Guest Host Trae Hawkins
Welcome to the Stone Soup Weekly Digest! This is where I share what I'm up to and some of my favorite things from around the internet. Subscribe to Stone Soup to get this in your inbox every week.
Well friends, it’s a hell of a time to be in the United States. I am personally choosing to focus on the important questions we need to be asking each other, as well as the people in my life who I can support, and the causes I can back. I don’t have much else to say right now, if I’m honest. We all know the score. All we can do is be here for each other, with each other, as much as humanly possible. Here are a few places to start.
In the meantime, the Stone Soup Digest Guest Hosts continue! Meet this week’s guest host, Trae Hawkins. Trae is a fantasy and science fiction writer whose stories incorporate themes exploring various forms of marginalization through Black and queer lenses. He graduated in 2021 from Penn State with a Master's in English and in 2024 from the University of Nevada, Reno with an MFA in Creative Writing. He is a student of the 2023 Viable Paradise workshop, the winner of We Need Diverse Books and Penguin Random House’s Black Creatives Revisions Workshop, and he teaches creative writing at UNR. He also works as a freelance sensitivity reader, where he reads fiction and nonfiction for issues of sensitivity and representation.
Take us away, Trae!
-gailey
A Heap of Petrified Gods | Lightspeed Magazine
I came across this story about the loss of culture and history that occurs during assimilation. This story imagines this process as a literal loss of memory, humor, personality, and language. The optimist in me initially found the ending much too bleak, but the more I think about it, the truer it resonates. You find yourself wondering why the narrator is willing to give so much up--and then you realize you've given up just as much.
‘Daily Bread’ – interview by Zoë Hitzig | Prac Crit
I saw this quote from Ocean Vuong yesterday and found it so important: "There’s a legend about a Chinese painter who was asked by the emperor to paint a landscape so pristine that the emperor can enter it. He didn’t do a good job, so the emperor was preparing to assassinate him. But because it was his painting, legend goes, he stepped inside and vanished, saving himself. I always loved that little allegory as an artist. Even when it is not enough for others, if it is enough for you, you can live inside it." The new year often yields periods of reflection, and creatives sometimes take that time to be harsh to themselves. This is an important reminder to love your work, and to know that it's enough.
Still Moving | The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
This is an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin that I think of at least once a week. It's best experienced without any context, I think, so I won't summarize it here, but I think it speaks to the heart of what a story or narrative is. At least, it offers a lens through which writers and readers might understand the role or purpose of a story or narrative. Every time I read it, I glean something new!
"Of Better Worlds and Worlds Gone Wrong" by Katherine Addison | A Dribble of Ink
Lastly, this is an essay by Katherine Addison--the author of the great The Goblin Emperor. Now especially, it's all too easy to fall into cynicism. Hopeful literature may feel out of touch or distasteful when the world around us is anything but hopeful. I think that Addison writes a compelling essay about the role of hope in SFF writing, and I often use this essay as a reassurance that my own writing--in all its saccharine hopefulness--is exactly where it should be.
TRAE IS CURRENTLY READING: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
A lone human ambassador is sent to the icebound planet of Winter, a world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitants’ gender is fluid. His goal is to facilitate Winter’s inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the strange, intriguing culture he encounters...
Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction.
Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Find an Indie Bookstore
TRAE RECOMMENDS A FEATURED NEW RELEASE: Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
Disabled, disinclined to marry, and more interested in writing than a lucrative career in medicine or law, Zelu has always felt like the outcast of her large Nigerian family. Then her life is upended when, in the middle of her sister’s lavish Caribbean wedding, she’s unceremoniously fired from her university job and, to add insult to injury, her novel is rejected by yet another publisher. With her career and dreams crushed in one fell swoop, she decides to write something just for herself. What comes out is nothing like the quiet, literary novels that have so far peppered her unremarkable career. It’s a far-future epic where androids and AI wage war in the grown-over ruins of human civilization. She calls it Rusted Robots.
When Zelu finds the courage to share her strange novel, she does not realize she is about to embark on a life-altering journey—one that will catapult her into literary stardom, but also perhaps obliterate everything her book was meant to be. From Chicago to Lagos to the far reaches of space, Zelu’s novel will change the future not only for humanity, but for the robots who come next.
Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Find an Indie Bookstore
Thank you, Trae!
If you’re a paying subscriber, come say hello in the Supper Club and share the ways you’re connecting with and supporting your local community. Remember to drop your local mutual aid networks so we can put them in future issues of the Digest.
In the meantime, do what you can. Care for yourself and the people around you. Believe that the world can be better than it is now. Never give up.
—gailey