Ancient village with modern kids and bubbles.If you don’t know about DonorsChoose, it’s a great program that lets you support individual classroom projects. I sponsored one in honor of my aunt Nona. Here’s the lovely thank you note I just got.
Dear Cat Rambo,
Thank you so much for your donation to my classroom. Having copies of Persepolis: The Story Of A Childhood has had a dramatic impact on my students as they finish their eighth grade year.
When the students received copies of a book that they were actually interested in, they felt like they were the ones in charge of their learning experience. The decision to design a unit around Persepolis was student driven. Earlier this year I noticed that students were coming to class regularly asking questions about the Middle East and Islam. In student interest surveys, the class overwhelmingly expressed a desire to learn more about these topics. So when students got copies of Persepolis, they felt as if their voices were being heard. When I started the unit, I noticed a big increase in student engagement. “I felt lucky!” Eighth grader De’jean Williams said when the class received the books. “Adults hardly ever listen to us- it’s nice when they finally do.”
The Persepolis books have provided students with a window into life in the Middle East. Students are beginning to understand the complexity of the forces shaping the region. They are deeply engaging with questions about the role of government, culture and religion influencing a society. Middle school is the time when students are first beginning to shape their world-view. Reading Persepolis is helping students in this process. As the United States gets more and more involved in the region, I am so glad that my students understanding of the region is growing.
Thanks again for your generous donation! You are truly making a difference in the lives of young people!!
With gratitude,
Ms. Founds
Want to see students reading diverse, interesting, informative reading that features protagonists like them? Find programs doing just that and help them.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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Advice for Attending a Writing Workshop
A student wrote in to let me know they’d made it into Odyssey, huzzah, and asked if I had any advice about attending a workshop. As a matter of fact I do. Like many things in life, you get more out of a workshop if you’re willing to invest a little effort beforehand, during, and afterward.
I went through a number of workshops in college at both the undergraduate and graduate level, but the place where I learned the most was Clarion West, a six week workshop in Seattle. My instructors were Octavia Butler, Andy Duncan, L. Timmel Duchamp, Connie Willis, Gordon van Gelder, and Michael Swanwick; my classmates included Ann Leckie, E.C.Myers, Rashida Smith, and Rachel Swirsky, among others. If you read a lot of F&SF, you may recognize many of those names and realize how incredibly privileged I was to be part of that year.
How I Prepared
Read work by your instructors. At least a few stories or a novel. Get a sense for what they will be able to give; there will be things you won’t expect, but you will learn what you like and dislike about their writing and what you want them to teach you.
Come with story ideas. Not stories, but prompts and scenes. A list of potential titles. A page where you took fifteen minutes to generate ideas.
Put other shit on hold. Clear the decks so unrelated work and deadlines is not distracting you. You want to give it your all. The spouse of one of my fellows had their children writing letters saying how much they missed the parent and wanted them to come home, and it was one of the clearest examples of someone sabotaging their partner that I have ever witnessed. Don’t let anyone do this to you. Make the most of the workshop while you can.
Useful Things I Did
Go first. One of the things that has stood me well in life is a habit of volunteering to go first, mainly due to a let’s-just-get-this-over-with-already impatience. I’ve done it every time I’ve been in a workshop and it helps you not feel that you have to live up to earlier examples. Do a nice job and you can actually be that intimidating classmate whose work people worry about living up to.
Talk to people. Your fellow students are a peer group you’ll be interacting with for years to come. Be a good citizen and avoid being a jackass, even if it’s your natural tendency. Ask people questions more than you tell them about yourself. Listen.
Take good notes. I like to write stuff down, at the time in Moleskinnes. If there was ever a time for learning to write good notes, this is it. If you have difficulty, you might ask your classmates about recording.
Take care of your body. Six weeks is a long time and one in which health issues can develop if you’re not careful. Stretch. Walk daily; work out a few times each week if you can. You will emerge more energetic and creative as a result of investing that time and effort.
What I Would Have Done Differently
You can’t go home again. I did go home two weekends in order to hang with my spouse and cats. In retrospect, while that did recharge me, I should have spent that time hanging out with my classmates since that time was pretty finite.
Take some board games. I don’t know why I didn’t think to do this, perhaps because we weren’t gaming as much then as we used to. I would take games that were easy to teach, had a timespan of never more than an hour or hour, and which stressed creativity. Examples: Codenames, Dixit, Fiasco, Microscope.
Life Post-Workshop
Grieve that idyllic life a bit. It’s okay to mourn. You will miss some of your classmates fiercely. Some will become lifelong friends; others will fade back into the world and never be heard from again.
Go back over your notes. I still go back over my notes periodically, sometimes making notes in a different color; I’m about due to review these again.
