In this episode of Strange Horizons at 25, Kat Kourbeti sits down with longtime friend and Seattle Worldcon Poet Laureate Brandon O'Brien, chatting all things speculative poetry, TTRPG design and actual play streaming, and the impact of markets that have many readers and editors—hey wait, that's us!

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Episode show notes:

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• Find more links to everything we talked about as you read 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's 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 is Brandon O'Brien, a performance poet and writer from Trinidad and Tobago, first published on Strange Horizons in 2016 with his poem 'Population Changes'.

He has since gone on to be the poetry editor for FIYAH magazine, published several poems and short stories all over the literary landscape, including his debut poetry collection, Can You Sign My Tentacle, which won the 2022 SFPA Elgin award. This year, he is Seattle Worldcon's Poet Laureate as the community gets ready to celebrate speculative poetry with its own inaugural Hugo award.

He is also a massive tokusatsu fan, among other things, and can often be found playing or designing tabletop games. It's great to have you here, Brandon.

First of all, I love a varied career that has bits of everything. I was trying to like put that intro together and I was like, my God, you're a poet, a fiction writer, a columnist, a podcaster, a TTRPG designer, a streamer, like the list goes on.

Brandon O'Brien: I don't know how I find the time for it.

Kat Kourbeti: Genuinely. I am kind of in awe. We're going to try and dive into everything today, I want to get a real picture of how it's all evolved together. But firstly, would you describe yourself first and foremost as a poet?

Brandon O'Brien: Yes, first and foremost. I feel everything springs from that well, first and foremost. I've been doing poetry since I was so young that I can't even recall what those poems could have possibly been about. It is the thing that I find the easiest and most compelling to do. Like there are still moments that I'm pleased with myself for being able to just pick up a notebook and scribble out a poem when everything else gets hard. So I'm very proud to be able to call myself a poet and to be able to be in the position where I can now tell my mother, yes, poetry is allowing me to pay bills. It's very hard, but it's doing it.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I mean, it's the the ever-evolving struggle of the outside of the US publishing landscape where it's an absolute mess, but I am glad that it is making something and allowing you to do that for money. It's all that we can hope for in this field. Let's talk about how that poetry journey started for you.

Because you say you've been scribbling things out since you were a kid. At what point did science fictional elements or speculative elements start seeping into your poetry, would you say?

Brandon O'Brien: So this route for me has been a very hilariously circuitous one. I love telling this story because it briefly becomes the dumbest thing that I ever did in high school.

So as I said, I was writing since I was very young. Poetry was like the thing that I would do when I was bored in a class. So while I was bored in a class one day, a kid asked me, while they were noticing that I was writing a poem, asked me if I would write a poem for him. Mind you, I was in an all boys high school that was physically connected to an all girls high school separated by a lobby. It was the most catastrophic experiment that anyone could ever perform on teenagers. But I'm here in this class writing this poem and this kid asks me if I would write a poem for him, to get the attention of a girl on the other side of campus and I was like, this is a bad idea. I don't even know who you're talking about. How would I possibly write a poem for them? And they're like, I'll give you $20.

I wrote the poem. I'm still so very ashamed of myself, but that very quickly led to other people realizing that I was into poetry and I would, like, read for school assemblies and stuff like that. And that got the attention of one of my like, elder classmates who introduced me to spoken word because at that point, other people were also doing performance poetry in local universities and stuff. And we would like leave school to go there and read and talk to those poets, and I got into that space as well.

And it was through that and then doing that for work, being able to perform poetry in order to pay my bills that I attended a literary festival in Trinidad called the Bocas Lit Fest for the very first time, mostly as staff because they hired us to do poetry stuff, and I decided I was going to go to some workshops and see if this would help me figure out other things about my craft. And I went to a science fiction workshop with Tobias Buckell and Karen Lord, and it was brilliant. Tobias and Karen are absolutely wonderful writers and absolutely wonderful speakers and just brilliant people overall.

But like, the thing that broke my brain in that moment was just the realization that, oh, they're doing this for a living, and they don't have to water down their work to do it. I can just write whatever I want? Okay, I'm gonna try that.

And somewhere very early on in that process, I was like, I wanted to figure out what to do with this thing, but I do want it to be poetry first. And I was very pleased to discover that there were magazines that were publishing poetry, of which Strange Horizons was one of them, and I very rapidly started turning out all of these poems, some of which were just me still trying to figure out, well, what is it that I want to say, moving from the poems that I am writing in high school, that are like these very intensely romantic things. "I have very strong feelings about whether I'm going to be loved or appreciated or whether my parents actually like me and like having me around, and I may have a crush on someone, but I'm never gonna tell anyone. So this poem is the only place where it's gonna be." I was rapidly transitioning into, "do I have a thing to say?" That helped me kind of figure out more strongly, okay, these are some of the things that I care about. These are some of the things that I like observing.

And I'm very pleased to be able to say that I turned into lot of poems, like between 2015 and 2017, of which one of them was 'Population Changes'. Which was kind of a fluke in the writing process in part because a lot of that was just, I know what I want to say, how am I going to say it? And then like in the middle of the night, I'm pretty sure this is two days before I actually submitted it, I'm up at 2 o'clock in the morning and I go, Oh, this is it! And it just kind of spirals out into my brain. And most of that is just because I was listening to a rap song at that point in time and went, Oh, I'm just rewriting that rap song I guess, so let's just do that. Let's just see where that goes. So that's how that came about.

The reason why I tell that whole story all the time is because, a lot of my poetry work was around young people. One of the things that I keep trying to hold on to is the fact that these paths are always circuitous. When you tell it as a story, it seems like it has a beginning and a middle and an end and it's all coherent. But when you're living it, you're like, I'm just going with the flow until something works out. And I'm grateful that it's worked out, but it's also very important to qualify that. If I weren't just doing the thing that I appreciated doing for myself in a classroom that one time, none of this would have ever happened.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, it's fascinating how you figured out like, 'Hey, it's this thing that I like doing, but also could I make it into something else? Look at these people doing it. Can I do it? Yeah.' That's fascinating.

And I love how it all kind of linked to your Strange Horizons first publication because that would have been one of my next questions, is how that came about. So that's very interesting. Chaotic, but also it tracks.

Brandon O'Brien: Mm yeah. So like, I think back about those early poems a lot because at the time I had no idea what I was doing. But thinking back on, again, about how circuitous these paths are, but how they eventually reveal what you're supposed to be doing. I look back at some of those poems and go, I surely was not this smart in my twenties. Somebody must have made this realization for me, but I'm glad that I had hit on the thing that I was trying to discover in that poem. And that's also a rewarding feeling to be able to go back to your own work and go, you did in fact figure something out.

So being able to say that was happening while I was still trying to figure out my place in the genre overall is very rewarding.

Kat Kourbeti: Would you say that your poems start with the idea you're trying to talk about, usually, or is there a lot of figuring out in the process where you start writing something and the theme or the point kind of emerges later?

Brandon O'Brien: I mean, every poem is different, I think. Sometimes it's about, I know what I want to say, I just need to figure out how to make what I want to say look good. And those are always the harder poems to write. But sometimes, most times, actually, for my process, I will find an image or this very unique kind of juxtaposition that I think is interesting, and I'll just kind of play with it for a couple of poems and see where it goes.

