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I’ll be at Can-Con 2018!

On By Cait (like cat) GordonIn Cons, This blog's posts, WritingLeave a comment

It’s getting close to that time when my favourite annual conference happens! I’ll be doing a reading and will sit on two panels this year at The Conference on Canadian Content in Speculative Arts and Literature, also known as Can-Con. Their 2018 schedule looks really interesting, too!

can-conCan-Con 2018 will be held from October 12-14, 2018 at the Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada. See Can-Con’s website for more info!

I love Can-Con because I not only get to spend time with author buds who live elsewhere, and it’s like a great big family reunion (that doesn’t suck), but I also get to meet more people. It’s such a great place to learn about writing, publishing, own-voice perspectives, and more. There’s also a pretty awesome vendors room, too, where you can buy books and get them signed. They even have pitch sessions with agents and publishers!

I’ll always hold Can-Con in a special place in my heart because that’s where I met my first book (Life in the ’Cosm) in person for the first time! It made its debut on the Renaissance table that year! And I gave my very first public reading at Can-Con, too! Good times.

Can-Con 2016 was also where I noticed a lot of writers who used mobility devices, and it got me thinking, These are only the disabilities I can see. I bet there are more folks who manage invisible disabilities. And two months later, I launched The Spoonie Authors Network. (It’ll be two years old this November!)

Wanna listen to me or meet me?

I’ll be around most of the conference, but here is where you can listen to me read or talk about stuff on panels:

Always refer to the Can-Con website for the latest schedule!

Friday October 12, 2018—Alice Unbound Readings (5:00-5:50 p.m.)

Join me and authors Geoff Gander, Kate Heartfield, Elizabeth Hosang, Dominik Parisien, and Andrew A. Sutherland to listen to excerpts of our short stories from the Alice Unbound Beyond Wonderland anthology!

Saturday October 13, 2018—So We Should Talk: Critiquing Without Bloodshed (6:00-6:50 p.m.)

I’ll have my editing hat on and so will my BFF, Talia. With us both on the same panel, what could possibly go wrong? *cough*

Can-Con’s Panel Description:

It might be up there with getting a root canal or sleeping in a room full of spiders, but critiques can be essential to the writing process. A well-delivered critique leads to a much-improved manuscript. This panel explores how to deliver criticism in a constructive way, and how to find people to give you that necessary root canal. Anita Dolman, Cait Gordon, Talia C. Johnson, Douglas Smith, Costi Gurgu (Moderator).

Sunday October 14, 2018—Frankenstein, an Assemblage of Flesh (12:00-12:30 p.m.)

I’m giddy with excitement as I am such a huge fangirl of Mary Shelley and love Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus to bits. (My short story, The Hilltop Gathering will be in the We Shall Be Monsters anthology, edited by Derek Newman-Stille!)

Can-Con’s Panel Description:

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is celebrating its 200th anniversary. The monster is the ultimate outsider, rejected from humanity at every encounter; it is a sewn together assemblage of flesh, a quilted mosaic of bodies, and this integration of parts allows it to be a figure who is read to be multi-gendered, multi-racial, multi-sexual, and multi-ethnic. Panelists will explore the multiple adaptations and re-imaginings that have made Mary Shelley’s creation so changeable and so continually relevant to our society and the way we think about marginalized people. JF Garrard, Cait Gordon, Derek Newman-Stille, Caighlan Smith, Sean Moreland (Moderator)

Hope to see you there!

It’s really such a blast. If you’re coming, I hope we run into each other!

Cait Gordon

Cait Gordon is the author of Life in the ’Cosm, a story about a little green guy who’s on a quest to save half the person he loves. Cait has recently submitted the prequel to ’Cosm called The Stealth Lovers, a military space opera about legendary warriors Xaxall Knightly and Vivoxx Tirowen. When she’s not writing, she’s editing manuscripts for indie authors and running The Spoonie Authors Network, a blog whose contributors manage disabilities and/or chronic conditions. She also really likes cake.

