Shining Moon Episode 31: Non-Western Fantasy

Hello and welcome to Shining Moon Episode 31, Non-Western Fantasy! With me today are Tina Zhu, Osahon Ize-iyamu, and Liza Wemakor. Let’s get started with some introductions!

We had some audio problems with Osahon's feed in places. Please be patient with the technology.

 Osahon Ize-Iyamu is a Nigerian writer of speculative fiction. A graduate of the Alpha and Clarion Writers Workshop, he has been published in magazines like Clarkesworld, Nightmare, The Rumpus, and Strange Horizons. You can find him online @osahon4545.

Liza Wemakor is a writer and a Ph.D. student in UC Riverside's English Department. She writes and studies speculative fiction and Black American literature. Her writing has been published in Strange Horizons, Anathema Magazine, Baffling Magazine, Prismatica Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a member of the 2023 Clarion West Writers' Workshop cohort, and her debut novella (Loving Safoa) was published in February 2024.

Tina S. Zhu was born in a suburb outside Tokyo to Chinese parents and mostly raised in a rotating cast of small American towns. She is currently based in New York City, where she writes from her kitchen table. Her work has appeared in Tor.com, Lightspeed, Fireside, and other places. She also reviews books for Strange Horizons. You can find her at tinaszhu.com.

Stories in this episode:

Osahon Ize-Iyamu

 Last ritual of the smoke eaters Lightspeed, November 2023. 

Tina Zhu

"One for Sorrow, Two for Mirth."  This was published as part of Strange Horizons' Wuxia and Xianxia special issue.  

 
Liza Wemakor

“Loving Safoa,” Neon Hemlock, 2024. 

Nghi Vo

"Boiled Bones and Black Eggs" Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issue #275, April 11, 2019 

"Don't tell me that the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." -- Anton Chekov

Piano music for closure

Thank you for listening to Shining Moon! You can reach the host, Deborah L. Davitt, at the following social media platforms:

www.facebook.com/deborah.davitt.3

Bluesky: @deborahldavitt.bsky.social

www.deborahldavitt.com

Transcript

Deborah L. Davitt (00:03.906)
Hello and welcome to Shining Moon, episode 31, non-Western fantasy. I'm your host, Deborah L. Davitt. With me today are Tina Zhu, Osahon Ize-iyamu, and Liza Wemakor. Let's get started with some introductions. Osahan Izy-Eyamu is a Nigerian writer of speculative fiction, a graduate of the Alpha and Clarion Writers Workshop. He has been published in magazines like Clark's World, Nightmare, The Rumpus, and Strange Horizons. You can find him online at, at...

Osahan 4545. Osahon, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here today.

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (00:39.246)
Hi, it's so great to be here. I'm really happy to be a part of this today.

Deborah L. Davitt (00:47.358)
All right. Next we have Liza Wemakor who is a writer and PhD student in the UC Riversides English department. She writes and studies speculative fiction and black American literature. Her writing has been published in Strange Horizons, Anathema Magazine, Baffling Magazine, Prismatica Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a member of the 2023 Clarion West Writers Workshop

Liza Wemakor (00:56.84)
right. I mean, especially with this kind of walking out from the entrance. I didn't even know what to do. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to do.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:14.546)
was published in February 2024. Liza, welcome to the podcast. It's wonderful to have you here.

Liza Wemakor (01:21.46)
Oh yeah, thank you so much. I'm glad to be tuning in with you today.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:26.798)
Thank you so much. And finally, we have Tina S. Zhu, who was born in a suburb outside of Tokyo to Chinese parents and mostly raised in a rotating cast of small American towns. I'm going to ask you a question about that later because I was thrilled to see Carson City was named in your story. I was like, yes, a fellow Nevada person maybe. So she is currently based in New York City where she writes from her kitchen table. Her work appeared in tour.com, Lightspeed.

Tina (01:41.244)
Ha ha!

Deborah L. Davitt (01:55.606)
Fireside and other places. She also reviews books for strange horizons. You can find her at tinaszhu.com. Hello, Tina. Welcome to the podcast

Tina (02:05.191)
Hello, thanks for having me here.

Deborah L. Davitt (02:08.074)
It's going to be a great conversation. I'm going to learn so much today. And that is always something that I want to do, because I have learned so much through doing this podcast. I have learned about every genre that we have covered, things that I didn't know. And just it's been wonderful so far. So I expect nothing less today. All right, let's get started with some of the general questions. What makes non-Western fantasy different from traditional Western fantasy?

What are some of the hallmarks of its narrative style? And since we have a PhD student on, we are going to start with Liza and say, your narrator in your story is a professor of literature who talks about the canon of Western literature to her students, you are probably eminently qualified to tell me what makes Western literature and non-Western literature different from each other. What do you say?

Liza Wemakor (02:57.892)
Yeah, so I think first, maybe I would like to push against the idea that it's simply like a representational thing, or that just having characters who are not American or not European is the only quality that is inherent or associated with.

Deborah L. Davitt (03:12.93)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (03:20.27)
Mm-hmm.

Liza Wemakor (03:27.732)
non-Western literature. It's also about a representation of non-Western ways of being and thinking, I would say. And in that way, we can see that a story that is set in America or set in Europe can still be non-Western literature because it is imbued with, like, a life world or an outset, an outlook that

Deborah L. Davitt (03:28.215)
Okay.

Liza Wemakor (03:57.717)
defies Western values of productivity and of disconnectedness and individualism.

