#i did also find a novella on clarkesworld that i wanted to read but did not have the wherewithal for 13k today lol

[essektheylyss]

Day 4 of summer short stories! Admittedly, I almost forgot to read something today today, which doesn't bode well, but alas.

[isabeljkim]

Short Story Submissions Guide for Idiots

The short fiction submissions game is confusing as hell when you first get into it…or at least, it was super confusing to me circa 2.5 years ago. I realized pretty quickly that the question wasn’t even “How do I get published?” but “Where do you go to get published?” and “How does anyone get published when the acceptance % rates are so low?” and “Where is everyone getting their information about how to do this?”

The answer is through googling. And twitter. And asking established writer friends. And guides that writers put together, like this one. There are others out there, and they’re probably better - do some searching, find out what works for you. But maybe this is a good starting point.

That’s a lot of opening to say this post is a fairly broad, hopefully comprehensive, slightly messy overview to “How to submit short stories (idiot edition),” which is hopefully helpful for people who want to break into the pro sff short story market. Skip to the end if you want tips, read from the beginning if you want a process guide.

This is not for: anyone who knows what they’re doing. This is for idiots only, guys . This is also not for people who want to submit to exclusively literary magazines, this is for genre [science fiction, fantasy, horror, speculative fiction broadly] only. Literary fiction submissions (and poetry, of any genre) aren’t something I’m well versed in.

My credentials: I girlbossed hard enough at submissions to get some pro sales (Check out my website for my three published things at Clarkesworld, Khoreo, and Sub-Q, gotta self plug, my other stuff is coming out hopefully soon at Lightspeed, Fantasy, Cast of Wonders, BCS, not to humblebrag). I started submitting seriously and actually selling stuff about in 2019ish, so I’m fairly new to the game so my process is very up to date. Also I’m a lawyer. That is irrelevant to today’s conversation but it’s new and exciting information for me and I’m very proud of myself so you get to know about that.

Disclaimers: This guide just has my submission process, and there are probably more efficient ones out there (and if you have suggestions dm me on twitter about it!). The style of this guide is going to be colloquial as fuck because if you want my good words you have to pay my billable hours (did I mention the lawyer thing). I can’t say that this is “wow! one true method for getting published!” because at the end of the day getting published is really only about the strength of your story and how much it resonates with a particular editor and market and whether Mercury is in retrograde.

But! There’s still a bunch of practical technical shit that’s helpful to know. So here’s the comprehensive, quick and dirty overview from the top:

1. Write a story

In some ways this first step is the hardest part, but not the focus of our exercise today. Good luck have fun don’t die write that funky music. Also edit that funky music. Pro tip: a “short story” is generally considered somewhere between 1k and 6k words, with anything lower than 1k generally being considered “flash fiction” and anything in the 10k and above being a novelette, novella, etc. Different markets will have different word limit restrictions - some only accept flash, some only accept short stories, some accept all of the above AND novellettes, etc. If you want to tailor your submission to a market, skip ahead to steps 3 and 6 and check out the guidelines before writing. My advice is that about 3-4k is a good, marketable length, but also, fuck marketability.

2. Format the story

Now we start caring about marketability. 99% of markets will want Shunn Manuscript Format (Modern). Format your story accordingly. This is the first pass at formatting you want to do - later you’ll want to format to the specific market you’re sending it to (Some markets want anonymity, etc.)

3. Pick the markets that you’re interested in

Maybe you have markets in mind, because you read a lot of short fiction. Maybe you have no fucking idea where to start. Well if you’re in the latter camp, you might want to join the former camp, but I’ll give you the cheat codes first: the first two places you probably want to look are a) The Submission Grinder and b) Ralan. Both websites list the currently open markets, and the Submission Grinder has a lot of really great submission tracking features. Ralan looks like it’s from the 90s but it’s regularly updated. If you have five dollars to toss every month, Duotrope has similar features to the Submission Grinder and lists literary markets and interviews with some editors as well. (Disclaimer: I pay for Duotrope, but I find the Submission Grinder far better).

