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Hey there! You're reading the Tuesday Telegrams, a bimonthly newsletter from author Naseem Jamnia. Every other Tuesday, I send out a Telegram that's either writing related or a personal essay. You're currently reading a writing-related Telegram, which is where I give updates on projects, behind-the-scenes look at my work, craft discussions, recent publications, event news, and other publishing things.

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A few months ago, my friend Nicole reached out to me with a request. I met them at the Lambda Literary Fellows Retreat in 2019, and what struck me then and now is their unflinching kindness. On the first day of the retreat, I was being shy in a corner (which might come as a surprise—despite being extremely outgoing, I am an introvert and also extremely shy in public settings), having not met anyone from my cohort or others. Nicole noticed I was sitting by myself and engaged me in conversation with their broad smile.

Anyway, soon after the retreat, Nicole created a nonprofit organization called Roots. Wounds. Words. that focuses on marginalized storytellers. I've been watching this organization grow and kick ass over these last several years with so much pride, because Nicole practices what they preach and has poured their heart and soul into making an organization by marginalized writers, for marginalized writers.

Nicole first reached out to me last year to do a speculative fiction craft talk at the top of the year. It was the first craft talk I'd given, and gave me the confidence to pitch it to other organizations in the interim. (Which is where my Clarion West class has come from!)

In the wake of how that talk was received, Nicole reached out to me again, this time with a different request: be the speculative fiction faculty for Words of Resistance & Restoration, a fellowship program for storytellers who have been impacted by the carceral system either directly or indirectly. Despite severe imposter syndrome, I accepted the position.

I love teaching. I first discovered how much I enjoyed it when I was a TA in undergrad for a non-majors biology course. During my first master's, I had more science courses to TA; during my second master's, I ran my own courses entirely, this time in English. I enjoyed teaching composition less than biology and neurobiology in some senses, but enjoyed very much working with students and giving them a bit of a break as they begun college. (I am not a hardass when it comes to grading.)

Teaching while trying to balance graduate work (and, in one program, intensive research) is a pain in the ass. Teaching will take all the time you give to it, especially when you're in charge of your own courses. I learned from other grad students to limit my time on each student paper, to only give myself so long to lesson plan.

I have been wildly anxious about this fellowship, although the things I've had to remind myself over and over again are: 1) this is not a formal course, and therefore, I am not beholden to academic hierarchies; 2) these are not 18 year olds forced to take a required course; 3) we only meet eight times over twelve weeks for two hours each session.

I am a chronic over-planner in my lessons. I have such ambitions for class that are never realized. I learned to over-plan for composition courses partially because participation would be all over the place (hence why #2 is worth remembering).

We're now just over halfway through the program, with session 5 meeting this week. Each time we meet, I am utterly floored at the insight these storytellers bring. They range in ages, with at least half of them older than me from anywhere between a few and twenty years, and in experiences, with some of them having never taken a workshop at all. I handpicked everyone based on their applications and writing samples, which was hard enough on its own—so many people could have been in this fellowship, and I ultimately chose five (plus Nicole, who is auditing) who seemed they'd gel together in a workshop setting. We're approaching our first workshop-workshop next week, which I await with nervous but gleeful anticipation.

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Building communities around creativity like writing can be tricky. I've ranted before about my experience in the MFA and its inherent ties to capitalist, US identity. (Rereading this previous Telegram reminded me of workshop experiences I'd rather forgotten.) One of the things that was so important to me, in designing my plan for this fellowship, was to not perpetuate MFA baggage, and to create a workshop space they wouldn't get in an academic program.

Of course, I hadn't realized I was carrying MFA baggage into this fellowship until I read The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop by Felicia Rose Chavez. While I don't think her method of the Liz Lerman method makes sense for fiction, especially speculative fiction, it gave me marvelous insight into what I was still carrying with me. (Matthew Salesses, in Craft in the Real World, has a different Liz Lerman approach for his workshops. I've melded elements of both.)

I find that I missed this baggage sort of hilarious, because a year ago, a couple of friends and I stared the Heretics' Workshop. Last year, annoyed by the fact that we never focused on craft during our MFA (except for our comprehensive exams, where we were left to our own devices and therefore was of varying usefulness), we started doing craft workshops. At least for the ones I ran, these were a mixed success, possibly because I was approaching them very much like lectures—"Here, take this information from On High."

