In this episode of Strange Horizons at 25, Podcast Editor Kat Kourbeti sits down with long-time Strange Horizons contributor RB Lemberg for a conversation about their extensive work with the magazine, using poetry as a tool to refine short and long-form fiction, writing about the diaspora experience, and the comfort one can find in stories from perspectives outside one's own. Oh, and Ursula K LeGuin, of course.

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Episode show notes:

• Read RB Lemberg's work in our archives.
• Visit their website, their Patreon, or follow them on Bluesky.
• Buy Yoke of Stars, their latest Birdverse novella, which just won the World Fantasy Award!
• Pre-order We Will Rise Again, the activism anthology edited by Annalee Newitz, Karen Lord, and Malka Older.
• Find more links to their work, plus other interesting things, scattered through the transcript below.

Transcript

Kat Kourbeti: Hello Strangers, and welcome to Strange Horizons at 25, a 25th anniversary celebration of Strange Horizons. I'm your host, Kat Kourbeti, and it is my privilege today to welcome you to another episode that looks back at the history and impact of Strange Horizons on the speculative genres.

Today's guest, RB Lemberg, was first published in Strange Horizons in 2010, and most recently in March of this year, with everything from poetry and fiction to round tables and articles under their belt on Strange Horizons alone. RB is a queer bi-gender immigrant from Ukraine to the US. They are an author of five books of speculative fiction and poetry, many of which are set in a shared universe, a translator from Ukrainian and Russian, and an academic. RB's books of fantasy have been shortlisted for the Nebula, Locus, Ignyte, World Fantasy Award, the Le Guin Award for fiction, and many others. It's so great to have you here, RB.

RB Lemberg: It is so great to be here, Kat. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Kat Kourbeti: You are one of the people I think of as like Strange Horizons people, you know what I mean?

RB Lemberg: I'm so glad to hear this. It's probably my favorite magazine. I think Strange Horizons and Beneath Ceaseless Skies are my two favorite magazines in the whole world, so.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I mean, I think there's few people who are so like, embedded in sort of everything that we do and all of the different departments we have. Like, you've kind of worked with everybody.

RB Lemberg: I have been very happy, privileged, and lucky to work with multiple editors at Strange Horizons across multiple departments. And so it's always such a delight to return to the magazine and to read the magazine, and thank you for this opportunity to interview.

Kat Kourbeti: It has been such a joy interviewing everyone on this podcast who has such different, first of all, different experiences with the magazine, but also different ways of coming into it, different genres and different formats that they write in. And it's all so varied, and 25 years is a long time, so there's been a lot of variety—

RB Lemberg: Oh, yeah. Oh yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: —in these interviews already, including your partner, Bogi, with whom I had a really nice chat about criticism and reviews and all sorts of things.

So I wanna hear about your work in general. First of all, you dabble in so many things. Your genre is predominantly fantasy, I would say.

RB Lemberg: You know, I love so many different things within the speculative realm, and I've even ventured beyond the speculative. But I think my heart is in the speculative realm, broadly construed, and I think within that very, very large space, fantasy is where my heart is primarily. But I've written everything: I've written science fiction, I've written horror, I've written slipstream, surrealism, things that people say are realism, but they're not really realism, essays, poetry, like really academic stuff, translations. I've really done a lot of stuff over the years and I think it's a feature, not a bug.

But yes. So I think I'm most known for my fantasy work, both within poetry and within fiction. I've written a lot of stuff set in my Birdverse universe, which is a secondary world with many, many cultures and languages and very queer, very trans, and have been running for a long time.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. We'll get to that one because I wanna hear all about it. First of all, like, you're a very curious person, you wanna find out all the things, you wanna analyze the things. In terms of format, because you've written a lot of shorts, you've written obviously novels, the poetry... what draws you to the different formats, would you say, and how do you decode if like, something that you've come up with— do you have an idea, when it starts forming in your brain and you're like, I think I want this to be that?

RB Lemberg: You know, it's such a great question and I don't know if I have a capsule answer to that. I feel—and again, I dunno if that's the actual reality of other people, but for a very long time I felt, "oh my God, other people can just focus on one or two things and you have the spread and things just happen. And what's wrong? What's wrong, RB?"

And then I started getting deeper and deeper into Ursula Le Guin's work. I mean, I've always been into her work since I can remember. Now I'm doing a lot of work connected to her actual poetry and some nonfiction that she's written, and the more I studied Le Guin's body of work and the more immersed I became in her body of work, the better I felt about my own spread, because she also did everything and she delighted in everything, literally everything. For some reason, when people think about her work, they think about novels and they think about science fiction, but she's literally written everything. And so it gave me a lot of solace to know that, hey, a lot of other people have actually done this, where you do a lot of different things and they feed each other.

So how do I know what is what? I don't, a lot of times. Recently I've just finished a short story that I sent out, and I've written at least three poems that I connected to the short story. I now teach it also, as a tool. I teach speculative fiction writing sometimes, and I tell folks about this thing that I use, which is poem outlines. I write poems to accompany the fiction that I'm writing, that help me disentangle plot and character development and emotions.

I have a few formal approaches about how to write poem outlines, and sometimes they just appear. But I think in terms of poetry, which is probably my first and truest love throughout my life, it works by lines. I am walking or doing something completely different—usually I'm in motion, Walking is usually how it happens—then the line pops into my brain and I have to write it down, and then the second line pops into my brain, and I have no idea where this is going... and then I start writing. Then I figure out where it's going, and here is the poem.

I also love epic poetry. I love the long form. I've written a bunch, mostly for Strange Horizons. I've written a whole bunch of very long poetry before I told myself "actually, these are stories! People should actually experience them as fiction as well." So I started doing more fiction.

