portal fantasy as diaspora
a short story's roots, clarion west, & unpacking genre trope in "what becomes of curious minds"
Everything Creed knew came from his mother, Joy, who had first fled down the rabbit hole with a baby on her back, escaping a much worse monster than a jade rabbit.
My short story “What Becomes of Curious Minds” appears in this month’s issue of Lightspeed, along with a podcast reading and short interview! I love short fiction; I think it lets you experiment so much and really hone certain points of craft you don’t get to focus on as much in novels, and I think it makes you a sharper, tighter writer. Because I’ve lately been focusing so much on the novels, I haven’t been able to do short fic the way I’d like, which is why I am excited to still occasionally get to talk about some.
I wrote "Curious Minds” for my very first submission at Clarion West in 2022—if you’re not aware, Clarion West (not to be confused with sister workshop Clarion in San Diego) is a 6-week SFF writing workshop in which every week you turn in a story for workshop and critique everyone else’s stories as well, under the guidance of a guest instructor each week. Minus the first introduction week, you end up writing five stories in a delirious yet productive writing state. Here was my post about the workshop on Instagram:
Knowing the structure of the programme, and having read up some blogs from alum, I prepped for the workshop by looking through my list of short story ideas and identifying those I thought I could pull on for the workshop. Most of them weren’t very fleshed out, just single images or high concepts without story. The very first one on my shortlist, though, marinated as I got to Seattle, and became fully formed over the first week of writing. I even made a little moodboard to keep myself motivated.
Of these, I ended up writing two (Wonderland and Cleo Li, which I love but haven’t gotten to edit) and adapting the band idea, which was really fun but probably won’t see daylight. I then wrote two completely new stories plus a bonus sixth: one will be coming in an exciting anthology next year (announcement soon!), one I want to revise and send out, and the bonus was “Laura Lau Will Drain You Dry”, now on Nightmare.
I turned in “Curious Minds” for week 2 with instructor P Djeli Clark. The story is about a boy storyteller orphaned after his chosen-one mother’s heroic death, and what happens when a second human falls into Wonderland. It’s also about diaspora and displacement.
It’s fun and interesting to explore the metaphorical or meaning-bearing potential of stock genre tropes in SFF. A lot of the time, it’s an underlying conversation/context that’s always been in the canon, deliberately or not. Aliens, mutants, monsters and villains have been reflectors of conversations towards real-life Others; robots and AI sites for anxieties about personhood; etc. Fantasy is never just fantasy. Portal fantasy specifically offers so much in terms of first-contact, or cultural meeting and globalisation, or invasion. It also often comes packaged with Chosen One—the foreigner stumbling through the portal happens to be the prophesised hero/one person who could save our land/foretold royal!—and I think there’s a deeply interesting trope subversion available there in the context of colonialism. I’d love to write something that truly chews on that one day, but for “Curious Minds” I was thinking more about the aspects of displacement and assimilation; a character entering this entirely new world alone with no way to get back home, bearing a responsibility to make a life and be who their new neighbours need them to be.
(yes, this is also my first Taylor Swift title pull. the song is actually pretty fitting.)
I already wrote my inspiration behind it for my Lightspeed author interview, and I’ll pull some parts of it out here:
How did this story originate? What inspirations did you draw on?
At some point in 2022, I binged the entirety of Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series (at least, those that were published at that point). It got me thinking a lot about examining and subverting the portal fantasy genre, and the ways in which the narrative device of the portal world could be used to engage with wider themes. Wayward Children has a lot of resonance with queerness, I think (I also read it on the back of the pandemic and the grief of losing a world you thought was yours definitely resonated there too)—but I started thinking about portal fantasy as diaspora. If you think about it, the character is tossed into this alien land with alien customs in which they suddenly find themselves quite alone. If you put aside the sense of wonder and chosen-one-ness, there’s a lot of scope for thinking about displacement and assimilation.
If I was going to be in conversation with the genre, I wanted to riff on the most canonical and absurdist example of that genre. Wonderland is so whimsical and yet actually has some pretty dark stuff in it, and obviously it’s also so canonical that it makes it easy to use because people will get your references, although I’ve put my own spin on it. I think the absurdity of the setting in this story juxtaposed with the violence and the serious emotional arc made it a lot more impactful than it would have been otherwise. Violence packaged in absurdity can somehow be really striking (me, weeping over the hallway fight from Everything Everywhere All At Once).
It was also fun to think about how a kid who’s grown up in Wonderland would find Wonderland normal, and find their “human world,” which they don’t remember, the actual fantasy land. I don’t think that was a deliberate choice, just something that came out and felt right, but I like the fact that the story’s not anchored in our context while also hopefully being very relevant. Ultimately, I wanted to explore what happens when a character who’s risen to his position by being the sole representative of this fantastical place and legacy meets someone else from that same world, and how it might go wrong.
Where are you in this story?
This story is a lot about being a storyteller, obviously, and I was exploring a lot of prickly thoughts that have drifted through my mind at some point as I increasingly start to think about my own work being packaged for consumption, who I’m writing stories for, and why and how I tell them. Creed obviously does some not very good things, but I hope the story doesn’t come across as ungenerous. It’s an incredibly complicated positioning and I hope that thorniness and sympathy come through.
You can read the full interview here.
currently consuming
Books: I’ve read so many good books just in these first two months of the year, but particular highlights were:
Sleep Donation by Karen Russell (short, gorgeously written, unsettling dystopia)
Palestinian Walks by Raja Shehadeh (keen, tender, heartbreaking; landscape is so inherently political)
The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo (Nghi Vo does gothic and I need more so immediately - top 2 favourite entry in the Singing Hills cycle)
The Jasmine Throne and The Oleander Sword by Tasha Suri (feral asian fantasy sapphics!! weird plants! also moving back to my adult fantasy brain for *things*)
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado and Dinner on Monster Island by Tania de Rozario, two visceral sapphic creative non-fiction collections both pulling on folklore/fantasy/horror elements in conversation.
I also read A Banh Mi For Two by Trinity Nguyen (again), and while I’m biased because we’re friends, I think it is the perfect tender teen romance, and sapphic+SEA on top of that!! believe me or not, it’s your loss.
On the topic of romance, I also read Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross and while I don’t often read romantasy I got the love for this one.
I’m currently reading Afterlife, a YA Southeast Asian-inspired fantasy graphic novel from a local indie publisher about a girl and a Spirit Keeper who may have known each other in a past life venturing into the afterlife to save the girl’s dead brother.
Shows: In a British era, I had a lot of fun with Netflix’s Bodies, a scifi murder mystery about four variously marginalised detectives in four time periods in London who come across the exact same dead body. I also finally—finally! finished Sex Education while weeping and immediately texted my friends about it. It’s such a special show to me and resolved itself (or was allowed to resolve, thanks netflix) in such a complete, told way.