MF GALAXY

Award-winning writer Jennifer Cockrall-King is a journalist and the author of Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution, a book on global movements in urban food production.

Her articles have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers including the Chicago Sun-Times, the National Post, Maclean’s, and many more. She spoke with me live onstage at Authorpalooza #2 in Edmonton at Cha Island on November 26, 2014.  She talks about the business and the craft of being a freelance journalist and how the skills for both can help other writers boost their careers, and what her A-game is, what it means to physicalise her writing, and how to learn from other writers.

Next up, award-winning fantasy novelist Eileen Bell. Her debut novel was the paranormal mystery Seeing the Light, which won the 2014 Book Publishers Association of Alberta award for Best Speculative Fiction Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Bony Blythe Award for Light Mystery. She’s also the author of Drowning in Amber and Meeting the Parents, edits for On Spec Magazine, and wrote one of the novellas in Women of the Apocalypse. She spoke with me at Authorpalooza #3 on March 11, 2015 live at Devaney’s Pub in Edmonton.

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London-born Jenn Brissett is one of those classic overnight success stories who was decades in the making. Her first novel, Elysium: Or, The World After, was the runner-up for the 2015 Philip K. Dick Award and a finalist for the 2015 Locus Best First Novel Award. She’s currently completing the sequel called Eleusis and has had stories published in The Best of Halfway Down the Stairs.

She has a Master degree in Creative Writing specialising in Speculative Fiction, and also an Electrical Engineering degree with a concentration in Visual Art. Prior to winning literary accolades, she owned and ran Indigo Café & Books in Brooklyn.

In today’s MF GALAXY, we discuss:

• Her strategies for creating intimacy for readers
• How, why, and where she takes careful observation of her fellow New Yorkers
• Why she uses analogue methods in a digital age for editing her work
• Her take on using the five senses and, yes, extra senses, in order to make her work the best it can be, and
• How to defeat imposter syndrome

And along the way, Brissett cites fantasy author David Anthony Durham.

She and I spoke on July 22, 2016 by Skype, and we began by discussing which teacher had such a huge impact on her, and why.

jennbrissett.com

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To be alive is to eat. To enjoy life is to eat. To meet with family and friends and reminisce and plan the future is to eat. And of course, all of human culture, in one way or another revolves around our basic need to stay alive through producing, consuming, and loving food.

So why do so few novelists, poets, lyricists, and other writers talk about food in their work?

I’ve been cooking since I was a kid and have always loved everything about acquiring, making, and consuming food, and in recent years I’ve become an enthusiastic and productive gardener. I’ve relished (ba-dum-ching) my conversations with other people, but especially other writers, about food. This episode features the sparkling ideas about food, culture, science, feminism, social justice, technology, and more of three delightful human beings and celebrated writers:

SG Wong is the creator of the Lola Starke hardboiled detective series (Die on Your Feet, In For a Pound, and Devil Take the Hindmost), set in Crescent City, California, in an alternate history in which China colonised North America. An Arthur Ellis Award finalist, Wong is also a sparkling stalwart of Edmonton’s literary scene as an organiser of writer conferences. She’s one of those outstanding individuals whose endless energy benefits everyone in the community. 

Ekaterina Sedia is the author of The House Of Discarded Dreams, The Secret History of Moscow, and The Alchemy of Stone. She’s a short story writer who also occasionally edits anthologies, and was an interim non-fiction editor for Clarkesworld Magazine in the fall of 2008. She blogs television, books, fashion, food, and even cats, with a focus on the intersection between fashion industry and feminism. She encourages readers to contact her at [email protected].

Nalo Hopkinson, whom the Routledge Companion to Literature and Science calls a luminary in the science fiction community. She is widely known for her Africentric science fiction and fantasy novels exploring the experiences and cultures of African peoples in the Caribbean and ultimately into the galaxy. She’s the author of ten celebrated books including Skin Folk, Sister Mine, The New Moon’s Arms, and her explosive debut Brown Girl in the Ring, a dystopian science fiction adventure set in near-future Toronto featuring an African-Canadian heroine and the orisha gods of Nigeria and Benin.

The bonus edition for Patreon subscribers features an extra 40 minutes of conversation, so sign up, why doncha?

For more information including recipes, visit MFGALAXY.org.

Thirty actors, writers, film makers, cartoonists, singers, MCs, DJs, and academics answer the question: Does racial tension ever disappear for you?

