Mimi Mondal

My 2017 Award Eligibility Post ._.

I have put off writing this post for months. That doesn’t make me special — I am not the only writer, by far, who cringes at the notion of having to beat their own drum. But others have already written theirs, and prioritizing my cringe over everyone else’s is nothing but complacence.

2017 has been a year of many disappointments and personal struggles for me, but it has also been a year of exemplary kindness from quarters I did not expect, and working with a lot of wonderful, talented people. It was the first year I was solicited to write anything at all, and the “What? Me? Really? Are you sure?” sensation of that hasn’t yet subsided. I worked with editors and teams from India, the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, which is… not quite an achievement on the literary scale, and yet is for me, for where I come from and who my people are. I am writing this post in the spirit of celebrating all these amazing people who have given me opportunities and love. I feel very blessed.

1. Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler

Eligible for: Best Related Work at the Hugo Awards; Best Non-fiction at the Locus Awards

This book was a labour of love. That’s a hackneyed phrase, but no publisher (or editors) expect to get rich from a nonfiction anthology that presumes the knowledge (and love) of another author’s work. I came into this project only halfway through, and I accepted it because it was a book I believed should exist, a vision that gave me strength and hope at a time little else did. That is the same reason Alisa Krasnostein and Alexandra Pierce of Twelfth Planet Press started it. Every contributor in this book – well-known or not – has written out of love; and I hope everyone who has read has imbibed it from their words.

This is the entry I am campaigning the hardest for. I believe 100% in its capability to win All the Awards. If you really like me and for some reason want to spend a vote on me, vote Luminescent Threads up, please.

An excerpt from Gary K. Wolfe’s review in Locus Magazine:

[B]y far the most moving section consists of contributions by recipients of the Octavia Butler Scholarships to Clarion, not only because some of them have begun auspicious careers of their own (such as Rachel Swirsky and Indra Das), but because their own accounts are often powerful tales of self-discovery, even when they repeat the same points: no one expected to get in, no one certainly expected a scholarship, no one thinks Octavia would remember them. Maybe not, but the point now is that they remember her, and they do it beautifully. She’d be cool with that, if a little embarrassed.

2. Missive from a Woman in a Room in a City in a Country in a World Not Her Own

Eligible for: Best Related Work at the Hugo Awards

I’ll be honest – this is a very long shot. This is more of political/identity/intersectionality article than an SFF article. But it is one of the first things I wrote in 2017. It loosened up an awful knot in my chest; brought me back from a very dark, unproductive place. I would love for some of you to read it again.

An excerpt from Charles Payseur’s review in Quick Sip Reviews (which I’ve posted before; my apologies for repetition):

This is an essay about erasure and about place. About feeling like you belong to a parallel dimension. Or that you’ve passed through some portal and instead of the fantasy realm where things were going to be magical and just, you find a banal and ruthless place that is actively seeking to create a past that never existed.

3. On Translating the Stories Yet Unwritten: A Dalit Perspective from India

Another political/identity/intersectionality article I wrote last year, touching only very slightly on SFF. It’s eligible for the same as above, and an even longer shot. Once again, I would mostly love for you to read it. I had never published this kind of nonfiction before these two articles. They are probably a new direction in my life, both as a writer and a human.

I have received heartwarming feedback about this essay, but I don’t think I can point to a review.

4. Learning to Swim

Eligible for: Best Short Story at the Nebula, Hugo, Locus Awards

Honestly, the above line took me five minutes — and a lot of facial-muscle-and-diaphragm exertion — to write. I don’t believe yet that I’m ready to win any awards for my fiction. (I will tell you about the many, many really great stories I read last year that are. Let me do that on Twitter, since I’m rarely ever here, and so are you.) But this is the only story I published in 2017, and once again, it reflects all the thoughts and anxieties I was going through last year. I’ll be very glad if you read it. It somehow happens to be in the Nebula Reading List.

An excerpt from A. C. Wise’s review in Apex Magazine:

“Learning to Swim” is a beautiful story, even as it touches on the painful subjects of xenophobia, prejudice, and the way marginalized groups such as immigrants and religious minorities are too often treated in Western countries. However, it’s also a story of hope, found family, and community building, reminding us there is kindness in the world. Samantha and Raon’s refusal to give up on Uma, and the way they see her truly even when she cannot see herself shows that sometimes reaching out to someone in pain can make all the difference in the world.

Okay, that would be all. Hope all of you are having a very lovely 2018 so far, filled with beautiful stories and other things.

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I had not remembered this, but in April last year I was writing a poem on my phone for the boy I then loved. I never finished the poem. I no longer have that love. Nor do I have, any longer, much pride in my skills as a poet—for years I have written only for my heart—so I think I will set that draft free.