I think my approach is fluid and it's really whatever comes, and things come and go and they morph, and as I said, sometimes I write about kind of the same idea or image I have in my mind. I would write a piece of fiction and I would write a poem and I would write another poem and I would write an essay about another thing that I'm thinking about. Once I've even written, like I've written with my latest Birdverse novella (Yoke of Stars), it was a dissertation chapter and it was a publication and it was like an academic publication and it was a whole bunch of poetry and it was a short story. And then it was an unpublished short story, 'cause I felt, "oh, it really needs to be longer". And then finally, it became a novella.

So I really think that my approach is fluid, and over the years I've not been very chill about this process, I'll be honest.

Kat Kourbeti: I mean, actually I would argue this is the chillest response I've had—

RB Lemberg: Thank you!

Kat Kourbeti: —from someone who does so much, and you're very prolific as well, which I admire immensely. No, I think it's super chill to just be like, "well, I'm gonna let it be what it is, and we're gonna find out. I don't know, I'm gonna try this."

The idea of poem outlines sounds fascinating to me and I want to try it.

RB Lemberg: Yeah, you should try it. So if you want to hear more, I can tell you, and I can tell everyone what I do.

Kat Kourbeti: I mean honestly, yeah! This podcast is very much like a little masterclass for listeners, so please teach me your ways.

So you have an idea and you're like, "I'm gonna outline it with poetry and see what comes out."

RB Lemberg: Yeah. There are many ways to do it. And I think what coalesced for me when I started—so it all began when Clarion West invited me to teach a workshop about poetry techniques for fiction writers. And I decided, "hey, I am gonna teach poetry outlines, 'cause I do them all the time", and I talk about them on Patreon, but I hadn't talked about them at that point outside of Patreon.

So I gave my students in the Clarion West class an exercise to write from a viewpoint of a character or two, and do either a boast or a lament, where a character either boasts about something they've done or laments. And everybody had so much fun and people really got into it. I think this one exercise where you write a boast or a lament, it really gets to the emotional quirk of character work. And because it's poetry, you don't have to stop yourself. You can be as over the top as you want to. You can write as purple as you want to, as outrageous as you want to, and nobody sees it too because it's for yourself, right? You don't have to publish it. You can, if you want to, but it's really just for you. So you can be as outrageously yourself as you want in a poem, or you can be as outrageously a character as you want.

And other poem outlines, again, it's an image. So a poem that I just wrote to kind of outline my short story, it was all about the vibe. It was all about the mood and the setting and the beautiful imagery that came to me that then I used, and some of it I didn't use. So in the poem, there was a tiny piano, and in this short story, there's no tiny piano because there was no room for tiny piano. But there was room for everything else I've stuffed into this poem outline, except the tiny piano, which is a bit sad. Maybe next year's story can have a tiny piano.

But I think poetry can liberate you. Poetry can really let you do, especially if you tell yourself, "I'm just doing it for me, this is really an outline, there's no perfection required, I'm not gonna revise it, I'm not gonna polish it. It's just for me to express how I feel about this piece." And then what comes out for me often is the truest, the most like vivid thing about whatever fiction I wanna write.

Kat Kourbeti: Hmm. It just kind of removes that critical voice that you might have that's stopping you because you're like, "oh, but I wanna come up with a perfect image."

RB Lemberg: Exactly. Just let it go.

Kat Kourbeti: Fascinating. I'm very curious to try that next time I'm sitting down to write something.

RB Lemberg: Oh, please tell me! Please update me. I'm very curious.

Kat Kourbeti: So yeah, so poetry outlines as a method of figuring out what an idea is and where you wanna take it. And has that ever helped you shape the story itself into like say, "oh, I think this is a short, for example, or is this something that's part of something bigger?" Have the poetry outlines actually helped you reign that in, in any way?

RB Lemberg: Yes and no. I think my own desire, sometimes the way I envision things, I want my process to be very orderly. I want to write every day, I want to have a schedule, I want to sit down and write what is in my plan. I have a plan, I always have a plan, I plan things out. And my creative brain is like, "No! Absolutely no, I will not do the thing."

It's a struggle between them a lot of times, where I somehow cling to this idea, this notion that things need—so if I've written a poem outline, it needs to unlock certain things for me. If it has not unlocked certain things for me, what am I even doing? But my process is actually a lot more iterative, and it's not at all orderly and it's not very linear.

So, when I write a poem outline, a lot of times it'll sit, it'll literally sit. There was a time when I was writing this novella in Birdverse and these two characters kept having dialogues and I've written, I dunno how many poem outlines I put on my Patreon, where they're just constantly in dialogue with each other and they argue about things and they're both very lyrical, and it's just endless dialogues.

And I don't think that went anywhere. I think that that just had to be, and it clarified a lot of things about my world and let me express what I was feeling. But in the end I was like, "actually that's their own private business. It's not actually going to be a book, or it's not going to be another additional novela." Like the things that I've written out in this one are just going to sit. And I have no idea, because maybe in two, three years I will return and I will say, "no, actually this is a novella, this is a short story, this is a book. I keep thinking about it, so maybe."

Sometimes my fiction process—again, "I have an outline, I know what I'm doing", I think over and over and then I conclude, "well, actually this outline, no, that's not where it wants to go." I just see where I'll trash the outline. My struggle as a writer is to let myself just do the process of discovery and accept that everything feeds everything (else). So if I write something about folklore two months later or two years later, it'll be incorporated into something else. Or if I write a piece of fiction, then I want to crunch some data, like, let my brain do the thing, let myself do the thing, and somehow it's a continuous struggle for me still. Still.

Kat Kourbeti: It's a good problem to have probably, just too many ideas and too much creativity in there, and too much curiosity about the world and about writing and stories. You also blend a lot of the fiction stuff that you do and the poetry stuff that you do with academia.

RB Lemberg: For sure.

Kat Kourbeti: Looking at it from, yeah, as you said, like crunching some data and like, "let's look at this actually, and what does this mean more broadly, and who else is doing it?"

RB Lemberg: Right.

Kat Kourbeti: What has that lent to your fiction and vice versa, would you say?