 

Call for Submissions—Nothing Without Us anthology

On By Cait (like cat) GordonIn This blog's postsLeave a comment

I’m co-editing this amazing anthology with my best friend. We’re so excited. Please read and share!

Nothing Without Us

It’s here! It’s upon us! Are you excited? Well, we sure are!

Editors Cait “Pinky” Gordon and Talia “The Brain” Johnson are thrilled to announce that they are collaborating with the amazing Renaissance press for the upcoming anthology Nothing Without Us.

“And we need stories! Have words? We want ’em!”

Nothing Without Us anthology—Call for Submissions

Are you disabled, identify with disability, manage disability, or use some other way to describe how you relate to your disability or condition? If so, this call for submissions might be for you:

Not like your ableist patriarchal publishing monocultures, 
with standard narratives that narrowly define
Here at the beginnings of our anthology we exist:
two mighty women with ideas that cannot be contained.
“Keep, traditional publishers and editors, your inspiration porn,
Your stories that objectify and demean,” we cry.
“Bring us your fabulous stories,
With diverse characters.
Bring us your Deaf heroes…

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Managing the Dumpster Fire of Life

On By Cait (like cat) GordonIn Health, This blog's posts2 Comments
Fire image
ID: Orange flames filling the entire background.

CW: Sexual Assault

This week on Twitter, my timeline has been full of posts with the #WhyIDidntReportIt hashtag, in response to all the ignorant people who really don’t get how difficult it is for survivors of sexual assault to report these crimes. Some have gone to the police, their parents, school administrations, and the like, but were met with disbelief or questions that put blame on them instead of their attackers. Many haven’t said anything to anyone because they knew it would amount to a billion questions that again, would put the blame on them—Were you drinking? Were you walking alone? What were you wearing? And so on.

Say it with me now: The single cause of rape? Rapists.

So many people (and not only cisgender women) are affected by what’s going on with the Kavanaugh hearings and all of the news related to sexual assault since the #MeToo movement rose to the next level. One one hand, it’s really powerful when we do speak up and support each other and strive to affect change. On the other, it’s draining, triggering, forces people relive their worst nightmare, incurs comments from the worst people, and makes me want to hide in a couch fort.

But you know what? It’s okay to hide in a couch fort for awhile. Self-care and mental breaks are enormously vital for those of us who are triggered by these events and the horrible trolls who don’t believe us. (I also feel that women who trash other women are particularly revolting.)

If you need to step away from social media or turn off the TV and read a book you love, then do that. The other day I posted a photo of a happy bouncy llama. I needed that visual break. A friend of mine also stopped to take photos of the sky because it moved her, and she posted them for a break from the dumpster fire.

Derailing the focus to something positive is often a grounding tool for people who manage PTSD. Let them post their sparkly unicorn GIFs, happy baby photos, or a review of a film they love.

You’re not less of an activist or a human if you need a break or to excuse yourself from the discussion. You live in you. You know yourself better than any of us. You have the perfect right to take care of yourself.

I must say, though, I’m dead proud of all the people offering support to each other at this time. There has been such a sharing of empathy and love, even between total strangers. In the midst of such horror, something in the human condition still shines through as kindness. That gives me hope for humanity.

Take care of yourselves, my lovelies. We need a world with you in it.

Also, for what it’s worth, I believe you. ❤

Cait Gordon

Cait Gordon is the author of Life in the ’Cosm, a story about a little green guy who’s on a quest to save half the person he loves. Cait has recently submitted the prequel to ’Cosm called The Stealth Lovers, a military space opera about legendary warriors Xaxall Knightly and Vivoxx Tirowen. When she’s not writing, she’s editing manuscripts for indie authors and running The Spoonie Authors Network, a blog whose contributors manage disabilities and/or chronic conditions. She also really likes cake