Now that you have a list of all the places, you’re going to want to narrow that down.

Four considerations to make:

Prestige of the market: There are multiple tiers of market. Pro markets are those paying at least the SFWA rate, (8c a word currently) and who doesn’t like to get paid more? Furthermore, pro markets generally have larger readerships, and more eyes on your thing = better. And, a lot of the pro markets have Big Fancy Award winners in their pages, and it’d be pretty fun and sexy to share a TOC with one of them, right? In my opinion, there’s no point submitting to token or semipro markets first (unless theres a really specific market you want to get published in! follow your dreams!) - aim high bitches. (NOTE: I did this and it worked out pretty alright for me, but it took me longer to get published because of that, I think). The downside to the really prestigious markets is that they receive a lot of submissions - check on submission grinder and peep those sub 1% acceptance rates. Furthermore, there’s not a ton of pro markets. Get ready for rejections, and lots of them!

Submission opening windows If a market is open for a month once a year, you might want to prioritize it over a market that is open year round. This is the sort of thing you need to check individual markets websites for. For example - Lightspeed opens like once a year. Clarkesworld is open basically all the time.

Whether your story is a good fit for a particular market This is probably the most important point. At the highest level, don’t send horror to markets that say they don’t take horror, etc. On a lower level, you should read the magazines you’re submitting to and try and get a sense of what sort of stuff they publish, and evaluate how close your story is to what they’ve got. That being said - take a reasonable amount of stock in this, but you should send everything everywhere (within reason)…this will just help you decide order of operations. Furthermore, read the magazine’s submission guidelines, because they’ll usually list their likes, dislikes, and specific considerations.

Submission turnarounds. Some places take three months to get back to you with a rejection. Some places take two days. My best advice is to check the Submission Grinder for this, because that sure is a time difference, and that’ll change your timeline substantially.

4.Order of operations

Rank your now narrowed list of markets, based on the prior considerations or any other considerations you have. This is the point at which I recommend creating a spreadsheet to keep track of markets, submission dates, and responses. My spreadsheet is called “REJECTIONQUEST 2K20” despite it being the end of 2021 and also not made in 2020.

(If anyone wants a longer entry about my submission tetris approach, I’d be happy to write a post, but this is hella long already). Note: Let’s say you get rejected from everywhere you wanted to send it to. Just expand your list - my recommendation of curtailing the list comes from the fact that you have to start somewhere, and you might as well start at the combination of prestige and likelihood of publication - but different writers have different approaches.

5. Write a cover letter.

A cover letter is usually copy and pasted into the text entry part of the online submissions portal. Keep it short and simple, no need to get fancy. Your cover letter is the least important part of your submission. A lot of places won’t even look at it before reading your submission. It should look something like below:

[Greeting],

Body paragraph that lists a) story name, genre, and word count, b) relevant life experience (If you’re writing hard science fiction about physics and you’re a physicist… probably say that); c) relevant publications (three most relevant is a good number, if you don’t have any don’t worry, it’s not going to hurt your submission - it doesn’t matter that much.)

Thank you,

Your Name Here.

6. Submit!

BUT WAIT. First read the guidelines of the market you’re sending to, AGAIN. Then modify your formatted story to fit their guidelines. Anonymize, do specific formatting, save as a .doc rather than a .docx, then go ahead and shoot your shot.  

Nearly all markets have online submissions portals now and require digital submission. There will be a fairly obvious link on the market’s “submission” page on their website. A lot of places use Moksha, or sometimes Submittable. 

Note: Make sure the market got your submission - most places will send you an automatic notification of receipt.

