(Hi! You can skip the mini-essay and scroll down to the bottom for a link to my latest story, if you like.)
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Read the kind of thing you want to write is a common piece of writing advice, to the point where it’s almost not advice so much as it is a basic observation: writers who do well are generally aware of what’s going on in their genre of choice. To add to a conversation effectively, you should know what the conversation is about.
I had the opposite problem to the problem that piece of advice is meant to address. I was too saturated in my own genre; too up-to-date. It wasn’t that I lacked breadth; though more breadth is always better, I have always read a broad array of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, including experimental work. It was specifically a problem with recency. I was reading so much contemporary SFF that everything I wrote was at risk of becoming a watered-down version of whatever I read last.
My PhD advisor tells me that though many people want their academic writing to be “timely” — to respond to current issues — scholarly writing is simply the wrong medium for that, because good scholarly work is predicated upon years of research, followed by months of peer review, followed by a maddening revision process that makes you want to abandon academia and live in the woods, followed by (hopefully!) publication. The humanities scholarship people call “timely” is not actually written in response to current events; it traces centuries-long historical/cultural patterns that seem relevant to the now because they’ve been relevant forever. I’ve come to believe that fiction writing operates similarly. The pace of publication is slow. That’s a feature, not a bug. So I stopped caring about being up to date with my genre and started reading literally anything else in the hopes that fresh influences would flavor my work, like parmesan rinds dropped into a soup.
After several months of ignoring recent fiction in favor of older work, it became clear that the real value wasn’t in fresh inspiration. I’m certainly in no danger of being inspired to write like Alexander Pope. Ultimately, my work will always be indelibly and perhaps disappointingly contemporary, with a certain similarity to everything else published today, because I live in the contemporary world. The real benefit to losing track of the current SFF landscape lay in keeping my eyes on my own paper: no longer worrying about how my own writing does or does not fit within the market; no longer comparing myself to others. I always thought I was decent at not comparing myself to others, but apparently I was wrong. It was only when I swore off contemporary SFF for three months that I realized how much mental energy I unconsciously devoted to judging my work in comparison to others, trying to figure out if I’d produced something publishable. (More or less abandoning social media also helped me stop doing this!)
I also stopped trying to publish short stories for a year. I simply stopped worrying about the market. I was undergoing a terrible bout of writer’s block brought on by, among other things, starting a PhD program and a minor publishing disappointment. And then, after spending September 2024-August 2025 utterly ignoring my home genre, I wrote 317,000 words between August of last year and this September. I understand that for some people, that’s business as usual, but I did that while (1) writing a dissertation prospectus, (2) studying for a qualifying exam, (3) getting married, and (4) not actually being very good at multitasking. At certain points I ended up producing text at a pace faster than I’ve ever achieved in my life. Assessing it in retrospect, about 50% of that isn’t publishable. The other 50% might just be! But the 50% that I would not dare expose to the harsh light of the market is still some of my favorite work I’ve ever produced, because it proved to me that I didn’t make up that “being able to write” thing. Among teachers of rhetoric and composition, we call this “exploratory writing”: writing not for an audience, but to develop ideas.
Anyways, here are some disconnected, patchy notes on books I read that were (a) outside my favorite genres, (b) not written this century, and (c) for fun / not part of my degree. It’s not by any means an exhaustive list of what I read, but I guess… it’s the ones I felt the need to write something down about?
Brideshead Revisited (1945)
Possibly the most Catholic novel ever written. I’m not a British Catholic living through the thirties, so wrapping my head around the characters’ interior states was like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube with my eyes closed. I spent the whole book complaining about it to my spouse, yet in retrospect, I am forced to conclude that I like this novel quite a lot.
The Invention of Love (1997)
I re-read this because I’m considering assigning it to my literature students next year. It’s my favorite play. It’s hard to believe that the Tom Stoppard who wrote that is the same guy who was at least partially responsible for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. (Directors would call him in to salvage dialogue for their blockbusters. He apparently made 2 mil from tweaking the Indiana Jones script.) When Stoppard passed away, I was darkly amused that while most obituaries mentioned The Invention of Love, few were willing to discuss the play’s content. The NYT obit used the word “homoerotic,” which is a start, but the AP news obit just said it explores “the mysteries of the human heart,” a phrase so vague that it could refer to literally any play.
Various 17th and 18th century poems
My dissertation research includes the 17th and 18th centuries, but my focus is fiction and proto-fiction, not poetry. I used to hate early modern and eighteenth-century poetry, but am beginning to love it. The other day, I was thinking about Henry Vaughan’s 17th century poem “The Book” and the media history of books. The poem includes this verse:
Thou knew'st this papyr, when it was
Meer seed and after that but grass;
Before 'twas drest or spun, and when
Made linen, who did wear it then:
What were their lifes, their thoughts & deeds
Whither good corn, or fruitless weeds.
