SNOW DAY

leading to treacly expressions of gratitude

It is snowstorming in Minneapolis in late March and all is right with the world. The peaceful silence is broken only by the distant churn of snowplows and the scrape-scrape of shovels against sidewalks, but these noises of human toil merely serve to enhance the gentle aristocratic ease of my own position: lounging in a heated home, in an ergonomic office chair, with a designer cat on my lap.

(Apologies to Eric, homeowner, and Mallory, strong and useful housemate, for not offering to help shovel. You know I must maintain the softness of these typing fingers.)

(JK if you actually need help, let me know, I’m upstairs covered in cat fur.)

Does the fact that I’m wearing a Macalester sweatshirt make up for the fact that I spot-canceled class, maybe for the first time ever? The roads are NOT GOOD. Today we were going to discuss Tasha Suri’s excellent The Jasmine Throne, which we’ll talk about on Tuesday instead.

What a life! Honestly. Sometimes visual artist/friend Nicole Sara Simpkins will turn to me and say, “I can’t believe I’m an artist when I grow up!” and I feel the same about writing and teaching. Not to say there aren’t PLENTY of days when my jobs feel like real jobs, and to quote another friend, poet Aurora Masum-Javed, I “rage against the tyranny of doing things”… but I try to remember as often as I can that I’m a lucky bastard (literally!—my parents were never married. Fun fact).

I believe this is called CULTIVATING GRATITUDE and I could probably learn more about it on the internet. Or from pal and novelist Matt Burgess, one of the best gratitude-cultivators I know. I recently received this photo of him (credit to Georgia Banks), with the caption, “Can you believe this is our JOB?!”

To which I responded:

To be fair, we were respectively on sabbatical and spring break, but still!

Anyway, I had a really good time at the Tucson Book Festival and then in Orlando for ICFA, and I’m still kinda riding the high. I finally read The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera (pictured sunnily above) and yes, it is as good as all your friends say it is. I will almost certainly be teaching it in my Worldbuilding class next spring.

The sole disappointment of ICFA was that one of my dearly beloveds, Izzy Wasserstein, had two flights canceled on her and couldn’t make it—which was a double-shame because her novella, THESE FRAGILE GRACES, THIS FUGITIVE HEART, had just come out with Tachyon and I was looking forward to celebrating with her.

What is Izzy’s novella about, you may ask? Well!:

In a queer, noir technothriller of fractured identity and corporate intrigue, a trans woman faces her fear of losing her community as her past chases after her. This bold, thought-provoking debut science-fiction novella from a Lambda Award finalist is an exciting and unpredictable look at the fluid nature of our former and present selves.

During a panel in Tucson, someone asked what question I wanted people to ask me in interviews, and I said I wished people would ask me about my writing playlists, which I meticulously and obsessively curate. My fellow panelists pointed out that I could put those playlists on the internet, which for some reason hadn’t occurred to me, even though I’ve been listening constantly to Kelly Link’s banger of a playlist for The Book of Love. Maybe next newsletter!

For now, though, I asked Izzy for three songs she had on rotation while writing THESE FRAGILE GRACES, and here’s what she said.

While I was writing These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart, I spent a frankly embarrassing amount of time listening to a playlist I originally titled “it’s 2020 and we’re all out of fucks.” It turns out I had more fucks to give, and the novella is in part an expression of that, exploring what it means to fight for a better world, a better community, and the people you love when times are darker than dark. It’s also a book about how we can go on despite our flaws and failings. 

Here are three songs from that playlist I listened to obsessively while writing and revising These Fragile Graces: 

Against Me!, Bamboo Bones. One of my all-time favorite songs, sung by a trans woman (long live Laura Jane Grace), and capturing the punk rock spirit that I wanted to bring to the novella. “What god doesn’t give to you, / you’ve got to go and get for yourself”: I couldn’t have said it better myself. 

Leonard Cohen, Anthem. Everyone knows “Hallelujah,” but this is the Cohen song that got me through the early, dark days of the Trump Presidency. Cohen’s reminder that “there is a crack, a crack in everything. / That’s how the light gets in” was an important reminder for me as I struggled through writing the wrong words in an early draft.

Hozier feat. Mavis Staples, Nina Cried Power. Like a lot of queer women, I’m low-key obsessed with Hozier, and this song, which opens with the insistence that “it’s not the waking, it’s the rising,” feels absolutely essential to me. Later, Mavis Staples interrupts her verse for one of the most perfect, powerful, haunting laughs you can imagine.

Get out there and get a copy of Izzy’s novella today, and put it right next to your hardcover copy of Ink Blood Sister Scribe, because they have the same color scheme and look cute as hell together!

Speaking of color schemes… GUESS WHAT, the paperback of my novel will be out on June 11 (though you can pre-order it right now), and it’s had a bit of a makeover!

Pretty slick, huh? I am excited to see it in person.

I’m not sure how to gracefully move into ending this newsletter, so, IT’S DONE! Back to the snow day. Please enjoy this photo of Igor not wishing to be woken from his divine slumber.

Til next time,

<3 Emma