Deborah L. Davitt (04:08.626)
Yeah, that brings me back to our Hope Punk episodes and our cozy episodes, which sort of defy those conceptions as well. So just to tie that in for listeners who have listened to other episodes, Osohan, what about you? What defines non-Western fantasy for you?

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (04:31.51)
Yeah, I think I am going to definitely pick it back off what Liza said, in that non-Western fantasy for me is definitely things that, is definitely fantasy that it's not just really about setting, it's also about format, about structure, about the way it's set up and the way it's presented almost because there can be, as you know, there can be stories set in non-Western settings that have like a Western story structure

of thinking and similarly there can be stories set in the US that have non-western ways of thinking or like non-western story structures or story formats. So non-western fantasy really I think is about anything that doesn't, is about any type of fantasy that isn't taking on I guess the very Eurocentric structure, Eurocentric setting or Eurocentric way of thinking.

So it's really not just a representation thing, it's about kind of viewing it in a sense that is almost not necessarily the, I guess, norm that is thought of in a lot of Eurocentric fantasy and Eurocentric world building and formats.

Deborah L. Davitt (05:48.514)
Tina, your story in particular is set in the United States, but in the United States of the mind, but it has all those hallmarks of non-Western fantasy. I'm going to switch tales, questions to you. You told me that yours is a wuxia tale. Tell me about the hallmarks of the genre. What makes something wuxia? And am I saying that right?

Tina (06:13.139)
Um, yeah, well close close. So the X sound in Chinese is like SH. It looks really hard to read, but it's a lot. Yeah, yeah. So Wuxia story is, so Wuxia is this genre in Chinese genre fiction that revolves around like wandering heroes going around and doing things, protecting good people while fighting evil. But what's really important is that they're not really associated with like...

Deborah L. Davitt (06:16.13)
Hahaha!

Deborah L. Davitt (06:20.138)
I wish you all okay.

Tina (06:42.979)
the government. A good example is S. L. Huang had a novel last year, The Water Outlaws, that revolved around these heroes and they're also willing to be outside of the governmental system in order to do the right thing. So that's an important part of the genre. So what makes this story also a Wuxia story is...

Deborah L. Davitt (06:50.306)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (07:00.434)
Interesting.

Tina (07:09.207)
is that Poppy, the main character, she's also a bit of a wandering hero. Her job is like just wandering around and like fighting evil. That's her kind of her day job. So that makes it fall under that. And a very classic like narratives are like around revenge or around like family legacy or honor. Another very big thing that's important in this genre is honor, like honoring the honoring like what came before you and also like following the code of honor.

Deborah L. Davitt (07:16.958)
Hmm hmm

Deborah L. Davitt (07:40.43)
Okay, very nice. Thank you for that very comprehensive definition and I can totally see how your story ticks all the boxes and when we get to that, we will talk about that in depth. That is really cool. Alright, so one of the biases that Western editors and readers have is a fondness for the active protagonist. You hear it all the time in creative writing courses that you don't want a passive protagonist. Do you find yourself resisting that in your writing? And I'm going to take that back to Liza.

Liza Wemakor (08:10.212)
Yeah, yeah. So one of the reading suggestions I made when we were preparing for this podcast was, I think, a pretty well circulated article in Fantasy magazine by Vita Cruz called We Are the Mountain, a look at the inactive protagonist. And Cruz thinks about how there is this almost an immediately pejorative sense.

Deborah L. Davitt (08:27.863)
Yeah.

Liza Wemakor (08:40.136)
in which a protagonist who is not your typical like Western comic superhero fighting off villains and bad guys are viewed as somehow poorly written or unholistic. And she thinks about how strength and resistance can take so many different forms depending on like your social position.

Deborah L. Davitt (08:57.678)
Mm-hmm.

Liza Wemakor (09:08.264)
the circumstances you find yourself in, which are often very different for people of color and for people who are subjected to colonialism and imperialism. And yeah, I think, I'm not sure if this was part of the question, but in my own writing, I do try to maybe free myself to write outside of

those constraints and to think of characterization in a broader way, in a broader sense, in a less limited sense, to think about how strength for a character might involve strategies other than being the individualist hero.

Deborah L. Davitt (10:04.766)
Yeah, which is.

Liza Wemakor (10:05.556)
I try to think about how characters are feeding off of each other and working together oftentimes and try to bring a collectivist mindset to the way I'm writing things.

Deborah L. Davitt (10:21.47)
Again, that ties back in beautifully to the Ho-Punk and Solar-Punk and everything else, because those are rebellions against the traditional Western. Osa-Han, your narrator in your story stands against the active going out and fighting off the dragons that his lover, or her lover, it was never entirely clear to me, but let's say their lover.

embodied and was someone who stood up for the ideals of learning and understanding and everything like that. Was this a deliberate attempt to write against the traditional Western paradigm or did it just come more naturally?

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (11:16.691)
I think I would say it came more naturally to me to kind of think of this idea. Specifically, I really am drawn to writing stories that either feature a passive protagonist throughout or have a passive protagonist at least through half of the story, especially because I was really fascinated by that idea when I started writing short fiction that passive protagonists are somehow less interesting than active protagonists.

because I never really related to that feeling or that experience because for me people could be passive for so many things like if I'm thinking at it from like you know like my upbringing like you could be passive because of like tradition or you know like culture a specific way in which you're expected to fit in and I think that's what the narrator really grapples with in the story like you know she's made to occupy this really passive position.

throughout the entire story of being made to keep this particular tradition and make to keep things a certain way. And so, when she kind of breaks out of that, it is almost a celebration, but it's almost a celebration of her agency. But it's not about, I didn't want the story to be all about her being active from the beginning because that didn't feel true to life as to what the story was trying to convey and to what I know. So I really wanted to, I guess, show a blend of both like...