RB Lemberg: I really think that when I talk about it, it's years after everything has already cooked in my brain and it's coalesced and I can make a pretty picture out of the chaos, or the fomenting chaos that things actually came from. But a good example of this is a poem that's going to come out in The Deadlands, "Bay Nakht Afn Altn Mark: A Rehearsal", which is based on this modernist fantasmagorical play by Yiddish writer Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, which I've read many, many years ago in the Yiddish and then in English translation, and I realized, "oh my God, this play... it's a poem! A poem that is a play." The first time this play has ever been staged was in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, and they've rewritten everything to make it more revolutionary and more communist. And so I've read that and I've written a poem, I've written an article that's under review. I want to redo this play as a play, I wanna write a play based on the (original) play. I have started developing it. It's not developed, it might never coalesce.

Another example of something like this is actually Yoke of Stars, this novella that just came out last year and is now World Fantasy finalist. [Editor's note: it actually won the award! And a bunch of us were there to celebrate!] It's a Birdverse novella about a linguist and an assassin, and it's basically all about translation. People are there basically talking in a language that neither of them speaks as their first language. Both of them are exiles or migrants and they can't figure out how to communicate. One of the protagonists comes originally from a culture where they don't use verbs, and this idea has fascinated me since my graduate school days.

I've really iterated this idea from every possible angle, like what would it be like to come from a culture that does not use verbs, as most human languages do use verbs. Some use very few verbs, but most of them do use verbs. And so for this one, I was thinking, "well, it would have to be a culture where literally everything is different, because motion is different and their society is different, and the way they conceptualize relationships is different, and everything is different."

Of course then the idea of being in exile and coming to a completely different linguistic world, right? Like a completely different linguistic culture, which is more familiar to us, what would it do? What would it change? So these were both academic questions and very lived in questions for me as an immigrant and a person who is multilingual, and moves, you know, sometimes very uncomfortably between my various cultures and languages. And so this set of works, I feel it represents what it feels like to hop from one thing to another, and be so bothered by it that literally I need to write it in multiple ways.

I don't think I'm done writing about this, certainly not done writing about translations. So I feel my process is very messy.

Kat Kourbeti: But that's the thing though. You've touched upon a couple of things that I wanted to ask you about anyway, and one of those is the interaction of language, and as you said, the way you conceptualize the world. I mean, that is an ongoing kind of philosophy, isn't it, that a lot of people subscribe to that, like the language that we speak shapes how we understand ourselves and the world and relationships and all of that stuff.

So as a multilingual person working in all of these languages and keeping all of them fresh in your mind, it's very clearly impacted your fiction, because Birdverse in particular has an academic component, there's people who are studying, there's translation, there's all of these different cultures interacting... "How did it start?" I feel like is a really big question, but at what point did you go like, "ooh, actually I have an idea", and then this universe happened that kind of touches upon all of these things that you think about on the regular?

RB Lemberg: You know, it's such a great question, and thank you for all these really cool questions. Thank you.

I don't know if there's an easy answer. I feel like I was a world-builder before I became a writer and, I also for many years struggled with—I wanted to write and I dabbled in writing for years and years before I became a writer. And I think early in life, my fundamental struggle was with what language will I write this in? I couldn't find a home in any of the languages I tried.

During my early grad school years, I learned Czech and I started writing in Czech, and I wrote this kooky story about a portal fantasy with cats. And it was hilarious. I wrote it in Czech and I had some Czech friends who started laughing because of course I made all the grammatical mistakes possible, and they read it and they were entertained by my grammatical mistakes. But then they were like, "oh, I wanna know what happens next!" And they started writing me emails like, "we'll correct your mistakes, so please keep writing". And I don't know what happens next, I have no idea. I don't know.

So early in life, I think I had this overabundance of ideas and just no foothold in a language, which is really strange for a person who lives with so many languages, and studied a ton of languages. I studied a ton of very dead languages and loved it, and still dabble on and off. I have my very dead languages with me, and it's hard to keep all of them going simultaneously. It's not easy. I feel very sad at times, not always, but very sad at times because once I figured out, "no, it's actually English, I want to write in English," English has expanded—

Kat Kourbeti: Oh yeah.

RB Lemberg: —and it's taken a lot of space in my brain that I don't wanna give it. But it has, it has. So once I figured out that, no, it's actually English, the English choice has been helpful in so many ways, because I could do the grammatical gender experimentations that I wanted to do much easier in English than I could in my other languages, which have very rigid, morphologically coded gender systems. English used to as well, but it doesn't anymore. So I think finding English, as, yes, I'm gonna embrace this and I'm gonna write this, has really helped me.

But a lot of my Birdverse ideas certainly started before I started writing in English. I remember I went to Worldcon, my first con, years before I started writing, and somebody held a panel called How to Kill and Maim Your Characters. And I attended this panel and then I was telling my friends, I don't wanna kill and maim my characters, I just don't wanna do it. I remember spinning these ideas, like, I really struggled with "How to Kill and Maim your Characters" as a "you have to do terrible things to your characters" idea, and I remember that as a spinoff of those ideas.

I was in Berkeley as a graduate student at that point. I went back to Berkeley, I was telling my friends, "no, linguists should write articles". And this image came to me of a linguist, a queer woman, who is traveling to do field work and she's in the wood and she's about to meet these informants, these people she's never met before, they're magical people that are very different. Of course, every magic exists in Birdverse, but she's about to meet some Dream Way people. I didn't know the names back then. And she's waiting for them to come to this glade in the middle of the wood, and there's this bright sunlight piercing the canopy. It was just the sense of something miraculous, something wonderful is about to happen.

I remember this image so brilliantly, and for many years when people ask me, "well, where does Birdverse come from?" And I would say, "hey, this character, man, who is not in any book, then popped into my head when I was still a graduate student, wasn't writing any fiction, and that's where Birdverse came from. And she's not in any book." Well, now she is: this is Ulín, who is the protagonist of Yoke of Stars. So finally, there is something with her in it.

Kat Kourbeti: Wow.