As you can imagine from my aforementioned discussion of teaching, planning these monthly craft classes took a lot of time and effort. I, for one, have been running on fumes for literal months, so for the summer, we decided to take a break on the craft talks. I started doing weekly write-ins; I'd bike to The Radical Cat, an indie bookstore/cat adoption center that opened up about a year and a half ago, and sit in the cat room and write, and people would join me. (They're also the hosts of our workshops.) I'm so pleased to say that after four months of doing this, there are consistent attendees in addition to people who drop in when they can.

Reno's literary community is burgeoning, and there aren't many public writing spaces. That we've developed one has utterly delighted me, and I hope we will continue to grow and hold space for people who feel alienated by academic writing programs.

With the summer over, and with one of our founding members graduating, the Heretics has shifted so that my best friend and I run it together. As she works full time (and I have no bandwidth for anything that involves planning), we have to reexamine what the space should look like moving forward. She created our community Discord, and a couple of weeks ago, she ran a terrific workshop on fairy tale (and monster) retellings for spooky season. We hope to therefore shift into my weekly write-ins and her monthly craft workshops, which I think gives us a nice balance of providing knowledge hoarded by the Academy while opening space for any who needs it.

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Here are a few lessons I've learned as I'm building these spaces:

• No one is an island; it's okay to reach out to others for help (even when it is hard) and to admit you can't build a community alone. It's sort of in the definition, after all.
  • I am calling myself out with this one; I tend to do everything on my own, worrying that I'm asking too much, instead of bothering other people (even if they're already involved in whatever I'm doing!). My best friend calls this "eldest (assigned) daughter syndrome" 💀
• Reevaluating what a space is doing and what it looks like has to happen regularly. That might mean switching gears from what you thought you wanted to create into something that looks different; it might also mean trucking ahead for now and putting a pin in the discussion for when you have the bandwidth. But communities are constantly in flux, which means their needs are, too.
  • I talk about trying not to be "precious" about my writing, which is how I like to view the "kill your darlings" advice—allow things to change, even when you really want to hold on. That's what this is essentially saying, too. Just because I might not want a thing doesn't mean the community doesn't need that thing.
• But on the same token, know your limits, strengths, and weaknesses. If your community needs a thing you can't offer, partner up with someone who can! Ask your members if they have suggestions of people who might be able to help. Ask them to do a thing if they have the expertise! Honor your bandwidth: you can't do it all.
  • Let things go when they're not something you're controlling. So what if someone else runs something differently than how you're running it? The point is, you're not running it; they are.
• Rather than viewing the community as a hierarchy, view it as a rhizome: everyone is coming in with something to contribute. Whether that's something directly related to the community's goals or just enthusiasm, remembering that can be key to destabilizing the lessons we've been learned regarding what any gathering space looks like.

Qilwa Corner: Environmental Magic

Well, despite my love of spreadsheets, I only just sat down to create one for the Telegrams. Each week, I sort of wing whatever topic I'm going to write, and sometimes come up with a handful of topics for the next ones. Anyway, by making this spreadsheet, I can finally keep track of, exactly, I've been talking about, including for these Qilwa Corners.

(This is partially why this Telegram is coming to you a few hours later than usual.)

Anyway, it was by doing this spreadsheet that I saw that I still have worldbuilding topics I haven't discussed, which is to say: let's talk about environmental magic in the Qilverse.

(The universe name is still up in the air, but a friend of mine suggested Qilverse, and I think as a placeholder, that's way better than what I'd been using.)

Environmental magic is probably the most easily recognizable form of magic in the world. If you've seen Avatar: The Last Airbender, Fullmetal Alchemist, or read the Broken Earth trilogy, then you have some passing familiarity with the way magic systems can manipulate the environment around them.

The foundation of environmental magic in the world of Qilwa is equivalent exchange, an equal and opposite reaction. Like all the magic in this world, environmental magic operates on energetic principles, particularly the laws of thermodynamics. Shifting air currents in one area means they move in another; on a molecular level, creating a vacuum means an overabundance of atoms outside it.

Environmental magic is the most "squishy" of the magics in this world. I've said before that the way I see it, if there is some sort of mechanism by which a thing can happen, no matter how unlikely, then magic can make it so. The dangers of environmental magic is that manipulation of the environment necessarily has to affect the environment elsewhere. You can't cause a storm in one location without pulling water from another, etc.