Hilariously enough, that's how Can You Sign My Tentacle happened. I was just writing a poem for a reading that I was supposed to do, like, sometime later that month. And at that point in time, I had just finished watching season one of Atlanta. I was like, I have a lot of feelings about this, about Atlanta, about Donald Glover as a creator, about the act of creation. How do I make that not only interesting, but funny? And that turned into the first poem of the collection, Hastur Asks For Donald Glover's Autograph. And I just read it at this reading, just thinking, okay, I just wanted to read something that no one had heard before. Hopefully it's good. People liked it. Cool.

And then Interstellar Flight Press was open for chapbook submissions and I was like, okay, this is cool. I was working on another collection at that point in time for like months. I was like, maybe that's gonna work for here. How big is that chapbook again? Oh, this is too big. I guess I need to start all over. Do I have anything that I can do? Do I have any ideas that are worth like 40 pages? And I looked back at that poem and went, this is a bad idea, but I'm going to experiment with it anyway.

Kat Kourbeti: Is there such a thing as a bad idea, truly?

Brandon O'Brien: I mean... fair. But like, the interesting thing about it was at that point in time, I wasn't sure if I had anything to say, and one of the most rewarding things about that book as a result is that I am still actively in a state of discovery every time I go back into that book. Because it was in the process of digging into more about H.P. Lovecraft's experiences and his work and finding, like, unique kind of juxtapositions between that experience and the Black diasporic experience that were really interesting to me in ways that were revelatory even in the act of writing. Like, I joke a lot to people now that it's very easy to hate Lovecraft, but I kind of pity him now instead.

Kat Kourbeti: Mm.

Brandon O'Brien: Because it's kind of obvious in the process of writing that everything that is going on in your life is not uniquely different to other kinds of fear and doubt, and this desire to be safe from things that you think are going to endanger or ruin your life. And it's a shame that you [Lovecraft] had to be a racist about it, but if someone had just spoken to you, if you weren't surrounded by yes men all the time, this could have not happened. You could have found the opportunity to learn from this experience and tell something even more radical from it. And what would your work have looked like as a result? What would your interactions with other people look like?

And like, in the process of out both of those things, I feel like the poems kind of emerged as not so much a kind of admonition of Lovecraft as a creator, but a kind of reminder to the reader, you are not necessarily a morally superior person in the world. You're just a person who has been surrounded by people who helped you figure out how not to be cruel, and you can do that for other people as well.

The inception of that collection were just in the middle of the first Trump presidency.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Brandon O'Brien: And I was still in the process of editing—the process of editing for me is also very much a process of going, "is there a part of the story that I'm not finished telling yet?"

Kat Kourbeti: Hmm.

Brandon O'Brien: Which I'm very grateful was not very annoying for my editor, Holly Walrath, who was very gung ho about, "oh, you have more poems? Please let me see them." Because I was worried that I was gonna be annoying going, "here's three more poems for the book. Is it still a chapbook now?"

But like, a lot of the process of editing during that period in history was also me noticing, as I said, that there is nothing making you uniquely a good person in the world. We are now in a period where one of the most abhorrent political ideologies of the past century is re emerging in the world, unprovoked in territories that have never been uniquely touched or inspired by fascism, because people see that it is working.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Brandon O'Brien: Because people see that it is selling well.

Kat Kourbeti: The caveat to that is that I don't think that there have been places that were ever completely untouched by fascism. Perhaps it wasn't Nazi rhetoric, but there was other stuff and good God, was there ever military coups and other such things going on.

Brandon O'Brien: I guess what I mean is, there are places where it is uniquely obvious, to me at least, that everywhere in the world, there are ultra conservative ideals that are being clung to, but there are places where some sub section of those ideals don't cater to them.

I was thinking in particular from my own perspective as a Trinidadian, at one point thinking that it is uniquely impossible for Trinidad—for all of its foibles—to cling to any flavor of ultra nationalist rhetoric, and then one of the poems that I added last minute to the book was literally written between the period of Brexit passing and the big celebratory rally that folks were having in the UK at the time. Our then opposition leader in Trinidad and Tobago joined a TikTok influencer-led protest against Venezuelan migrants to Trinidad. On an island where we regularly refer to ourselves as a melting pot, much like other territories, and where our relationship to Venezuela has never been negative up until this point... and I'm like, this is only happening because you think, if you play the Trump card—and I hate to call it that—you will win the game, and you're not wrong, and I hate that.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Brandon O'Brien: How do I communicate that this is not a rule of the universe, that these things are not right because they're working. They're working because everybody keeps doing them.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Brandon O'Brien: And that turned into, a whole group of poems in the book that is just about, "hey, sometimes evil will lay a seed in your territory, and its only goal is to hurt as many people as possible, and it will either hurt you or assimilate you. Which would you rather be, hurt or assimilated?"

Kat Kourbeti: Oof.

Brandon O'Brien: And that idea sucks, right?

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Brandon O'Brien: There is a correct answer to the question because there is an answer from which you can go, "at least I can be less hurt by defending other people". I was thinking just the other day—and I love that this is also a thought about poetry in my head, but it's not in the real world—I was thinking the other day about the fact that people love making jokes about whether people get that famous Holocaust poem by Pastor Niemoller. "First they came for the Jews, but I did not speak because I was not a Jew." Everybody likes joking about how people don't get that poem, about how people will never make themselves available until they are the last.

But then, the joke is also you making yourself available, so at some point you also have to speak for someone. And I feel like we are now upsettingly at this point where people get that fact, that you are still in Niemoller's poem and you get to speak whenever you want to. And I'm hopeful, despite the fact that, again, it is going to hurt, at least you will not be assimilated. And then you have a duty as a result to limit the amount of hurt that you and others experience. And I don't know what that's going to look like in the future. It is a trying time in some of the territories where that kind of rhetoric has also taken hold in your own territory's government, so you have to deal with them and the world superpower that is the US, doing things to you at the same time.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Brandon O'Brien: But if you deal with it now, if more people see that this is actually untenable on a global scale, it will fall because the only thing it has left to do is hurt you. And if you refuse to let others be hurt, then they survive to speak.

Kat Kourbeti: Hear hear.

Brandon O'Brien: And that is also important.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Oh, God. I mean, that's exactly the mindset I've been in myself in the last little bit. We're recording this literally a few days after the inauguration for the re-election. Good God. And yeah, I think it's on everybody's mind. There is certainly a lot of that rhetoric in the UK where I live. Some of it in Greece, where I'm from, less than it has been, which is good progress, I guess.

I do think that people, especially in light of the US situation at the moment, are reflecting a little harder. In particular, within creative communities, it's been heartening, to see people flocking together and starting to devise plans of resistance, of how do we make work during this time, how do we preserve each other's work in case it gets banned, how do we amplify the voices of people that need to be heard so that, as you said, those hurts can be minimized, so that we're not assimilated into just like despair and evil and hurting each other. It's a really scary time to be around.

But yeah, I wanted to touch upon some of the themes in your poetry that Strange Horizons published, but also I guess, about your relationship with the magazine before the publications started, like as a reader, and the process of submitting your poetry as well, how that cooked together to make the result.

Brandon O'Brien: So, at the time, I felt like I didn't know a great deal about the publication space in the genre, so I felt like I was just kind of feeling my way through the space at that point. But one of the things that immediately inspired me to submit to Strange Horizons, other than the fact that obviously it was taking poetry in the first place, which is still very rare among magazine outlets in the genre, was the fact that it had so many poetry readers and poetry editors, and that immediately clicked for me.