RB Lemberg: But not about this particular field work. Still not about this particular field work, which was, I still don't know what the story is there.

Kat Kourbeti: Fascinating. I love that there was a moment though, for you, that there was a very distinct moment of, "oh, I think I have something."

RB Lemberg: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: And that sparked all of the things. Did you ever do field work like that? Like that character does?

RB Lemberg: No, I have not. So Ulín is an anthropological linguist. I mean, in modern terms, not in universe terms. She's an anthropological linguist and a lot of times I have a lot of trouble with anthropological linguistics. Its methods, its accomplishments, its history, its everything. And one day I will even publish something about this in fiction, but I personally did not want to do classical inter-linguistics, where you go out in the field and you meet people who are not like you, and you learn about them and you write about them. That did not ever appeal to me. I've done work with informants, but I tend to study my own groups.

So I think it's a bit different. The dynamics are certainly different, and I do less anthropological work. It's complicated, but again, I don't do that type of work and I have a lot of criticism of that type of work as a historical phenomenon, and so do a lot of anthropological linguists today, which is great, which is excellent.

Kat Kourbeti: The history of the field is not the best.

RB Lemberg: Exactly.

Kat Kourbeti: Cause there's a lot of kind of colonial aspects—

RB Lemberg: Yeah. Exactly.

Kat Kourbeti: —to it and to language and how you relate to the foreign language, and then you try to communicate and it's just, yeah.

RB Lemberg: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: I could see why, but at the same time, that makes it a very interesting thing to explore in fiction. So I can also see how you were like, "hmm!"

RB Lemberg: I have so many ideas, and many of them are large scale. So for example, the anthropological linguistics idea, I'm forever working on this book that really deconstructs it. The academic anthropological field work is not very savory, and I think the idea with Ulín's enterprise is that she's never been a mainstream person. She's never been a person coming from an imperialist or colonial culture, she's been an outsider and that has opened some doors to some more nuanced and interesting things.

And so a lot of times my work needs a larger scale because it's so nuanced, and it's not always a good thing, because it needs so much setup to actually get to the nuance of what it's doing, that it can be difficult for many reasons. But it's very worthwhile, I stand by it. I wouldn't change anything.

But for these big, anti-colonial ideas, which rely on so much history that's not US history—because I'm never writing about US history, I'm not from the US originally, so I want to lean into what am I getting out of stories that I feel I inherit, like the Russian Revolution, and the terrible and not so terrible things that happened during the Soviet regime, and how the Soviet regime treated a variety of minoritized people.

These are the questions that historically, if I go to a more close connection to what is happening in our world, that's where my mind tends to go to, or like the history of Jewish diasporas broadly construed, and constructing this very, very diasporic Jewish fantasy, which Birdverse is, which is not about any return to any place, but really about—we are diasporic, the exile happened, but we no longer even think about it. And what does that look like? What are these connections like?

So a lot of it is very big, and sometimes from all this big scale work, I wanna scale down, I wanna write a poem.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

RB Lemberg: I want to write a shorter piece.

Kat Kourbeti: And yet you still find ways to touch upon all these things in the shorter work. A lot of your poetry, a lot of your short fiction still kind of has components of Birdverse, or they're just fully in there, or expanding upon ideas and places and settings and characters and that sort of thing. So would you say that you're ever not thinking about Birdverse in some form?

RB Lemberg: You know, it would be really tempting to say, "I'm always thinking about Birdverse", but that's not true. I'm not always thinking about Birdverse. I'm thinking about it a lot, and probably every day. But my head is a very busy place. I'm thinking about a lot of things.

Kat Kourbeti: In the best possible way.

RB Lemberg: Thank you. Thank you.

Kat Kourbeti: I love to pick apart the brains of creative people on this podcast. It's pretty great. This segues very well into my next set of questions, which are about your Strange Horizons journey, which has been long. Gosh, I mean, 15 of the 25 years you've been part of this magazine, which is amazing! How did you first come across Strange Horizons in the first place?

RB Lemberg: This brings back memories, you know. Shweta Narayan and I, we've been friends for a very long time, but Shweta's introduced me to the magazine, I think, and I started reading it in 2008/9.

Kat Kourbeti: Okay.

RB Lemberg: And I was just starting to write for publication. I've deleted or destroyed everything that I've written before 2008, nothing survives. And then in 2008, my friends convinced me to try sending some of my stuff out, and suddenly I sold things. I think 2008 was the first year I published poems. I started writing short fiction, and I was reading Stange Horizons all the time because it was my dream magazine—and it remains, I love the magazine.

I was reading Strange Horizons all the time, and I sent a few works to Strange Horizons and I sold a short story, which was my first professional sale, and it came out in 2010. And since then, I've met a lot of people who sold their first thing to Strange Horizons, and that's one of the things I love about the magazine, that it has opened doors to so many writers who had their first pro sale in Strange Horizons.

So for me, that has been such a big milestone. It was a flash story that might now be reprinted. It was called Kifli, about a golem made of dishes. And finally, when Bogi and I also started talking, we talked about that story because Bogi told me that they thought that I was Hungarian because kifli is a Hungarian baked good. We were talking about the varieties of kifli, and can kifli have jam or can kifli not have jam? And it's just been such a funny conversation about Hungarian baked goods.

So yeah, Bogi was convinced I had to be Hungarian because of this story. It's such a funny story and it was inspired by dishes that I have, that my mom actually—

Kat Kourbeti: Specifically? There's something in there about purple flowers, like is that—

RB Lemberg: So the purple flowers is what the protagonist wants to have, but the plain white dishes is actually what they get. It's a story that's based on the plain white dishes that I've gotten at that time, and I still have them, and they're still known as "the golem dishes" because in transit many of them did break, and that's how kind of the idea for the story came from it. I am not a baker. It has very little to do with my life, other than this seed of 'dishes that broke in transit'.

