clear distillation of a damning colonial angle to the current cross-genre zeal for purple nonsense metaphors lauded as "poetic" (in re: Granta & AI): "The real question... is why a particular form of trained, statistical incoherence was so readily legible to its judges as postcolonial seriousness."

the great folks @locusmag.bsky.social are crowdfunding a new best-of anthology--starting with 2025, a banner year for short fiction! In a time when traditional publishing faces so many threats, collections like this matter more than ever. support it at locusmag.com/anthology!

hi booksky, looking for recs for spec novels that end w magic *returning* to the world; bonus pts if lit-spec; bonus bonus pts if they end w a moment of surreal/ambiguous transcendence. examples of the vibe: Mirrlees's Lud-in-the-Mist; Clarke's Jonathan Strange; Crowley's Little, Big; Ryman's Was

MKE, ICE is on the south side kidnapping people (Voces as well as local media confirmed). GFM for this man and his family in the post below. www.jsonline.com/story/news/l...

the new Lisa Robertson (Riverwork, 2026) is lovely & also feels like it was written in 1998 or maybe 2003, w its archives & indices & rhizomes & Barthes. first book I've encountered where a turn-of-the-20thc style feels so mannered & jarringly *past*

scrotus giving free speech rights to unlimited campaign spending while stripping trans women of their constitutional protections & upholding birthright citizenship by the slimmest of margins = the final telos of citizens united. people isn't people. only money is people

Notes from a Regicide!!! Yes!!

more prairie posting

I'm so proud to have this essay out in support of the @strangehorizons.bsky.social fund drive. I have thoughts about worldbuilding, and I hope after reading that you will, too ✨

SH is a vital magazine in the SFF short fiction ecosystem, committed to uplifting marginalized voices & promoting a horizontal editorial model. They're also one of still-too-few outlets for excellent reviews. Please support them if you can!

ok wow so was not expecting a mic drop of a ghost scene at the end of The Magic Mountain, a book I thought was unspoilerable bc the final twist is literally just WWI

so happy OFTV's back with a new ep that gives the people what we want: fun trans history & an outro that's a nearly full play of Fleetwood Mac's "Rhiannon." never have I felt so seen

I received this "informed" poll, which was v obvs funded by the Rodriguez campaign but did not disclose so when I asked (repeatedly) abt it. It was a joke; scant mention of other candidates, biased questions, seemed to be digging for ammo against Hong in particular

the toilet museum and my MC: a thread. for my novel DRY LAND (2023) I found photo referents for chars. my MC was based an unknown guy in a 1930s horseshoe team pic I saw in the dinky basement museum of the Kohler Design Center—a bath/toilet showroom in Sheboygan WI that features a wall of toilets

listening to Silas Marner while writing a public lecture on Les Mis & having just read Little Dorrit: I've somehow ended up in a c19 vortex of world-weary calloused dad/Daddies being Fixed by adopting waifish daughters

went into this James Purdy novel expecting gay art drama, 1930s edition; received instead sadomasochistic gay Faulkner. not complaining! but what a wind-up, what a pitch

this weekend my husband & I visited Pendarvis, an old Cornish miner's cottage c. 1830 in southwest WI that was restored into a tearoom in the 1930s by an openly gay couple, Bob Neal & Edgar Hellum; a reminder that there's so much interesting queer history outside the metropoles

😳 SOUR CHERRY won the Locus Award for First Novel!! 😳 Thank you so much @locusmag.bsky.social and congratulations to all finalists and winners! I wish I could have been there with you all. 🚀💫🌗🍒

my fuck-AI @lightspeedmagazine.com story featuring a broken-spirited middleaged trans man, evaporated Lake Michigan, & reddit being the only social media to survive the US's fracture, is in this!

this is v good. sending out energy into the universe that we can get more trans masc litfic like CRAWL / Realistic Fiction (& also unlike them. I too love horny irony abt masculinity’s inherent absurdity & am tired of Representation, but I want more than both. fill the desert)

finished (v rough) draft of new novel. still so much work before I've got a beta draft, but it's done. I've had a magical-thinking self-denial thing going since last Sept in hopes of bribing the universe to make a publishing thing happen. It didn't, but this did. maybe it was abt this all along.

