Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer, Tod McCoy & M. Huw Evans, eds. (Hydra House 978-0997951073, $17.95, 196pp, pb) February 2021.
Gathered here are 28 essays (six reprints, 22 originals) by instructors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, intended, as Tod McCoy explains in his foreword, as “a way to give back to a community who may not be able to attend the workshop by delivering thoughts and insights about writing and process from writers who have taught at Clarion.” Those who might benefit most from these insights, McCoy goes on to say, are neither beginning nor advanced writers, but rather “writers with one foot firmly in the door.” Co-editor M. Huw Evans underlines the humanistic value of the workshop and these lessons. In her introduction, Neile Graham, who has helped to run the Clarion West program for many years, makes a compelling case that “writers and writing can always get stronger. Writers and their stories can always be more, get better, dig de
Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (by Francesca Myman)
Our very strange year invited, among other things, mournful reflections on a past that felt abruptly truncated, and a number of non-fiction titles, though surely in production before the world’s temporary suspension, were eerily attuned to this backward gaze. Then again, SF/F/H have a tendency to steep themselves deeply in their own genre pasts and traditions, even as they often compost these into unexpected futures, so the apparent synchronicity may be illusory. At any rate, Jonathan R. Eller’s
Bradbury Beyond Apollo satisfyingly closed out a minutely researched and finely realized three-volume biography of Ray Bradbury. This concluding tome covers his life and work from the late 1960s through the end of his life in 2012. Collection
Locus magazine’s February 2021 issue, the list is a consensus by the
Locus editors, columnists, outside reviewers, and other professionals and critics of genre fiction and non-fiction editor-in-chief Liza Groen Trombi; reviews editor Jonathan Strahan;
Locus reviewers Liz Bourke, Alex Brown, Karen Burnham, Katharine Coldiron, Paul Di Filippo, Amy Goldschlager
, Paula Guran, Rich Horton, Maya James, John Langan, Russell Letson, Adrienne Martini, Ian Mond, Colleen Mondor, Tim Pratt, Elsa Sjunneson, Gary K. Wolfe, and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro; Bob Blough; critics and authors Gwenda Bond, James Bradley, Niall Harrison, Paul Kincaid, Cheryl Morgan, Adam Roberts, and Graham Sleight. Art books were compiled with help from Arnie Fenner, Karen Haber, and senior editor Francesca Myman. Short fiction recommendations had input from editors and reviewers Rachel S. Cordasco, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Vanessa Fogg, Maria Haskins, Charles Payseur, Nisi Shawl, TG Shenoy, Sheree Renée Thomas, Sea