Quierdo Blog: Squish Talks Genre

As a writer, reading is the most important thing that can be done to improve your craft. Provides a richer well from which to draw (try saying that five times fast). For a long time, I wasn’t reading. Nothing quite gripped me after I stopped reading Rick Riordan’s work religiously. (Funny how he has come up by name twice in a row.) I struggled to get through any long-form fiction until, ironically enough, Aru Shah and the End of Time. What broke me out? The decision to, as much as possible, stop reading fiction written by cisgender heterosexual white people. A choice that has upped my game significantly, both in terms of reading and writing.      Even more so than Aru Shah, Zoraida Cordova’s Labyrinth Lost was the first book that I read in years that felt like the literature that made me care about writing and storytelling. It was adventurous, provocative, and inspiring in all of the ways that I want my YA to be.      Labyrinth Lost follows Alejandra Morti...

Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series is the thing that got me to start reading long-form fiction for the first time. I vividly remember being in the fifth grade, watching the Lightning Thief movie, and being so excited that the movie was based on the first book in a five-book series. ((Imagine the growing pain that I experienced the deeper I got and realized how violently the movie butchered the book.) With Riordan’s work being the biggest influence on my reading tastes, it only makes sense that one of the books that helped get me back onto the reading horse, so to speak, was from Rick Riordan Presents, an imprint he started that focuses on the mythologies of cultures that he, a white man, should probably (definitely) not be writing about. Roshani Chokshi’s Aru Shah and the End of Time was the first book I bought to get back into reading, and I’m glad I did, and have been even happier to revisit now. It follows Aru Shah, shocker, a twelve-year-old who lives in the Museu...

Before sinking my teeth into Akata Witch , I want it on the record that the book’s title is different in Nigeria and in the UK because of the fact that the word akata is an anti-African-American slur more or less translating to “cotton picker.” Little meaning would be changed if the title were “Nigger Witch," an anti-Black slur. All that is to say, hearing that repeatedly made me itchy. But, as an akata, I will continue using that version of the title in my writing.      Comparing Akata Witch to Harry Potter feels almost like a disservice to Nnedi Okorafor’s work. Mostly because I actively resist the idea of comparing an Author of Color’s work to a white author, basically saying ”it’s this thing but brown.” (Which, by the way, is what everyone seems to say about Roshani Chokshi’s Gilded Wolves , calling it a brown Six of Crows .) It puts an idea on the table that fails to really encompass the depth that Akata Witch goes to. For example, one of the biggest things that...

I’d been trying to figure out how to describe this book for as long as I was reading it. Recently, my friend said, “The world is dying and my body reflects that.” That sentence does the job pretty well. Wilder Girls is a novel that does interesting work in blending body horror with romance and inexplicable science fantasy. All of these elements work in tandem, making for an experience that cannot be excavated from any of the genres it falls into.      What sets Wilder Girls apart, what I think will start to define the “New Weird” as we call it, is its marriage to (and, in a weird way, celebration of) the marginalizations of the cast. The book is comprised almost exclusively of women, two of the main cast, Hetty and Reese, are queer—something that Reese openly states outright, unprompted and unabashed. The body horror, then, starts to become indicative of both their individual characters (Hetty has something growing, squirming in her left eye; Byatt has two spines a...

I first discovered Carmilla as a concept through this web series. Imagine how satisfying it was to discover that the tales of the lesbian vampiric legend dated all the way back to the original text. Of course, the queer themes and characters are brought even more to the fore in this as it is meant to be a lesbian web series, the first season of which concludes with Laura and Carmilla in a committed relationship with one another.      That said, vampirism is always a metaphor for some sort of draining toxicity and I don’t think that is entirely untrue of this series. It begins with Laura’s roommate going missing only to be replaced by Carmilla, who seems to switch between aloofness and intrigue with Laura. A thing that is common of the lesbian experience (as much as I can gather, I haven’t identified as such for all that long). This paired with the weird dreams that accompany Carm’s appearance point toward the ways that we can be drawn to people who exhibit toxic behavio...

Goddess bless Mary Shelley, mother of my genres. Part of why I took this class was to try and get my feet wet in some of the roots and core ideologies of the genres in which I write. Discussion on this, for example, has helped push me into wanting to pivot the genre of my thesis from straight contemporary fantasy to wanting it to be more neo-southern Gothic.    But I digress! The gothic traditionally is very concerned with questions of mortality. Namely how to escape it or the repercussions of attempting to do so. I’m pushed to think of Edgar Alan Poe, who is constantly grappling with death and what it means in his work—probably because everyone he ever looked at died of TB within 20 minutes of meeting him.       Mary Shelley wasn’t too much better off, so Frankenstein doesn’t come as a shock. But Frankenstein asks what happens when you try to cheat or outwit death. Frankenstein’s monster is the bastardization of life itself, and Doctor Frankenste...