Stephanie would like to talk to you about ghosts. Beneath the fold she uses words like ‘decolonise’, ‘ritual’, and ‘read the Koran to keep the ghosts away in a video game’.
Category: writing
Stephanie attends festivals: JLF
This weekend the Jaipur Literary Festival came to Melbourne, hosted by the Melbourne Writer’s Festival. This was a free event, with a full day of panels and activities, and so of course Stephanie attended. Below the fold: Writing Travel, and From the Margins to the Mainland.
environmental business at SWF + UWRF
Final instalment of Stephanie goes to UWRF + SWF! Today we’re talking environmental business, featuring activism, identity and the illegal wildlife trade; and sadly we’re not talking sand piracy.
Identity, piety, translation and performativity at SWF
Penultimate SWF/UWRF post. Today we’re talking about writing from the diaspora, the future of translation, and objects of piety and consumerism.
Continue reading “Identity, piety, translation and performativity at SWF”
Stephanie and the Very Spatial Awareness
Today’s adventures in Southeast Asian writers festivals feature two panels from UWRF, one from SWF, and a broad look at the idea of the construction of space and borders in cities and minds.
Called-out author bingo
Does it even matter what inspired this? The sad truth is that all this has happened before, and will happen again, for as long as agents keep repping racist books and publishers keep buying them.
There’s hope for change, in that the massive outpouring of criticism in this instance has persuaded the publisher to move the release date so that the manuscript can be revised, and the attempts to destroy Justina Ireland’s career have been unsuccessful — but this is an extreme case, and meanwhile, how many microaggressions are slipping through?
The world doesn’t need another white lady with an opinion here, so instead, I have made a bingo card for use whenever a pasty-faced writer responds to a call out.
The Colonialism in Your Heart
Today, let’s talk about your favourite topic and mine, colonialism.
I spent three days at Ubud Writers and Readers Festival last week, and it was lovely! And currently the Singapore Writers Festival is on, and I am attending that as I’m able. I have many thoughts about many things, and I’m going to spread them out over a few days, actually probably a couple of weeks TBH, because Liz needs space to talk about classic boarding school novels and Star Trek and things like that.
[Liz: YOU DON’T KNOW ME.]
But today: colonialism.
No Award goes to Singapore
Steph’s moving on Wednesday (TOMORROW), to be Artist in Residence for three months in a city (Singapore) that’s enough like the ancestral home (Penang) to be familiar, but dissimilar enough that she’s probably going to spend the first two weeks flipping her shit. Do you want to know about what she’s up to? OF COURSE YOU DO. LIVE VICARIOUSLY. (Liz will.)
Vote [1] No Award
We’re still in awards season, guys! Hey, guess who is nominated for the Best New Talent Ditmar? Oh, just the ginger half of No Award!
It’s a tremendous honour just to be nominated, but to take it that next step further, members (including supporting members) of the 2016 Natcon can vote for Liz here. (Digression from Stephanie: AND THEY SHOULD, so Liz can have the tremendous honour of winning it and being there to accept her award. Don’t you want to make Liz’s homecoming sweet and delicious and statuesque? Do it for Liz on International Women’s Day.)
And while you’re there, you can also vote for “Sara Kingdom Dies at the End” by Tansy Rayner Roberts in Companion Piece: Women celebrate the humans, aliens and tin dogs of Doctor Who. Not to mention a lot of other excellent people and works.
THEN there’s Hugo nominations to take care of! We humbly suggest you should include in your nominations:
- For Best Related Work: Companion Piece: Women celebrate the humans, aliens and tin dogs of Doctor Who, edited by L M Myles and Liz Barr (Mad Norwegian Press)
- For Best Novelette: “The Dan Dan Mien of the Apocalypse” by Stephanie Lai, Review of Australian Fiction
NOT AN AWARD: You can buy Cranky Ladies of History, featuring stories by both Liz and Steph, for discount today, International Women’s Day. Celebrate Ladies by giving them your votes and your money.
in your face anthology
Hooray! Steph is in the Fablecroft In Your Face Anthology, which will launch at either Contact or Continuum 2016.
The stories we have already accepted are challenging and/or confronting but with a firm purpose – they are pieces that will perhaps make readers uncomfortable because they are a bit too hard-hitting or close to the bone, but which interrogate these themes and ideas, and make a point about the world we live in. It won’t be an easy book to read, but it is a powerful one.
In Your Face is currently running a pozible campaign for extending the number of authors in the antho. You should contribute! To help convince you that this antho will be excellent, Steph is going to challenge you so hard with her story. YES GOOD.
no-award.net 