Afterwards,
when all this is done,
all the fear and anxiety
and hunting, living

like a mouse in the cracks of
walls, all
that I will recall
is your smile, like a tearing
gash of sunshine through
these squalid skyscrapers.

That is all I wish to recall.

I wish to recall this spring,
cherry blossoms, the white
sand of beaches, your
half-bitten fingernails, the
torments of your youth, your
eyes like placid sea glass.

I wish to recall the promises
you’re too young to keep.

[That’s all I wrote. Float away from me in peace now, half-written poem.]

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I have finally finished responding to all the poetry submissions from the October submission period of Uncanny. It took longer than I’d imagined. Since this was my first round as poetry editor, I had intended to read every submission myself (I did), but I hadn’t imagined just how many submissions a magazine like Uncanny receives in each submission period (400+, as it turned out), or how long it takes to read all of them.

Both ends of a set of submissions can be time-consuming for different reasons. On one hand, there are submissions that are so odd that you can’t merely hit the reject button — you stare and marvel at the henceforth unacquainted dimensions of the human mind. On the other, by the time you have narrowed down to a second tier of submissions, nearly every poem is strong, vibrant, important, deserving of publication space. I had spent many years of my early youth trying to learn to critique poetry, then shelved away that training in an unused section of my brain, since I moved on to editing and writing fiction. Never before has that training been so strongly called into application. It was exhilarating.

I have been trying to return to writing poetry myself, but moving back into that home is a slower process. Going back home is never the same as never leaving, anyway.

I have not gone back to my physical home in a long time. It occurs to me that 2017 is the first year I will have spent entirely away from home. It’s a year of no passport stamps. A first, ever since I acquired the passport.

I am waiting for many things, but solstice, and longer days, will be the easiest achieved and welcome. For the new year, I wish for more quietude of the heart, music, stories, writing, hope.

Writing in 2017, Part II

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2017 was a difficult, depressing year, but sometimes when you’ve been through possibly the worst time(s) of your life and emerged on the other side, everything else feels relatively pale. So, let’s say 2017 was a relatively pale year.

In January, I moved to New York.

In March, I published an article in Uncanny Magazine.

(In May, I acquired a new therapist.)

In June, I became a fellow at the New York Foundation for the Arts.

(In July, I turned 30.)

In August, Luminescent Threads came out, a book that I co-edited with Alexandra Pierce of Twelfth Planet Press.

In September, I started working as the Poetry and Reprint Editor of Uncanny Magazine.

In October, I had my first New York reading at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, one of the two largest branches of the NYPL.

In November, I published an article in Words Without Borders.

In December, in a few more days, I will have a small story published in Anathema Magazine.

In between, bleakness, writing, occasional pleasure, entirely too many cigarettes. The political situations of both India and the United States get worse every day than I have ever known in my life. (In India, I was born a few years after the Emergency, and was too young during Babri Masjid. I was still too young during the Kargil War, and actually considered it a positive thing.)

I am darker, angrier, wearier than I have ever been before. I channel my obsessive streak into reading the news for hours, and still never catch up with all the horrors sprouting everywhere, every minute.

My heart, that overused organ, has been put to cryosleep. The only thing that stirs it up any more is the occasional nightmare.

I feel like an animal, which isn’t fantastic, but preferable to feeling like a corpse.

What else? New York is cold and I like where I’m living, but Clinton Street is many miles from here, in Lower Manhattan, too far for the music to waft in.

I am getting by. I am thankful for the sunshine on my face, the kindness of strangers — all that has come my way since the time I tried to commit suicide in 2015. I am living on borrowed time and grace. Everything is a miracle. All of you reading this (or not).

The world will get better, I promise. We will live to see it together.

Space Unicorns Get New Poetry Editor: Talking with Mimi Mondal

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Here’s a fantastic interview I did with Bryan Thao Worra, President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. Contains details about what I enjoy in poetry, and also how editors should approach Dalit writers, besides other things.

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I recently had the pleasure to learn more about the Dalit community of South Asia and one of their wonderful emerging writers, Mimi Mondal. You can see my interview with her over at SPECPO, the blog for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association.

She is the new poetry editor at Uncanny Magazine, which has been a long-time supporter of my work, particularly imaginative pieces that might have struggled elsewhere to find a home.

Mimi Mondal and I had an extensive conversation on how to encourage more voices from the Dalit community and writers to watch for, and what she looks for in her own writing and verse. I enjoyed discussing literature with her greatly, and found there to be some exciting opportunities for collaboration and mutual support of each other’s emerging literary voices in the future. I recommend keeping an eye out for her over the years ahead!

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