Alice Sola Kim‘s writing has appeared in publications such as McSweeney’s, Tin House, BuzzFeed READER, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, the Village Voice, and Lenny. She is a winner of the 2016 Whiting Award and has received grants and scholarships from the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Elizabeth George Foundation.
# I belong to a writing group that has existed since I was in college. The group has gone through many transformations—people have joined, left, and moved, necessitating both an East Coast and a West Coast branch—but it’s essentially still the same group. When the BuzzFeed editors Karolina Waclawiak, Saeed Jones, and Isaac Fitzgerald solicited a story from me for BuzzFeed READER on the theme of being almost famous, I knew right away that I wanted to write something inspired by my gorgeous long-running miracle of a writing group—except completely scary and evil, which my writing group is only sometimes.
As in the story, a lot of us are East Asian and South Asian, and when we all started writing in college, there was this sense that there wouldn’t be enough room for all of us—that our place in the white-dominated literary world would be as tokens and therefore maybe only one of us would make it. But literary publishing has slowly become, is still in the process of slowly becoming, more reflective of the actual diverse world, and I’m happy to say that, unlike in the story, all of us in the group are seeing each other succeed. It is unbelievable and wonderful and everyone has worked so hard for it—no one took the shortcut of feeding their friends to a giant snake woman, for which I am thankful.
A. Merc Rustad is a queer nonbinary writer who lives in Minnesota. Merc is a Nebula Award finalist for “This Is Not a Wardrobe Door”—definitely a highlight of the year! Their stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Fireside, Apex, Uncanny, Shimmer, Gamut, and other fine venues. Merc likes to play video games, watch movies, read comics, and wear awesome hats. You can find Merc on Twitter @Merc_Rustad or on their website, amercrustad.com. Their debut short story collection, So You Want to Be a Robot, was published in May 2017.
# I almost didn’t write this. No, that’s not quite right—I wrote it, and it scared me because it felt true and honest. This was all-out me on the page. I had read a lot of portal fantasies, and none of them seemed to follow through on the aftermath. The trauma of being locked out of your found-home, cut off from all your friends and the life(s) you built, unsure why you could never go back. I refused to let this be a downer, either; it needed a happy ending, and I had these nagging doubts that Serious Genre would want that. So I trunked the story for six months, and only at the last minute of Fireside‘s sub window did I send it out. Well. You know the rest. I like happy endings. I’m so pleased by the warm, welcoming reception “This Is Not a Wardrobe Door” has gotten. It’s the most rewarding aspect of being a writer: when you see people connect with a story, the characters, and find hope in the end. Let’s all build lots of doors.
Nisi Shawl‘s alternate history/AfroRetroFuturist novel Everfair was a 2016 publication and a finalist for the Nebula Award. Her 2008 collection Filter House co-won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and she has been a guest of honor at WisCon, the Science Fiction Research Association, and ArmadilloCon. She is the coauthor of Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, and she coedited Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler, and Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany. Recently she guest-edited Fantastic Stories of the Imagination‘s special People of Color Take Over issue. Since its inception she has been reviews editor for the feminist literary quarterly Cascadia Subduction Zone. Shawl is a founder of the Carl Brandon Society, a nonprofit supporting the presence of people of color in the fantastic genres, and she serves on Clarion West’s board of directors. She lives in Seattle, taking daily walks with her mother, June, and her cat, Minnie, at a feline pace.
# Located adjacent to Everfair rather than functioning as its sequel or prequel or holding any other position on that novel’s timeline, “Vulcanization” is told from a viewpoint I deliberately excluded from all other Everfair-related fiction: that of Leopold II, king of the Belgians. The historical Leopold my character is based on was a nasty piece of work, and I had a hard time inhabiting his head even for these few pages. I didn’t really want to use the racial slurs that came so easily to his lips, but that’s what his entitled callousness demanded.
Researching “Vulcanization” was a lot easier than writing it. I looked into rubber processing, the Royal Museum for Central Africa’s layout and architecture, and the personal foibles of this particular Belgian monarch. But then I had to put on a Leopold-shaped suit and wade into his story.
Did I construct the suit well enough? Was it proof against the ick? I hope that as you read you didn’t get any on you.
Jeremiah Tolbert is a writer, Web designer, and photographer. His work has appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Interzone, and numerous anthologies. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas, with his wife and son.
# “Not by Wardrobe, Tornado, or Looking Glass” required more time to get right than any other story I’ve written. I began tinkering with the idea nine years before and even completed a draft, but I didn’t know how to end the story. I was certain that my poor protagonist could never find what she desired most (a rabbit hole of her own), and in my relative youth, I could see this leading to nothing but despair. The original ending was too cliched to even describe here. It didn’t work, and I couldn’t see how I could make it, so I set the story aside and moved on.
Years later, after having a child, my perceptions of life shifted in very profound ways. One day, while waiting for another story idea to percolate, I went through my folder of unfinished and unsatisfactory work. I found this early manuscript and remembered my past frustrations. Upon rereading, I realized with one of those rare lightning bolts of insight that what my protagonist required wasn’t for her world to change; she needed to change her perspective of the world. It took going through a similar change of perspective in my own life to see what she truly needed most, and not just what she (and I) thought she needed. As a writer, this realization that my understanding of my own stories can change as I age has helped me feel less urgency in getting stories perfect right away. Sometimes they require a period of hibernation.
Debbie Urbanski‘s stories have appeared in The Sun, the Kenyon Review, Interfictions, Highlights Magazine, Cicada, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nature, Terraform, and The Southern Review. She lives with her husband and two kids in Syracuse, New York, and is permanently at work on a linked story collection concerning aliens and cults.
# I wrote “When They Came to Us” at a time when I was convinced that ordinary people (such as myself, and perhaps you as well) were capable of great evil but we were all pretending otherwise. “Oh no, that would never be me,” I felt we were telling ourselves falsely when watching, on the news, whatever horrors were being committed that day. Why did I think this? Perhaps it was the beginning of a bout of depression. But also I was reading some really heavy nonfiction. Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts, for starters, about 1933 Germany as seen through the American ambassador’s eyes—a study in, using Larson’s words, “what allows a culture to slip its moorings.” At the same time I was researching Abu Ghraib and war crimes in general for a bleak novella. Some of the soldiers involved in Abu Ghraib—one in particular, a woman who took certain photographs—seemed so normal and recognizable in interviews, and I wondered with dread whether, in such an environment, I could have done what she did. I became interested in Robert Jay Lifton’s idea of “atrocity-producing situations” in which ordinary people—“indeed, just about anyone,” Lifton writes—“can enter into ‘the psychology of slaughter.’” Eventually, after reading way too many books, I realized I was never going to figure it all out, so I should just write a story about it. That story became “When They Came to Us.” I was interested in telling this story using the collective voice as a way to invite the reader to step closer toward the narrators—the reader becoming, perhaps, for a little while, part of the town. An act not done by them but by us. Thank you to the editors of The Sun for giving this alien story its first home.