There is something uniquely engaging to me about being in a room full of poets. When I was doing spoken word, I was working with other poets. We would gather once a week and just sit in a room for three hours and just write. We would regularly just meet up and talk about poetry. We were rehearsing all the time. We were writing all the time. There is something refreshing about sharing space with more than one craftsman of this art form.

So there was something interesting to me about being able to submit to Strange Horizons, where at that point, I think in 2017, there were three poetry editors all at once. A part of me was actually very nervous about that because I was like, if three poets don't like my work, my work must suck. It was also, obviously they're going to have a conversation about my work, above the level of whether it is momentarily working for them as a reader in that moment.

And this is not me judging the process. When I was at FIYAH, I was the only poetry reader that we had, and I tried to give that as much space as possible. To the point where, like, there were some periods where I will shamefully admit that I would run the clock on when the magazine was actually supposed to be friggin due because I was like, I wanted to process all of these poems as carefully as possible. But the thing that I appreciated about Strange Horizons, the thing that I wanted to believe would benefit my work, was having multiple poets look at it and go, well, this is what we're seeing in this work.

And if I recall correctly, I'm particularly grateful at that point in time, because I think when Population Changes was published, that was the first batch of poems that I had ever sent to Strange Horizons. So I was like, okay, this worked. I don't know how it worked, but I guess it worked the one time. It worked immediately. And that was also very rewarding. So, I feel like there is value specifically in that part of that space.

There is a lot, I think, that Strange Horizons has been doing, well, since I got into the genre, that I think are very good indicators for what makes a magazine not only easier to run, but makes its process more accessible for readers and writers. And I feel like one of those things is having more than one editor, not just more than one slush reader, but more than one member of editorial staff dedicated to that part of the magazine whose job it is to all process the work at once.

Obviously that's not hard for fiction because a lot of people are trying to get into fiction. But I'm always grateful when it's happening in poetry, because poetry is just as valuable. Poetry is the place where you have to tell the exact same story in as few words as possible. I feel like there is a lot to learn from poetry, and as a result, I feel like there is a lot to learn, not only from being published in Strange Horizons, but reading the work that is published by Strange Horizons.

Kat Kourbeti: That's very sweet. Thank you.

Brandon O'Brien: Like at the time of recording, I wrote a blog post for the Seattle Worldcon blog. It's called Con-Verse. We thought we were being very clever when we came up with that name.

Kat Kourbeti: I love it.

Brandon O'Brien: I wrote, like, a breakdown of how to get into speculative poetry for the first time. Like, what makes a poem speculative? And how do you find ways into discovering these speculative elements of a work. And at the bottom of that blog post is an exercise for readers, and it is 'go to the poetry section of Strange Horizons and pick a poem at random, and read it and process for yourself. What are you discovering in this poem? What do you think this poem is about, what do you think is the obviously speculative element of it? What devices are performing that speculative element for it?'

Because speculative poetry is actually very hard. The longer I think about the act of trying to teach it, the more I realize that part of the difficulty is, poetry is very good at making certain elements feel so concrete that it becomes very difficult from a reader's perspective to go, "is this a metaphor? Is this something else?" And being able to help readers parse, this is what the thing is trying to do, this is how the speculative element is trying to reveal itself, is very challenging, but very rewarding for me as a writer and as someone who wants to help other people read it more.

And being able to just kind of guide people to spaces where I think there is a wealth of very good work in that space, and just being able to tell them, hey, just, just scroll for a bit and just click one, is actually, you have created a pool of poetry that I think is very instructive in that regard.

Kat Kourbeti: Wow. Thank you so much. That's like the sweetest thing I've heard. And I agree. I mean, I'm not in the poetry department, but I think what they do is really cool because as you say, it's a larger team and it's not just one person calling the shots, but also because of that diversity of perspective, there's a lot of different things that make it through that different people are interested in and they're championing poems within the department and saying, yeah, actually, this one. And I do appreciate having resources that are free that are accessible, like this, you don't have to go buy a book or textbook or anything like that.

It's just on a website. You can go and as you say, scroll a little bit and find something that maybe will speak to you.

You've inadvertently answered a big question I had, which was what's your advice for a tentative speculative poet? We will link that post in the show notes. Because I know that a lot of people who listen to the podcast are writers who want to break into the space, and I'm sure that a chunk of them are poets who haven't been published before. So I hope that your words will inspire and stoke a fire to write more and to submit.

Brandon O'Brien: Yeah, and I kind of want to speak to that on the recording so people can hear me say this part as well: I think for a lot of people, especially people who have been writing poetry for a while and are still trying to navigate their way into speculative poetry, like I was in the early process, there is kind of this complicated part where you kind of go, "well, what makes a poem speculative must just be putting a fantasy or science fiction thing into the poem and then just moving on. There's a dinosaur, there's a robot, there's a spaceship. It's suddenly a speculative poem." And I think ultimately it means more than that.

I think one of the things that I kind of discovered as a process of reading other people's discussions about what makes poetry speculative is the idea that there is—well, there are two things that I think matter to me: one is what I refer to in workshops as a metaphor in a heightened state of arousal. Which is the point at which it becomes obvious that this metaphor is trying to be real and you cannot deny that it is real. My go to example in classical poetic work is The Second Coming [by W.B. Yeats] when the persona refers to this "beast slouching towards Bethlehem, waiting to be born". There is a moment when you read the poem where you go, "Oh, I see this thing. I can imagine what this thing is in the world". And I'm sure that's not what Yeats meant, but the fact he pulled it off means that at that moment, that metaphor is in a heightened state of arousal, where you can imagine that this is not just a theoretical force of power or threat entering space, but you can imagine something.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Brandon O'Brien: And the second thing I think is most important is, what is the speculative question that you are trying to ask or answer? What is ultimately the thing that matters in a way that reveals the mundane thing about something speculative, or the speculative thing about something mundane? And I think that a lot of speculative poetry that I really enjoy is essentially asking us not merely to reimagine the real world in the context of what would we look like in 10 years, or what could we have looked like if this didn't happen, but also asking a deeper kind of speculative question, like, what is it about the world that we live in, that if it had changed, would affect you in a specific way or would affect someone else in this specific way? What does it mean to you as a reader to experience this kind of imagined world? And what are you going to take from that experience and go back into the world with?

Which is the same thing that a lot of good prose does, obviously. That it's not just about the robot, it's about, now that you've seen what happens to the robot at the end of the story, what are you going to do in the real world so you don't have to be in the terrible position that this robot has been? And how do you ask that question in a poem as well? So I think once you have those two things together, everything else is just craft.

Kat Kourbeti: I love that. That's good practical advice that myself and other people can take away, and go noodle on some poems, maybe. Every time I talk to you, I'm always inspired to like, go write some poems. It's a unique superpower.

Brandon O'Brien: This is my goal. I've worked with young people so often, that I think a lot about some of the canards that people have about poetry—that poetry is too hard to read, that poetry is too hard to write, that it has to rhyme—I hate all of those things. So whenever I incidentally inspire someone to want to write, I'm always very excited about that.