The verse refers to the practice of making paper from linen rags (recycled clothes). Sometimes when you handle very old books, you can see hemp or flax fibers and seeds in the paper. Sometimes paper-making involved river water, which was silty and full of organic material that couldn’t be sieved out. Vaughan’s poem focuses on the materiality of the book as a product of a vast, interconnected economy and ecology.
The Accursed Share (1949)
Did you know Georges Bataille is capable of writing sentences that make sense? News at eleven. The blurb on the back of my copy tries to convince you otherwise by deliberately quoting lines that sound bizarre and nonsensical out of context, presumably trying to draw in people who are interested in Bataille because of the Surrealist-adjacent stuff he wrote way earlier in his career. Despite this, The Accursed Share is just an interesting take on surplus in economics and society, and it seems to be Bataille trying to write accessibly for a broad audience. Props to the translator, Robert Hurley, for keeping the text lucid.
To rip away all the nuance, Bataille’s idea is that societies should seek to offload surplus onto the needy rather than accumulating it. I was struck by the last section of Vol. 1, in which Bataille—writing right after WWII—predicts where the then-nascent Cold War was going to go. There’s a depressingly wistful note to him talking about the possibility of peace, a sort of “Why can’t we all just get along? It would be cool if we could stop doing authoritarianism while we’re at it” moment. Once you get to that, it colors everything he argues earlier in shades of nostalgic sepia.
Modern Woman (1916)
Edith Södergran was an important Swedish modernist poet who I’ve never heard of because this book was only translated into English in 2026. The translator is CD Eskilson. I adore modernist poetry, but my reading leans American; I’m a big fan of H.D. and Langston Hughes. At times Södergran felt staid to me, because the innovations that the early 20th century modernists introduced in poetry were so influential that they now feel commonplace. But I was pleasantly surprised to encounter “Vierge Moderne,” which embraces a nonbinary embodiment (it opens with “I am not woman. I am neutrois. / I am a child, a tomboy, a bold decision”). My favorite poem, though, is “The Stars”:
When night comes
I stand on the stairs and hear
stars swarm the garden
While I linger in darkness—
listen, one falls with a crash!
Do not go barefoot into the grass:
my yard is full of shards.
I have a longstanding fascination with speculative takes on stars that make them tangible on a human scale. My story “Diamond Cuts” has a similar motif.
The Iliad, translated by Emily Wilson
Okay, so, the Odyssey is better than the Iliad, right? It’s not just me? Okay, maybe it’s just me. Look, I’m just saying, when Wilson translated the Odyssey, it felt almost novelistic—fresh, crystalline, contemporary in a way that a thousand adaptations set in the modern world don’t. But the concerns that drive the Iliad are so alien that even Wilson’s crisp translation can’t bring them to life for me. It’s different when the characters dwell on grief, an experience as close to universal as we can get; those parts always pierce me sharply. Beyond that, though… The alienness of works written in other cultures in other times is one of the chief reasons to read them; it’s good to stress-test your mindset. But I slip unavoidably into reading the Iliad with a historian’s brain, and I do think that means I lose something.
The Iliad, translated by Alexander Pope
Despite the fact that I study the 18th century and these days am relatively immune to the alienation of 18th century prose and poetry, I could only read this in tiny gasps. Reading it from beginning to end was inexplicably impossible for me. I mean, if I had to do it for research, I would have buckled up and done the thing properly, but this was for fun. I’m able to enjoy it in disconnected, nonlinear snippets. I’m still slowly inching my way through, one zig-zag at a time.
Okay, so I said I didn’t try to get short stories published for a year. That being said, I made an exception to my no-publishing rule for opportunities that fell into my lap; that’s why I have a piece in Weird Horror magazine. I also have a general backlog of other publications to share, because I didn’t write this newsletter for a hot minute because my nonfiction energy went to the PhD.
New-ish Stories
“The Hum,” out in Weird Horror Magazine.
I don’t think I ever officially announced this, but my short story “Your Thoughts Are Glass” was selected for last year’s Best Weird Fiction, ed. Michael Kelly. Michael Kelly’s editorial work/curation is the reason I started reading and writing weird fiction in the first place, so being selected for Best Weird Fiction meant a lot. “Your Thoughts Are Glass” is my best short story, but it was difficult to place in magazines; it seems to be the least approachable and most off-putting thing I’ve ever written.
I also had a piece in Transversals, an experimental art/fiction/theory zine. There are still a few copies left of the print run of Dead Futures, the issue I was in. My story is called “Film/Theory from the Year 2539, or: a roundtable discussion featuring the galaxy’s last analog filmmaker, a physicist-mystic, and the Morris Worm.” It parodies the format of the academic roundtable to tell a science fiction story about a nonexistent film called The Utopia Riddle.