TIL that my uni has the papers & art of Karl Priebe, a fantastic c20 WI queer surrealist known for his detailed bird paintings & loving/celebratory portraits of the midwest's Black arts community, incl his lover, Ebony editor Frank Harriott, who died tragically young; Priebe was his caregiver

just read a book abt a clever, vicious, unreflective MC whose author despises her so much she winds up being boring & the book's (unfortunately strenuous) effort to Say Something a hacky mess. feels very sins of fiction: 2026 edition. our little rut in the Malebolge

an oak savanna in spring is the greenest green

Achievement unlocked! Shout out to @tbonejenkins.bsky.social and @artlitlab.bsky.social for inviting me, @bpladek.bsky.social and @alexjennings.bsky.social to read and discuss our work. It was mad fun and an incredible experience.

an oak savanna in spring is the greenest green

hey this is tomorrow! @alexjennings.bsky.social, @lpkindred.bsky.social, and me are reading at Arts & Literature Laboratory in Madison at 7 pm! come through if you're around! details here: artlitlab.org/events/lab4-...

for those of you who've been following the Wisconsin story of a Watertown school board censoring a school band's instrumental tribute to Marsha P. Johnson, the students are now playing it at multiple sold-out events around WI, one conducted by the piece's literal composer:

got my most anticipated 2026 read from @littlepuss.net today & I’m pumped for the moon prism power make-up of it all mecha nonsense w Lispector footnotes & buckwild incantatory typography, yes pls

seeing the heartening news that ASU undergrads booed their AI-booster commencement speaker. our undergrads did the same! now I'm wondering how common this was (both the AI-booster-speaker & the boos). anyone else's kids-these-days certified All Right in this extremely specific way?

my husband and I moved maybe 3000+ lbs of soil today between us. I am proud and very, very sore

I need to make sure you all heard that right because this did not make enough noise the first time around—THE Crawford, Stoker, World Fantasy and British Fantasy award winning Usman T. Malik, who has published incredible short fiction for over twenty years, will have a DEBUT NOVEL out NEXT YEAR

hey WI, on May 23 I'm reading in Madison alongside the fantastic @lpkindred.bsky.social and @alexjennings.bsky.social at Art + Lit Lab! come through if you're around! I'll be reading a fairy tale abt a magic fish, the water wars, & deontology

sometimes the abandoned picnic ground is a liminal space

pushed through and did my word count through a daylong mild panic; will hit 80k tomorrow. when I am done a full draft this will be the longest nonacademic book I’ve ever written

the worst email is the Outlook Daily Digest, which tells me some, but not all, of the emails I have received in the past 24 hours

this is so incredibly cool: my @lightspeedmagazine.com story from Jan 2025, "Tell Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness," has been translated into Spanish by the lovely folks at @vocesinsolito.bsky.social!! thank you so much to the Voces editors & translator @carlabestruch.bsky.social!!

Wisconsin spring is my favorite green

been an awful spring but sometimes I look up & remember I transitioned & I stg it's that moment in The Last Unicorn where the unicorn goes "unicorns are in the world again! no sorrow can live in me as long as that joy" anyway happy May Day, the world is evil but transition is both bread & roses

tonight, the last publicly-funded TV news station in NJ broadcasts its last show. a relative I love very much, a brilliant reporter and my personal hero, worked there for years. what a cruel May Day. fuck the people who did this

I'm reading a history of Reconstruction right now & thinking abt how nakedly SCOTUS is trying to recreate plantation/sharecropping-style vote distribution, esp in the south

last day of teaching. what a heartbreaking term this has been, on so many axes

MKE: the JS has a lovely article on woodcocks, who are beginning their (ridiculous) courtship ritual; you can see it in brushy parkland around the city on warm evenings until June.

one of my favorite portraits of early summer, from Glenway Wescott's 1924 novel The Apple of the Eye. I love hyperlocal nature writing, & describing horses as "mahogany" against green fields is so strikingly true of June in Wisconsin.

US news environment feels very 19thc right now: big networks doing yellow journalism bc they’re effectively entertainment corps, viewers putting their trust in independent muckrakers or bitchy commentators, everything saturated with a lurid combo of puritanism + ultraviolence

Scores of Forest Service plans could be upended after Boundary Waters mining vote via @stateline.org wisconsinexaminer.com/2026/04/21/r...

Auden's "In Memory of Ernst Toller" been jangling in my head lately "but existing is believing / We know for whom we mourn and who is grieving."

would love to read criticism abt the minor strain of fantasy where magic returns to the world--Mirrlees's Lud-in-the-Mist, Crowley's Little, Big, Clarke's JSaMN--esp bc they're *not* inversions of the nostalgic "magic-leaves" story, nor utopian/millennial; they end w a very ambiguous transcendence

I promised a second thread on Plastic, Prism, Void & here it is! This time I want to talk about it as writing, not as typesetting. And I want to talk about it as writing about love, specifically about trying to be loved as a trans woman. (remembering to put the pre-order link at the top this time!)

husband took a pic tonight that’s probably the coolest I will ever look, thanks horrible 2026 Milwaukee floods I guess? also pictured: stairs to nowhere