I did workshops with young people for most of my twenties. So I'm accustomed to people hearing me share my love for discovering other people writing poetry and them going, "but I don't want to do that because I don't want anybody to read it". I never asked nobody to read or share nothing with me. The thing that matters is that you are exploring the craft in your own time, in your own way. You don't have to show it to anybody. This is not me inviting you to be published if you don't want to be published, although I hope that at some point you pursue that route.

This is not me telling you that you have to be a performer. This is not me telling you you have to write a book. This is just me going, "there is something revelatory about the act of writing a poem. And you can do that for yourself in your own time, and discover things about doing so that are not just rewarding for the poem itself, but are rewarding for you."

Kat Kourbeti: Man. That's inspiring. Thank you.

Brandon O'Brien: Oh lord.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, I love that so much. Yeah, and I think it's uniquely in poetry that you find this, because it's less tied to convention, in the way that prose can be, where you have to have a certain structure, and you have to have a certain plot beat to follow, and you have to have conflict... God forbid! So poetry has that kind of liberatory, nothing has to be any sort of way. And once you embrace that, it can be genuinely anything you want it to be.

It can have a narrative. It doesn't have to have a narrative. It can just be vibes. And I think a lot of the poems I've enjoyed have just been vibes, where it's just like, 'there's something unsettling going on in space'—but really it's about loneliness or really it's about something deeply human, just clothed in various speculative things.

Brandon O'Brien: So, when you say that, I mean, I do think about most crafts that it is perfectly possible to do anything that you want at any time. It's just harder in prose for a reader to get accustomed to the idea.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, for sure. I suppose it is possible.

Brandon O'Brien: Yeah, no, and that's what makes prose so much harder for me. Because I do think that you are right about poetry in that sense, that you are encouraged to be freer in poetry in part because what is typically a constraint is now also a freedom. The fact that in this brevity, you just get to explore the idea that you want to express, and nothing extraneous to that.

There are poems that people like, and like to joke about, because they feel like it is indicative of how artificially ideal poetry is as a craft. They like to joke about how we think that poetry is a high art form, but you can really just say anything in it.

One of the examples that sticks in my brain a lot as a good example of people essentially saying they've gotten poetry, is when people attempt to rewrite William Carlos Williams. This poem about eating the plums in the icebox. This poem is one of the greatest poems of all time. This is not just a joke about a guy being hungry; this is a very loving husband writing a letter to his very loving wife about being hungry this one time and acknowledging her feelings in this moment. And every other time that somebody has aped that poem, they're either saying, I've never gotten poetry a day in my life, or I don't think that this poem is actually really meaningful. Let me express it to you by rewriting the exact same poem with the exact same feeling and the exact same emotion in a way that matters to me, but I imagine will matter to no one else. I'm like, you're doing the thing! This is what we mean when we tell you to read. This is the process.

I just want people to experience that all the time. I want them to experience it in the ways that are accommodating and encouraging and inspiring to them. I want people to get out of the habit of assuming the worst of poetry. I'm not saying that there are no bad poems, obviously there are some bad poems out there, but I'm also saying that it's not our business to be interested in whether a poem is bad. It's our business to be interested in whether a poem is doing the thing that it has to do for us in that moment.

One of my go to examples of what makes a poem good, without having to perform any of the artifice of what makes a poem high culture, is that poem that people keep sharing on the internet that a nine year old wrote about a tiger escaping its cage. It's four lines. It's written by a nine year old. [Actually, he was six!] This kid is like 16 or 17 by now, I'm sure. And I'm sure if anybody ever asks him about that poem, he's like, please don't ever repeat this to me again. But the rest of us are like, you got it at nine! I wish I had it at nine!

I hope you're still writing poems. This, was the name Nael or something like that? I hope you're still writing poems. Because that was dope. I hope that you are still engaging with the craft. And I hope that every time somebody sees that tiger poem, they feel inspired as well. Because that's what it's all about. And I want more people to tap into that.

Kat Kourbeti: It's what you were saying about writing things as a teenager about where you're at at the time, which is heightened emotions and big conflicts and intentions that happen for everybody at that age. It's not necessarily, you know, yeah, high culture, but is it not what matters to you?

Brandon O'Brien: Also is it not? What's the difference between like, a Greek epic and an Olivia Rodrigo song—what is the emotional difference?

Kat Kourbeti: Genuinely, it isn't. It's why there's a lot of theater productions that kind of coat the Greek epic in something more, like, I'll say "pedestrian", but like, something more accessible or modern. Or, you know, Shakespeare. It's why Shakespeare has prevailed, right? Because there's all of those emotions and all of those questions and the social upheaval and stuff that he talks about is very much echoing through time, and so you can dress an actor in whatever, but the stuff underneath is the same.

And so yeah, no, highly agree, and to finish my sentence, like, it's not high culture, but like, it's coming from a genuine place. And what's interesting about the speculative stuff is that we also get to play with that as well.

Would you say that as a speculative poet, that the reach of your art is finding a more segmented audience or not? Is the speculative stuff limiting who you can reach with your poetry, or is it perhaps expanding that?

Brandon O'Brien: So, this is less an art form thing and more a culture thing,

Kat Kourbeti: Mm hmm.

Brandon O'Brien: Because I do think that the genre space is very niche and when you're in fandom, it means that you are essentially expressing all of your thoughts about the genre to other people who are into the genre. As an aside, one of the greatest examples of this is whenever the Hugos or Worldcon are in the news, and you're seeing booktokers and booktubers, people who are reading speculative fiction on a regular basis, comment on the news as if they've never heard of Worldcon before. Because they hadn't! Because they've never been to one, because they didn't know that it existed. Because they didn't know how to attend. Because they didn't know that the Hugos were community voted. There are people who think that the Hugos are juried. And I'm like, I don't blame you. I know where that's coming from.

Kat Kourbeti: I absolutely was the same. I mean, I didn't realize that the Hugos were a thing that you could (a) vote in and (b) go to until there was a Worldcon in London and I could only attend the day of the Hugos, and so I went to the Hugos. And I was like, you mean you can go to these? You can just go? And then it turns out you can vote in these? And you can longlist and shortlist things? And like, that it's actually us, who love this stuff, making the choice of, like, who gets a Hugo? That's huge! What?! I was 24 at the time, and it blew my mind. It blew my little mind. And it's great to see people discover that. It's not great to see people discover it in this way, because there's drama.

Brandon O'Brien: It's a very trying time to have that discovery, but it's also an opportunity for you to engage with that discovery as well, for you to be a part of the process. But like, when I say that the space is niche, that's what I mean, that we are in the genre talking to ourselves a lot of the time, that when news about fandom breaks, it is breaking for us on the inside, no matter how widely read the genre is. So in that sense, it is actually very limiting because if I get published in a magazine, the chances of the average person discovering that magazine elsewhere is remarkably slim.

Because some of the big mags that publish poetry don't have print. If you do have print, it's kind of hard to justify having copies of your stuff in a place where people can easily see it. I don't think Locus is in your local bookstore.

Kat Kourbeti: No.

Brandon O'Brien: Which it should be, but it sucks that it's not. So people who are passing through for their latest Sarah J. Mass or whatever, know that the culture is happening somewhere, but they're not on the inside.

