GUEST DIGEST: Christopher Caldwell

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Christopher Caldwell is a queer, Black American who lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland.  He is a recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship, and an alumnus of Clarion West. His work has appeared in publications such as Uncanny Magazine, Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, and Fiyah Literary Magazine, as well as the anthologies New Suns 2, Trouble the Waters, and Glitter and Ashes, among others.  His debut collection of short stories Call and Response: Stories of the Fantastic will be published by Neon Hemlock Press on October 14, 2025. 

Take it away, Christopher!!

- Gailey

Seattle Art Museum

I love art museums. It's easy to lose a day in them, wandering around, contemplating imagination-made material.  When I was in Seattle in August for Worldcon, I took some time out to visit the Seattle Art Museum; I was interested in an Ai Weiwei exhibit which was well worth my time. But while I was there, I discovered the work of Tariqa Waters through her temporary exhibit Venus is Missing (through January 4, 2026). In this exhibit, Waters takes the familiar and nostalgic, specifically the little hair ties with colorful plastic balls on the end (every Black girl I knew in elementary school had dozens of these) and turns them into something exotic and spectacular. Blown up to enormous proportions and made out of materials that resemble marble and glass, they adorn a pink rocket ship, and stand central to the exhibit in colossal size as a pair of binary planets, ringed by python-sized versions of elastic bands.  

Rufus Wainwright on Tour!

As a much younger queer, his double album Want was a sort of soundtrack to my life. Such explicitly gay yearning! His voice is plaintive and seductive as he admits "No words ever could sell you, sell you one me after all that I have done..."  I was fortunate to catch him in Edinburgh on September 20th backed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra with new arrangements for the songs on Want One and Want Two, and if anything the rich timbre of his voice has only improved with time. I don't know if he's going to continue the Want symphonic experience beyond two nights in Manchester, but there's a full list of tour dates in the coming year, and he's a performer worth seeing. 

The Gumbo Pages

I love to cook. More than that, I love to cook for people. But I come from a tradition where you learn the steps by heart and practice until you get almost good enough. Which means that sometimes a friend asks, "tell me how to make this!" and I don't have a good answer ready. In my family, recipes were for cakes, not Sunday dinner. Fortunately, my good friend Chuck Taggart has maintained a piece of the old web, the Gumbo Pages, for over thirty years. The Creole and Cajun cuisine recipes are invaluable for any time someone asks me "how do you make this," and they don't want to sit around watching me make a roux, or cluck at them because they chopped the green bell peppers too big for the trinity. 

Glaswegian Scots English

When American friends come to visit me in Scotland, they're always worried about understanding the locals. Without a little immersion, the local dialect of Scots English can be challenging to interpret. Fortunately, Glaswegians are a friendly folk, and tend to be very patient with tourists and happy to code-switch into an English that is more easily mutually intelligible. 

However, sometimes it's fun to eavesdrop! I've found this little glossary invaluable in introducing new people to some of the sounds and commonly used words and phrases in the "Glesca Patter."

Currently Reading: Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Beyond by Matthew Delmont

I don't tend to read much fiction while I'm writing it, and I'm under deadline for a few projects. I've been mostly restraining myself to project-specific research, which is pretty dry.  An exception to the dryness is Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Beyond by Matthew Delmont. Langston Hughes' autobiography The Big Sea has long been one of my favorite creative works of non-fiction, such sharp observations of the times and priceless historical details about the Harlem Renaissance firsthand coupled with such care to reveal as little about himself personally as possible. Delmont doesn't start his engaging history with Pearl Harbor, but years earlier during the Spanish Civil War, and concerns by African American intelligentsia about the growing threat of fascism and parallels between the Third Reich's abhorrent racial models and Jim Crow. The book follows Langston Hughes to Spain and hooked me right in. Then it carefully models the reality of fighting to defend a country that doesn't see you as a complete person. It's one thing to hear about these times from my grandparents, and quite another to read them documented in such painstaking fashion with so many personal stories.

Over one million Black men and women served in World War II. Black troops were at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and the Battle of the Bulge, serving in segregated units and performing unheralded but vital support jobs, only to be denied housing and educational opportunities on their return home. Without their crucial contributions to the war effort, the United States could not have won the war. And yet the stories of these Black veterans have long been ignored, cast aside in favor of the myth of the “Good War” fought by the “Greatest Generation.”

Half American is American history as you’ve likely never read it before. In these pages are stories of Black heroes such as Thurgood Marshall, the chief lawyer for the NAACP, who investigated and publicized violence against Black troops and veterans; Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., leader of the Tuskegee Airmen, who was at the forefront of the years-long fight to open the Air Force to Black pilots; Ella Baker, the civil rights leader who advocated on the home front for Black soldiers, veterans, and their families; James Thompson, the 26-year-old whose letter to a newspaper laying bare the hypocrisy of fighting against fascism abroad when racism still reigned at home set in motion the Double Victory campaign; and poet Langston Hughes, who worked as a war correspondent for the Black press. Their bravery and patriotism in the face of unfathomable racism is both inspiring and galvanizing. In a time when the questions World War II raised regarding race and democracy in America remain troublingly relevant and still unanswered, this meticulously researched retelling makes for urgently necessary reading.

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Find an Indie Bookstore

Featured New Release: Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon

I didn't come to Thomas Pynchon by way of reading Gravity's Rainbow in a literature class, or his nearly perfect short story “Entropy” in an anthology. I came across a Mason & Dixon hardcover on-sale and picked it up out of sheer curiosity. It was a magnificently weird and wonderful book, playful in all the ways we're told that "serious literature" isn't supposed to be. The prose was so much fun to read and unravel! So I'm incredibly excited that Shadow Ticket is being published on October 7th.  The protagonist is a former strikebreaker turned private investigator whose routine job tracking down a missing cheese heiress goes wrong. Ridiculous! Sublime! I honestly can't wait. 

Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a onetime strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to Lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Find an Indie Bookstore

Thanks for taking the wheel this week, Christopher!

And thanks for reading, friends. In case you missed it, my new book, Spread Me, came out last week! It immediately hit the USA Today Bestseller list, which is WILD and such an honor.

It also topped the Amazon charts in its genre, which is very cool – and even cooler than that has been the response from readers, who have been celebrating by requesting the book from their local libraries and buying it at their local independent bookstores! I am so thankful to you all for your support, both of my work and of the institutions that really care about readers. I can't even begin to describe what a thrill it is to see this book resonating so powerfully with independent booksellers and librarians.

If you read Spread Me and loved it, I hope you'll consider leaving a review somewhere!

Goodreads | Storygraph | Amazon

And if you haven't picked up your copy yet, don't worry – it's waiting for you out there.

Bookshop.org | Barnes & Noble | Books-A-Million | Powells 

—Gailey