Host: Therese Maisonpierre, editor of the short fiction anthology As the Earth Dreams Black Canadian Speculative Stories, and Chinelo Onwualu, whose story The Hole in the Middle of the World appears in that anthology, and they both join us in studio. How are you guys both doing?

Therese Maisonpierre & Chinelo Onwualu: Good. Thank you very much. Great. Thank you.

Host: I'm going to start with you before we dig into sort of the storytelling, what is speculative fiction.

Chinelo Onwualu: So speculative fiction is an umbrella term that describes a wide variety of genres, specifically fantasy, science fiction, apocalypse, horror, superhero, supernatural, anything like that all falls under the speculative fiction umbrella.

Host: All right. Now, Chinelo, tell us a little bit about the historical connection between speculative fiction and black authors.

Chinelo Onwualu: For I believe that black authors have been telling speculative stories for as long as storytelling has been around. It's intricately intertwined with the understanding of our own liberation. Seeing ourselves in the future, especially in future scenarios in which we just don't exist. So the question happens what happened to us? And so it is very important, and I think there's been a long history of black storytelling that is speculative, from our folktales to our understandings of the future and futurisms, it's very much entwined. Yeah.

Host: Do I have the same thing? ... In terms of what it requires, what it challenges readers to, do. What does speculative fiction do when we talk about perhaps stereotypes, when someone's reading some of the work in this anthology, what do you hoping that it challenges them to do?

Chinelo Onwualu: Yeah. So speculative fiction, I feel, is really important for sort of breaking down barriers and widening readers imaginations not only of what their future could look like or the future of the planet we live on, but also different perspectives regarding the people around them and what they what their lives would be like in the future.

Host: Now, you had the challenge in honour of putting together this anthology... Help us understand what considerations did you have to take on to build the team of authors to put this together?

Therese Maisonpierre: Yeah. So I'm really, really grateful to have the opportunity to put together a collection like this, especially with all of these really amazing and talented writers. The title of the anthology is As Earth Dreams. So I was thinking about dreaming. I was thinking about reflection and deepening perspectives, not only in Canada, but also for black people as individuals and their relationship with their communities and their world. In regards to finding these authors, a lot of them are writers that I admire whose work I love. So it was really a great privilege for me to work with them. And their stories are beautiful.

Host: Tell me a little bit about sort of their experiences as well, because there was a full range in terms of the stories of immigration, their stories of sexism, classism, and also, if you can speak to, you know, sometimes there's a broad stroke that, you know, the black community is a monolith. Sometimes we've had conversations here in this studio about, you know, the black experience in your title. It's black Canadian. And sometimes we say African American and we just call it just one. In terms of the contributions here, why did you make sure that there was a diverse cast of kind of storytelling?

Therese Maisonpierre: Yeah, when I thought about what I wanted to showcase in the in the stories, in terms of the direction I gave the, the authors, I wanted to keep it as broad as possible. I don't sort of design to tell them what parts of themselves they should write about, or what parts of their stories I think are publishable, or ones that readers would find most engaging. I wanted to keep it honest and authentic, and in terms of the diversity we see in themes in the anthology, we've got everything from, as you mentioned, immigration, classism, sexism, but also food. You know, also memory, childhood and motherhood, as well as joy and friendship. And all of these things kind of encompass dreaming and space for for reinvention and imagination.

Host: All right. So I'm going to read a short passage from your story, The Hole in the Middle of the World. This it reads, this is not the first time I've been asked about my birth status. The rich white folk of this country can't seem to birth babies on their own anymore, so it looks like they've kicked up their search for surrogates among us refugees and immigrants. There's really nothing they won't buy there these days, though, the question snags at something in me a hole, a vast abyssal emptiness at the core of my being. I want to cry, but I don't know why. I just can't shake the feeling that I've forgotten something deeply important. What inspired this beautiful piece?

