The Outliers

The Outliers is an eclectic zine containing setting notes, character ideas, micro-fiction, and other ruminations on belonging outside belonging from a wonderful crew of ten collaborators (see below for bios). It’s a supplement for Dream Askew and Dream Apart.

Available in print or pdf.

Dream Askew Contributors

Dia Lacina is an indigenous trans woman writer, photographer, and founding editor of CapsuleCrit.com. Her work is most frequently featured on Waypoint and dialacina.com. She tweets entirely too much at @dialacina.

Dead Fire is a microfiction meditation on survivance and subaltern peoples who have already lived through the post-apocalypse.

 

Brandon O’Brien is a Black queer speculative fiction writer, performance poet, teaching artist and roleplaying game designer from Trinidad and Tobago. He is a mentee of Avery Alder’s Emerging Designers Mentorship Program, currently working on a game about music, magic, community and finding one’s voice. He believes that art and art-making, including play, is revolutionary, and his writing and design insists that the speculative is a lens through which we can reevaluate our personal and political realities, challenge hostile histories, and explore uncharted futures. In his writing, reading, design and play, he adores surreal circumstances, bittersweet and vulnerable relationships, and intriguing mysteries.

Brandon’s piece is about the emergence of queer enclaves from a Black and Caribbean context. He also contributed two poems intersecting with queerness, Afro-Caribbeanness, and collapse.

 

A picture of DC.

DC is a game designer from the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California. They’ve produced several Dungeons and Dragons supplements, but recently released their first Forged in the Dark game, Mutants in the Night. Their main goal is to create games that represent a diverse range of fantasies beyond the eurocentric focus of the roleplaying genre.

DC’s piece is focused on how mutation & marginalization intersect at the edge of social collapse. What parallels exist between the world of fantasy mutation and the marginalized struggles within society?

 

A picture of the Norcal division of the Degenderettes, here pictured swinging baseball bats.

The Degenderettes-NorCal are an art & advocacy club of trans & queer members who aim to support and uplift communities. They attempt to fill unfilled needs as best they can until more permanent & funded organizations can be built for them. Currently these projects include radical visibility, interpersonal support, self-defense, community protection, and connecting people to resources.

Led by Kayl Cassidy, The Degenderettes collaborated on a fiction piece that reflects on what ground-level queer resistance work actually entails.

 

A picture of Sasha Mannequin

Sasha Mannequin is a “post-rave” electronic musician, and part of the shadowy cabal of trans women working for revolutionary socialism. She wrote the theme music used in our Kickstarter video!

Her piece is on using the 20th century radical Jewish organizing concept of Doikayt to focus the play of Dream Askew, injecting de-assimilated Jewishness into the game, and organizing outside the limits the of “queer enclave.”

Dream Apart Contributors

A picture of Ellen Kushner.

Ellen Kushner unites her talents and insights as a writer, performer, and cultural maven in one sleek package: she is the author of acclaimed works of literary fantasy (including the queer cult classic Swordspoint and the World Fantasy Award winning Thomas the Rhymer), an award-winning audio book narrator and stage performer, the creator and former host of public radio’s national series Sound & Spirit, and a popular teacher and lecturer.

Ellen will invent a character for Dream Apart; it’s what she does best.

 

Caren Gussoff Sumption is a science fiction writer, peer counselor, and tarot reader based in Seattle, WA, of Kaderash (Romani), Russian, Ashkenazi Jewish, and German ancestry. Her latest books are Three Songs for Roxy and The Birthday Problem. Her website is spitkitten.com

For Dream Apart, Caren explored the way Romani intersect with Dream Apart’s characters and setting.

 

A picture of Rabbi Sonja K Pilz.

Rabbi Sonja K. Pilz earned a doctorate from the department of Rabbinic Literature at Potsdam University, Germany; she holds Rabbinic Ordination from Abraham Geiger College, Germany. Prior to coming to HUC-JIR, NY as a teacher of liturgy and ritual, Sonja taught as a Junior Professor of Jewish Ritual and Practice at the School of Jewish Theology at Potsdam University, and in many congregational settings, and served as a rabbinic intern and cantorial soloist in congregations in Germany, Switzerland, Israel, and the US.

Rabbi Pilz wrote the inner monologue of a young Yeshivah student, Avrum, who wonders where God is to be found in his days.

 

Joshua A.C. Newman is a game designer and publisher best known for the roleplaying game Shock: Social Science Fiction, for the Mobile Frame Zero series of LEGO-constructed giant robot wargames, and for the Bronze Age Sword & Sorcery RPG The Bloody-Handed Name of Bronze. His games, art, writing, and fascinatingly intolerable electronic noises can be found at patreon.com/joshua and glyphpress.com.

Joshua wrote us the story of an iconoclastic, pistol-toting, balalaika-jamming, ecstatic klezmer for Dream Apart.

 

A picture of Nick Mamatas

Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including I Am Providence and the forthcoming Hexen Sabbath, as well and over 100 short stories, many of which are collected in The People’s Republic of Everything.​

Nick’s piece is a pamphlet text, announcing the arrival of the industrial socialist movement to the shtetl.