Deborah L. Davitt (12:26.456)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (12:34.188)
Mm-hmm.

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (12:39.578)
you know, like the passive genre and still a way to give like an active protagonist while also not like demonizing, you know, her for being passive throughout the beginning, like the first half of the story.

Deborah L. Davitt (12:48.29)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (12:51.638)
I thought it was extremely skillfully done because she has an inherent dynamism as she goes through her journey. But we'll get to that in a minute. We'll talk about your story in more depth in a moment. I will get to gush about it. What are some other inherent biases that you find yourself resisting or writing against? And I'm going to turn to Tina for that.

Liza Wemakor (12:53.092)
I have to be very specific. I'm going to find an example of this. It is funny. It's not the end of the world. It's the last one. You have an idea.

Tina (13:13.359)
Yeah, so one thing I think that's already been mentioned by both Liza and Ossahan was that the tendency to write towards the individualist hero in the stereotypical western narrative. So something I'm really fond of, at least in my short fiction, is I like using the wee P.O.B. a lot, like the first person plural. This is probably part of why a lot of my short stories have ended up in literary magazines and not-

the speculative fiction ecosystem because they tend to observer POVs or more unusual POVs are more accepted in that realm. But I really like, I think as people we're rarely acting as totally individual units.

Deborah L. Davitt (13:53.87)
Mm-hmm.

Tina (14:02.947)
Like we're usually part of a group. At least I grew up in these like very small, tight knit immigrant communities and everyone kind of like knew each other and everyone was in everyone's business. So it's been fun. I have a couple of stories out. We're writing around about these like children just like observing what the other people in their community are doing.

Deborah L. Davitt (14:13.09)
Hehehe

Deborah L. Davitt (14:21.97)
Interesting. I love that. That is something I hadn't even thought about. Liza, what are some other inherent biases that you find yourself responding to subverting or writing against?

Liza Wemakor (14:36.02)
Oh man. I think one thing I intentionally do, or maybe also subconsciously do, because it's like a product of my own identity and experience in the world, is trying to write queerly and trying to like imbue queerness in the writing I'm doing. And the sense of like gender nonconformity. I think

At least in certain spheres or in certain circles, there can be a push to disconnect African-ness from queerness or Blackness from queerness. And so that's something that is, it comes up a lot for me while I'm writing as well.

Deborah L. Davitt (15:26.136)
Okay, same question to Ossahan. What are some other inherent biases that you find yourself pushing against in your writing? Because I'm sure that there are some.

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (15:36.926)
Yes, definitely. I think one of the inherent biases I find myself really pushing against whenever, especially whenever I write fantasy, is that I tend to notice, especially when I read a lot of very stacked epic fantasy, that there was almost like a

there was like an uncritical view of imperialism and colonialism in a lot of these stories, especially with them being very Eurocentric and with them fighting against like a group of maybe savage people without any kind of criticism or any kind of like depth or nuance into looking at those issues. So whenever I try to write fantasy, the main thing that comes to my mind, especially when I'm thinking of things like wars, how can this actually have a critical look? And,

Deborah L. Davitt (16:06.01)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (16:15.667)
Yeah...

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (16:28.846)
like a critical and actually like very anti-imperialist look at like these things that are going on. Because especially as we've seen so much of that in fantasy, I feel like it's really important for me to kind of make sure that whatever I'm writing is very anti-imperialist or anti-colonialist. So that is something that I always kind of keep at the back of my mind.

Deborah L. Davitt (16:50.682)
And your story shows a great way of looking at that as well. And again, we will get to that in a minute. I swear to God. Let's see, my last question is, quite a lot of non-Western literary tradition actually comes out of oral storytelling and other cultures. How do you use that tradition or do you? And I'm gonna start with Ossahan with that, because it seemed to me that your story could be read out loud beautifully.

and I wondered if there was any oral storytelling roots in it.

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (17:23.79)
Yeah, that's a great question. I do definitely use a lot of oral story techniques, especially when I'm writing. One of the oral storytelling traditions that I really fall back on is rhythm work whenever I'm writing. So even though I'm not really reading things out loud, I am kind of using the rhythm structure that oral storytelling has. So the beats and the pauses where the story might be.

into the written word. So it is also a very subconscious thing of me to do now and to have these stories where I'm like, the beat would be here, or if this was being read out loud, it would sound like this. And I think that that's kind of a way I always tend to preserve that kind of tradition within all of my stories to make it kind of, do a story that can still have a communal effect. You could tell it to a group of people or you could narrate it out.

Deborah L. Davitt (17:51.838)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (18:18.966)
I will say that your story had rhythm, it had flow, it had repetition in all the right places. And therefore it just carries the reader along and I would love to hear you read it out loud at some point. So Liza, same question to you, oral storytelling. Do you find yourself employing any of the techniques or giving any sort of nods to it? Talk to me about that.

