We’re continuing the interview process with our awesome authors. Azzia Walker, our operations manager, got to know Ada Hoffmann, author of Monsters in My Mind and The Outside, which is coming in June 2019 from Angry Robot Books.

Q. What got you started with MONSTERS IN MY MIND?

A. I started publishing short fiction in 2010, and by 2015-ish I had an amount of it out there that I felt was a book’s worth. I always loved the idea of having a short fiction collection of my own, so I started experimenting with themes that could tie together big chunks of my work and with different ways of arranging the stories and poems.

When Dani Alexis Ryskamp beta read the manuscript for my novel THE OUTSIDE, she offered to publish it. I wanted (and, eventually, got) an agent and a bigger press for the novel, but I had been playing with the collection idea for a while at that point and had been struggling with where to send it, so I asked if we could do that instead. I liked the idea of publishing MONSTERS with a group of neurodivergent publishers who “got” my work.

I actually changed the entire story order for the NeuroQueer Books imprint. I asked myself: how did the stories and poems engage with the idea, literal or metaphorical or subtextual, of being neuroqueer? I knew what stories I wanted to start and end with, and between them I was able to order the works in a way that charted a satisfying path between different ways of engaging with that concept, like a meta-plot.

Q. Was there anything that surprised you about the stories or the characters as you got further in?

A. Not a lot – most of the stories were already polished and published before I assembled them. Even the new ones had already been through beta reading and revisions.

The surprises were mostly to do with how well the stories fitted together. I was surprised how much of my work I could fit into the structure I’d come up with, even if it had nothing to do with neurodiversity at first glance. It also surprised me which stories I ended up dropping. I had a couple of published stories that I think are great stories, and that even engage with neurodiversity and mental illness themes more directly than some of what made it in. But they didn’t fit the meta-plot – they contradicted what I felt like the meta-plot was overall trying to say. So I left them out. Maybe in a future collection!

Q. What do you want people to come away with after experiencing your work?

A. I hope people feel a sense of wonder. I want them to feel that they experienced some image or idea that was new to them, that their mind expanded a little bit, or that they’ve seen something from a different perspective. I also want them to be able to engage their emotions and have fun!

Q. What’s next for you?

My debut novel, THE OUTSIDE, is coming out in June from Angry Robot Books. It’s a space opera with elements of cosmic horror, featuring an #ownvoices autistic protagonist and other diverse, non-neurotypical characters. It’s also a queer book – the protagonist is a lesbian and her supportive girlfriend is a major character. There are very few straight characters, actually. I’m watching the buzz build and I’m VERY excited.

I’ve been struggling with burnout after finishing my PhD thesis, so I haven’t written as much new work as I’d like, but short fiction and poetry will always be there in some form. I have lots of ideas for THE OUTSIDE’s potential sequel, though it won’t be greenlit until we see how the first book does, and I have the beginnings of an unrelated novel involving dragons.

I also am continuing my Autistic Book Party project, a long-running review series that talks in depth about representations of autism in speculative fiction. Autistic Book Party is funded through Patreon; the reviews are free for everyone, but backers help choose which books are reviewed, along with some other goodies. If that’s of interest, you can check it out at https://www.patreon.com/ada_hoffmann.

The Basics

Autonomous Press seeks submissions of poetry, short fiction, and short memoir pieces for an upcoming anthology, Spoon Knife 5: Liminal.

Scheduled for publication in Fall 2020, this fifth volume of the Spoon Knife Anthology series follows The Spoon Knife Anthology: Tales of Compliance, Defiance, and Resistance (Spring 2016), Spoon Knife 2: Test Chamber (Spring 2017), Spoon Knife 3: Incursions (Fall 2018), Spoon Knife 4: A Neurodivergent Guide to Spacetime (Fall 2019).

Deadline for submissions was Tuesday, December 31, 2019. You can join our email list to become notified when we start seeking submissions for Spoon Knife 6.

What We’re Looking For

limen: Latin, “threshold”

A liminality is a threshold, the place between here and there which is, in itself, both and neither. From it we get the word “subliminal” meaning, literally, “below the threshold of sensation.” A liminal space is a transitional zone. It is at the heart of a ritual or rite of passage, when one is no longer the thing they started as, but has yet to become the thing they will be. To stand at a liminal point is to occupy both sides of a boundary at once. Liminality can be disorienting, unsettling, ambiguous, and uncomfortable, but it can also be freeing, an existence without labels or boxes, or a means to a new becoming.

We are looking for fiction, poetry, and memoir that explores thresholds and liminalities of all kinds — including those not listed here. The work must further intersect with themes of neurodivergence, queerness, and/or the intersections of neurodivergence and queerness. Some examples might be:

• racial or cultural liminality
• the experience of occupying liminal space as an individual
• the experience of collective or cultural liminal spaces, such as demimondes
• rites of passage, including via formal ritual or ceremony, or as a transition between states of being, locations, moments in time or ages, statuses, or situations
• sensory phenomena that occur at the threshold of sensation, perhaps sensed by some but not by others
• metamorphosis or transformation
• explorations into the subconscious or other borderland spaces
• ghosts, entities out of phase with the material world, virtual entities, voices, or other characters that exist in threshold or liminal/subliminal spaces
• doorways, gateways, and the literal and figurative passageways between here and there

The Editors

Spoon Knife 5: Liminal will be edited by Andrew M. Reichart and Dora M. Raymaker

Andrew M. Reichart is managing editor of Argawarga Press, an imprint of Autonomous Press dedicated to genre fiction. He is co-author, with Nick Walker, of the epistolary science fiction novel Insurgent Otherworld and the Weird Luck webcomic. He has also written four genre-blurring novels, Wallflower Assassin and the City of the Watcher trilogy, which will be re-released in new editions by Argawarga Press starting in 2019. For his day job Andrew helps run a small utopian tech firm, and he’s also an activist with a grassroots abolitionist project. He lives in California with his wife and a couple of dogs.