• T.E.D.D.Y.
• Wes Borg
• Joy Lusco Kecken
• Michael Muhammad Knight
• Thomas Wharton
• DeWayne Copeland
• A Lee Martinez
• David Simon
• Ishmael Reed
• Scott Wilson
• Waymatea
• Robert Chew
• Shawn Taylor
• Isaiah Washington
• Sonja Sohn
• A Peter Bailey
• Wendell Pierce
• Lisa Yaszek
• Abdi Samatar
• Lester Kenyatta Spence
• Jamie Hector
• Amir Sulaiman
• Gene Luen Yang
• Stephen Notley
• Jitu tha Jugganot
• Ann Vriend
• Runoko Rashidi
• Sharon Lewis
• Seith Mann, and
• Clark Peters

A couple of important links:

David Simon refers to conflict with Charles Roc Dutton while making the miniseries The Corner. For further reading, check this article.

I asked A. Peter Bailey about African youth in the US (and Canada) believing that education is “White,” and learned later for the outstanding sociologist Algernon Austin and his book Getting It Wrong that such claims are mostly a myth. Listen to my interview with Algernon Austin here.

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I've been asking the question for over two decades. Now here the responses in part one of a special two-part series on MF GALAXY featuring, in part one (be sure to download parts 1A and 1B):

Angela Davis

Billie Jean Young

Billie Jean Young

Ernest Dickerson

Lorraine Monroe

Chuck D

Reginald Hudlin

Michael Parenti

Mario Van Peebles

Ralph Nader

Andre Royo  

Bill Fletcher

Vern Thiessen

Kenneth T. Williams

K Tempest Bradford

Jim True-Frost

David Barsamian

David Mills

Neil Grahn

Darryl Lenox

Wendell Pierce

William B. Davis

Robert Wisdom

Ted Bishop

Charles Saunders

Clark Johnson

Titilope Sonuga

Juan Cole

John Jennings

Ron Pederson

Seth Gilliam

Ed Burns

NK Jemisin

Christian A. Brown

Janine Jackson

Algernon Austin

Wab Kinew

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John W. Campbell Award-winning novelist Mur Lafferty is the author of the six-volume Afterlife series, the Shambling Guides series, Playing for Keeps, Merry Christmas from the Heartbreakers, and Marco and the Red Granny. She’s been a podcaster since the beginnings of podcasting, starting in 2004, and she’s won the Podcast Peer Award and three Parsec Awards. Last year, she was inducted into the Podcaster Hall of Fame for shows such as Geek Fu Action Grip, I Should Be Writing, and her writing business show Ditch Diggers. She holds an MFA in popular fiction. She’s also an avid pro-attendee of fiction conventions, and annually publishes a beginner’s guide to preparing for con season.

In today’s episode of MF GALAXY, Mur Lafferty discusses:

• What it is about novel proposals that is so profoundly unsatisfying she might switch to writing on-spec permanently
• The craft of revision, and her latest method for jumpstarting a stalled manuscript
• Cloning vs. inventing for character creation, and her favourite book to explore character archetypes
• Why she’s hate-watching The Bachelorette
• Why she says that reality TV is populated by narcissists and extremist TV pundits are sociopaths
• Why working with an editor is like experiencing the five stages of grief, and
• What happened when an editor asked her to make a sex scene more graphic

Lafferty spoke with me on July 07, 2016 by Skype from her home in North Carolina.

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Gail Sidonie Sobat is a singer, teacher, author of eleven books, and organiser of YouthWrite, one of Canada’s most successful and enduring creative writing workshops for young people. She’s taught internationally and at the post-secondary level, and is profoundly devoted to writers, the writing community, and teens and kids in distress.

In this episode of MF GALAXY, Gail Sobat discusses:

• How YouthWrite encourages students to develop writing skills and experience across writing disciplines
• Mental hacks to overcome writing blocks and guarantee page output
• How being a teacher has helped her create better and more truthful characters
• Why she says she has an ethical duty to listen, and
• Her excellent business advice for writers seeking to build a career for the long run

Continuing from the previous episode of MF GALAXY, is part 2 of my conversation with comic book and video game writer Andrew Foley. Andrew Foley writes for Beamdog Game Studio in Edmonton, and wrote the graphic novels Parting Ways (illustrated by Scott Mooney and Nick Craine) and Done to Death, illustrated by star-artist Fiona Staples. He’s also the writer of the graphic novel Cowboys & Aliens.

In this episode, Foley discusses:

• How comic book scripts are similar to screenplays
• The Marvel Method of writing as a scam to make artists do most of the work
• What makes Alan Moore an insane genius
• How a car accident led Foley to create his graphic novels Parting Ways + Done to Death
• Why working with superstar artist Fiona Staples wasn’t enough to guarantee their graphic novel stayed in print, and
• His career advice for anyone who wants to enter and stay in comics.

Andrew Foley spoke with me live onstage at Authorpalooza 1 in October 2014 at the University of Alberta.

