We’ve got one more late-entry mini-interview for you on the eve of the Our Beautiful Reward launch event! (which is tonight, and for which you can still RSVP, click that link!).
Dyani Sabin’s searing poem about love amid oppression, “This is a romantic comedy” is online here.
Michael: How do the tools of speculative writing help you to think and communicate about what’s being done to personal freedoms around our bodies?
Dyani: I think that sometimes the only way to talk about issues that are so close to home, painful and traumatic, is to put on the gloves of metaphor, so to speak. Speculative fiction offers a lense into our reality that is unparalleled, because it automatically creates distance. That distance is what allows speculative writing to closely examine these issues—in the same way that memoir only works when the writer has enough emotional space and wisdom to see events with the understanding of time, speculative fiction allows us to do the same thing with culture.
Michael: What are you reading and thinking about that helps put this issue in perspective for you?
Dyani: I recently read Jeanna Kadlec’s Heretic, which I thought was just fantastic, a look at body autonomy and queerness through the lens of someone leaving an evangelical church to find the tarot and a queer community. I also enjoyed—in a totally different vein—Sara Mueller’s The Bone Orchard, which is a speculative fiction novel where the owner of a brothel is forced to investigate the death of the Emperor who captured her—and is entirely about consent, autonomy, and the struggle to define yourself in a world where there are gendered expectations.
Michael: Tell us, if you’d like, about something you’re doing, outside of writing, to make the world a less hostile and dystopian place for human beings with bodies to exist in?
Dyani: I work, every day, to reach out to my world with kindness! There are so many things you can do—lobbying, donating your time and money, calling your congresspeople—and all of that is important, but the thing that makes me feel human is going out into my community and making connections. Meet people in your community, and see other people who are learning and trying and believing in a better world—bit by bit you start to feel like together you can make it happen. And we will.
Michael: That’s a great answer! Thank you very much.