But since then I've published a lot of work in Strange Horizons, but I think primarily poetry. There was a time when I was writing a whole bunch of epic poems that were narrative, and Sonya Taaffe was editing for Strange Horizons, and I mostly worked with her, although I've worked with a lot of other editors. I worked with Romie, I worked with Lisa Bradley, and a whole bunch of other poetry editors who've edited my work over the years. So I've published a lot of poetry in Strange Horizons.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. You really have.

RB Lemberg: Yeah, which is great. I think I've been really happy with how my work was treated in Strange Horizons and the readership that it got. Then I had some essays and round tables and this and this, so I've really been connected to the magazine.

A few years ago, I published a poem called Stone Listening, which was a tribute to Ursula K Le Guin, my friend Corey Alexander, who passed away, and to Sonya Taaffe as well.

It basically riffs off Ursula K Le Guin's Always Coming Home which has this character, Stone Listening, who is a healer, and I wanted to write about him. He's a minor character, but he's always fascinated me. And so that poem was then translated to Ukrainian by Mykhailo Zharzhailo, and I think it was my first poetry translation into Ukrainian. I was so happy. Now there's another was just published, but this was the first, so.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I mean, that's gotta be very special.

RB Lemberg: It is.

Kat Kourbeti: To be writing in a foreign language and then get that poem translated into your mother tongue, and to be read by people back there... Ugh. That's beautiful.

RB Lemberg: Yeah. It was very touching, and remains. Every time my work is translated into Ukrainian or I do something with Ukrainian diaspora, it's just such a gift.

Kat Kourbeti: I did want to talk a little bit about Kifli. First of all, it delights me that this was your first pro sale, 'cause every time that I have another guest here whose debut we facilitated, it makes me so happy. So First Pub Club, high five, well done.

Because it's so emblematic of a lot of what you do, stuff that we've already talked about with your other work in general, and with Birdverse—Kifli has these themes of emigration, of leaving home, of the diaspora experience and of course Jewish culture and Slavic culture, the mesh that that is, or that it can be for a group of people.

I find that it's so cool, first of all, that your first pro sale encompasses a lot of the stuff you care about. I just wanted to hear a little bit about what you wanted to give to the reader as an emotional experience, as they read this story.

RB Lemberg: It's such a complex question for me because it was a very long time ago, and at the same time, that story is so dear to me and I love it so much. Ultimately it's a story about love, and it's a story about love that is problematic and messy.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, as mothers and diaspora daughters can be. I related to this a lot, which is why I wanted to ask you about it, 'cause my very specific experience resonated with this story a lot, cause I left home, my mom is of Slavic origin, and so it's very much like, ooh!

RB Lemberg: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: That whole thing where they're on the phone and it's like, "my mom listens; she doesn't listen." And it's like, yep, I felt that very much.

RB Lemberg: I love diaspora stories, and I think I've been reading so many diaspora stories for the same reasons I'm sure that you do, because they have this resonance, and I think a lot of diaspora stories are about food and love that is unspoken, because when you have this language barrier and often you have the distance barrier, it's very difficult to cross. And when you come into the American context, there's a lot of therapy speak: how you communicate and you develop communication. Hey, that doesn't always work, sorry.

Kat Kourbeti: It'd be nice, but...

RB Lemberg: Things are messy and complicated, and a lot of times diaspora stories are about food because food is how people express caring and love, and making traditional food is a very complicated thing, and sharing it is a complicated thing. And so this story I think was born out of the fact that I love food, and I love making food and sharing food, and yet there's no way to teleport it. And so in many ways my own family history, which is very complicated but also a very diaspora story, it all revolves around food that's been eaten and food that has not been eaten, and the food that was supposed to be eaten, but due to distance and migration was never eaten, and things like these.

I have a story coming out that also relies a little bit on some of these ideas of my own family history and the feels of uneaten food. It's a story that's coming out in the anthology We Will Rise Again that's been edited by Annalee Newitz, Karen Lord, and Malka Older. It's a great anthology, and my story in it is also a secondary world diaspora story. There's a moment where there's jam that grandma made and she passed away, and the jam is still sitting there. And the question is, who is going to eat the last jam? And it's a small moment in the story, but it is also a moment from my life, like, who is going to eat the last jam?

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

RB Lemberg: How will the last jam be eaten? That is definitely a moment from my own life, that I think brings together all these themes that I constantly write, because I constantly write about diaspora and I constantly write about exile. I think Birdverse is very heavy on thoughts of exile and migration, and leaving home or needing to leave home or being forced to leave home, and what home means anymore, and where are you gonna land and how are you gonna get there, and comings and goings.

That I think is very diasporic, but also very tied to experiences of the senses, at least when I write about them. So definitely food is a common denominator to a lot of diaspora. So it's not just to mine, because there's so much emotion around it that I don't think you can process in therapy. You can't taste—how can you explain the taste of the last jam? Or how do you explain the smell of this particular forest or that particular town or city, or village where you came from, when the words are in a different language, if they exist at all?

Kat Kourbeti: Mm-hmm.

RB Lemberg: These are complicated and very emotional questions, and I think they are at the heart of my storytelling because I'm constantly writing about comings and goings, and I don't think I will ever stop writing about comings and goings.

Kat Kourbeti: Those are the things that every writer has deep in their psyche somewhere, the stuff that matters the most that you're trying to pick apart, and you iterate trying to solve the mystery maybe, or figure out how you feel about something. And often maybe you can't, and that's kind of the point. And I always love like, writers who are conscious of it like, "yeah, it's the same question as I always have, and that's okay. We're gonna ask it again."

I relate to that whole thing with the last jam very strongly. I still have a jar of oregano that my grandfather picked when he was still alive. And I have not allowed myself to finish the oregano, it's just in the jar now.

RB Lemberg: Do you smell it sometimes?

Kat Kourbeti: Yes. Yeah.

RB Lemberg: Yeah. Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. And those are the things that like, yeah, like food and smells and the feeling of a place, and especially when you've left it, and even if you go back, it's not gonna be the same, cause the version that you left and the version that you loved as a kid doesn't exist anymore, because of course it doesn't. Places evolve and change, and in some cases violently, you know? So then you come back and you're like, "oh, right."