Liza Wemakor (18:45.1)
Oh yeah. Yes, I think in my writing, I am attuned to like the rhythm and the, the sort of beauty of the language. I try to think about how the writing is gonna land on people's ear. And I think,

A really beautiful thing about oral storytelling or oral storytelling traditions is that it uses like the beauty of the language as like an almost teaching tool or a didactic tool. But if people take pleasure in the story they're hearing, they're more likely to retain it or to connect with it.

Deborah L. Davitt (19:33.962)
Yeah, absolutely, yes. The oral storytelling in Western literature, obviously, is the epics. And we had a grand tradition of that in the pre-written cultures of Anglo-Saxons and the Greeks and things like that. But something that we've largely lost, which is kind of sad in many regards, because the way people's memories

even in the pre-literate cultures, that people had much better memories because they were relying on their brains so much more to retain information that they'd heard. It's a completely different brain structure and it's something that we have lost in the West and it's sad. Tina, same question to you. How much comes out of oral tradition for you? Do you find yourself turning to the tools of it or to...

any oral storytelling in your family that you because your story talks about things being passed down from generation to generation or being lost from generation to generation as the as the parents refuse to teach magic to their children for example so yeah same question

Tina (20:53.391)
Yeah, definitely. I think something that comes across in a lot of my work is inheritance, what we get from our parents, what we don't. And I've always been really fascinated with fairy tales. They've inspired a lot of my stories. I think this one is a rare exception. There's not really a fairy tale to it. But I think fairy tales are a lot of fun, just because you can twist them, and then somebody can still recognize where it comes from.

Um, and I think I just not just fairy tales to just like fairy tales, folklore, urban legends, like we still have urban legends today. We just call them like Reddit. Am I the asshole? Yeah, and they're like professional like folklore professors who spend like their careers studying like Reddit folklore, which sounds amazing. I would love that job. But the I, yeah, but like rumors and hearsay. I find that like

Deborah L. Davitt (21:20.683)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (21:27.77)
Mm-hmm. We do.

Hahaha!

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (21:33.059)
Thank you.

Tina (21:48.788)
big inspiration for me.

Deborah L. Davitt (21:51.494)
Interesting, thank you. We're gonna switch gears now and talk about each of your stories in turn. We're gonna start with Tina's because she may have to leave us early today, which will make me sad, but I wanna make sure that she has the most opportunity to talk about her story before we move on. So your story is One for Sorrow, Two for Mirth. This was published as part of the Strange Horizons, Wuxia and Xianxia?

Tina (22:16.968)
Just like, Shinsha, just SH. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:18.99)
Xinxia, Xinxia special issue. Poppy Chan has been looking to avenge her father's death at the hands of an assassin hired by a railroad magnet for years as her shadow has shrunk and faded away. Her brother, Ty, has been on the same journey, not that she recognizes it at first, and it's his shadow, a tiger in form, that's killed the railroad man, while her shadow, in the form of magpies, protects her from the tiger, which has run amok, no longer knowing right from wrong.

Liza Wemakor (22:27.273)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:48.35)
You noted in the information you sent me for this story that the that Ty is named for a historical figure. Which figure and why the homage?

Tina (22:56.447)
Yeah, so Tai was named after, well while I was writing this I wasn't sure what to name him at first. Usually it takes me a couple tries to like get a character's name right. Yeah, so it came up in the news actually that they were doing tours in Yosemite honoring like the Chinese Americans who worked on there, worked in Northern California and there's a mountain there called Sing Peak. So this

Deborah L. Davitt (23:04.99)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (23:19.415)
Mm-hmm.

Tina (23:23.991)
So Tai's name after Tai Sing, who was the cook? Who was the cook actually for the US government, the US Geological Survey, and they named him Mountain after him. So that's what he's named for.

Deborah L. Davitt (23:36.978)
Okay, that's actually really cool. Okay, we talked a little bit about the concepts of honor and the concepts of being related to your family. We talked about collectivism. We talked about all these things that made things a Wuxia story. What makes this story in particular a Wuxia story?

Tina (24:00.023)
Well, I mean Poppy, she has to get revenge. She has to write the dishonor done upon her father by being killed by a railroad. Yeah, a railroad baron. Yes, yes. Yeah, but it becomes her life. It starts consuming her for all these years. So I personally wanted to write about that. I was inspired also. Over 2020, 2021, I had a lot of.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:10.255)
Mm-hmm, well.

very good thing to avenge.

Liza Wemakor (24:13.944)
I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure. I like to be comfortable. So I'm going to be comfortable. I'm going to be comfortable.

Tina (24:29.803)
extra time on my hands that I wouldn't have otherwise. Yeah, and I watched Wong Kar-Wai's The Grandmaster, which is about during the Sino-Japanese War. There's this Ip Man, who's like best known as Bruce Lee's like master in the West, but he was like pretty well known in China. There's a movie about him and it's also about this like woman he runs into who's on this like revenge mission and it like destroys her.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:31.97)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:47.598)
Mm-hmm.

Tina (24:57.512)
I thought it was really interesting and I wanted to write a story like that.

Deborah L. Davitt (25:01.766)
Interesting. Okay, as someone who was originally from Reno, Nevada, I was absolutely thrilled to see a small town like Carson City, Nevada, that meant mentioned in the story. Why is it the city? Why is that the story in California and Nevada? Why why those areas in particular?

Tina (25:18.903)
Yeah, well a lot of early Chinese immigration to the US was in the West in general, California, the coastal California region. But I wanted to put them in Nevada, also sort of an homage to Tai Sing, who as far as I can tell, at least from verified sources, he's lived in Nevada some point in his life. And also, yeah, the issue would like...