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SG Wong is the creator of the Lola Starke hardboiled detective series set in Crescent City, California, in an alternate history in which China colonised North America. Arthur Ellis Award-finalist Wong is also a sparkling stalwart of Edmonton’s literary scene as an organiser of writer conferences. She’s one of those outstanding individuals whose endless energy benefits everyone in the community. In this episode of MF Galaxy, SG Wong discusses:

• How a major publisher of her first novel did almost nothing to sell their own book
• The impact of going indie on her work and creativity
• How writers must view their own work
• Under what conditions writers should conduct seminars in schools
• Her approach to world building her magnificent alt-earth setting of Crescent City, and
• How writers should approach writing characters who possess an ethnic, racial, or other identity unlike their own.

Along the way, Wong refers to Gail, meaning the novelist, writing teacher, and literary organiser Gail Sidonie Sobat. SG Wong spoke with me live onstage at Authorpalooza 3 at Devaney’s Pub in Edmonton in April, 2015.

SG Wong reads from Die On Your Feet

Next, from Authorpalooza 1 from October 2014, is comic book and video game writer Andrew Foley. Andrew Foley writes for Beamdog Game Studio in Edmonton, and wrote the graphic novels Parting Ways (illustrated by Scott Mooney and Nick Craine) and Done to Death, illustrated by star-artist Fiona Staples. But to some, Foley is best known as the writer of the graphic novel Cowboys & Aliens, and that’s the subject of “Andrew Foley’s True Hollywood Stories.”

Here’s what Stephen King has to say about Tananarive Due’s best known novel, My Soul to Keep: It’s “an eerie epic [that] bears favourable comparison to Interview with the Vampire. I loved this novel.”

When one of the best-selling and most-loved novelists of all time praises your work like that, you know you’ve arrived. But success wasn’t overnight for Tananarive Due. After working for years as a journalist, she took a leave to co-write Freedom in the Family, a memoir of the 1960s US human rights struggle from the perspective of her mother, Patricia Stephens Due, who’d been an activist in it.

Due is the author of twelve novels, including The Living Blood, Devil’s Wake, and Joplin’s Ghost, and the short story collection Ghost Summer. Due has won the American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and the Kindred Award. In 2004, along with Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, Due received the “New Voice in Literature Award” at the Yari Yari Pamberi conference co-sponsored by New York University's Institute of African-American Affairs and African Studies Program and the Organization of Women Writers of Africa. In 2010, she was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism's Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University.

With her novelist husband Steven Barnes, Due writes the Tennyson Hardwick mystery series in partnership with actor Blair Underwood. She holds a journalism degree and an M.A. in English literature from Leeds, where she specialized in Nigerian literature as a Rotary Foundation Scholar.

She currently teaches screenwriting at UCLA and in the MFA programme at Antioch University ,Los Angeles.

In this episode of MF GALAXY, Tananarive Due discusses:

• How learning screenwriting can make you a better novelist
• Why anyone aspiring to be a novelist should master the short story first
• Why, even as a creative writing teacher, she won’t read your novel
• How novice writers mis-use so-called witness narrators
• Ongoing racist barriers in Hollywood, but a surprising breakthrough in some writers’ rooms for women, and The origins of psychological realism in contemporary science fiction and fantasy

Due spoke with me on June 6, 2016 by Skype from her home in Los Angeles.

Writing blog www.tananarivedue.wordpress.com

Website www.tananarivedue.com

The “brain drain” from Africa’s 55 countries is the cause of much lamentation—sending legions of doctors, engineers, and other professionals to serve the West at the exact moment they can lead economic growth at home.

But Titilope Sonuga is part of the unheralded but very real “brain train,” the expatriates who are moving back home with education, skills, and networks they’ve gained abroad.

Sonuga has ridden that train. She’s lived on two continents, had a career in Canada as a civil engineer, co-founded Edmonton’s thriving Breath In Poetry performance collective and hit stages with her work across the country, relocated to her family’s home country of Nigeria, become an Intel spokesperson to encourage women to use information technology, performed her verse at the inauguration of Nigeria’s president, and ascended to television stardom in Nigeria.

Not bad for a thirty-year-old, huh?

In today’s episode of MF GALAXY, Titilope Sonuga discusses:

• How she came to perform at the presidential inauguration for a country of 180 million people
• Her approach to rehearsals for spoken-word poetry performances and how she addresses anxiety
• The purposes of Intel Nigeria’s campaign She Will Connect, and why the tech giant asked her to be its spokesperson
• The many reasons that artists should embrace science and technology, and how her engineering mindset lives in her poetry aesthetics, and
• The perks of getting famous by being a star on one of Nollywood’s most beloved television shows.

Sonuga spoke with me by Skype from her apartment in Lagos, Nigeria on November 15, 2015.

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