My first book, Turn This World Inside Out (AK Press 2019), which Vanity Fair called “slim but transfixing,” sold out its first print run in six months and has sold over 10,000 copies. My writing is listed on college syllabi at McGill, UBC, UC Berkeley, and universities across North America and Europe, and has appeared or been mentioned in international media such as Room, LitHub, On Being, Everyday Feminism, Eureka Street (Australia), Geledés (Brasil), Gender Hub (Nigeria), West Coast Line (Canada), Dwutygodnik (Poland), Ebony, and Feminist Legal Studies (USA). Turn This World Inside Out is a nonfiction inquiry into systemic violence conducted through multivocal dialogue.

My submission, Someplace Better, is a 22,000 word speculative fiction novella that builds on these same themes. Someplace Better grapples with themes of authoritarianism, coercive control, and dissociation that are increasingly urgent in our time.

Gwen has just been promoted to a senior post at the Institute, the source of all knowledge production in the world. On her first day, she stumbles upon a balcony in a hidden room, where she meets a woman in white who gazes down into an open place beyond the edge of the known world. Under the dangerous watch of Institute bureaucrats, Gwen risks her career and her safety to slip back into the room again and again to look out at the rolling meadows of another world hundreds of miles below. The unexpected death of a rogue colleague and an ensuing chase bring Gwen tumbling over the balcony ledge into this lush world. Given new life, in a community she could never have imagined, Gwen heals her spirit and body and learns what her role will be in the world that is to come.

Set in an allegorical dreamscape, Someplace Better draws on and is profoundly influenced by the work of science fiction great Ursula K. Leguin. It invokes the struggle to think beyond the edges of naturalized systems of power that seek to erase ways of living and of perceiving reality. It will be of interest to readers invested in the struggle to widen and protect the possibilities for human thought and for creativity in the political imagination, a struggle that grows more crucial by the day.

Since Someplace Better is quiet and slow moving, with an atmosphere that would work well in a visual medium, the novella has potential for adaptation to screenplay. This is a limited simultaneous submission, and the manuscript is complete and has been professionally edited.

Gwen works at the Institute, the source of all knowledge production in the world. The Institute’s rectilinear stone columns and thin white cutstone steps fill her imagination, and her work fills her days. Slowly her orderly, linear world begins to crack at the edges. In the oldest part of the Institute, a woman in white stands in a hidden room, staring down in yearning over a stone balcony ledge into an open place far below, at the back of the world where nothing could possibly exist. At the nearby market, dark-haired girls on wooden push scooters flash by in peripheral vision, gone the moment Gwen turns her head. The image seen a moment too late is always the same: a lush bundle of greens in a cornucopia nodding over a girl’s narrow shoulder, dark hair flying, a strange quality of light.

Under the dangerous watch of Institute bureaucrats, Gwen slips back again and again to the room at the back of the Institute, to stand next to the woman in white and look down into the open, impossible place beyond the edge of the known world. With the help of her friend Doran, who soon joins her at this task, she begins to make out more and more detail of the open green world below. Slowly, Gwen puzzles out the secrets of her world until she finds she can no longer be part of it.

The unexpected death of a rogue colleague, and an ensuing chase, bring Gwen and Doran tumbling over the balcony’s edge into the green world, where in a new, whole form, Gwen heals her spirit and body, learns the work of the green world girls, and discovers what her part can be in the world that is to come.

Someplace Better is a Cipher story. Why ‘Cipher’? A cipher is a secret or disguised way of writing; it is a text with encoded meaning that calls to be deciphered. ‘Cipher’ can also mean a stand-in, a person or image standing in for something greater, the way a zero stands in as a place holder in arithmetic, or the way the woman in white stands in for the green world. Cipher invites the reader to unfold levels of meaning that are not predetermined or ever fully known. In this way, Cipher mirrors the ways we must struggle to see beyond the edges of naturalized systems of power that cause dissociation and are rendered unthinkable. Bringing together analyses informed by mental health, antiracist, feminist, and antiauthoritarian impulses in a creative, intuitive form, Cipher sings the love and wholeness that is growing on the planet, a cellular reorganization of life that is slowly emerging right in the belly of our time of chaos and fear.

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(cover illustration by Aleks Besan)

Cipher is currently open to an agent, publisher, illustrators, and other unforeseen forms of magic. Do you know things about how a book like this gets out into the world?