So a lot of the work that we are doing is for fandom, which is good, because fandom is still very big, and these are people who are definitely interested in propagating the art form. But it does mean in that sense that it is very limiting on a culture level. But on a craft level, I think what is most interesting is there is nothing stopping anyone from being available for my work. As long as I make my work accessible, there is nothing stopping other people from wanting to access it. So the only problem is, how do we solve the culture problem to let more people discover that for more people? Which is a larger issue that cannot just be solved by the craft itself.

But I think one of the most obvious ways that individual creators get to play a small part in solving that problem is merely writing the work for their local audiences, for the audiences that would otherwise not be directly tied to fandom. And then when you've already hooked them with that work, you get to tell them, here are all these spaces that people don't want you to know exist. We're going to crash these places. So you can always know that I will be doing my work here and you can always find other people's work in this space. And in so doing, other people start to discover other places and other local voices and local ideas about the speculative. And that's how the thing grows. That's what cons are supposed to do. And then at some point, I guess the walls fell back down.

I do not think that this is anybody's fault necessarily, but because of the insular nature of the niche that is fandom, it can often feel like we're trying to widen the field and people aren't looking for what's on the other side. And that's something that creators and these spaces themselves have to work together to solve. But one of the ways that we solve that, I think, is by making work that reveals more of the world from our perspective, and then introducing those regional stories, those local stories, into those wider fandom spaces.

So people get to go, I want to hear more like this. I want to read more like this.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Brandon O'Brien: What door do I have to kick down? Where do we have to bring Worldcon next to experience more of these things?

Kat Kourbeti: On the subject of that, the local stories, as you've said, how do you inject your cultural experience, your Trinidadian background, your growing up, your experiences from all aspects of your life, into your speculative work?

Brandon O'Brien: I do think this is one of the questions where when you ask someone in the beginning of their career, they're like, here are all the things that I want to do, and then 10 years pass and you ask them again and it's like, what did I do? Did I actually accomplish a thing?

So one of the big things for me in my work is I like folklore. I think ultimately one of the things that is most revealing about human nature is that almost uniquely as a collective unconscious state, we have latched on to certain kinds of fears and ideals that reveal themselves through folklore in ways that are ultimately very revealing.

I care a lot about the fact that there's a creature in Caribbean folklore that is technically not a vampire, is not known as a vampire. Does not suck blood, does not drain people of blood, but it does bite people though. And it is subject to arithmania, so if you drop a pile of salt or a pile of rice at a crossroads they will stop and have to count each grain. But it's not an Eastern European vampire. I love that a lot. I have no idea where it came from when I'm like, is there something about math that we're latching on to? Is that what you're telling me? And those things I dig a lot about folklore, that ultimately it is revealing something deeper about us as a species. The things that we fear, the things that we think we can trust, et cetera.

A lot of the poetry that I've been writing for a while now have been specifically about Trinidadian folklore, and how they relate to the experience of violence in the world. How they relate to our own nature of feeling violent or experiencing violence thrust upon us. How we relate to the idea that there is no perfect victim of violence. And how we relate to people who do not present themselves in like culturally appropriate ways as a result of experiencing violence, but through the image of folklore, because ultimately that thing that is radical to me about folklore is you have told me that this person is a person. That at some point, at least, this person was a human being. And then they suffered something, and now where they are not to be trusted.

There is a character in Trinidadian folklore known as the Diablesse, the Devil Woman. The common narrative is essentially that this is a woman who at some point witnessed or suffered intimate partner violence, and as a result goes out into the world to lure lustful men, and then murder them. The cultural vantage point of that story is obviously, "don't go out with people you don't know in the middle of the night", and more curiously, "don't go out with strange women in the woods". Because why is this woman in the woods? But no one asks the obviously deeper question, "what happened to this woman?" And if you are falling for this woman's guiles, what is that saying about you? And digging into those questions is actually more interesting to me.

A large part of the collection that I'm presently working on right now is about another creature from Trinidadian folklore known as the Lagahoo, this powerful, monstrous shapeshifter, that I immediately kind of latched onto because as a black man, there is this lingering sense in the world that people constantly consider you a physical threat to them, regardless of what's happening to you. And there is something revealing, I think, in using the Lagahoo as a metaphor for not being in control of what people imagine is your beastly nature. For that beastly nature, (a) is informed by trauma, and (b) reveals in itself this deeper understanding about where harm comes from and what is necessary to keep other people safe. That when you tell me I'm being monstrous, you're really telling me you do not have the right to tell other people how to treat you because they're afraid of you anyway. So I might as well be the result of your fear in order to survive.

Kat Kourbeti: That's fascinating. And really interesting, how some of what you talked about reverberates in other folklore as well. The vampire that isn't a vampire, the woman who's kind of beguiling, but really it's the result of something that's happened to her, you see that in South American folklore, you see that in Arabic folklore. The Greek vampire is kind of like the Caribbean vampire in that like, it's not a vampire at all. Like, there's no blood, but there is a an aspect of revenance, you know, of coming back from the dead and people being scared of the person that they know coming back and being different, and being violent, or being scary. And whether or not that goes back to perhaps periods of illness, where people were ostracizing members of their community that were perhaps sick, or whatever the case may be.

It's just fascinating how, it's what you said exactly that, this stuff kind of like happens, and it reveals stuff about human culture and how it develops independently of each other, and sometimes in discussion with each other.

Brandon O'Brien: Yeah, overall, I think the thing that is coolest about folklore is, there is this lingering fear that people have, that someone that you love will be someone that you do not recognize at some point, and you will not be able to do anything about it. Like, a lot of zombie and vampire lore is about the idea that someone will come back in a way that you will not recognize, but they still obviously know you and want to be in connection with you, but something about their capacity to connect has now been broken.

There are stuff like changelings in a lot of European folklore where the sense is that you might lose the true form of someone that you care about, and it will be replaced with something totally unrecognizable to you. And that means that you have been robbed of the true relationship that you have with that person and never be able to actually solve that problem because everybody else thinks nothing has changed.

I think that fear in particular comes from two different places. I think for a lot of people it is obviously the concern that relating to people is already very hard, and you don't want to feel like you're starting over with somebody that you've already bonded with. But also a lot of it is a fear of a loss of control over the conditions of your relationship, that something will change radically about the way that you relate to somebody in a way that makes you feel like you no longer have a sense of control over, not just that person, but the conditions of that relationship, and you won't be able to navigate it again. Because now the person with that control is them, and you don't want other people to have to tell you how that relationship goes. You wanna say how the relationship goes, and then that fractures in a way that is threatening to them.

I feel like that's where all of that is coming from, and being in the attempt of using poetry to communicate, "well, sometimes that just happens to people, you know, people change", is presently refreshing as a poetic process.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, that sounds fun. It's fun to work with the stories of your homeland, but to use that to say more current things for you. I'm looking forward to reading that new collection when that comes out.

Brandon O'Brien: So am I. It doesn't get finished. It just keeps getting bigger.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh no! The infinitely growing!

Brandon O'Brien: But yes, I would like very much for people to experience that collection when it is finished.

Kat Kourbeti: So let's touch a bit upon the different side of your poetry journey, which is the editing. Because you were poetry editor for FIYAH, you did mention that a little earlier that you were the only person going through all those submissions. What was that experience like for you? And what did you take away from it? What was your process in editing the poetry for FIYAH?

