some recent updates!
It’s been a minute since I’ve had new publications to show you! I blame the international move, as well as the time I’ve spent working on a manuscript draft. (It’s been going extremely well, and my agent and I are talking about how to proceed with it.) But the word drought is over: I have a short story appearing soon in Slumber Party, a zine about weird moments of connection in the dark!
Slumber Party is a not-for-profit zine, and any proceeds raised from zine sales will be donated to the National Network of Abortion Funds in the US. As someone with a US immigration petition in the system (also as, like, a human who cares about bodily autonomy), I’m honoured to be part of this project. It looks absolutely stacked with amazing contributions, too. All things considered, you could do way worse than picking up a copy.
My piece for the zine is called ‘Respite’ and it is about having a feeling at the end of the world. But you could have guessed that, based on my track record.
Long-time readers may recall that my short story ‘The Last Good Time to Be Alive’ (about having a feeling at the end of the world, if you can believe it) made the cut for a best-of anthology last year! We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2020 has since done extremely well. In fact, it’s done so well it won the Locus award for Best Anthology.
The applause here really has to go to the editors, C.L. Clark and Charles Payseur, for putting together such an incredible collection. I’m not kidding: it is stacked with talent. I’m still amazed they looked at me twice! But they did, and I was absolutely thrilled to hear about the award. Congratulations to everyone involved, and here’s to many more We’re Here collections in the coming years.
You may have gathered that I live in Canada now! Which is to say that I get to live and work here for two years at maximum. I’ve had a wonderful time so far, largely spent getting to grips with things like ‘cheese curds’ and ‘phone company’ and ‘wrong side of the road.’ Nova Scotia is a beautiful province and I am conscious every day of how lucky I am to have this opportunity.
You may also have gleaned from context clues that I am already planning my next move. Shortly after moving continents, I got engaged! To that end, we’re in the process of trying to relocate me to the United States. If you have never dealt with immigration law before, I will hasten to clarify that this is a process. It’s likely to be at least a year before anything actually happens, and there will still be more admin to do after that.
If you are interested in either of these things, I have repurposed the newsletter I started in lockdown to write about them in more depth. If you want dispatches from North America delivered straight to your inbox, you can subscribe (for free, and I have no intention of implementing charges) to the Anchorite.