Note: Let’s talk about simultaneous submissions for a bit. So, a simultaneous submission is when you send a story to multiple markets at the same time. Some markets are okay with this. Most of them aren’t. (This differs from literary markets, which are pretty much mostly simsubs). Is it worth simultaneously submitting despite the guidelines? Will doing so blacklist you? I’m going to give the controversial opinion of “It’s situational.” I think if it’s your first time submitting anything, you can probably get away with it. So if you want to roll the dice, that’s a you decision. But the minute you get anything other than a form rejection, abort mission. The real risk in simulsubs is that you damage relationships with editors by being uncool about their guidelines, and for that to be a risk, you have to be on their radar. Use your best judgement. I personally find simsubs that aren’t explicitly allowed by a market to be too stressful to do.

7. Receive feedback! Rejections, acceptances, rewrites, etc.

The feedback is going to range from form rejections to acceptances. Unless you’re fantastically talented and lucky, you’re going to be getting more of the former than the latter. Rejectomancy, or the scrutinization of rejections for signs and portents of how much an editor liked it, is a whole slightly suspect art practiced by short story writers. Jokes aside, it’s a good idea to keep track of whether you’re getting mostly form rejections, higher tier form rejections, or personal rejections. 

A “form rejection” is one that is copy and pasted to the majority of the slush pile, and usually just indicates something along the lines of “nope! not for us!” politely. A “higher tier form rejection” is one that comes from a managing/associate/etc editor or editor-in-chief and indicates that the story got closer to publication or they liked it in some way, and therefore is more in line with the work that the magazine wants to publish. A “personal rejection” is a personalized rejection that details specifically what worked and what didn’t, most of the time. Each magazine has norms for how many of each they send, or what their stock phrasing is. Rejection Wiki is somewhat out of date, but has a large database of examples. 

Some magazines only give out personals to a small fraction of the slush pile, and it’s always a lovely silver lining to receive some useful feedback or learn what worked in a story. Furthermore, keeping track of rejections can track progress, and it’s cool to see over time that youe’ve gone from all forms, to mostly higher tier forms and personals. Don’t get discouraged (yeah, easier said than done, I know. I could write a whole other post on that topic.).

Other things you might receive are “hold notices” and “rewrite requests.” Many magazines send out hold notices when the story passes the first tier of slush readers and is pushed up to the editor. This indicates that your story is a tonal fit for the magazine, and also, it’s getting closer to hypothetical publication. This also indicates usually that it will take fucking forever to get back to you if it’s a rejection or an acceptance, but that’s the price you pay. A “rewrite request” is an interesting, fairly idiosyncratic response - high level, the editor wants you to rewrite a portion and resubmit it, or they’re accepting with the caveat that you need to change something. These are varied enough from market to market that I don’t have useful info for them as a whole. 

Note: A healthy way to think about submissions is as not the definite chance to be published, but the sure outcome of receiving feedback. Treat rejections with advice in them as your own personal writer’s workshop. What I learned from my early rejections was that my endings needed a lot of work and I had a tendency to trail off, and incorporating the advice into my work led to later acceptances.

Note: DO NOT respond to a rejection letter. JUST DON’T. The ONLY exception is if you get a rewrite request.

If you do receive an acceptance, CONGRATULATIONS !! I have no advice for you now because most editors have different acceptance/contract signing/payment protocols, from here on out it gets pretty idiosyncratic.

And that’s all I’ve got, drop me a line on twitter if you want me to elaborate on any of this. And...

Good luck ! 

Grab bag advice

1. Have multiple stories out at different markets. Like. A lot of stories. Have 5+ stories out on submission at once, all at different markets. Yes that’s a lot. No not all of them will probably get published. But writing more will make you a better writer, and it effectively multiplies your chances at publication. This is why having a spreadsheet is useful, because it’ll help you track what is where, and for how long. (Or you can use the Submission Grinder for this, but I personally don’t because I’m attached to my horrible gdrive spreadsheet)

Note: I don’t always follow my own advice, I usually have 3 stories or less on submission at once, because I sure do have a day job)

2. Follow markets on twitter. Why is everyone in the writing world on twitter? I have no idea. But markets will often announce upcoming submission windows, guest editors, and similar things on twitter. Following a bunch of markets on twitter is often easier than manually checking each site.