Brandon O'Brien: I still think that editing for FIYAH was one of the most radical experiences for my poetic career at this point. Because ultimately I think anybody who wants to write in a craft should read as often as possible. And now that I'm no longer editing, it does feel kind of weird to be in a position to tell people, well, you should be in slush because then you get to read what people who have never been published before will write. It feels like I'm putting you in a position to judge strangers and that's kind of weird. But I do feel like it is obviously very important to be in a position of consistently reading and consistently seeing what works and doesn't work in that sense.

But also specifically for FIYAH, specifically for poetry, I think you discover things that are obviously resonating in Black spaces in the speculative genre in ways that is ultimately very dramatically revealing. One of the things that I learned the most about that experience is there are biases that people have about describing the Black experience. Both the African Continental experience and the Black Diasporic experience come with these unique biases that people who are not African or not Black have about telling those stories. And just like every other craft, there are people who are like, okay, I'm writing for an audience that I know is not me. So I guess I need to perform that bias in order to enter this space.

I think that happens for a lot of diasporic writers all over the world. But the thing that eventually reveals the heart of your poem is refusing to do that and instead telling the story that is true to your community and true to your ideals. And that's particularly meaningful to me as a poetry editor who is neither an African Continental writer nor an American Black writer, to be able to witness both of those things simultaneously and go, I have no idea what you're talking about, but it is not my job to know. It is my job to be taught, it is my job to learn. As an editor I am reading just like everybody else, my job is not to know more than the poet, my job is to be in a position to help you write the poem that makes it the most effective way to teach me, so it can be the most effective way to teach other people.

And I think that has informed my writing, obviously, in the process of what is the version of my poem that is neither inaccessible nor coddling? How do I write the poem that is genuinely instructive without feeling like I need to diminish the value of the heart of that work. And also, I think one of the things that's most revealing about editing in general is people underestimate how hard it is to get into the space overall.

Folks were having this conversation on Bluesky like a couple of weeks ago. People were frustrated about an editor who was commenting on how easy it is for work to kind of get lost in the slush after not keeping a reader's attention for a certain arbitrary amount of words. Like, you have to hold us in the first few paragraphs, you have to hold us by the first line, and people are like, "but you don't know what the rest of the work says, you kind of gave up, without ever committing to the rest of the thing", and the problem is, there aren't a lot of us out here.

One of the things that I think I particularly discovered, as someone who is now reckoning with the fact that I feel like a lot of my experience as an editor was also defined by undiagnosed mental illness, is there isn't enough time or enough resources to commit to every possible work in the world. But the lesson there isn't that your work is less valuable because it has not been published. There is still time for your work to discover the place where it is absolutely positively meant to be published. Your work doesn't lose value because it hasn't been accepted. Your work doesn't lack value because it hasn't been accepted. It actually still has value yet to be gleaned by someone who is not me.

I went out of my way for a period while editing FIYAH, to write at least a one line note for every rejection that ever came through the magazine. And there were periods where that was easy to do because we got maybe a hundred, a hundred and fifty poems. Still a lot, but I can still go, "if I read twelve poems today, I know what all of those twelve poems are about. I can comment on those things."

I'm grateful that FIYAH has now gotten to the point where that's a great deal more streamlined for those editors, but I imagine that it's still very difficult as a result, because it's still not a lot of people navigating hundreds of works at a time. I think the lesson that writers need to get from that is not about the lack of value that comes to your work from not being accepted or from not getting comments on your rejection, but simply the acknowledgement that at this time, someone hasn't gleaned the value your work obviously has. So it's just a matter of going back to the drawing board and making that value unavoidable.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I did see that discourse, and I like that a lot of people were very reassuring to unpublished writers that it wasn't about anything nefarious, but it's more like, we train our eyes to see what's good, or like, the kind of writing that we like, and so a lot of people were saying they can tell really early on that this isn't it. So no, thank you. But it's not a rejection of you as a person. Crucially, it's not a rejection of your work as a whole. It's just about finding that editor or those editors, those markets, that they'll see your work and go, yes.

So it's very reassuring, but at the same time it doesn't lighten the difficulty of dealing with this. Publishing is a fickle mistress.

Brandon O'Brien: No, it is! And I feel like, the two things that stand out to me are separate kind of experiences from FIYAH actually. One is the idle observation that if I'm not mistaken, Strange Horizons has expanded its number of published works from earlier in its career, to the point where it is trying as often as possible to publish six poems, seven poems, whenever it can. And sometimes that's not possible. I know a lot of other magazines are going out of their way to do that as well. I know Uncanny Magazine tries very often in its fundraising period to let people know the only thing stopping us from publishing another novelette every period, or another two short stories every period, is that we don't have the money to pay the writers to do that. And I think that one of the obvious sticking points is editors are also keeping track of word count, so they can't say yes to everything and then not be able to pay you for your work. People underestimate that. I think the speculative genres are one of the few places where magazines are paying you by the word for your work. You can't put a short story in the New Yorker and get six cents a word, you know.

So like, we should appreciate the fact that even if it is harder to get in, when we do get in, we are experiencing that value. And the other experience of this was when I was the guest editor of Apparition Magazine. There was a point in the editorial meeting when we were discussing a work that we wanted to put in the final issue, and obviously the thing that I find rewarding about a group editorial process is everybody is discussing the things that they see and don't see of value in that work. But it meant that I was in the unique position to be able to say, "I like all of these poems. I know you only told me to select this specific number of poems. I am not fighting you on whether we're taking all of those poems instead, so we need to figure a way around this." And that still ended up having to be a discussion about, ultimately, what still needed to be cut. But it meant that people also underestimate how often editors are actually fighting to make room when room can be made. It's just, often it cannot.

The solutions to these problems are putting more editors in more magazines that give magazines more money. And we cannot do that all the time. I can't ask everyone in the real world to be a slush reader because then they will never read for leisure anymore. And not everybody has all of the funds to support these magazines all the time. But if you can, and you want to be a part of making more room for more writers, part of doing that is obviously, how do you contribute to the magazine in a way that allows their bottom line to give room for more writers.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, it's the age old problem. Subtle reminder to the listeners that you can, in fact, support Strange Horizons on Patreon, and in other ways as well on our Donate page. That will make or break, say, if we can do a special issue, or how many things can we include in a special issue, and things like that.

Because, on the week to week, we can have a conservative estimate of what a budget is for the year. But then because we, as a magazine, love to do either a themed special issue or something around a region of the world or whatever, then it's like, well, we have to allocate a specific pot of money for that, and so, however much we can raise, that's it.

And so, absolutely, that then becomes a barrier. And I'm sure that for every magazine, that's the same. So yeah, support your favorite magazines in whatever way you can. And honestly, there's nothing too little. I'm sure that everybody would be grateful for whatever they can get. The climate is difficult.

Brandon O'Brien: I kind of want to actually stay on this call to action, to anyone who's listening to this podcast at this moment in time. If you just donated five dollars to Strange Horizons right now and got nine of your friends to do the same, that's like half of the payment for one poem. So if you do that every fortnight, if you can spare ten dollars every month, and get nine other people to do the same, you can add one poem to Strange Horizons every month for a year. And that's 12 new poems you get to read, and you get to do that for dozens of other magazines anytime you want.

