future world where myth and legend cohabit with population control schemes, media cover-ups, and subcutaneous GPS trackers.” (Elianne Ramos, the vice chair of Latinos in Social Media – LATISM)

Ink’s publication is part of Crossed Genres’ commitment to bringing new and underrepresented voices into fiction. CG’s list of publications include Daniel José Older’s “Salsa Nocturna;” Kelly Jennings’ “Broken Slate;” RJ Astruc’s “A Festival of Skeletons;” as well as the anthologies “Subversion,” “Fat Girl in a Strange Land” and the upcoming “Menial: Skilled Labor in SF.”

For more information about “Ink,” or any of Crossed Genres’ titles, contact Bart Leib at 617- 335- 2101 or by sending an email to publicity@crossedgenres.com.

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

La Bloga: Show me your INK. Banned books update. On-Line Floricanto in waxing October

La Bloga: Show me your INK. Banned books update. On-Line Floricanto in waxing October

Pre-publication reviews of INK by Sabrina Vourvoulias

Release date: Monday, October 15, 2012

Reviews:

Publishers Weekly: "Readers will be moved by this call for justice in the future and the present."  Click to read in full: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-615-65781-3

Reforma: The National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish Speaking: "A chilling tale of American Apartheid, and the power of love, myth and community." Click to read in full: http://www.reforma.org/article_content.asp?edition=2&section=2&article=231

Utica Observer-Dispatch Blog Carpe Librum:  "I enjoyed Ink and found the writing intelligent." Click to read in full: http://www.uticaod.com/blogs/books/x710706736/Ink-Reviewed-by-Lewellyne-Blanchard-Member-Book-Lover-s-Reading-Group

Escape Pod: "Vourvoulias' writing is fluid and easy to read." Click to read in full: http://escapepod.org/2012/08/27/book-review-ink-by-sabrina-vourvoulias/

Elianne Ramos, vice-chair of Latinos in Social Media (LATISM): "In Ink, Vourvoulias masterfully weaves an increasingly complex parallel universe at once fantastical and eerily familiar." Click to read in full: http://inknovel.com/reviews/

There are also early reader reviews posted to Ink's listing on Goodreads and Librarything.

Other news: 

Join me at the Comadres and Compadres Writers Conference, Saturday, Oct. 6 at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, NY. I will be part of a panel on genre fiction. For more information: http://www.lascomadres.org/lco/lco-eng/events/2012/NYCWC.html

I've got a Latino literature-Hispanic Heritage Month guest blog post over at the Tejana Made blog: http://tejanamade.wordpress.com/2012/09/26/guest-post-by-sabrina-vourvoulias-author-of-ink-hispanic-heritage-month/

Specs for Ink:

ISBN: 0615657818 / ISBN-13: 978-0615657813
$13.95 (print) / $5.99 (ebook)

For review copies please contact publicity(at)crossedgenres(dot)com

Ink will be available on Amazon and from Barnes and Noble online.

From Genreville: More than Tramp Stamps

Click the link to read what's on Rose Fox's desk at Publishers Weekly currently. My novel, Ink, is one of the books, of course. But ... so is Jocelynn Drake's Angel's Ink (which launches Oct. 16, one day after mine) and Damien Grintalis's Ink (which launches in December). They all sound completely and utterly distinct and different from one another, but it's funny that we all had the same title impulse. I'm blaming it entirely on our (obviously shared) muse who really, REALLY wanted a book with ink on more than just the pages.


Read Fox's posting here: http://blogs.publishersweekly.com/blogs/genreville/?p=2030

Reading INK in public for the first time at Readercon ...

 ... was absolutely terrifying. My hands shook so much at one point I had a problem scrolling to the next page of INK on the laptop.

Sheesh.

People get good at this, I know, because Barbara Krasnoff and Sandra McDonald who read before me were pretty terrific. And then some people, like Daniel José Older who read after me, are just naturals.

