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(Note: this essay contains major spoilers for The Wicked + The Divine.) I am a first-generation Indian-American. I did well in school. I am a “model citizen,” not even a current speeding ticket on my record. In The Wicked + The Divine (WicDiv) by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, every 90 years, twelve young adults are told they’re gods from various pantheons. They will be loved. They will be hated. They will be brilliant.
I think a lot about fairy tales: who gets to live inside them and who can only wish to; how they help us to survive, and when they no longer serve us, what parts of them we can leave behind. With this story in particular, I wondered whether a prolonging of a character’s beginning could act as a refusal of their ending, and whether refusing their ending could be a way to save them.
I’m part of a writing group with two friends from college, and sometime last year we chose the prompt “Illusion.” I started thinking about my time at Yale, and how we all presented these glowing, successful versions of ourselves when we first got to campus, not deliberate illusions, but subconscious ones. With that mental image in my head, I sat down and wrote the first few paragraphs of “How to Make a Man Love You,” and the rest of the story grew from there.
In this issue’s short fiction, Hannah Yang takes a different kind of look at the magic of love in “How To Make A Man Love You,” and in Kristina Ten’s “Beginnings” we get a new twist on “once upon a time;” in flash fiction, Martins Deep plays with format, imagery, and emotion with “Isio,” and fantasy meets reality in “Practical Childcare Considerations for Knights Errant” by Rachel Locascio; for poetry, we have “Great Sage, Protector of Horses” by May Chong and “Alice Is Much Farther Than She Appears” by Laura Ruby. Plus essay “Stereotypes, Godhood, and The Wicked + The Divine” by Priya Chand. Enjoy!
Maladies we used to blame on spirits or an imbalance of humors are now known to be due to germs, or genetic factors, or organ dysfunction. Mental illnesses and drastic personality changes that used to be called possession are now discussed in terms of functional brain connectivity. But there are cultures that still believe in those older, less scientific explanations, and what if they’re not wrong?
Creativity is fragile. You can’t let many voices in because there’s always plenty of people who want to tear you down, not realizing your harshest critic is yourself. Or at least it is for me. So while I do sometimes read early reviews, I tend not to read anything about my work after it’s been released. It’s already gone through editors and a critique group and many, many drafts. And no work will ever be perfect or please everyone. It can only capture a moment in time for the author – who they were and what concerned then when they wrote it – and then we move on to what’s next.
I think in a world where death is just a state change, we would absolutely turn the dead into one of the cogs in the machinery of capitalism, a resource to be utilized by the living, and this story takes that idea to that logical conclusion. I was inspired by the classic idea of “necromancer resurrects skeletons/zombies to do their bidding”—great, now what if it’s just the whole guy you grab, and everything that the guy knows?
In this issue’s short fiction, Isabel J. Kim gives us a necromancer out for justice for her murdered brother in “Christopher Mills, Return to Sender,” and Gabrielle Harbowy takes us inside “The Dybbuk Ward”; in flash fiction, Marie H. Lewis re-examines Persephone’s fate in “I Have Reached Into The Quantum Basket,” and Lisa M. Bradley’s “Collecting Ynes” is a mythologized account of Ynes Mexia, a Mexican-American woman who experienced mental illness, and who eventually became a world-renowned botanist – without a degree; for poetry, we have “Negative Detection” by Alex Jennings and “Stilling” by Cislyn Smith. Plus an interview with award-winning author of the Sixth World series, Race to the Sun, Black Sun and Fevered Star, and much more, Rebecca Roanhorse. Enjoy!
This issue, I thought I’d do something slightly different. I wanted to celebrate a few authors, and I also wanted to celebrate short fiction in general. Interviews are a great way for readers to gain insight into favorite works and authors. They are also a great way for writers to find perspectives on both the craft of writing and the publishing industry. So I asked a handful of notable short fiction writers if they’d like to do a group interview.
I want my readers, specifically Black women, to walk away from this story understanding that there are always choices in life. That they do not always have to choose what has been set out in front of them, that they can always say “No” and establish boundaries for themselves and it may be scary and it may be a big unknown, but it is their lives and no one has more right to their lives than they do.
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This issue's cover art by
warmtail / Adobe Stock Image.
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