3. The odds of publication look bad on paper, but in reality, are probably better than you think they are, as long as you can write a coherent narrative. A lot of the stuff in the slush pile is…questionable quality. Best thing you can do is focus on your writing! Sorry, that’s boring advice, I know.

[topmixtrends]

VANDANA SINGH IS a writer who straddles the boundary between the sciences and the humanities. From August to May, she devotes her time and energy to teaching physics at Framingham State University in Massachusetts, but in the summer months her attention turns to the writing of what she calls imaginative fiction. Born and raised in New Delhi before moving to the United States to pursue a PhD in particle physics, Singh’s cultural and scientific understanding of the world is woven into her narratives, the minds of her characters, and the richness of her landscapes (whether earthly or extraterrestrial). This background makes her fiction at once startling, unique, complex, and beautiful. By employing features common to genres such as magic realism, science fiction, fantasy, folklore, and myth, Singh’s fiction defies boundaries and, in that defiance, captures a vision of the world that is both far-reaching and profoundly original. 

Singh uses her imaginative aesthetic to explore worlds where once dominant ideologies no longer prevail, where new mythological structures are emerging, and where seemingly settled categories such as race, gender, and even species cease to hold weight. As such, her work is about more than aliens and alternative universes: it exposes forms of alienation caused by social and political constraints. As she explains in her “Speculative Manifesto” (2009): “Reality is such a complex beast that in order to begin to comprehend it we need something larger than realistic fiction.” Singh’s fiction is indeed much larger.

Her works include the short story collection The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories (2009), along with several novellas: Of Love and Other Monsters (2007); Distances (2008), a Carl Brandon Parallax Award Winner; Infinities (2008); Sailing the Antarsa (2013); Entanglement (2014); and Of Wind and Fire (2016). Her essays and short stories, many of which are routinely featured in “Year’s Best SF” volumes, have appeared in Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction. Her second short story collection, Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories, will be published by Small Beer Press in February 2018. 

On April 8, 2016, at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, Singh presented a reading alongside fellow SF author Joe Haldeman at an event entitled “Imagining the Present: Science, Science Fiction, and Society.” Prior to this reading, Singh graciously agreed to sit down with me to discuss (among other things) speculative fiction, storytelling, physics, climate change, and her recent trip to the Arctic. Below is an abridged version of our conversation.

¤

KYLIE KORSNACK: In your “Speculative Manifesto,” you write: “[S]peculative fiction is about what cannot ever be or what cannot be as yet.” Can you talk a bit more about this statement? What do you mean by this particular definition of speculative fiction?

VANDANA SINGH: I have always thought of constraints as something to push against. There are constraints that are social and constraints that are physical — laws of nature, for instance. The only thing that at least theoretically can transcend constraints and boundaries is the imagination. So, to me, the literature of the imagination is speculative fiction and it is the freest literature. Despite the fact that a lot of science fiction does have constraints and can be very short-sighted — it can repeat and not challenge certain types of norms and customs — this literature still has the potential to soar above those constraints to another space, and that is why I love speculative fiction. And the revolutionary part of it is that you can imagine a different way to be.

Now, speculative fiction is not necessarily going to tell you how you can get there. But if you can imagine it, then, in a sense, you’ve already taken the first step. If it involves violating the laws of the universe, then you will never get there, but it is going to nevertheless change you-the-writer or you-the-reader in some fundamental way. So I think that the practice of writing and reading speculative fiction, at its best, is a very freeing thing. And so that is what I was referring to when I wrote that “Speculative Manifesto.”

I really like the way you emphasized just now that both reading and writing speculative fiction gives access to its revolutionary potential. Would you say that you’re not simply trying to challenge the reader to think in a different way, but that you are also challenging yourself? 