Ah well. I'm told I did fine and for once I'm choosing to believe it. ;)

Of web sites, giveaways and SFF conventions

Want to get the PDF version of this newsletter? Email me at svourvoulias (at) yahoo (dot) com.

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)

Meet the editor of INK

Want to get the much more readable PDF version of this newsletter? Email me at svourvoulias(at)yahoo(dot)com

Want to get the much more readable PDF version of this newsletter? Email me at svourvoulias(at)yahoo(dot)com

Want to get the much more readable PDF version of this newsletter? Email me at svourvoulias(at)yahoo(dot)com

Sign up for giveaway of advanced reading copy of Fat Girl in a Strange Land

Crossed Genres Publications is offering three advanced reading copies of the anthology Fat Girl in a Strange Land, which has my story "La Gorda and the City of Silver" in it, to the winners of CGP's giveaway on Goodreads. But you have to be quick because the giveaway closes Jan. 14.

I've signed up for the giveaway, not so much because I'm cheap (though I have been known to exhibit those tendencies every so often) but because early reviews have excited my curiosity about many of other stories in the anthology. (For some idea of the range of stories take a peek at Lillian Cohen-Moore's review of the anthology, which you can read here. A much briefer Publishers Weekly review is here.)

If you are interested in the genesis of the anthology read Bart Leib's blog post about it here. (Along with Kay T. Holt, Leib is editor of the anthology and publisher of CGP). You can also chat with him tonight (Wed., Jan. 11) at the weekly Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Chat on twitter. Use the hashtag #sffwrtcht to participate.

If you are interested in how I came to be included in this anthology, check out my earlier blog post: Unabashed fat.

A subversion of stories

I love collective nouns: a parliament of owls, a murder of crows, an exaltation of larks. The provenance of some collective nouns are easy to figure, others less so. With their mythic ties to Athena, the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom, I can guess how a group of owls became a parliament. But a murder of crows? They aren’t birds of prey -- those lethally efficient killers of the bird world -- just scavengers. Still, in spite of -- or maybe because of -- the horrific meaning of the word murder, this collective noun is one of the most memorable. Easy to remember. Evocative.

 

Which is all background for my intended use of this collective noun for stories: a subversion.

 

Yeah, the word means to overthrow, to ruin and destroy. Not nice words -- as dark, sometimes, as murder -- and not what most writers would choose to describe the painstaking product of their craft. But it fits. Stories supplant and turn things upside down -- even the gentlest and quietest stories. Stories change what we experience (or imagine experiencing) by replacing the felt, the seen, the smelled, the heard, the sensed, the remembered and the said, with a whole new governing system: the written word.

Is there anything more dangerous, more utterly transformative? Not for nothing has literacy (and access to the printed word) long been considered foundational to freedom and the best proof against repression.

Which brings me to the specific subversion of stories I want to write about today.

Crossed Genres Publications (which, I’ll disclose, published one of my short stories a year ago and is slated to publish another story and a novel in the future) is releasing an anthology of short stories tomorrow (Dec. 5). “Subversion - Science Fiction and Fantasy tales of subverting the norm,” and each of its 16 stories, subverts in multiple ways. First and foremost, of course, they are stories. But they are also stories in an already subversive genre (what could be more subversive than swapping our world for another?) and filled with acts of subversion, both large and small. One of the stories even subverts the notion of subversion.

Pretty interesting stuff.

A number of the people included in the anthology are writers whose work I already search out: Daniel José Older, Kelly Jennings, Cat Rambo. Others were discoveries.

Camille Alexa was one of those. Her “And All Its Truths” is a story about a nameless person given up for dead in a prison on another world; a compassionate religious sister; and an act of sabotage worthy (and reminiscent) of the partisans during WWII. Alexa’s story is more Roberto Rossellini than George Lucas, and its images and characters linger long after the story is done. I liked this piece so much I hesitated before reading the rest of the anthology. There have been anthologies that I remember only for one story, good or bad (such as the anthology that contained Geoff Ryman’s “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter”), and I really didn’t want this anthology to be that way.

