Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 67 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, fantasy, magazine, short story, clarkesworld, science fiction magazine, fantasy magazine, short stories, semiprozine, Hugo Nominee, best editor short form
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2012-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

About the Author

Brian Francis Slattery is a freelance editor, musician, and author of Spaceman Blues, Liberation, and the newly released Lost Everything, completing a kind of trilogy about what happens when everything collapses. He lives with his family outside of New Haven, Connecticut.

Passing Through Each Other:

A Round-Table Discussion of Speculative Fiction and Academia

Jeremy L. C. Jones

What do Julianna Baggott and Paul Levinson have in common? Or, how about James Enge and Joan Slonczewski? Nnedi Okorafor and Brian Evenson? Ekaterina Sedia and Jeffrey Ford? For one thing, they all write speculative fiction and they all teach at a college or university.

Below, these eight authors discuss the interrelationship of speculative fiction and academia from the point of view of writer/professors. The questions I posed to them grew out of my work at Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that I co-founded with Jeff VanderMeer at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC. Shared Worlds, in turn, grew out of my having used speculative fiction in a high school English class and seeing how powerful an effect it had on students.

Yet, as historian W. Scott Poole, a professor at the College of Charleston and the author of Monsters in America, points out, “Speculative fictions are seldom seen as a central part of a traditional liberal arts curriculum. In fact, such works tend to be relegated to special topics courses in [English departments], seen as the special province of those, usually, postmodern leaning profs, who jump back and forth across the line between popular and so-called ‘High Culture.’”

My experiences as an adjunct professor in higher education are similar to those mentioned by Poole. At the three colleges where I have taught, I have met numerous colleagues who read speculative fiction, a few who teach it, and one that writes it. But I also have been told, in essence, “We don’t teach that here.”

However, Poole suggests that “[s]peculative fiction and higher education share some of the same goals. Both build worlds. Both are amalgams of art and science that endeavor to open up the mysteries of nature, history and culture by hypothesizing speculative universes of meaning.”

I bet that many of the professors and administrators involved in Shared Worlds might agree with Poole on that!

As a student, I was lucky. My undergraduate creative writing teacher, Madison Smartt Bell, told me point blank, “Read anything and everything. It will all teach you something.” In workshops, he never balked at speculative stories.

Similarly, in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, no one ever forbade me from writing or discussing speculative fiction. Yet, I do not remember ever discussing speculative fiction or reading any speculative fiction manuscripts in workshops. Even so, a few years after graduating from the program, my close friend and classmate, Robert V. S. Redick, sold an epic fantasy trilogy, The Chathrand Voyage, to Gollancz (UK) and Del Rey (US).

(When we were in school, I didn’t even know he read fantasy, let alone write it. I don’t think he was hiding a “dirty secret” .

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