REVIEW: “Reclaiming a Traditional African Genre: The AfroSurrealism of Ngano” by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu

Review of Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, “Reviving a Traditional African Genre: The AfroSurrealism of Ngano,” Fantasy Magazine 84 (October 2022): 39-41 — Read here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

While in the last five years or so I have made an effort to read more spec fic outside the western/European tradition, including especially African speculative fiction, I still feel like quite a novice when it comes to the details and differences of traditions that I didn’t grow up with. Ndlovu’s article is an excellent piece for me, therefore, because it’s a concise introduction to a particular tradition — Ngano — clearly explained with Ndlovu’s own experiences hearing, reading, and writing it interleaved.

AfroSurrealism, for Ndlovu, is a way “to capture the flavor of the absurdity and horror I experience daily as an African woman” (p. 39). Ngano, a story telling genre (traditionally oral story telling) from Zimbabwe, is made up of five elements (pp. 39-41):

  1. the sarungano, or storyteller
  2. shamismo, or fantastical or surreal elements grounded in reality
  3. hunhu/ubuntu, or humanist morals
  4. nziyo, or song/call and a response
  5. tsuro naGudo, or anthropomorphism

I was particularly interested in Ndlovu’s discussion of how each of these elements shape the structure, as opposed to the content of the stories.

I would love to see more short essays on different non-European genres of this type!

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REVIEW: “Essay: More Than a Journey” by A. T. Greenblatt

Review of A. T. Greenblatt, “Essay: More Than a Journey,” Fantasy Magazine 94 (August 2023): 40-41 — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Greenblatt’s fascinating and reflective essay focuses on the question of “Who does this story belong to?” It’s a question she was posed early in her writing career, and on the one hand, it makes sense as a question to ask a budding writer, because if we do not know whose story we are telling, how can we know what story it is that we are telling? But what Greenblatt highlights, from a more experienced perspective, is that stories do not belong to individuals, but to groups. For Greenblatt, the mismatch between the drive to hang a story on an individual and the fact that we all collectively participate in the stories around us results in a particular hunger, “for a type of story I don’t see very often in SFF” (p. 40) — stories that are about collectives, about groups, not about individuals.

Thought short, I found the essay compelling, found myself nodding along at almost every point. One thing I often wonder, reviewing stories for this blog, is “why this story?”, i.e., how did the author decide that this was the story to tell, rather than that. And I think some of my own concerns reflected in this question are the same concerns that Greenblatt has: Who gets to tell a story, and why, and how do we, as authors, make these decisions.

I love read about other author’s crafts and practices, it’s one of the most valuable things I find for my own writing practices. This was an extremely stimulating and useful essay, full of through-provoking points that I hope will help me out of the slough of despond when I’ve got a story that needs to be told, but I’m just not yet sure why or whose.

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REVIEW: “Proverbs of Hell for Writers” by Ian McDonald

Review of Ian McDonald, “Proverbs of Hell for Writers”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 181-188 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

McDonald closes off the anthology by giving us 94 pithy proverbs about reading, writing, and being a writer. Some obvious, some insightful, some humorous, some inspirational, this was a good way to end the collection. Having devoured the entire book over the course of four days, I now feel like maybe, just maybe, I can tackle again that glorious pain which is attempting to put words of fiction onto paper.

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REVIEW: “Matters of Life and Death” by Susan Palwick

Review of Susan Palwick, “Matters of Life and Death”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 175-179 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Palwick in her essay extols the virtues of what she calls “slow writing”, and compares the process of writing to that of learning how to spin and weave cloth — not as a metaphor, but as an actual explication of practice, talking about what she learned about how to write while she was learning how to spin: In neither case should you draft too fast.

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REVIEW: “*Take As Needed” by Hiromi Goto

Review of Hiromi Goto, “*Take As Needed”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 171-174 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

When Goto asks, “What if you not only lose your imagination, but you also lose faith in your imagination?” (p. 171), it feels as if he’s exactly addressing me. I read this essay with great hunger and hope. More than anything, living through a pandemic has been exhausting, and it’s useful to read yet another reminder (so many of them in this anthology, and yet every one is worthwhile) that it exhaustion isn’t just physical, and it takes time to recover from, and “solace is necessary when you lose faith” (p. 172). What I didn’t expect, and which made the essay all the more impactful, was to find that it was not written by someone who has been through the dry patch and come out the other side; it was written by someone who is in the middle of it.

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REVIEW: “Positive Obsession” by Octavia E. Butler

Review of Octavia E. Butler, “Positive Obsession”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 163-169 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

In the review of the anthology as a whole, I said the essays “are like written kaffeeklatsches with people you feel you could be friends with”, and nowhere does this feel more true than with Butler’s essay, a quiet reflection on her life and growth of a writer, and on the central importance of positive obsession:

Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all (p. 168).

There’s no advice here, but one cannot help but learn from simply seeing someone else’s story of perseverance.

It’s also fascinating to see how things have changed since 1989. At the time this essay was writing, Butler was the only Black woman writing SF, and one of only four Black SF authors. How she would have loved to see the state of the genre today, with the likes of Jemisin, Okorafor, and Adeyemi writing at the top of the SF game, and the existence of entire anthologies to Afrofuturism.

(Originally published as “Birth of a Writer”, Essence, 1989.)

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REVIEW: “Pitfalls of Writing Science Fiction & Fantasy: General Useful Information & Other Opinionated Comments” by Vonda N. McIntyre

Review of Vonda N. McIntyre, “Pitfalls of Writing Science Fiction & Fantasy: General Useful Information & Other Opinionated Comments”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 153-161 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.

In this extremely helpful essay, McIntyre identifies 14 concrete pitfalls, applicable to any writer but perhaps more apt for the SFF writer, and then provides advice on (a) how to detect these pitfalls in your own work and (b) what to do about them.

All of the advice she gives is great advice, nothing earthshattering but all worth being reminded of, including the advice she opens with:

McIntyre’s First Law: Under the right circumstances, anything I tell you could be wrong (p. 153).

But you’ve got to know the rules in order to be effective in breaking them, after all.

(Originally published in 2012 by Book View Café.)

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REVIEW: “On Mentors and Mentees” by Cat Rambo

Review of Cat Rambo, “On Mentors and Mentees”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 147-151 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

If you aren’t already convinced of the benefit of being both a mentor and a mentee, as a writer whether of SFF or otherwise, then hopefully you will be after reading Rambo’s piece.

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REVIEW: “Going Through an Impasse: Evading Writer’s Block” by Eileen Gunn

Review of Eileen Gunn, “Going Through an Impasse: Evading Writer’s Block”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 137-146 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Gunn’s essay is one of the longer ones in the collection, appropriate given how big a feature writer’s block often is in a writer’s life! — in fact, one could probably put together an entire collection on advice on what to do when you want to write but just can’t. Gunn’s approach is to talk about how to deal with writer’s block, rather than how to “cure” it:

I’ll help you analyze the way you experience blocking and offer some suggestions on how to circumvent the trauma and get on with your work (p. 138).

This process of analysis ends up weirdly feeling like sitting in a therapist’s office, being asked questions that probe us and challenge us to answer honestly and emotionally. I suspect people will have varying degrees of success with this approach: my own experience, reading the essay while in the midst of a writer’s drought, was to feel strong resistance to her questions and suggestions, a refusal to engage — even when her suggestions are exactly the same suggestions that I give to other people! And perhaps that’s part of my problem. 🙂

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