Write and write and write some more. Apply what you’ve learned. Experiment. Reply to other people’s stories with your own. And send stuff out. And welcome to you. Once you have made the first sale of six cents or more a word, join SFWA, but even before then use its resources like the SFWA Blog, Writer Beware, and the SFWA reading series across the country.
Here’s the sections and the suggested reading lists.
Problematic aspects can — and often do — appear when working with the steampunk genre, primarily because of the typical setting of the Victorian era. One thing you want to remember about the Victorian era is that during this time the British Empire is exactly that – it’s an empire. At this time the British Empire is working to control the territory it already has and expand into the territory it does not yet control. It has a lot of colonies, and many explorers who want to find new lands to add to those colonies. England’s not alone in this. Many of the explorers being sent out are bent on conquering in some way. Coupled with that is the fact that the lands they are entering are in fact not uninhabited, but are often occupied by civilizations older than England’s.
Looking at the history of this time period, brutal stories are told over and over again – there’s a lot of economic oppression and sometimes the removal of legitimate governments. So when you write in this era, you will want to consider issues of colonialism (control of dependent countries) and imperialism (the policy of expanding an empire through the establishment of colonies and conquering other countries). It is important to remember that for many people, especially those who are “othered” in some way, the Victorian era is not a pleasant one. It is an era of tremendous racial discrimination and attempts to legitimize that discrimination in any way possible. One in which white women are struggling to get the right to vote, homosexuality is illegal, and society in general is incredibly repressive to the point where furniture legs are covered to avoid their suggestive nature. You will also want to think about how industrialization affects the poor. London fog for example doesn’t have to with the weather, but rather all the factories that are churning out coal smoke.
Representation and diversity has not been steampunk’s strengths in the past. Today more and more writers are trying to change this and writing steampunk stories featuring characters who are people of color and using them very effectively to confront a lot of these issues.
When it comes to problematic history, steampunk isn’t alone. Weird Western also has its own issues. Just as Victorian England had an imperialistic approach to the world, the western expansion of the United States into the already inhabited territory of the “Wild West” was accompanied by its fair share of atrocities. Native Americans were displaced and often killed, and their land given to white settlers.
The latter half of the 19th century is marked by the American Indian wars – constant battles, massacres, and overall brutal savagery on the part of the settlers expanding into the frontier. Reading the history of this time period is both intensely saddening and informative as well as something you will want to have a working knowledge of if you are writing Weird Western.
One thing I suggest doing when you are writing Weird Western is to figure out the actual date of the story. Since you are writing alternative history, it may be slightly different, but chances are these wars will be going on unless you have compensated for them in some way. And in turn, those events will be having an influence in the world you are creating.
One of the big issues we have when writing Weird Western and dealing with the Wild West in general is we have an impression that has been supplied by the mainstream media, particularly Hollywood. This version has been incredibly whitewashed compared to historical reality. Despite what we see in movies and television, the first cowboys weren’t early John Wayne prototypes, but actually Hispanic vaqueros, who spread northward from Mexico into the United States (as well as south into Argentina).
Many Hispanic cowboys in the Wild West were ones who chose to remain in the United States at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, when the land they were living in, which had previously belonged to Mexico, became the American territory of California. They soon discovered that the citizenship they had been granted didn’t protect their land from white settlers. At the same time laws were passed that were intended to discourage them, such as laws preventing traditional celebrations on Sundays for being “too loud” and other laws known as “greaser laws” which permitted the police to arrest and imprison Mexican Americans on vagrancy charges if they were unemployed.
Something that has been usually overlooked in media depictions of the Wild West was that one in four cowboys were black. In fact, the historical inspiration for the Lone Ranger was a fascinating man named Bass Reeves – a former slave who was a U.S. Marshall for 32 years. In 1860 1/3 of the population of Texas were slaves that had been brought by settlers to Texas to maintain their herds and ranches.
Another group that gets introduced to the American West to serve as labor are the Chinese, who are brought to America and the west not just to work on the railroads, but also in the gold mines. In fact in the latter half of the 19th century, most of the larger towns contained a “Chinatown.” There was a very pronounced gender imbalance in these communities, which contained less than 5% women. Once again, much like the Hispanic population in California, as the Chinese population grew, laws were passed to limit them, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which restricted immigration from China for 10 years.
All sorts of diverse and interesting figures abound in the real life stories of this time period. Some of these are also women passing for men, or else carving out their own space, like Calamity Jane or Belle Starr. When you are writing your Weird Western stories, don’t write just a version of that generic Hollywood vision, but instead use the fact that the Wild West was far more diverse, complex, and interesting to give your writing those qualities as well.
One of my projects this year has been fleshing out the on-demand version of the live class I teach, “