Tina (25:46.607)
digging up these historical figures is like there's not much about their early life, but apparently he did live there. And also Nevada is far enough away from California that it gives the sense that both Ty and Poppy have wandered around such as more of the wandering hero thing. And also I'm from small towns, so I wanted to...

Deborah L. Davitt (26:06.434)
Okay.

Yeah!

Deborah L. Davitt (26:13.182)
Okay, and we talked about the inspiration a little bit, Ip Man and these other things. So, all right, we are going to bop to someone else. So thank you very much for talking about the story. I really enjoyed reading it. I highly encourage everybody out there to go and read it now because it was wonderful. We're gonna bop to Osahan with his story, Last Ritual of the Smoke Eaters, which appeared in Lightspeed November, 2023.

Liza Wemakor (26:16.832)
Thank you.

Liza Wemakor (26:23.005)
But when you see the

Liza Wemakor (26:29.491)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (26:42.806)
This story takes place in a secondary world, West African inspired village with the element of dragons added in. In the story, Joshua and Effie are lovers and partners, having loved each other since childhood. Joshua goes off to fight the dragons and Effie is forced to, or agrees to, depending on which portion of the story you're at, to inhale his ashes and take Joshua's spirit into her body, which they're now meant to share.

But something's wrong. Their spirits, though they loved each other, fight one another because Effie has read just enough of the old works to doubt the narrative of dragons being evil and were the only of death. And this story is wonderful. It questions colonialism in terms of the war that's being fought against the dragons. It questions the nature of true love, the narrative of true love. It questions lots of things all at once. So

What legends or other stories, if any, gave you touchstones to draw on for this story? I guess is my first question.

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (27:44.874)
Yeah, that's a great question. So I think I drew on a bunch of different things. I think one of the first things that I really took inspiration from, or I really pinpointed, was that there is this African, or rather Nigerian tradition of actually having to, well not inhale, but like...

what is it called? You have to drink the water used to wash someone's dead body like when they die in some cultures and in some traditions. And it's a cultural tradition that's very much rooted in this idea of submission. And it very much robs the person of their autonomy because it's a thing that it's almost forced upon women especially to do.

So I wanted to, I definitely took inspiration from that. When I was younger and even till now, I read a bunch of West African folktales. So I really wanted to write something that had like kind of that feel, but also kind of like incorporated dragons because, you know, just getting really back into like the idea of dragons a lot. And so I kind of wanted to blend a lot of those like sources of inspiration together. And that's how I kind of.

came up with last rituals.

Deborah L. Davitt (29:12.379)
Excellent. We've talked about the hallmarks of non-western fantasy. Which of them do you think the story exemplifies best or what were you taking aim at the most when you wrote it?

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (29:24.446)
Yeah, so I definitely talked a little bit about this before, but I think I definitely was trying to write something that very much was like anti-imperialist. And I also think it is non-Western in the sense of how they view like these traditions and these things, like, you know, for like Effie, the main character, it's this tradition that like, you know, when the people you love die, like, you like, you are still responsible for them, you know, like, your body is not their body, you have to like...

like honor them in this specific way. And, you know, for her it's like, well, you know, for her it's like, it's almost invasive to have to, you know, use like her own bodily autonomy and agency to honor someone, you know, like in that specific way. And there's also like this whole argument and this whole protest because, you know, there's still this inherent fact that like, when Joshua was alive, he was aiding in this very,

Deborah L. Davitt (29:57.219)
Mm-hmm.

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (30:22.374)
you know, imperialist world without any questions or without any criticisms of it. And it affects him as he goes on and he doesn't really want to address it. And it's something that she can't get over. And I think that specifically is like some of the like my most important part structures and like some of the things that I wanted to bring in and just kind of like questioning of like this status quo and like the status quo and what is acceptable in a society and what is, you know.

Deborah L. Davitt (30:32.139)
Mm-hmm.

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (30:52.29)
you know, what is considered the norm, especially in fantasy, which is, you know, going out to fight a war without any questions, because usually it's expected that the main characters are always fighting the war for a great reason, but it's never really critically looked into, so I really wanted to kind of explore that in greater depth.

Deborah L. Davitt (31:16.462)
Okay, excellent. I again, I will link to the story in the comments to make sure that everybody knows to go and read it. It is really good. I highly encourage people to take a look at it. Liza, your novella is loving Sapphoa. It appeared from neon hemlock in February of this year. It is a sapphic romance between Sapphoa, a vampire of African or Haitian heritage and centuries of age.

and Cynthia, an African-American woman who's a professor of literature. The narrative moves smoothly between times and places from 1990s New York to the era of the Haitian Revolution that saw Safoa's birth as a vampire. There's a point in the narrative when Cynthia talks about teaching the canons of literature, Western literature and others. Where do you see this work fitting into the canons of literature itself? What are your reference points for the story of love and transformation?

Liza Wemakor (32:17.565)
So I guess some of the literary influences are named explicitly or at least one of them is named explicitly at some point in the novella. So Cynthia at some point is holding a book by Toni Morrison called Playing in the Dark.

It's a collection of like nonfiction that Toni Morrison released in the 90s. And I'm very influenced myself by Toni Morrison's work. And I think she really shifted in some ways what people thought was possible for Black American writers to do, for Black American writers to write about and explore. And also in some of her work, she...

Deborah L. Davitt (32:46.529)
Mm-hmm.