Dora M. Raymaker, PhD, is a scientist, writer, multi-media artist, and activist whose work across disciplines focuses on social justice, critical systems thinking, complexity, and the value of diversity. Dora is an Autistic/queer/genderqueer person living in Portland Oregon, conducting community-engaged research at Portland State University, knitting fractals, and communing with the spirit of the City. Dora’s work includes the novel Hoshi and the Red City Circuit and the short story “Heat Producing Entities” in Spoon Knife 3: Incursions.

Format and Length

Fiction and Memoir: We’re looking 10,000 words or less of fully-polished prose, submitted in standard manuscript format (title page with contact info, double-spaced Times New Roman 12-point font, pages numbered with either title or author’s name in the header.)

Poetry: You may submit up 5 pieces of any length and style, provided they fit the theme of this collection.

All submissions must be in a Word-compatible format (.doc, .docx, .odt).

When and How to Submit

As of Wednesday January 1, 2020 submissions are closed.

Authors will be notified of their acceptance or rejection by Friday, February 28, 2020.

Payment for accepted submissions will be 1 cent per word, to be sent by check during the second quarter of 2020.

Email all submissions to info@autpress.com.

When submitting your work, please put in the subject line one of the following:

    “Spoon Knife 5 Submission – Fiction”

    “Spoon Knife 5 Submission – Memoir”

    “Spoon Knife 5 Submission – Poetry”

Also, please include a cover letter that clearly specifies the name under which you want to be credited, along with a 3-4 sentence bio written in the third person. The name and bio should be typed exactly as you want them to appear in the book.

Azzia Walker, our new Operations Manager, had the great pleasure of interviewing Dora Raymaker, author of Hoshi and the Red City Circuit. Dora is a fabulous person to know and we recommend checking out more of her work.

Who do you want reading your books?

Most urgently, people like me. There are so few neurodivergent characters in literature–and of them, rarely are they heroes–and of those heroes, rarely are they portrayed outside of stereotypes. Rarely do they include the realities of our lives either, like the perils (and privileges) of passing, or the constant fight for person-ness and inclusion. I tell stories I want to read. I want them read by other people who wish, as I do, for realistic neurodivergent heroes, and for themes that trouble existing disability realities and narratives.

But also, I want my books read by everyone who enjoys literary science fiction and a weird, fun romp through cyber-fueled speculative worlds! I’m not playing to the mainstream, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be excellent to have broader readership.

What was your favorite scene to write?

Definitely the chase scene that happens about mid-way through the book. I love writing action scenes, particularly chase scenes. Sometimes I act them out. That one was extra-fun because it gave me a chance to run through a lot of Red City, and I really enjoy walking through the streets of that setting and experiencing it with Hoshi. During the scene, I had to both get Hoshi from one physical location to another, and bring her from baseline to total mental and physical exhaustion. So it was a fun writing craftsmanship challenge too.

What scene was the hardest to write, and why?

I wrote this story so long ago, I’m not totally sure anymore–the position of “hardest scene ever” is seared into my current memory as a particular scene from a different novel. For Hoshi though, possibly the Claudia’s apartment scene, which in the final book is scattered throughout the story but was originally one scene. That was structurally difficult–where to put what information and when? The other possible contender is the scene where Hoshi confronts the murderer, which remains the one part of the book I’m still not totally happy with. As to why that scene was hard, it’s because I feel like I never quite got grounded on the character of the murderer. It was “good enough” for the story, but not solid enough for me write without struggle.

What feeling do you want people to come away with?

Satisfaction at a story well-told, coupled with disappointment that it’s over and a desire for more stories with these characters, or in this world, or by me as an author. I want that feeling that I get when I read a good book, and turning the last page is a bitter-sweet sigh of satisfaction and yearning for more.

Tell us something that we wouldn’t guess about you.

When I was 17 I ran away from home with a friend. We made it all the way from Maine to Western Saskatchewan, and then back down into Eastern Montana, a distance of nearly 3,000 miles. That’s maybe guessable to anyone who knew me at the time, plus or minus some details, but the reason I was found was because a psychic who was sometimes used by the police back in Maine told my parents the name of a town which happened to be in the same area where the police picked us up. The Montana police would unlikely to have been on the lookout for us otherwise, and we’d have slipped away. So, yes, I was located by a police psychic. I was an actual X-File.

We hope you enjoy this review of Dora Raymaker’s Hoshi and the Red City Circuit. Michael Northen has great taste in books.

We’re delighted to share this podcast with Dora Raymaker, author of Hoshi and the Red City Circuit. She discusses the book and autism in literature in general. Let us know what you think!

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