Another year brings with it another crop of radical stories worth reading from all across the speculative fiction landscape. It’s also been a kind of a hard year for all of us, one where what we read and write has become in a lot of ways the truest shape of extolling who we want to be and rebutting who we are afraid of becoming. 

A lot of that has particularly come from many of the things that I’ve read, which I want to turn into another post where I can truly talk about the length and breadth of good SFF that came out in the year 2018. 

It’s also been an intensely busy one for me creatively. Lots of things were either published or cooking this year, which I’m somewhat glad for. If I’m being honest, it’s rather ironic that I wrote so much in a state of such mental and emotional flux that today, in another one of those valleys, I find it hard to just write the blog post about the stuff I wrote so people can read them and possibly consider them worthy of a statue. But ultimately, I’m proud of my output. That I can use my work as a channel for some of those valleys, and at least work slowly through the words when the valley fills with water, is a marked improvement from just last year. And ultimately, I came out with some things that I’m really proud of, and I hope I can make more things like those next year. 

But since I should also mention the things themselves, here are some stuff that fell out of my brain this year: 

[cw sexual assault and harassment]

If you are a member, big or small, of any international SFF fandom, you’ve either already met Crystal Huff, or would benefit greatly from doing so. I met her at my local literature festival, Bocas Lit Fest, in April of 2016 while she was pushing the bid for the World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) to be held in Finland in 2017. She has consistently advocated for fandom to be inclusive, representative, and accessible, and has on more than one occasion gone to bat for internationally visible, safe, and respectful SFF fandom wherever she goes. She was one of the folks who encouraged me to seek publication and would, in the year leading up to some of my first non-commissioned poetry sales, personally let me know when SFF outlets were about to open for submissions, ask about my progress, and encourage me to attend cons. Her motivation to make fandom an international space is what got me to my first con – unsurprisingly, WorldCon 75 in Helsinki, which was one of the highlights of my short SFF journey and my even shorter international travel history. She is one of the many new friends in the field that I know I can rely on to take me to task when my language isn’t inclusive, but also be there in the little moments when I or someone else could use a hand, like when she literally helped me find somewhere to sleep for my first night in Helsinki because I got in much earlier than I needed to be. 

What I’m saying is, Crystal Huff is a saint of fandom. Fandom can never have too much of those.
It can, however, have far too little, and be in the habit of mistreating the ones that it does have. 

Earlier this evening, Crystal wrote this absolutely upsetting blog post about her experience with Arisia, her former ‘home convention’, after it placed her rapist in a position of power at the con for another term. 

Read it. Then, read it again. If you’re engaged in that space, there is more than one call to action there specifically for you. 

I really just want to add one thing, without the desire to speak over anyone: if we really want to do justice by more fans like Crystal, we have to consider these things before anyone should have to write a blog post, or make a second complaint, and every time that we don’t, we have already let our communities down. 

One of the simple joys of my career is that, because I work with other freelance literary creators, we get to be novel in the ways we approach the same projects we’ve been engaged in for most of our work. As a teaching artist with The 2 Cents Movement, that means that our yearly nationwide secondary school tours get to be wildly varied projects, from the comical and narratively disjointed to the tragic and emotionally intense. 

It also means that, even when someone’s come to us to say, “We’d like you to solve this problem for us,” we’re trusted to find those solutions in our own ways. So when the Ministry of Community Development, Culture, and The Arts came to 2 Cents asking for us to continue our work on the National Patriotism Month tour they’ve usually performed, we were more than eager to take them up on the project, but were even more eager to try something new.

National Patriotism Month is a fairly recent observance in Trinidad and Tobago, but to me it serves a radically necessary social purpose. Between the dates of Independence Day and Republic Day, the Ministry aims to promote national cultural and heritage milestones to the public in the hope of raising national morale and reinforcing a national commitment to our twin-island home. Its festivities most often include using the performing arts to remind us of our greatest historical moments and their importance, and how they not only formed the definition of our national identity but, in more ways than many of us know, shaped international history or served as some of its most radical unsung moments.

The assumptions people typically make of the past are really stiff and unappetizing. No matter what radical things you may know about in your national history, the act of revisiting it is often done dully and without much engagement. Imagine someone performing a poem about the fact that an old man you don’t know who has long since been dead did a cool thing that doesn’t immediately impact your life. Imagine being asked, being begged, to care about this thing so external to your experience that you can barely be inspired to connect long enough to remember the person’s name at all.

The team lead for this year’s patriotism tour, Arielle John, shared this feeling about that quandary. So did 2 Cents Artistic Director Derron Sandy, who has been doing the same tour as far back as 2016, and hoped for a way to help students attach even more eagerly to our historical narratives. How could we bridge both gaps—how to deliver this year’s theme of ‘Legacy Is Me’ in a way that inspires young people to value their own commitment to nation-building, and make these histories more engaging for young people—in one short, concise tour?

Being the one speculative poet on the team, I pitched the first thing that  immediately came to mind: 

what if… time travel? 

I struggle to say that, sometimes, even the smallest of conversations makes me think deeply about the consequences of how we separate physical persons and abstract persons.