The Word Made Fresh: Mystical Encounter and the New Weird Divine - Journal #92

From the author of Oval, a collection of “fan nonfiction” that proposes new possibilities and genealogies for weird fiction in the age of extinction.

This collection is about love, death, plants, and weird fiction. It takes its title from a Margaret Atwood story in which an adolescent girl seems to turn into a tree. It examines works by Doris Lessin... See more

Some colleagues I know even speak of an “ethics of weirdness”, something I hope to work on more and that would presumably involve risk, improvisation, nonsense, even magic, not to mention a refusal to retreat before the bizarre, the disturbing, the nonhuman, the unthinkable. To turn and face the strange; to stay with the trouble.

The moment when the fiction changes the reality, when the story you are telling has real effects. You might not have begun with yourself in mind, but at this moment you come into sudden, astonishing contact with your “I.”I wanted to provide points of realization akin to what I experienced in the roleplay, and which I also experienced while writing:... See more

What made the trilogy so stunning and atypical as a sci-fi story was the fact that Liu wasn’t interested in interrogating whether humans deserved to survive. Instead, the novels explored the danger of connection, of the way a thought, once shared, can expand into an unstoppable force—a radical, terrifying ideology or a shrewd solution to a seemingl... See more

We need individuals and communities that serve these liminal times by calling them into being with the fullness of their senses and with a compassionate dedication to realizing instances of these new futures in the present. Transforming fragmentation into cohering fragments of integral futures. Doing the difficult work that is both material and spi... See more