Erin Roberts is a writer of speculative fiction across formats: her short fiction has appeared in publications including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Podcastle, and The Dark; her interactive fiction has been published in Sub-Q Magazine, and her non-fiction essays and reviews have appeared on http://Tor.com and in Cascadia Subduction Zone, People of Colo(u)r Destroy Fantasy, and Strange Horizons, among others. Erin is a graduate of the Odyssey Writers Workshop, holds an MFA from the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine, and has been the recipient of grants and awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, and the Speculative Literature Foundation. You can follow her on Twitter at @nirele and read more about her work at http://writingwonder.com.
In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Michael Ireland presents Reprise by Samantha Lane Murphy, read by Emmie Christie. Subscribe to the Strange Horizons podcast: Spotify
Black speculative poetry works this way too. It’s text that is flexible and immediate. It’s a safe space to explore Afrocentric text rooted in story, song, dance, rhythm that natural flows from my intrinsic self. It’s text that has a lot of hurt, as in pain, and a lot of healing—an acceptance of self, black is beauty, despite what the slave trade, colonialism, racism, social injustice might tell us.
It’s not that I never read realistic fiction and not that I don’t like it. It’s just that sometimes I don’t get it. I know realistic fiction, speculative fiction, and genre fiction are just terms we made up to sell more narrative, but I’m skeptical of how the expectations and norms of realism lurk, largely uninterrogated or even fully articulated, in the way readers, editors, and publishers interact with work that purports to depict quote unquote real life. Most broadly defined, realistic stories depict the quotidian and accurately reproduce the daily events, characters, and settings of the world we live
