Links: How we tell (marginalized) stories

Who Is Baba Yaga? by Kris Spisak. "Trickster, mentor, probable goddess—Slavic folklore’s most famous villain is so much more than a witch." Excerpted and adapted from Becoming Baba Yaga: Trickster, Feminist, and Witch of the Woods.

The Ghost of Workshops Past: How Communism, Conservatism, and the Cold War Still Mold Our Paths Into SFF Writing by S.L. Huang.

As part of tracing out why these types of workshops can be so detrimental to minority writers, both authors delved into the history of writing workshops. And both argued that the traditional workshop in which the author is enforced to silence will not only suppress minority voices—but that its domination across education happened not by accident, but by design.

We Are the Mountain: A Look at the Inactive Protagonist by Vida Cruz.

Now let’s flip the script. Let me take you through the anatomy of characters who are commonly labelled “inactive protagonist.”

They are marginalized in some way, via race or class or gender or sex or ability. They will most certainly have suffered some kind of trauma (or three, or more), whether physical, emotional, psychological, or sexual. These two things have inevitably and inextricably colored not only how they perceive and navigate the world they live in, but how gods, natural or supernatural phenomena, technology, society, or other people react to them.