Yeah. But it is a challenge. When I write, and a lot of people probably write like this, I have a beginning or an idea or an image or a character, and it’s like I’m entering some new land and can’t really see very far into the distance. And so I follow this guide rope, and I leave the guide rope as I’m going along too, and I discover things. To me, that is the most exciting part about writing — that I don’t know what is going to happen, and I want to find out! And there is that pleasure at the end if it goes well. You have this sense of everything working out, not necessarily neatly, because real life is never neat and you want that aspect to be there — the messiness and the complexity. There is a certain satisfaction in doing that, but I do think that pretty much all of my stories are in some ways failures. Some more than others, but nevertheless, I hope they are valiant failures.

Failures? Why do you think they are failures?

Well, I’m not saying, “Oh, my work is bad.” What I’m saying is that there is such a gap between that wordless sense of where I want to be with the story and the actual story itself, you know? It used to bother me a lot, but now I just kind of know that that gap is going to be there to a greater or lesser extent. And I feel like it is better for me to try to do things and fall flat on my face or not get so far, or have this abyss between intention and reality, than to write something safe. So in that sense I think that it’s like I’m reaching for something and not quite grasping it. And maybe you never can, but I have this sense of the story as an amorphous thing in a space I cannot describe in words or pictures. But I have a sense of where the story should be and most of my stories don’t actually get to that place. So that is what I mean by my stories all being failures.

So, do you ever know how a story is going to end when you start writing?

There have a been a few stories where I have known, from the get-go, as I am writing the first paragraph, how it’s going to end and I have some idea of the middle as well. It’s almost as though the whole story has come together in a rush, and I just need to type it out. That happens rarely, but it has happened. Other than those rare instances, I generally don’t know the ending.

I came across another version of your “Speculative Manifesto,” in the introduction to your collection Breaking the Bow. In that one, you say: “Speculative fiction comes naturally to us Indians since we have a tendency to embroider, to propagate, to let the imagination run wild, and to argue incessantly.” I was curious, thinking about what you have said about speculative fiction, if you could talk more specifically about Indian speculative fiction and/or what you meant by this idea that “imaginative literature comes naturally to Indians”? 

Well, you know, I can’t back it up with data, but it’s what I feel from having grown up in India and being Indian. You know, even going to the market — well, now there are more supermarkets, but you still have the neighborhood vegetable market where farmers bring produce from the fields outside the city and sell them — is such an interesting thing. I remember going with my mother to get vegetables and the witticisms that would pass back and forth. My mother would challenge the quality of the vegetables and the seller would take umbrage and it was like a drama — a script, but a very inventive one. And they would — each side — make up stories about the vegetables — something about the “beautiful conditions under which these pumpkins ripened” or other tall tales. The place is so thick with stories! It was something I didn’t realize until I lived in the United States for a long time and then went back … that you can almost pluck the stories from the air!

Even in my mother’s rendering of the Ramayana when I was a kid (I heard it from her and my paternal grandmother as I was growing up), she would interpolate, add her own descriptions, things like that. Only later I discovered from my grandfather that there were actually multiple Ramayanas, so it seemed like not just my mother but a whole bunch of other people had been doing this stuff and even going much further with it. (Breaking the Bow, which I co-edited with Anil Menon, is a volume of Ramayana tales that keeps that tradition alive in the 21st century!) A lot of Indians seem to be comfortable living in parallel with realities that are metaphoric or imaginative as well as in the so-called factual world. For instance, my mother is a very educated person but she grew up near a small village, and because of this she relates to the world through story. She would weave interrelations between people through story. Later on, though reflection, I came to realize this, and that is why I wrote what I did. It just seems to come naturally and I don’t know if I can explain it any better than that.

Do you feel that you are the same way? Do you understand the world through story?