Liza Wemakor (33:08.812)
pushes beyond the borders of the US and like sets some stories in the Caribbean and elsewhere. So I'm very influenced by that sort of like transatlantic sensibility and let me see. And there's also a line when Cynthia is talking about teaching canons where she says something along the lines of like she wants to teach.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:15.789)
Mm-hmm.

Liza Wemakor (33:39.028)
canonical Western canons alongside non-Western canons because she sees them all as like a continuum. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:44.459)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:47.797)
Yes.

I hope you bring that sensibility to your teaching as well, because that's important.

Liza Wemakor (33:53.384)
because that's important. Mostly it's just some letters in front of you, but the most important term would be the very important word.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:57.746)
All right, what are some of your touchstones in writing Sephoah either in terms of oral culture or literary? She is an incredible character she She she's nuanced she has such a sense of history about her and I wanted to know Obviously there are other vampires in literature that you could use as touchstones But I didn't think that she sounded like any of them. So where did you?

Liza Wemakor (34:10.873)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (34:26.71)
draw your inspiration for her specifically.

Liza Wemakor (34:31.66)
This is going to sound very like woo-woo spiritualist, but I feel like I almost had like a vision of what the novella was supposed to be. And then I like wrote it out the first draft and like this flurry of like inspiration and I don't know. I felt like, yeah, the characters were...

already in my head and I just needed to write them and to write the story that had come to me. Safua, the Ghanaian vampire character, I think in many ways was inspired by my mother. Not in all there are significant differences, but I think of her as this

Deborah L. Davitt (35:17.475)
Mm-hmm.

Liza Wemakor (35:28.376)
This character who is strong in ways that often counter Western understandings of strength. She has been strong through survival. She's been strong through plotting for a better world with other people as opposed to trying to take on the evils of the world herself. She is also

Deborah L. Davitt (35:37.479)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (35:53.695)
Mm-hmm.

Liza Wemakor (35:55.728)
I think shaped by the experience of being an immigrant in ways that I haven't always seen in vampire literature. Moving, yeah, moving from one country to another, moving around the world is something that changes her and takes a toll on her. And she doesn't always feel like she's in control. And that is something that I think is definitely a product of me growing up.

Deborah L. Davitt (36:03.123)
Oh yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (36:15.516)
Mm-hmm.

Liza Wemakor (36:25.804)
in a household with a mom who was an immigrant and who experienced both a lot of joy and a lot of struggle in that experience.

Deborah L. Davitt (36:41.73)
Control is usually a seminal thing in vampire narratives. I'm going off of my prepared questions because this is something that really interests me. And Seffwa does not exhibit the hallmarks of controlling others that vampires typically do. And she doesn't feel like she's necessarily in control of her surroundings. So that was again, a very interesting thing. Would you like to speak more about that? Or do you think that we've covered it adequately or what?

Liza Wemakor (36:51.448)
me.

Liza Wemakor (37:12.688)
Oh yeah. Yeah, so I think that also maybe ties into or reflects like the vampire biology in this story. That it is the way vampirism works or functions in this story is maybe a lot more naturalistic. They aren't necessarily...

Deborah L. Davitt (37:25.162)
Yes.

Liza Wemakor (37:40.812)
doing things that haven't already been witnessed or seen in nature or in the world. They're just doing things as vampires that are unusual for humans to do, but that are functions that exist in like other animal groups. And I think this is part of how we get to see vampires like Safoie and the story being so vulnerable.

Deborah L. Davitt (37:45.678)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (38:00.798)
Yeah.

Liza Wemakor (38:10.208)
because they aren't necessarily supernatural or they aren't necessarily beyond anything we've witnessed on earth before. They are still subjected to like the laws of physics and of dependence on other beings. And they still have weaknesses.

Deborah L. Davitt (38:31.778)
Mm-hmm.

Liza Wemakor (38:37.508)
and peculiarities that make them vulnerable to exploitation and so on.

Deborah L. Davitt (38:43.351)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (38:47.742)
One of the major differences in the type of vampire that Safoie is that she drinks from her lovers using her tongue instead of her teeth. And the process of turning a lover into a vampire takes years and many feedings instead of one and done the way you typically see it. I haven't seen the tongue used as the as the approach vehicle.

since the vampire tapestry of Susie McKee Charnas in 1980. So this was particularly intriguing to me. That is a very biological vampire. I don't know if you're nodding. I don't know if you've read the book or not.

Liza Wemakor (39:20.044)
I haven't read it yet. It's something that's been on my to read list for a while now though.

Deborah L. Davitt (39:25.958)
Yeah, the chapter, the unicorn tapestry was originally excerpted and was put into a course that I took in college. And so then I read the whole book because I loved that chapter that was excerpted so much. And it is fascinating and it is considered very seminally feminist in its approach to vampires as opposed to the very, very masculine way that

they are typically written even when they're written by female writers. So it is actually very interesting. I'm going to skip that question and we're going to move on to other people's work. I'm going to mangle this poor person's name, but we all read together, Nigi Vos, Boiled Bones and Black Eggs, which appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies issue 275, April 11, 2019.

In this story, a boastful ghost torments the house of Shang Hua and her relative, the narrator. They have served both the living and the dead for years, always suiting the meal to the recipient and allowing the dead to pass on as a result of finding their needs met. But Lord Ning doesn't want to pass on. He wants to eat them out of house and home and boast endlessly of his conquests, which he does with constant repetition of like someone who's in dementia, almost of the

Liza Wemakor (40:47.912)
And that's it for today.