RB Lemberg: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: "Is this home? I don't know."

RB Lemberg: Yeah, yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: You know, what is home? So I feel all of that very strongly. All of these themes are the stuff that I love to read too, because like, will it help me decode how I feel about things? A ha ha!

RB Lemberg: I think yes, yes and no. Right? Yes and no. I think, as you said, a lot of my work is very iterative. I feel that it's iterative even though it's all very different, but I feel that it does come back to a set of questions that bother me, even though I've done a lot of academic work on very different things. But it does come back to the same fundamental questions of multilingualism and silence and not being able to express what's there, despite all these languages that are available and all those things that are available. The things that are really wedged in the heart, they're not really expressible readily by any language, because they're about the feeling and they're about other senses.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

RB Lemberg: Something that is not yet said, or if it's said in one way, it can then be said in a different way. And it mutates and it becomes something else, and it evolves and it comes back to the same thing. And then again, so there's a lot of iteration in my work. And so thank you, because I feel like you expressed it so beautifully, and I'm really happy that you have the jar of oregano still with you, because I don't have the last jam and—

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

RB Lemberg: Sometimes I want to, but also I don't want to because...

Kat Kourbeti: It's a big thing!

RB Lemberg: Yeah, it is a big thing.

Kat Kourbeti: Actually I do in fact still have a jar (of jam) my grandma made, but she's still alive, so maybe we hold onto the jam.

RB Lemberg: Yeah. Let's hold on. Let's hold onto the jam.

Kat Kourbeti: Um, hold onto your jam folks!

There's a lot about language and the inability to articulate quite what you want to in some of your other Strange Horizons stuff as well. You've also talked about, in the nonfiction portion, about the importance of like having folks from different backgrounds involved creating, say, an anthology, or editing, and even if they're not of different backgrounds, like how do you frontline those narratives so that we can maybe try and articulate these things that exist, these stories that aren't mainstream, as you said?

RB Lemberg: Right, right.

Kat Kourbeti: So what has your experience been, first of all, as an editor of anthologies? And then also being edited in English, whilst you're trying to really confer a different kind of experience to a mainstream audience?

RB Lemberg: Thank you for these questions. I think when I started editing, I started Stone Telling, the magazine, outta spite. I started outta spite.

Kat Kourbeti: Spite is great!

RB Lemberg: 'Cause somebody told me that the way I write is not gonna have an audience. And I became so enraged. I'm still enraged. I'm laughing, right? For many years, I'm like, whatever.

Kat Kourbeti: Sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of all these awards I'm winning!

RB Lemberg: Yeah, I mean, it kind of did go that way, right? But back in the day, I remember hearing this, and it was absolutely devastating. And at the same time, I became just so enraged by it that I wrote to Ursula K Le Guin, that very day when I heard this.

Kat Kourbeti: Wow.

RB Lemberg: I came home, propelled by rage. I'm not very brave. I do very brave things, but I'm not actually that brave, but I was propelled by rage and I wrote to Ursula's agent and I said, "I'm starting a magazine. I'm going to call it Stone Telling, based on Ursula K Le Guin's Always Coming Home, the main character, and can I have Ursula's permission to name the magazine after one of her characters?"

And the agent forwarded it to Ursula K Le Guin and she responded and said, "hey, by the way, if you want a poem, here's a poem you can consider for publication, and you have my blessing and et cetera, et cetera." And I wrote back and I said, "I've been your fan (since) back in the day, (when the) Soviet Union fell and suddenly I read these translations," and we corresponded.

I think then I started editing Stone Telling, and I wanted to publish bilingual poetry, and people immediately, when I started talking about it—this was back in the day of Livejournal—I don't remember anybody who was among the naysayers, but people came and they gave me what they thought was constructive criticism. And one person said, "how are you gonna publish bilingual poetry when you yourself don't know those languages? You know some languages, but you don't know all languages, so how are you gonna vet it?"

Kat Kourbeti: Okay.

RB Lemberg: I said, "I don't need to control every aspect of an author's work." This has shocked people and still when I say this, people are like "What? As an editor, you don't need to control every aspect of an author's work?" No, I don't. I actually don't.

I don't need to understand every word, I don't need there to be a translation of every word. I can judge the quality of the work if it's bilingual from the parts that I do understand. I can ask other people who speak that language to read the parts that I don't understand and help me. But I don't need to control every aspect of an author's work, because as an editor, that's what leads you to reject work that you've never encountered or it's just not in your reading repertoire.

We're shaped by the things we read. And there is, in America at least, translations often are not read or things are not translated. Even people who read translations widely and who know many languages, which is true for me, our repertoire as readers is limited. We are limited to what we've encountered before. So if somebody who is completely outside of your cultural traditional understanding brings you a story that you connect with, but you don't understand every aspect, for me as an editor, that's the moment when I say I don't need to control every aspect of a story.

I'm going to do my best to understand the story experience and whether or not its home is going to be in my magazine or anthology, but I don't need to control every single tiny bit. I don't have to agree with every idea, I don't have to understand every reference, I don't have to understand—if it's multilingual—every word. I have read a lot of excellent multilingual work, where I don't understand every word and that's fine.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. And I think we do a bit of that on Strange Horizons for sure, but we are kind of uniquely placed, especially recently because our collective is so global, where we have all of these perspectives in the editorial staff that are not coming from like an Anglospheric, hegemonic (place), where we just kind of read the same stuff. Everybody kind of comes from everywhere. And I think over the course of these 25 years we've kind of kept that ethos of, "we want to platform new voices and we want to add more diversity to publishing". The way in which we do it kind of shifts according to who's on the team, but the spirit is kind of the same, if that makes sense.