And that's not just you going, I want to support this magazine and see this magazine do well. That is you going, I want to see what this poet, who I've never heard before, has to say about a thing that I've never thought before. And how will that change my life. You are investing ahead of time in discovering something radical about a writer who might have just gotten paid their first commissioned sale from a magazine on the internet in their entire life. And that's the thing you could do with ten dollars a month, and nine of your friends.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, we often say in our fundraisers, actually, you know, this amount of money funds this thing, so that it's not this elusive, big cloud of question of like, you know, okay, so I gave you $5. So what?

It's like, no, your $5, and the $5 of 10 other people means we can publish this. It's a review, or it's a poem, or it's part of a short story. So it's very much like, we try to make that transparent, at least during the fundraisers, that that's how much things cost. And definitely, you can see that in the pay rates of magazines, per word. What does that come up to?

Now, we've talked a lot about poetry. We've talked a lot about your writing. Now, let's talk about other fun stuff you do, cause, man, you're a multi talented guy.

So, in a slight related way, you've got your tabletop designs that you do, like you write your own games. And some of them are fairly simple, one or two player type things. Tell me a little bit about your process, first of all, how you got into that, cause it's a very different skill set and art form really, and where you get your ideas about how to structure things, rules and things like that. Like, every game is different. What does that look like in your head until it becomes a game?

Brandon O'Brien: So, how I got into Tabletop is also very circuitous, and this is also very fun. So, as I got into speculative writing, I was in a bunch of Slacks with a bunch of different writers. And I can't even remember which Slack this was, because I no longer use Slack, because Slack is very daunting. But I was in a Slack with Michael R. Underwood, who at that point in time was also not in tabletop yet, had done some tabletop study in university, if I recall, but wasn't in the industry yet. Mike is now also doing big things in tabletop design as well. I'm very excited for them.

But they had just randomly put a link that the game designer, Avery Alder, was looking for people who wanted to join her Emerging Game Designers Mentorship. And I was like, this sounds interesting. I have no idea what any of this means. I'm just gonna throw out a random idea in my brain and see if that manifests into a thing.

I sent my submission and then suddenly got very invested in the idea that I had submitted. I was like, okay, I hope this actually works, and it worked. And for the majority of a year I was talking through the process of a game that I wanted to work on that is still presently in development, and it was this very inspiring, this very refreshing experience to be able to go, "this is another avenue of my creativity that I can invest in, that also requires my speculative writing brain, that also requires me to think a great deal, not just about the mechanics, but about what this world is and what it does. And most importantly, how to get somebody to directly invest into that space."

And while that one big game was still on the back burner, I was like, let's just experiment with some of the ideas that I'm discovering by just making a bunch of very small things. And the thing that I think is the through line between my tabletop design and poetry, one of the through lines rather, is there is this unique moment when you discover how to present this brief, small thing in a way that is obviously concise in its shape, but gets bigger when somebody else gets to experience it for themselves.

I like the idea of something that I have crafted with as little words as possible, but those words' job is to get you to think more deeply about something other than just what's on the page. And playing with that more often has just been very refreshing for me being in the position to just go, "here is a thing that I think would be cool and funny, let's just see how I'd make other people experience the act of playing that thing."

One of the more interesting and more personally challenging small RPG projects that I worked on that is presently on my Itch.io page is a game called A Nice Hobby, where the game is about joining a nice hobby. It's about discovering this cool card game, or getting really into Gunpla or have you, like, discovered how to make costumes or something like that. And you're meeting all of these new friends, and you're discovering that, oh, this hobby is actually not very nice. There is a point in the rules where the game keeps telling you "this is a nice hobby. You shouldn't worry about anything at all. Please define your greatest fear." And then you turn the page and the book says "I'm sorry". And like—

Kat Kourbeti: Oh my god, I love this. Not for nothing, but we've all experienced that moment, though, haven't we, in a hobby?

Brandon O'Brien: No, like, because I'm essentially describing not only the real world sense of, you got into this thing because you thought it was fun, and now you discover all of these people are not cool. But also, it is expressed in a more speculative way, because it was like inspired by a tokusatsu series that I saw and really loved, and it's really a shame that it only got one season, called Girl Gun Lady, about a high schooler who decides she wants to get into building model guns from this weird model gun set that is available at the hobby shop next to her school, because all of her friends are into it, and also this girl who she stopped talking to for some reason and she doesn't get why they stopped talking is also into it, so she's like, maybe if I get into this thing, we'll be cool again. And then she goes home and she takes one of those model kits and she builds a toy pistol and goes to sleep. And she wakes up at school. But no one else is at school except for her and five other girls, which also includes the girl that she's not talking to. But they're all in different uniforms that look like military uniforms.

And they all have their toy guns on them. But their toy guns are now full of actual bullets, and now they have to shoot each other in order to leave the school! And like, okay, this is a lot. This is a lot and a half. This is very worrisome. But like, that heightened image of "What if this thing that you enjoy is bad for you?" revealing more deeply, how do you maintain the bonds that you have actually formed with people that you care about when you discover that the hobby that you're in is hostile? And try to replicate that in game form.

And I think that ultimately every time I make a small game like that it is essentially a poem that you roll dice in. Which is very funny to me in part because I am not good at math, so like rules and shit don't actually matter to me all that much. I try to not make a game that is so broken that you actually cannot play it to the end. But it also doesn't matter to me whether this game is "good" or "balanced". What matters to me is that it's replicating the experience that you're supposed to have at its core.

I don't care if the end state of A Nice Hobby is everybody loses, because that's still story. It's a very horrible story, and I'm sorry that I put you through that, but that's still story. And every once in a while I'll have an idea like that where the goal is, how do I create that experience in a game in particular?

My favorite of recent experiences is I made a game called The God of Spite and Violence, which is what if you essentially were John Wick? And the core story beat in that space is how do you punish someone for destroying all of the things that mattered to you before you were violent? While reconciling that violence is not ideal for your body. It's not good for you. Because like all of those movies, all of those games are about people who just resort to destroying themselves and then just find peace afterwards while severely wounded, while pieces of themselves are poking out, because hard, strong men are apparently not supposed to care about those things.

But what if you told the version of the story where, at some point, other characters come up to you and go, "you know, this is a lot. When this is done, you need to find your peace some other way," and the game doesn't tell you how.

Kat Kourbeti: Yikes.

Brandon O'Brien: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: But also, yeah, fair and valid. It's the thoughts you have while you watch a film like that, where you're like, "... could I just say something?" And then that becomes like a new idea.

And you don't only design tabletops, you also play them like, live in podcasts and things. So, how did you get into that? And do you have a favorite one you've done? I know that the tokusatsu theme kind of comes back in the other things that you do outside of the writing, and sometimes in the writing.

So tell me a little bit about your streaming TTRPGs and actual play things.

Brandon O'Brien: Yeah. So, I am the co host of a podcast called Speculate, which is presently on hiatus. But when we were still live, we would on a monthly basis stream playing tabletop RPGs. And I think the obvious fun that a lot of other people have discovered about tabletop RPG actual play streams is, it is essentially guided theater. The book essentially gives you room for improv, and anytime you want to ask a question that you don't already know how to improv off the top of your head, you just roll dice and the game will tell you what the answer to your question is. Which is very rewarding for narrative play, but also once you find the game with the world and the story that you want to tell, it becomes very engaging to just kind of pursue all of the energy that that game is trying to get you to fulfill.

