Leah Bobet

Spring means a few upcoming public events, all virtual, lined up in a row.

On April 1st, 7-9pm EDT, I’ll be the conversational half of YA author Maya Chhabra’s In Conversation launch for her new, Kirkus-starred verse novel, Chiara in the Dark, hosted by Montreal’s Argo Bookshop. As well as a reading and audience chat, we’ll be talking poetry, editing, and wherever it spirals from there.

On April 13th, I’ll be visiting a first-year Science Fiction and Fantasy class at Framingham State University, which is reading “The Bear Wife” this semester. This one isn’t likely to take interested strangers, but it’s a nice milestone to celebrate.

On May 6th, 12pm-1pm EDT, I’ll be reading at Strong Women, Strange Worlds alongside JF Garrard, Rebecca Gomez Farrell, Jenn Gott, Cerece Rennie Murphy, and Elaine Pascale. It’s six authors, eight minutes each — writer speed dating if you’re looking for a new read.

On July 17th, I’ll be giving a workshop — What Booksellers Wish You Knew About Books — as part of SpecFicNZ’s virtual professional development workshops. This is one of those dream workshops I’ve been cooking up over a space of years, because there’s so much knowledge frontline booksellers have that could make this whole gig a lot easier. It’s accessible to non-members for $10/workshop, as is that whole list of fantastic speakers.

Hope to see you there!

I pulled my contributor’s copies of Qwerty Magazine out of the mailbox yesterday, containing “Local Leopards” — the piece about self-destructive communal loops, complicity, and leopards eating yes, your face, but in the key of “Tupelo”.

Qwerty issue #44 is available for $10 CAD from their site now!

“Sunday in the Park with Hank”, a really very experimental short story about 1920s New York, what makes distance and intimacy, and everybody’s ghosts coming along on picnic dates, has found a good home at The Deadlands.

It was my attempt at something a little like a John Crowley story, after reading And Go Like This blew my entire mind.

It’s likely scheduled for later this summer; news when it’s there to be had.

2022 has come in with two new poems queued up in Canadian literary journals:

“Local Leopards” — a piece about self-destructive communal loops, complicity, and leopards eating yes, your face, but in the key of “Tupelo” — will be in Qwerty Magazine, the University of New Brunswick’s literary journal. It is part of my master plan to make “sounds like Nick Cave” a literary school.

“Breaking Horses” will be in a future issue of Grain. It’s a piece about Georgia O’Keeffe, codification, colonialism, and depiction but also just a bit of words being wonderful in motion; how sometimes you put them in your mouth to see what happens, and trust the result.

Updates when they hit print!

First publication of 2022: two new poems in the winter issue of Canadian lit journal Prairie Fire!

“Better Attitudes to Pleasure” is about a jar of grapefruit marmalade hand-imported from Connecticut which I treated very wrong, austerity mindsets, and extrapolating the problem from there.

“Vestige” is lives at the conjunction of whales, medical trouble, the women’s shelter movement and doing the work even when it sucks.

It’s being mailed out now to subscribers, and is available from their website in single issues.

As odd as it feels to post this in the face of rising case counts (yeah, so this is scary, please stay safe, everyone): a few publications here and there added up into a respectable heap this year.

Short Fiction
“The Instructions” in Neon: A Literary Magazine, Spring 2021.
“The Mysteries” in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 43, June 2021.

Poetry
“A Headful of Hair” in Climbing Lightly Through Forests, R.B. Lemberg and Lisa M. Bradley, eds., January 2021.
“Trojan Road” in Plenitude Magazine, January 2021.
“Rows of Houses” in The Deadlands, October 2021.

Non-Fiction
“Watch the Left Hand: The Magicianship of Jen Sookfong Lee’s The Shadow List”, CAROUSEL Magazine, June 16, 2021.
“Wild Bodies: PW Talks with Aliya Whiteley” in Publishers Weekly, June 18, 2021.
“The Tip of the Iceberg: PW Talks with Richard Butner” in Publishers Weekly, November 5, 2021.

Editorial
Guest poetry editor, Reckoning 5, January 2021.

Proofs for the first 2022 publications are trickling through: three more poems set to publish in the early winter and some non-fiction pending. I hope it finds you safe, well, warm, and with your loved ones.

New poetry! I have a piece live today in The Deadlands, a speculative fiction magazine about death and the unknown.

“Rows of Houses” is trying to do something a little different with haunted houses. It owes its title to Dan Mangan and through him, Stephen King.

I’ll be one of the horde of Strange Horizons writers, editors, and alumni appearing at authors and multitalented art-makers C.S.E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez’s Infernal Salon on Sunday, October 24 at 7:30pm EST.

It’s an evening of writing prompts, goofiness, and potential genius (who knows?) to benefit speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons as they run their annual fundraiser to support next year’s operations.

This is shaping up to be just a bucket of fun — a whole pile of talented people showing up to play — and if you’re short a bit of joy this week, come on out. It’s a good cause and guaranteed to refill your cup.

Looking for a professional critique?

I’m (happily!) going to be the resident Blue Pencil Sessions professional at CanWrite! 2021 — the annual Canadian Authors Association conference on craft and business.

The conference kicks off this weekend — Sept. 18-19 — and I’ll be contributing in-depth critiques and short one-on-one discussions on up to 6 pages of work for attendees the following Saturday, Sept. 25.

Sign up here, and I look forward to seeing your work!

Through the magic of distance conventions, I’ll be attending this year’s Readercon from August 13-15, 2021 — including one panel with an excellent crew of people.

Sunday August 15, 2021, 6:00pm
Darmok and Jalad and Merriam and Webster. At the “Decolonizing the Imagination” panel at Readercon 30, Cadwell Turnbull observed that linguistics as an academic field is restricted and distorted by underrepresentation of marginalized groups. How does that affect the ways languages, including constructed ones, are used in speculative fiction? What can authors do to overcome biased notions of what makes a language sound “magical” or “alien”?
Leah Bobet, John Chu (mod), Francesca Forrest, Greer Gilman, Sarah Smith.

Registration is open now, and the lineup of panels looks bluntly delicious. Hope to see you there!