MF GALAXY

WRITING HARDBOILED DETECTIVE FICTION IN ALTERNATE HISTORY CRESCENT CITY, VALUING YOUR OWN WORK, AND HOW TO WRITE “THE OTHER” RESPECTFULLY LISTEN/DOWNLOAD SG Wong is the creator of the Lola Starke hardboiled detective series set in Crescent City, California, in an alternate history in which China colonised North America. Arthur Ellis Award-finalist Wong is also a sparkling stalwart of Edmonton’s literary scene as an organiser of writer conferences. She’s one of those outstanding individuals whose endless energy benefits everyone in the community.  In this episode of MF Galaxy, SG Wong discusses: The impact of going indie on her work and creativity How writers must view their own work Under what conditions writers should conduct seminars in schools Her approach to world building her magnificent alt-earth setting of Crescent City, and How writers should approach writing characters who possess an ethnic, racial, or other identity unlike ...

WHY YOU NEED TO MASTER SHORT STORIES BEFORE TRYING NOVELS, HOW NOVICES MIS-USE WITNESS NARRATORS, ORIGINS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL REALISM IN SFF LISTEN/DOWNLOAD Here’s what Stephen King has to say about Tananarive Due’s best known novel, My Soul to Keep: It’s “an eerie epic [that] bears favourable comparison to Interview with the Vampire. I loved this novel.” When one of the best-selling and most-loved novelists of all time praises your work like that, you know you’ve arrived. But success wasn’t overnight for Tananarive Due. After working for years as a journalist, she took a leave to co-write Freedom in the Family, a memoir of the 1960s US human rights struggle from the perspective of her mother, Patricia Stephens Due, who’d been an activist in it. Due is the author of twelve novels, including The Living Blood, Devil’s Wake, and Joplin’s Ghost, and the short story collection Ghost Summer. Due has won the American Book Award, an NAACP Imag...

PERFORMING AT PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURATION, REPPING INTEL-NIGERIA’S SHE WILL CONNECT CAMPAIGN, WHY ARTISTS SHOULD EMBRACE SCIENCE + TECHNOLOGY LISTEN/DOWNLOAD The “brain drain” from Africa’s 55 countries is the cause of much lamentation—sending legions of doctors, engineers, and other professionals to serve the West at the exact moment they can lead economic growth at home. But Titilope Sonuga is part of the unheralded but very real “brain train,” the expatriates who are moving back home with education, skills, and networks they’ve gained abroad. Sonuga has ridden that train. She’s lived on two continents, had a career in Canada as a civil engineer, co-founded Edmonton’s thriving Breath In Poetry performance collective and hit stages with her work across the country, relocated to her family’s home country of Nigeria, become an Intel spokesperson to encourage women to use information technology, performed her verse at the inauguration of Nigeria’s president,...