Deborah L. Davitt (40:50.61)
his past glories. When Shang Hua realizes this, she comes up with a plan. She summons the ghosts of all the Lord slew in life to a feast with him and the hungry ghosts turn on the dead man chasing him from her house at last. What did we like about the story? Which of the hallmarks of non-western fantasy that we've discussed? Did it demonstrate? I'm gonna start with Ossahan. What did you like or dislike about this story?

Liza Wemakor (41:11.704)
I'm sorry, buddy.

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (41:20.946)
Okay, so I will be honest in saying that I haven't finished the story. So I do what I really am drawn to. No, yeah. Okay. What I really am drawn to, even though I'm not done yet, and what I really... No, it's fine. It's fine. I really am drawn to, I think what I...

Deborah L. Davitt (41:29.954)
Oh, it's okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (41:37.322)
I didn't mean to put you on the spot, I'm so sorry.

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (41:48.13)
What I'm really drawn to here is especially the character work in this piece. And I think I really am drawn as well to the setting as well. I think that really is something that really has been like standing out to me as I've been going through it and reading it. And so it's things that have really been like, I don't know, calling to mind.

I don't know, they've really just been pulling me forward. It's felt very engaging throughout as I've gone through it. And so I do have, I wanna have more to say, but I'm also very much like, I need to finish it before I put my thoughts together. But no, I have really been enjoying it so far. I'm sorry.

Deborah L. Davitt (42:23.31)
Well, thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (42:32.938)
Hehe

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (42:41.206)
No.

Deborah L. Davitt (42:41.754)
It's okay, I really should have asked you guys before the broadcast if you had all finished it or not. That is completely on me, I'm so sorry.

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (42:47.694)
No, no, it's okay, it's okay. It's fine.

Deborah L. Davitt (42:52.222)
Oh, I will agree with you that the setting is beautiful. Even though it is minimally described, I have such a set of mental images and I picture them being at this cliff side with this, a lot of my touchstones are from animation. So I have this brightly colored village basically perched at the side of this huge cliff.

Liza Wemakor (42:54.309)
And I think that's a good point. But I think that's a little odd. I think that's a little odd.

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (42:56.707)
Yeah, it's...

Deborah L. Davitt (43:19.302)
and people coming across bridges and things like that. It's not in the story, it's all in my head, but it does so much with so little to create and evoke this atmosphere that it's wonderful. And yeah, the character work is great too.

Liza, I'm gonna ask you, did you read the story all the way through before I ask you? Okay. Okay, what did you like and dislike about the story and what hallmarks of non-Western fantasy did this demonstrate?

Liza Wemakor (43:43.337)
Yes.

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (43:45.295)
Okay.

Tina (43:51.139)
Yeah.

Liza Wemakor (43:54.168)
Yeah, so yeah, I don't think there is anything I disliked about this story. One thing I really enjoyed that I only see, I think sometimes in fiction, was the way food was central to the narrative. And it makes me think of how in so many like non-Western traditions and diasporic traditions

Deborah L. Davitt (44:11.476)
Oh yeah.

Liza Wemakor (44:22.856)
Giving food as tribute, giving food as like a form of ancestral veneration is very central. So that's something that comes to mind for me. I also really like the descriptions of characters. I feel like there's a sort of emphasis on the shapes of the characters, like shapes of their

Deborah L. Davitt (44:29.577)
Oh yes.

Liza Wemakor (44:52.636)
Like, it opens with that description of shoulders being rounded by like a woven, a woven caper or shawl of some sort. So I really like the particularity of its descriptions. And I like how food is being used as almost a...

Deborah L. Davitt (44:52.881)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (45:06.261)
Mm-hmm.

Liza Wemakor (45:20.552)
a set piece or maybe even a character in the narrative.

Deborah L. Davitt (45:24.974)
point out that in a couple of episodes, episode 34 is going to be food in food ways, so everybody tune back in for that. And I will also point out that food as veneration to the ancestors is something we've lost because of Christianity, because the Romans in particular used to have holidays in which they would provide food at the tombs of their ancestors, and they would put it down a little tube into the sarcophagus.

and things like that. So it's something we've lost in the West. And it's again, it's kind of a sad thing because yeah, hygiene, whatever. It's still a method of talking to your ancestors and letting them know that they're loved still, even if it's just sharing the foods together as you think about the dead. So Tina, what did you like or dislike about this story?

Liza Wemakor (46:13.681)
just sharing this together as we take an op-ed at. So let me play for this link, not the story.

Deborah L. Davitt (46:20.266)
And what hallmarks of non-Western fantasy did you think that it brought up?

Tina (46:24.387)
Well, I mean, I like the story enough to recommend it to y'all. So that there wasn't there's pretty much nothing I dislike about it. I already mentioned food. I didn't actually know we lost them the West. So that's cool to know, first of all. But I really love the descriptions of food. They make me hungry just reading it. Yeah. And I also love the characters like Lordning. Everyone knows someone like Lordning who has these like same stories they tell over and over again.

Deborah L. Davitt (46:27.978)
Yes you did!

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (46:28.274)
Thank you.

Liza Wemakor (46:40.525)
I'm gonna go.

Deborah L. Davitt (46:43.474)
Hahaha!

