December Ideomancer live!

It gives us great gratification to announce that the December 2009 issue of Ideomancer is live!

Our last issue of 2009 tosses out a shout-out to folktales told against the cold with a lineup of more traditional fantasy fiction and poetry. If our folktales are a little more modern, well, that's par for the course.

C.S.E. Cooney's "Oak Park Eris" dips into the everyday problems of a middle-aged witch -- in the suburbs of Chicago; Mari Ness reimagines an old fairytale with "Rumpled Skin"; and Autumn Canter narrates the impact of magic on one woman, one family, and one mid-20th century town.

Our poets this month -- Megan Arkenberg, Michael Meyerhofer, Jennifer Jerome, and Marcie Lynn Tentchoff -- all tackle traditional fairytale material with a modern sensibility: reimagining, recasting, and reconsidering those oldest winter stories.

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We're also taking a bit of a winter break and will be closed to submissions until March 1, 2010, due to some hefty (and pleasant!) overstock of stories and poems. We'll have some shiny new stuff to roll out for 2010, including a new web design, new features, and some really funky fiction and poetry, so do not adjust your sets.

Here, put this on my holiday wishlist.

I wish people would spend less time ragging on other genres, whichever genre it might be, and spend more time figuring out what it is about those styles, settings, tropes, and thematic preoccupations that makes someone else's brain go ping!

Why? Skipping the stuff about how talking to an audience of like-minded readers about how the people in the church across the way aren't real Christians that other genre is bad and wrong is a real gutsy stance there, tiger, and skipping the stuff we've been over before about how people who have different tastes from you are not evil and also deserve books?

The act of reading is not actually about being confirmed in your concept of the world at all times. Sometimes it's about looking at what someone else finds important and interesting and worthwhile, and considering those things. Sometimes you have to learn how to do that or read those texts, say by talking to a friend or taking a class to get the necessary context, and sometimes it comes easy; actually, in some of the better-written cases, it comes easy. You can get as much of this out of something that's uproariously entertaining as you can something that's serious and dense. Sometimes it's fun. Sometimes it's profoundly uncomfortable.

We call this learned skill of learning to see how someone else looks at the world empathy.

That skill is why people ban and burn books which portray experiences or accounts of the world that frighten them and, incidentally, why we're not supposed to read Mein Kampf. It's why authors in every minority consider it so important to get works by and about people of their particular minority group read. It's why reading -- it doesn't matter what -- is still considered educative in most if not all societies with high literacy. A book contains a whole lived experience, just in the nuances and spotlighting and wording of metaphors; it is the thing that permits you to understand some of what it is like in someone else's head, since we don't yet have mind melds or telepathic unicorns.

You will probably now see where this is leading.

Saying that a kind of story is wrong and bad, when you think about it this way, goes farther than the story. If every genre, every literary mode, expresses the lived experience and priorities and desires and concept of the world of a kind of person -- those authors, editors, and readerships -- then it translates very easily into saying how that person sees the world is stupid, wrong, and bad. I dismiss their priorities and desires and worldview as legitimate.

This can be what you, in fact, want to say. Dismissing someone else's worldview as legitimate is a choice that we, as humans, can make. It can range from minor to profoundly hurtful to the person who hears it -- in fact, I'm pretty convinced now that I think about it that this is why people get really worked up about these genre fights -- but wanting to make others feel dismissed, either to hurt them or to shore up one's own position in a particular social hierarchy by peeing on the outsiders, is also a choice adults can and do make. People choose to close their ears or minds, to disdain something instead of trying it or finding out about it or admitting that it is not to their taste but valid as someone else's every day. People choose to disdain others every day.

I think, though? If that's the choice someone's making, let's not make it about the books, because that choice has nothing to do with the books. Let's have that choice be made in full awareness and expressed in full awareness.

Let's own our shit, shall we?

(And that is why I wish people would spend less time ragging on other genres.)