I had an absolutely brilliant chat with award-winning producer Redzi Bernard from Falling Tree Productions for what promises to be a fantastic listen (not because of me, because of the wonderful audio archive material of Le Guin, plus Dr. Cheddar Gorgeous!). Ofc I managed to get in my favourite current Le Guin quotation (you can get it on a T-shirt thanks to Frank Duffy!)

That opposition to violence, to domination, seems to me the unifying theme of her politics, even if it took a while to translate it into being called feminism. But an opposition to violence—being antiwar, antinuclear, against the separation between human beings and other beings on the planet—seems to be a thread that you can follow through her thinking and something that she was constantly grappling with.

Amelia Brown reviewed the book under the title “Endlessly Queer,” for the exceptionally-named t’ART magazine, writing:

Again and again, Mayer finds astonishing new ways to talk about, to investigate, to explode gender and sexuality on the page and the collection is conceptually astounding… Allow time to go in all the directions you are being sent and then to come back to where you started. This collection confirms Mayer as a brilliant writer, thinker and storyteller, and it is a book to keep revisiting across a lifetime.

And Mazin Saleem interviewed me for his substack Artless (part 1 & part 2), which is an inbox fave (check out this fantastic piece on Milan Kundera and storytelling fast and slow), and encouraged me to talk about my favourite subjects: speculative fiction (and why we’re living it), speculative punctuation (take a breath), non-binary God, and generally doing things differently while living difference in solidarity. There’s also a gorgeous review that says:

The stories in Truth & Dare are rich and dense with information… woven into the stories and relevant to them, and is always too fascinating to be superfluous. And its presentation is stylistically glad-ragged and decked-out – don’t expect the spare, ‘deceptively simple’ prose cliché here – without the stories ever becoming jazz-noodley.

This richness is most pronounced in Mayer’s language. You get the impression reading Truth & Dare there’s nothing they can’t write. From sensory detail as specific as it is palpable, like a swimmer’s “body that ripples with those arabesques of light that rise up from the gritty floor of the pool”, to the lyrical – “the skeletons of mist-mapped hedgerows” – to defamiliarising reversals like “coming into sleep”.

Plus I share the murder-wall method of constructing a short story collection… Read part 2 to learn more!

When we look at fashion and clothing and gender, we can see that time is a construct. That doesn’t mean that it’s meaningless; it just means that it’s very flexible, and that’s really liberating, because I think we can often feel very stuck in our own time. Orlando shows how things change.