Tina (46:53.763)
and you're trying to politely tell them, like, politely trying to tell them to, like, stop or find a new story, I guess. But you don't know how. Something I also really love about this story in terms of non-Western fantasy is that in a more traditional, like, Western fantasy story, you'd probably expect there to be, like, a physical fight against Lord Nyingkappen, the main characters, like, go on a quest to fight him or something or exercise as goes.

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (47:03.547)
Thank you.

Tina (47:21.519)
But in this story, our main characters are two women. They're not fighters of any kind, so they have to come up with some a bit more crafty ways to get Lordning out of their restaurant.

Deborah L. Davitt (47:29.268)
Yeah!

Deborah L. Davitt (47:37.242)
It comes out of almost a trickster tradition almost. It was a beautiful way to remove the impediment of his presence. And he definitely absolutely gets what he deserves. It is a wonderful ending. And again, I will put a link to it in the comments. We're going to switch gears and talk now about what all you have out recently or coming out soon.

Tina (47:40.108)
Yeah, I know.

Tina (47:46.715)
Ha ha!

Deborah L. Davitt (48:02.658)
that you would like people to read, Ossahan, what do you have out recently or coming out soon that people can look forward to from you?

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (48:11.422)
Yeah, so I think the most recent thing that I had out recently was a science fiction piece in Logix magazine. It looks at a future in which ancestral memories are kind of, or rather ancestral houses are kind of torn down and people are giving the option to upload these memories onto their hands through chips or through memory boots.

And the main character is trying to resist that by being like a wanderer around like, you know, like this future world. I think coming out soon, I have another non-Western fantasy that is coming out in Lightspeed this year. It is all about, yeah, it's all about a mystical fox creature and almost being forced to like find different...

Deborah L. Davitt (48:39.521)
Mm-hmm.

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (49:06.778)
conceptions of family when you're forced to run away from some place. So I'm really excited for people to read that. And I will, yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (49:13.23)
Okay, looking forward to that. Lightspeed has been really good. Yeah. Lightspeed has been bringing out some wonderful stuff lately, and I say that as one of their authors, so I can totally say that. Um, Tina, what do you have coming out soon or out recently that people should be totally gluing their eyeballs to their screens for?

Tina (49:36.959)
Out recently, a few months ago, I had a story also at Lightspeed that was a very short flash, but I enjoyed it. It was called Four Self-Care Secrets for a Long Unhappy Life. It was about a Fox spirit trying to sell a self-help product. I was trying to be a scummy self-help guru, but it ended up telling its life story in the process.

Deborah L. Davitt (50:00.354)
Ha ha ha!

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (50:00.955)
Thank you.

Tina (50:04.167)
So I had a lot of fun writing that. So coming in. Thank you. Well, coming up soon. Recently, I got asked by like an editor at frivolous comma, the short fiction market to they had they were doing like commission stories. So I wrote one for them that will be coming out I think at the end of this month. It's called North Georgia Hungry Ghost Investigators. It's about teenage girls.

Deborah L. Davitt (50:05.538)
Wonderful!

Deborah L. Davitt (50:14.55)
Mmm.

Tina (50:29.155)
about lesbians and ghosts, many ghosts, so that was a lot of fun.

Deborah L. Davitt (50:30.03)
Peace!

Osahon Ize-Iyamu (50:31.654)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (50:35.39)
Oh, that I'm so envious because I would love to get into frivolous comma, but no dice yet. So congratulations and I will look forward to reading Hungry Ghosts.

Tina (50:46.224)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (50:48.318)
Liza, what about you? Obviously the novella just came out so that is going to be a big focus here but is there anything else you'd like to talk about in addition to that?

Liza Wemakor (50:54.832)
I think it's a good idea to do that. Oh yeah. So before Loving Saffloi, which came out beginning of this month, I had two short stories that came out like technically within a day of each other in the fall. One was a flash fiction piece in Baffling called Who Needs It which is like a sort of

queer love story set in New York. That's an exploring like an interracial dynamic. And then I also had a story in Prismatica magazine, which is like a queer LGBTQ speculative fiction magazine called Magic City that is about robotic Android strippers in a far-ish future Atlanta, Georgia. So.

Deborah L. Davitt (51:25.07)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (51:47.189)
Okay.

Liza Wemakor (51:52.879)
Those are out as well.

Deborah L. Davitt (51:55.414)
Right. So talk to us a little bit more about where we can all read Loving Safwa. I know it's at Neon Hemlock, but a little bit about the process working with them. Was it an easy process? Did they give you lots of edits that helped you clarify the story or was it just this is exactly what we've always wanted to read and it just bloomed out of them?

Liza Wemakor (52:17.995)
Thank you.

Liza Wemakor (52:22.168)
Oh yeah. Yeah, I think Neon Hemlock has been very, very supportive. Dave, Dave Ring is the main editor at Neon Hemlock who also founded the publication and its offshoots. I think Dave was very supportive of the story in its original form, though I found that the feedback

he gave allowed me to add some clarifying details and some texture to the story that I might not have been able to necessarily envision if I had been working alone or if I had self-published. So I was really thankful to work with him and have him as an editor.

Deborah L. Davitt (53:02.359)
Okay.


Deborah L. Davitt (53:12.622)
Nice.

Deborah L. Davitt (53:17.71)
Fantastic! Alright, thank you all for having been here to talk with me this week. I've really enjoyed the conversation. I've learned a lot and that's always my goal. And next week on Shining Moon, I will be talking with Editor Cherie, Renee, Thomas of the Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Be sure to like and subscribe and we are out.