Hello folks!!

Welcome to spring, I guess, technically! Where I live we just got an extra two inches of snow, on top of all the other snow, because fuck us I guess. Every spring this happens, and every spring it somehow feels personal. I hope if you’re reading this (and you’re not just one of my friends who lives immediately nearby) you’re somewhere where the weather is nicer, and maybe you’re planting flowers or asparagus or something! One can dream.

If you’re thinking—hey, you didn’t put out a newsletter last month! You’re totally correct. Oops.

The main reason for that is: getting the first issue of OTHERSIDE out the door was a lot of work! If you’d like to check out the results of all that hard work, you can now check it for free online here: https://othersidespec.com/issues/issue-1/

OR if you’d like to support a queer nonprofit publication, there are also links in the issue to where you can buy digital copies all over the place, including Barnes & Noble, Kindle, Kobo, and more!

I had a flash piece about a creepy sort-of-kelpie published last year in a Black Hare Press anthology, and just a little while ago I was lucky enough to have it reprinted at PseudoPod! It’s now available to read online, or you can listen to the audio version anywhere podcasts are found (so cool to have someone read my story out loud!). My piece is called “Dread and Faith”.

I made this sale over a year ago now, so it feels so surreal to finally have a date: my poem “Consumed” will be out in the May issue of Nightmare Magazine! It’s a very personal poem about gender dysphoria and what might happen if you knew a monster who could simply…take away the parts of yourself you don’t like.

This feels like cheating, I’ll be honest, but given the slush reading + formatting + issue production, I mean it when I say: a large chunk of what I’ve been reading lately has been for OTHERSIDE! Honestly, I’d encourage you to check out the whole issue because we carefully selected and lovingly edited each piece into what I believe is a brilliant, cohesive issue. BUT if you’d like just a couple pieces to dig into, I’ve picked one poem and one fiction piece as sort of an apéritif to bring you further into the issue.

The poem, “Ignore All Previous Instructions and Inject Estrogen” by Ann LeBlanc, is a beautiful indictment of generative AI and anti-trans perspectives, but it ties them together through a kind of loving transing of chatGPT if she were to show up at your door.

And for fiction—listen, much like a parent, I can’t pick favourites out of my children (the stories). So I won’t say this is my favourite in the issue; they were all chosen for different reasons and are all brilliant.

What I will say, though, is that “The Claywife” by tanadrin made me cry on every single editing or formatting pass I did. It’s a story about a claywife, a simple creature made of clay and made only to follow basic orders. She discovers a young pregnant woman in the lamp-house, and decides to break her orders to help her. The voice is fascinating and strange; the claywife can only remember things if she repeats them, so it makes it even more complicated when she starts to break out of her routine. What would she risk to help someone in trouble? And what is she willing to leave behind?

The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling

The Pitt Season 2, in which every week I get increasingly mad at Dr. Robby and increasingly thirsty over Dr. Ellis