RB Lemberg: Yeah, for sure. I think one good example of that is actually The Truth about Owls, Amal El Mohtar's story that was reprinted in Strange Horizons, actually I think maybe 10 years ago, and that I still reread, where the narrator incorporates Welsh and in the end Arabic that is not translated. There is an Arabic sentence at the very end of that story that's not translated that I think is fantastic. And I love that story so much and I keep coming back to it.

And again, it kind of creates this multiplicity of possible audiences: who is going to connect to a story, (and) how? I think people who speak Arabic and whose first language is Arabic are going to connect to it, and it's going to be really revelatory to have untranslated Arabic in the end. But if you are a diasporic creator, but you don't speak Arabic, you still will connect to it because you understand that the narrator is reclaiming a part of her that she felt was not touchable before, and so that's such a powerful moment.

And if you're not a diaspora person, and you're monolingual, that gives you a sense of estrangement that maybe landing in a different culture and a different language gives you. The story works, and this is just one example, but I think that's what multilingual stories can do for you, is that they create for different types of readers, different kinds of experiences that are all equally valid and important and they're striking and artistic.

So driving towards a monoculture, and a monoculture of an audience that's always your audience and has to receive your work in one way, and there is only one way to receive a work... That, to me, is not what I hope for as a reader and a creator, because each person is different and each person is going to bring something different.

So if I write a very trans heavy work, or a work that is very immersed in non-binary experiences and what it means to be trans and/or non-binary migrating between cultures—and if you are a part of that, yay, that's gonna validate you and it's gonna resonate with you on a personal level, or maybe you'll say, no, my experience is very different. There's nothing like it. Hey, somebody else had this experience.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

RB Lemberg: But if you are not, then you learn something about people who are not like you, and maybe you see the world in a different way. So, there's not a monoculture, and definitely for Strange Horizons it has been one of the main reasons I love the magazine, is how much diversity, true diversity there has been in terms of storytelling and poetry, nonfiction, and the kind of editing you folks do, and the kind of production you folks do. So, hey, it's been really an amazing run, 25 years. It's been an amazing run.

Kat Kourbeti: I know. Yeah. It's... we're sitting on the shoulders of some incredible people who came before us. Like, no single editor or single department can say, you know, "we've just manifested outta nowhere". We have such a long history of folks who care about this genre so much and they want to build just a beautiful, diverse body of work, that just tells different stories and lets people tell different stories. Some of what you have written about, in your poetry, your short fiction, in your essays with us, the round tables you've done. We can only be as good as the voices that we get to tell their stories, you know what I mean?

RB Lemberg: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: I'm just happy to be here.

RB Lemberg: Well, I am so happy to be a part of this very rich tapestry of voices and works that you folks have showcased over the years, and it's a work of many, and I think that's what's so beautiful and so important about it. So I really hope that Strange Horizons continues forever.

Kat Kourbeti: We sure will try. Long may we continue!

Before I let you go, I wanted to ask a little bit about... just, I'm curious, I'm nosy. Here is the last portion of the episode where I ask you: what has it been like over 15 years submitting to Strange Horizons, being edited by different people, all these different departments... Have you noticed a change or an evolution or, what has your experience been like as a very long time contributor?

RB Lemberg: This is interesting because I think I've been in most, if not all, departments of Strange Horizons over the years.

Kat Kourbeti: And now on the podcast too!

RB Lemberg: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been in so many different departments, but I think it's the Poetry department that I've worked most closely with over the years, that I really view as my home in many ways. Because whenever I want to point towards a poem of mine, it's pretty much going to be Strange Horizons, even though I've published a lot of poetry over the years, but I'm gonna point them to Strange Horizons, both for my work and for other poets.

Over the years, I feel that the Poetry department has been unquestionably an extremely strong and vital part of the community. Poetry comes and goes. Now there's a lot more venues, sometimes there's less venues. There were a few years when the venues were kind of slim pickings. Not a lot of venues were publishing things that I wanted to read, and there were not a lot of opportunities for submission. Now it feels like there is a lot, and there is a lot of very cool things happening in speculative poetry right now. So it ebb and flows, but I have to say that Strange Horizons has always been a constant.

I loved Sonya Taaffe's editing. She was my favorite editor in Strange Horizons for years and years and years, and I worked very closely with her. And I also love all the other editors who have edited for Strange Horizons over the years, and have selected extremely strong work. Lisa Bradley was a contributor to Stone Telling back in the day, and a friend, and we've co-edited an anthology, and of course she's edited my work. So I love her work, and not just because she selected some of my work. And the same can be said for Romie Stott, who has selected my work and has selected a lot of other very strong work over the years, and other folks.

So I feel that I can't really say that it was an evolution for me personally, but more like, "oh, I always love this magazine." Sometimes I connect with it more, sometimes I connect with it less, but I'm just so happy that poetry has been such a strong feature in Strange Horizons throughout its history, and always paid well, which I think is extremely important in a genre that did not always pay well.

And beyond speculative poetry, I think litfic poetry does not always pay, and it frustrates me to no end.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

RB Lemberg: Because I believe that we need to be paid for our work.

Kat Kourbeti: Shocker!

RB Lemberg: I know right? And it's shocking that outside of the speculative poetry domain, litfic a lot of times you will pay submission fees and they will sit on your submissions and you pay them fees to read your work, and I find that exhausting, to be honest. I really think it's not fair and it should not be a thing, but somehow it's been a thing. And Strange Horizons has always paid, has always paid fairly, has always had very strong editorial across its many, many domains.

And I've consistently enjoyed the work that I've read in Strange Horizons over the years, and especially so for the Poetry department that I always follow. So, I don't know if it answers your question about evolution, but it's just been a pleasure.

Kat Kourbeti: It being kind of like a stable force of good in your life at least, that is an answerm and it's a lovely answer.

RB Lemberg: I'm glad.

Kat Kourbeti: Because I don't often get to talk to people who have just had that kind of experience where they've worked with a lot of editors, where they've been submitting for a long time, and in all of these different formats as well. You know, we didn't even touch upon, really, your academic stuff—

RB Lemberg: Oh, yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: That has made it into Strange Horizons in some capacity, which is also very interesting. It's just, it's great to hear that it's been a good experience.