Well, I would have said no to that question for probably many years of my life. But reflecting on that statement now, I think I have to say yes. But I didn’t know it for a long time. Being a scientist, you think, well, I’m going to look at data, I’m going to look at what it’s telling me, what nature is telling me through these numbers. Though I was never the kind of scientist who went into the field for the sole pleasure of working with data — as Einstein once loftily said, “I want to know God’s thoughts, the rest are details.” (Of course, the devil is also in the details.) For me, I wanted to know what the great patterns of the universe are, which is an aesthetic longing. But at the same time, I was bound by restraints — that this is what you can say because this is what nature is telling you, but other things outside of this are speculation. But being out of academia for 10 years gave me a chance to think about things critically and to reflect on science and its role in society — science, which I love very much and yet which is so flawed in the sense that it is so easily appropriated by powerful forces, such as colonialism. There is a link between science and colonialism that cannot be denied.

My area of study was particle physics — I studied the physics of quarks, but I have always been interested in language and in the nonhuman too. And so, later on, I realized that what I sought, even in the sciences, was stories. But it was stories of neutrons and protons or planets or whatever. And the stories had constraints because they were being translated through human mechanisms, and because of physical laws. Nevertheless, they were stories, and they weren’t any less interesting than stories about human beings. Later on, I realized why, even though I love a lot of mainstream literature, it doesn’t fully engage me and why I can never write it — because it is so divorced from the nonhuman. So, I got a sense of science as stories we are trying to interpret, stories that matter is telling us, filtered through our particular human/cultural lenses.

I think that, in the act of reading, one creates a kind of world that is neither the writer’s world nor the reader’s world, but a hybrid. And similarly, I think that when we interpret what nature is telling us, it is kind of a hybrid world that we make between humans and matter or humans and other species. That is when I realized that it has been all about stories after all. Which was a bit of a pleasant shock. Now, my thing is: “Hey, all stories are important! Not just human stories!”

Did this realization that science too is made up of stories change the way you teach your science classes at all?

Yeah, totally. It was a very delightful thing to think about — that we are trying to interpret nature’s stories. Particularly for the non-science majors in my physics classes, I think this is a way that engages them, but also other students as well. Now, every couple of weeks or so, they have to tell me physics stories. I’ll ask them: “So, what did the world tell you that has to do with physics?” And we will talk about it in class for a bit. It is a lot of fun.

That is really neat. And it feeds into another question I had. I’m really interested in the relationship between your scientific work and your literary work. In a past interview, you stated that, “Physics and literature are to me are like breathing and eating. I need them both to be alive, and in a sense they give me a sort of binocular vision of the world.” I can see from your last answer that part of this has to do with your interest in stories that thread through them both, but is there anything else that you see connecting these two domains — physics and literature — for you?

Yeah, there is one other thing: in science, traditionally (and we have to remember that science is still evolving, so what we call science now is not necessarily going to be what science is later on), if you think about its origins with Newton and Descartes, the reductionist idea of a clockwork universe, we are still deeply influenced by that vision today. It gave birth to the industrial revolution and all the “-isms,” political and economic, that we know now. But then we also have the great revolutions in physics — relativity and quantum mechanics and so on — which are telling us that things aren’t quite that way. The universe is actually not a clockwork machine; in fact, it is non-Newtonian. So, who knows what science is going to become in the future?

In that regard, one of things that has always bothered me is how scientists keep talking about objectivity. I get that you don’t want your own biases to affect your experiments or your conclusions, but how can you be objective when you are studying the universe and you are part of the universe? There is a limit to what we can mean by objectivity. It can only be temporary and contextual. In fact, this fetish for objectivity is almost becoming an excuse not to talk about the ethical implications of scientific developments. It is as though, when you are doing science, you cannot participate in the universe. You have to artificially remove yourself and say, “Hey! I am here, and this thing I am studying is over there.” Which makes it easier to think of it as separate from you, a thing you can study in a disinterested way.