Chinelo Onwualu: So I'm a mother and my child is five years old this year, and just before her birth, I was dealing with some health complications that affected my memory. And essentially, I went through a process where I literally forgot my own name. I had to check my my bracelet to remember, and when Torres asked me to be part of this project, one of the things that I'd been really wrestling with and wondering around was, what does motherhood leave inside you? What does it change fundamentally when you go through it? Because it felt like, you know, outside I, you know, given birth, I looked different, I felt different, but I wondered if all these changes were to be taken away. What part would still be left of me, what part would still be left of that experience? And so I was also dealing with like having moved into this country like, you know, a couple of years before that. And so it was just this big swirl of themes around memory and motherhood and, and what it meant to belong to yourself and to someone else, especially when all these other, you know, bonds had been broken in the move to a new place.

Host: Beautiful stuff. Not only did you have the challenge of putting authors together, you also wrote something as well. I'm going to read a small snippet from A Fair Assessment. Spirits didn't need to breathe, of course, but I could hear her instinctive breaths as she tried to calm herself, I began my spiel. My name is Sarah Baptiste, I said. I'm a spirit caster. Don't worry, I won't keep you very long. I know this is uncomfortable for you. Spirits often got cold in our realm and tired easily. Or so I had been told. I gestured around me with my free hand. This is Miss Zinnias, antiques and vintage shop in Toronto, Canada. Can you tell me your name? The woman girl finished her visual sweep of the room. I watched her gaze settle on many of the large items of Miss Zinnias. Hall, some likely recognizable. My name is Ruth, she finally said as we talked about speculative fiction challenges, our typical way of thinking. What idea were you hoping to challenge with this story?

Ruth: I wanted to write a story about ancestry and and family, and the ways in which we could connect with the people who came before us, even if it was something that we had lost, or maybe stories hadn't been passed down. So I was interested in writing a character who got that opportunity, and whose kind of job it was, was to speak with spirits and and figure out the meaning and the value of the objects they left behind. And I feel like for for this story, for me personally at least, it kind of reflected some of the challenges that I had faced when I wanted to think about and explore my own ancestry. Like my family's from the Caribbean. They moved to Canada in the '90s, and part of my parents journey had been, you know, we're Canadian now, and that's kind of what we're doing.

Ruth: We don't talk. About it. We? Yeah, it's not that we don't talk about it. It's more like that was the past. And you know, now we're looking forward to the future. So I never got really the opportunity to learn as much as I would have liked. So the story that I wrote for the anthology was, was, at least for me, a way to try to reconcile with that and try to make myself brave enough to do that kind of exploration myself.

Host: Okay. Through showcasing the work of Black Canadian authors and highlighting the themes that affect marginalised communities, what do you hope aspiring black writers in Ontario take away from this conversation? Janelle.

Janelle: I think I would like them to remember that imagination is a vital tool of resistance. We often think of, you know, fighting against oppression as something that you do by, you know, protesting and, you know, speaking out. And that's incredibly important. But before you do any of that, you have to imagine yourself to be free. And that's something that when our ancestors were enslaved and in, you know, in, in these conditions of incredible degradation, the only thing they had was their imaginations, the idea that somehow, somewhere, some way, our children, our children's children will be free. And so imagination being this incredible resource that we have, I really want writers to remember that and not to feel that they are powerless because all they have is the pen.

Torres: Torres. Yeah, I'm going to echo a lot of what Chinelo has mentioned, but also to let people know, particularly black writers, young black writers, that their stories matter. And in times like these, people often ask like, well, what is the point of writing? What is the point of telling stories when, you know, we could be out in the streets holding placards and things like that, but stories are the tools with which we not only express ourselves, but consider and imagine a better future.

Host: We're going to have to leave it there. Janella, thank you so much. Beautiful writing. It was fantastic stuff. Thank you for your insights as well.

Therese Maisonpierre, Chinelo Onwualu, Ruth, Torres: Thank you so much. Thank you.