I think the most fun I've had running a game for a stream, there is a game by Andrew Gillis called Girl by Moonlight, which is like a very magical girl anime themed, but the actual story frames in the book are often very dark and complicated in that sense. And we played a series of one of those for Speculate, where essentially the world building is there is this conspiracy of powerful... question mark—we never even qualify what these entities are, but they have the capacity to enter and control dreams, and they do so for a very deeply socially ingrained conspiratorial reason that has an effect on the state of our city as a dystopia. And the protagonists are essentially the only people who can willfully enter and leave dreams and have been given the mandate to save other people from this conspiracy and reveal what its true nature is.

And what was fun about that is this world sucks. There's a rule in that specific story frame of the game where players have to make what is called an Obligation Rule, and what it defines is in their ordinary day to day life, how their job is inherently dystopian. One of the players was playing a teacher who discovered that their school is so ingrained in their conspiracy that teachers aren't allowed to have inspiring or hopeful conversations with students about their own gender identity. Another player character was a hostess at a hostess club who just discovered that they're in debt to the mafia. And then after that, they have to do the thing that is their calling in the real world, which is enter the world of dreams and try to save people from this thing. And then they're learning things like, one of your best friends was a member of the conspiracy the entire time, but they did it because they were trying to protect you because they love you. But now you're in a fist fight with them because they're the only enemy in the room. And like, homie, what?

A lot of the energy that I try to bring when I'm running and playing RPGs is, I don't like to know a lot of the answers to the end of the story, because we're playing to find out how the story goes. So I will just make characters and give them very intense back stories and kind of have a good idea of what they would do if they were left unbothered for like five more sessions, and then someone will make a radical decision about that character. I'm like, okay, cool, what happens now?

There are so many moments when I have looked directly to the camera with my jaw to the floor going, "I don't know how to answer the question you have just asked me about what happens next. So I'm gonna go back into the rulebook and start throwing some dice, and I'm gonna get back to you in a minute." And that's fun to me. Like I'm sure you've heard a lot of writers joke about the fact that we write books because this is the book that we want to read and no one else has ever written it yet. There is a lot of inherent joy in being able to go, I am playing this game because I want this vibe. I have no idea what I want out of this story yet. I just know I want this flavor of story. And then getting four of your friends together and they do the wildest thing you've ever imagined and you're like, yes, I enjoyed this so very much. This is good story.

And then you have to turn back to them and go, now I have to tell you how the world responds. You don't just continue telling the story to me. And I enjoy that so very much. I've actually been very frustrated by the fact that I haven't run a game on stream in over a year now. I really want to get back to it. So hopefully sometime very soon I get to do that again because it is actually very fun.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. And it's part of that, bringing the collaborative element into the storytelling where it's not just you making things up, which can be fun, and is, but there's something so powerful about having other people improv and come up with something that you never would have, and that aspect of the fun is just so much more enhanced, because there's more of you there.

In my TTRPG experience, the most fun has been the improv element. I was never really a rules person, kind of like you said, math isn't really my thing, I'm not going to crunch numbers. What matters is what choices can we all make in this room and how can we affect the plot, or make the GM be like, well, I don't know what to tell you. Sometimes the chaos is even more rewarding.

Brandon O'Brien: One of my greatest experiences as a GM, before that story, we were playing a game of Blades in the Dark, where I'd created this entire story about, all of the players were essentially fugitives running from the law because they were alleged to own this very dangerous artifact that had been stolen, etc. And there was a point in time where they had to interact with a mob boss in order to gain more information about the situation that they were in. They knew nothing about this person. They knew nothing about this person's relationship to one of their dead colleagues. All they knew was they need to get information from this person about another person who they also do not know. They have no in.

And then one of my players describes going into a closet, changing clothes into what looks like a uniform for one of the workers in this warehouse, steps out with another player who is not human, who is essentially just a giant robot, and tells this entire story about how they've been sent here by someone to gather information about XYZ. I have no idea what they're describing to this person. They just made up a story for two minutes. I'm like, mechanically, I should ask you to make a roll to see if you've persuaded this person. But you've persuaded me, so just do the thing!

Kat Kourbeti: Sometimes the dice roll is not necessary.

Brandon O'Brien: Yeah, sometimes you just do the thing! And I think that's what is most rewarding to me. Because in high school and early university, I hung out with a lot of theatre folks. Theatre is still, like, very strongly bonded to how I discovered poetry as a craft as well. I'm very into the idea that what TTRPGs mean when they say play to find out, is that anything that you do in game is play. We ask you to roll dice because if we do not know the answer to our question, the dice will give us the answer. If your performance gives me the answer, I do not need anything else from you.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Brandon O'Brien: People are committed to the idea that rules as written, you need to do X, Y, Z.

No, sometimes your players will just be committed to a course of action and you just let them experience the consequences of their actions. Sometimes you don't need to guess what other people will feel about this thing. Sometimes you just know. And I'm always excited about the moment when somebody makes a radical decision like that. Because it means that everything is happening at once. It is all RPG, it is all theater, it is all storytelling, in a way that doesn't require any other artifice. And when you hit that on the head, like, that's the whole game.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, glorious fun.

Brandon O'Brien: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Just a rad ol' time. I do hope that we can see more from you in that field soon. And until then, we'll leave notes for people to go check out the podcast and other places where that can be found.

So outside of your current, ever growing, infinite poetry collection that you're working on at the moment, is there anything else that's kind of recent that or coming soon that you want to promote or plug?

Brandon O'Brien: First and foremost, I really want people to check out the Seattle Worldcon blog. I'm very, very, very excited about Con-Verse, actually, because I like talking to people about poetry. As I said, I like giving people opportunities to find access into poetry as an art form, and speculative poetry as a subset of an art form. So I hope that it inspires you to dig more deeply. Hope by the time you're hearing this, if nominations are still open, you have bought your membership for Seattle Worldcon and are actually nominating poems for the best speculative poem special award at the Hugo Awards. And if we have missed that, and we are now into finalist period, I hope that you still have your membership. So you can actually put a poem as the winner on the ballot. But yes, I hope that you check out the blog.

I have poems all over the place. One of my latest poems in Uncanny Magazine, Anansi Braids Your Stepson's Hair, is like one of my favorites to have written so far. I'm so very grateful to have more poetry in the magazines that I really, really adore. So I hope that you're checking that out as well. And again, I hope that you're checking out all of the poetry in Uncanny and in Strange Horizons, all kinds of other places as well.

I will say that I am presently in the end of writing text for an RPG called Gray Shade, which is the D&D 5th edition RPG tie in for the Gray Assassin Trilogy by my good friend, the author Gregory A. Wilson. So if you ever wanted to play a religious assassin in a city that is more or less Renaissance Venice with the serial numbers filed off, I hope that I give you the experience of playing that.

I recently finished some writing for an adventure in the Tomb Raider Shadows of Truth TTRPG that is coming out very soon. I'm so very excited about that as well.

And yeah you can find me on the Internet all kinds of places @TheRisingTithes, and I have a website that is also my newsletter at BrandonOBrien.xyz, where I very sporadically write about pop culture and show pictures of whatever game I'm playing on my phone right now. So, yeah, check me out anywhere on the Internet, I guess.

Kat Kourbeti: Absolutely. Will do. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you and we'll see you around.

Brandon O'Brien: Yay! Thank you so very much for having me, this was fun.​