Instead, I think the scientist should say, “Hey! I am part of the universe and this is part of the universe!” And we are just going to inquire into it, befriend it, and see what happens. There is still a humility involved — you don’t want to let your feelings or desires or biases distort your perception or throw you off track — but I believe scientific inquiry is more like a dance than a distancing. For me, I feel that the place where you can really be a participant observer in the universe is in science fiction or speculative fiction. Here, you are dancing with the ideas of science, but you are also engaged with what it means to be human and alive. So that is another aspect of my life in science, which has taken some strange turns.

I don’t do particle physics research anymore and haven’t for a long time because I took 10 years off from academia. You can’t easily go back to research in that field because it is growing so fast. But what I do now is a lot of research on the pedagogy of science — creative and critical pedagogy — and I’m also shifting toward talking about climate change, studying the science and pedagogy of climate change through an interdisciplinary lens. This is one of the things where the interlocking of various systems is so important that you can’t look at it from a reductionist perspective. So I’m hoping to go into that area more and more.

Speaking of your emerging interest in climate change, you took a trip to the Arctic not too long ago. Did that trip change your perspective in any way? Did it impact your desire to continue teaching yourself about climate change or your interest in climate fiction?

Yes, very much so. I went to the Arctic in 2014 when I was on sabbatical. I received a program award from the American Association of Colleges and Universities to create a case-study-based project for undergraduate education, so I picked climate change. I wanted to situate the study in a place where change is occurring most dramatically, and so the Arctic seemed a logical choice. I went to Alaska. I visited two or three places there. The most dramatic place I visited was Barrow, right at the edge of the Arctic Ocean. Firstly, it changed me just seeing a place that is so different from where I grew up and so different from anywhere else that I’d been. I think place changes us if we let it. It speaks to us. And the experience was so incredible that I’m still processing it now.

But also, the people who live there are the Iñupiaq Eskimos; they’ve lived there for thousands of years; they’ve adapted to modern lifestyles while retaining some of their traditions, such as whaling. They are actually among the more well-off Native peoples in Alaska because they are able to get money from oil leases. Thinking about their experiences, I realized how complicated the whole climate situation is — not just the physics of it, but how human beings interact with the climate and with the economic system. And I realized how important visions and voices of indigenous peoples are to us. I’m not trying to revive some noble-savage stereotype here because obviously there are many indigenous cultures and even within indigenous cultures there are many different ways of thinking. For example, I found that in some communities people were divided about offshore oil drilling. But still, I think that the alternate paradigms indigenous peoples give us, especially at a time when it seems literally true that we are looking at our own potential extinction, are very important. Some of the papers I read when I was at the University of Alaska Fairbanks were scientific papers, published in peer-reviewed journals, co-authored by Native elders who had not received a formal education. They were the result of decades of scientists and elders working together, of scientists realizing these people have something really important to give.

One of the things I’m really interested in now is looking at India and how traditional knowledge systems — the knowledge of the so-called tribal or indigenous peoples — might inform our own worldviews as we face the climate issue. This sort of engagement has been a big and very exciting new thing for me. I’ve always been curious about indigenous cultures, but my Arctic trip made me really, really interested. I’m following right now the fortunes of a tribe in northeast India. I just talked to a journalist-activist who has been working with them, and he emphasized how the development policies that are occurring in India are basically colonialist in nature even though it’s the Indian government that’s doing it. He said it is driving the people to ruination. This particular tribe just won a Supreme Court case against a mining company after a long and bitter fight. They didn’t want to have development the way it is generally defined. They said, “We know what it is like in the cities. We’ve gone there. We see how you live. We don’t want to live like that.” But, you know, if you look at how modern culture has crushed our imaginations, people can’t even think of an alternative. They’d rather think of the collapse of humanity than imagine an alternative. Which is why I like imaginative fiction so much, because it is about alternatives.

¤

Kylie Korsnack is a PhD candidate in English at Vanderbilt University. She studies contemporary literature, speculative fiction, and digital pedagogy.

The post Transcending Boundaries: An Interview with Vandana Singh appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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