(What this really means is I should learn more about how the weather works...)

Most of the magic users I've written use structural or blood magic. Environmental is the one I've hesitated to touch precisely because I really should learn more about how the weather works. 😅

Thus far, I've written three major characters who are environmental magic users. One is, of course, Healer Kofi in The Bruising of Qilwa. Kofi's affinity is with the wind, meaning, he feels most comfortable, most in his skin and at home, when manipulating the air around us. That doesn't mean he can't also manipulate water or other environmental elements, but wind comes most easily to him.

A quick but relevant sidebar: years ago, my agent and I spent a few hours brainstorming the magic system in the Qilverse. At that time, magic was very much an inherited skill, with strict lines demarcating the disciplines. She urged me to trouble these lines: make magic taught, she said, and the disciplines philosophies by which people approach the practice and use of magic. If all magic essentially comes from the same place, then I have a lot more flexibility in what I can do with it.

So, of course, that's what I did. As we see in the events of Qilwa, there is nothing that says one magic user can't access another form of it. It becomes a mental block more than anything; if you're used to approaching magic in a particular way, then it becomes more difficult to imagine another approach.

Anyway, one of the ways we see these lines troubled is with Kofi; his skill in his greenhouse, while "technically" called environmental magic, is really a blending of disciplines. It uses the life force within other living things (like weeds and grass) to boost the growth of his desired plants. Sure doesn't sound like environmental magic to me...

The other two environmentalists I've written have yet to be shown to the world, though funny enough, they're related to each other and, inadvertently, to Kofi. I'll give you a sneak peek.

[Incoming spoilers for Qilwa ahead.]

Remember Ahmed, Afonseh's friend who meets with an unfortunate fate? He's got a baby cousin—not mentioned in Qilwa, because I hadn't thought of their connection at that time. By the events of the Qilwa sequel, this little cousin, he-Fela, is a tween (or perhaps young teen, jury's still out), and he's an environmentalist who has been adopted by Ahmed's mothers, his aunts. In secret, one of Ahmed's mothers brings Fela to Firuz for training, unsure of where else to go. (You can guess which of the mothers this is if you read Qilwa, and why she keeps it a secret from the other.)

What's unusual about Fela is his affinity for the ground. Most environmentalists have affinity to wind, water, or fire; electricity and earth are rarer. Fela is, in NK Jemisin's lexicon, an orogene; he can reach for the heat in the ground, the roil of magma, and use that energy to manipulate... many things.

Firuz metaphorically pulls of their hair trying to train Fela in the Qilwa sequel, because 1) Firuz knows little on environmentalism besides theory; 2) Firuz is constantly reminded of both Ahmed and Kofi every time they see him. And Afsoneh, from whose point of view the sequel is written, gets similar flashbacks.

Thus, my second environmentalist is linked to Kofi by virtue of his cousin and sort-of teacher.

[ending the spoilers here]

The third person is one of the narrators for You Came Out of the Forest, the novel set in the Qilverse that takes place forty years after the events of Qilwa at a magical monastery on an island off the coast of Dilmun. He-Raul also has an affinity for the ground and is remarkably powerful, having been born on and lived his whole life on an island with a sordid magical history. Raul has two primary mentors at the Abbey: Master zhe-Afia and Master hu-Solarin. Afia is a structuralist with a focus on chemistry; Solarin is an environmentalist with a focus on physics and geology.

In a scene towards the end of YCOOTF, Solarin tells Raul a brief summary of hos life story, saying hu was raised by hos aunts in Qilwa and was secretly trained by a structural healer, who was not the best mentor for hom because of the affinity mismatches. But the Abbess came to Qilwa to recruit the healer, who refused to go with her, and instead agreed to take Solarin so hu could be trained.

Sound familiar?

So Raul is connected to Solarin/Fela who's connected to Kofi, and maybe one day, I'll write an environmentalist free from that baggage.

Upcoming Events

For the last two weeks of the month, I'll be traveling—including to World Fantasy! I haven't been told what panels I'll be on yet, but keep an eye on my Instagram for that info. Cross your fingers for me; The Bruising of Qilwa is a finalist in the novella category.

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There is a lot I can say here on what's going on in the world. Follow me on Instagram if you want resources on how to help, where you can donate money, history lessons, and on-the-ground footage; I share stuff in the mornings and evenings to my stories.

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