I shouldn’t have worried.

I’d already read one of Barbara Krasnoff’s smart and well-crafted stories before I started “The Red Dybbuk” in this anthology, so I was predisposed to like it. Like Alexa’s story, there are traditionally understood acts of subversion in Krasnoff’s story about four generations of Jewish women. But beneath the familiar forms of activism is a much more subtle upending of legend and family dynamic. Krasnoff’s writing reminds me just a tiny bit of Grace Paley’s, mostly because the characters are rich and complicated and I’m convinced they have lives off the page as well as on it.

I hadn’t read any of Natania Barron’s stories before I cracked “Pushing paper in Hartleigh,” but now I’m thinking I’ll have to search out the rest of her work. The story is a weird and delightful combination of Western and semi-Elizabethan, in plot, world and character. Though this story, too, has a recognizable act of subversion in the storyline, its real subversion may be that it dares to invite inimical tropes to the party and gets them to play perfectly together. 

Kay Holt’s “Parent Hack” hides subversion within subversion within subversion. In best Sci Fi tradition it takes real world issues -- in this case, absent parents and the shortfalls of the foster care system -- and reimagines them in a future context. The protagonists are two children who want to be brothers, three bots (two of them parent substitutes and a hacker bot) as well as a flesh-and-blood hacker -- and they’re all clandestinely overturning systems, be those code, expectation or actual institution. What’s particularly noteworthy in Holt’s piece is that despite its economy, the characters feel fleshed out, and are intriguingly complex. Worthy of a novel, in fact.

Jean Johnson’s deeply cynical and seamlessly written “The Hero Identity” is, for me, the most distressing of the stories in Subversion. That’s quite a feat in a book whose stories don’t shy away from showing the cruelties we (and our human proxies) visit upon each other. “The Hero Identity” is the subvert-the-subversion story I referred to earlier, and its inclusion in the anthology is sheer brilliance on editor Bart Leib's part. I can’t call this story my favorite -- to borrow a Gollum-ism, it’s tricksy -- but, boy howdy, do I admire its smarts and its skill.

I didn’t want to write about Shanna Germain’s story, “Seed.” Really, I didn’t. This story has the most repugnant of the many cruelties that prompt protagonists to subversive action in this collection of stories. But the thing is, Germain’s a terrific writer. Food, eroticism, cultural disjuncture, something a hair shy of femicide, the promise of revenge -- it’s all in “Seed” and its all laid out with consummate skill. Like Alexa’s story but far more disturbing, this one stays with you long after you’ve come to its close.

Newspaper folks like me know all about shared bylines on articles. It’s easy to do separate interviews and research and pull it into a seamless news story. But how does it work in short fiction? I don’t know -- I’m really asking RJ Astruc and Deirdre Murphy, who together wrote “Scrapheap Angel” for Subversion. This is one of my favorite stories in the anthology, what with its tyranny of depersonalization so well and completely drawn. There’s a lovely irony in Astruc and Murphy’s subversive act, and a gentle goofiness to it. You can’t help but root for it to succeed.

I read Subversion in epub form, but I have to admit, I would have preferred a print copy because -- no matter what the Who song says -- when it comes to this, the new “boss” is definitely not the old “boss.” I miss the feel of paper, the skipping around and the revisits that, for me, are more likely on the page than on the screen.

I know, I know, it makes me a downright unsubversive reader.  I can live with that. Now, if only I could come up with a collective noun ….

Subversion includes stories by: Jessica Reisman, Camille Alexa, Melissa S. Green, Daniel José Older, Kelly Jennings, Barbara Krasnoff, Natania Barron, Kay T. Holt, Jean Johnson, Cat Rambo, Shanna Germain, RJ Astruc and Deirdre Murphy, C.A. Young, Wendy N. Wagner, Timothy T. Murphy and Caleb Jordan Schulz. Click  here for its Goodreads listing and here for its Amazon listing.