RB Lemberg: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: For all of this time, honestly.

RB Lemberg: Yeah. This month I've submitted—not this month, in this summer, I've submitted some poems during Lisa Bradley's reading period, and I just got an acceptance for a poem that's gonna come out which I haven't even announced.

Kat Kourbeti: Well, this episode is not gonna come out for a little bit...

RB Lemberg: Okay, good.

Kat Kourbeti: Maybe it'll be out already and if not, you can look out for it.

RB Lemberg: Yes. So it's called The Ghost of Mirror in your Machine, which is about AI and awfulness of AI.

Kat Kourbeti: Excellent.

RB Lemberg: And I was working on this poem and I just, I've—2025 has just been an awful year. It's just been a horrible, difficult, challenging year for so many people and for me, certainly. And so I've been laboring hard to try to get pieces outta the door, and I've sent a story to Beneath Ceaseless Skies and I've sent this poem to Strange Horizons, and in both cases, I felt like knowing that I can submit work to (BCS and) Strange Horizons has actually motivated me to submit it, because I don't know if I would otherwise.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

RB Lemberg: Because I've just been feeling so worn out and just burned out in so many ways. I keep writing, it's just the submitting part that I'm just so worn out by. And so having Strange Horizons just existing has motivated me to finish it and revise it. I revise it many times and submit it. And the same is true for the short story that I sent to Beneath Ceaseless Skies, because I feel very similarly about BCS, that my work has been there over the years and so it's like, okay, if I can only finish it, then I can actually submit to my favorite place, Strange Horizons and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which are my two favorite venues.

So I was like, I sent them out and just the feeling of relief, of knowing that I don't care—I mean, obviously I care if the work is accepted or rejected, but I don't care as much about the rejection as I do about just feeling I trust these folks, I know these folks, they select good work. So, I can send it off.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. And to satisfy my curiosity, this is probably kind of like an out-of-scope little question, but as part of your Le Guin Fellowship, you've been studying SFF through your academic work. Obviously you're working on something and I can't really (get into it), but we'll be here all day if you want... Can you tell us a little bit about what you're studying in an academic sense?

RB Lemberg: Absolutely, yeah. So, my academic trajectory also shifted in recent years because I've done a lot of sociolinguistics and now I'm doing a lot of work in science fiction studies, which is new. Most publications are still in various stages of coming out, I'm still working on them because it's kind of a new turn, but as a part of my LeGuin Fellowship, I'm studying her poetry and I hope to publish a book about her poetry, but it's gonna be slow because she's written poetry for 80 years. She started writing it when she was five, according to her, and she worked until her very last day on her last poetry collection, which she sent back copy edits a week before she passed away.

So really, poetry, I argue, is kind of a frame to her whole life and creativity. And there's a lot of it, and there is a lot of very deep stuff that is not really anywhere else. So at this point, I've done two archival trips to the LeGuin Archives in Oregon. One was sponsored by the Fellowship, the other by some other thing. And I'm going to Portland a bit later, and I hope to connect to some of the folks from the LeGuin Foundation. I've been in touch with them.

I've also been a LeGuin Fiction Prize finalist with one of my Birdverse books, so I feel like I'm deeply in the Ursula K LeGuin legacy at this point, and I love her work, and obviously I knew her and in many ways her work saved my life. It's just so rich and so cool. However, because I can't just do one thing, even though I'm doing 70 things, I can't do just one thing. I'm also writing another book, about LeGuin's kind of connection to some of the Soviet era science fiction, and that also emerged from my archival work where I discovered some really cool things in the archives, and that is about the brothers Strugatsky and LeGuin. Without spoiling too much, it's going to be about missed connections between these authors who knew each other. It's great.

So a lot of very cool stuff that's very new to me, and all of it is long form, so it's gonna take a while, but I hope that it's going to be cool. I think it's cool.

Kat Kourbeti: It sounds very cool. We'll definitely look out for that whenever that gets finished. It sounds like it's a deep undertaking.

RB Lemberg: Yeah. The second one I think is going to be called, "LeGuin and the Strugatsky Brothers in Conversation". Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Great. Fiction wise, poetry wise, do you have anything that's relatively recent or perhaps upcoming that you would like to plug or promote?

RB Lemberg: Sure. There's always something. So there's two Strange Horizons poems, one that came out in March that's called The Blanket, the Secret, the Dark. It's a prose poem and I'm very fond of it. And it's, I think, in the Aging Special Issue. When Romie told me, "oh, it's gonna be in the Aging issue", I was like, "oh, it really kind of is about aging, shoot. Shoot, I've been here for a while!" You know, it's been 15 years. Oh my God, you know, it really has been 15 years! So I guess it's warranted, but I really love that poem and I hope people read it.

And then I have this upcoming poem that I mentioned that may come in the fall, called The Ghost of Mirror in Your Machine. I hope people will read it. It's also a prose poem, so I think I've been on a little prose poetry kick with Strange Horizons.

And then We Will Rise Again, the activism anthology that I also mentioned is coming out later this year, and I'm so excited for it. I have a story in it, and I'm just so excited for this anthology. It's just really cool.

And I still hope that folks will read some of my Birdverse works, even though they're not fresh of the present 2025, but Yoke of Stars, my new Birdverse novella, is on World Fantasy ballot, and I so hope that people will read it. It's an unusual book, it's a bit off the beaten track structurally. I'm very proud of it.

Kat Kourbeti: Well, thank you so much for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure.

RB Lemberg: Thank you so much. It's been amazing. Thank you, Kat.

Kat Kourbeti: And we'll look forward to reading your future work.

RB Lemberg: Yes. Thank you so much and hi to all the listeners. Thanks for listening and happy 25th anniversary, Strange Horizons.

Kat Kourbeti: Thank you so much.

RB Lemberg: Of course. Thanks, Kat.

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