Welcome to Brittle Almanac!

Thank you for peeking at this lo-fi blog/newsletter thing. In case you don’t know me: I’m brandon, and I guess we can say I’m a speculative fiction writer early in their career.

Let’s see, a few things about me: I’m a recent graduate of Vermont College of Fine Art’s MFA in Writing program. I like to say I got my MFA in strange stories. I spent about five years working as a veterinary assistant (but I escaped with my life last year). I’m black and I’m nonbinary—one of those he/theys you’re always hearing about. Recently, I joined a charity livestream run by Roll +Bond, an online tabletop roleplaying game community built by fans of Friends at the Table. We raised $8,595 for Trans Lifeline over the course of three days, and I was ecstatic to be a small part of that success. (You can find some of the stream, including the game of Songs of the Dusk I was in, on their Twitch channel. I think the VODs will roll out more fully soon.) I enjoy tabletop games quite a bit—we’ll talk more about that later.

Okay. What’s in a name? What are we getting into here?

For the last decade, I’ve been writing something I call “Brittle.” Short stories, mostly. They take place in a small South Carolina town called Brittle, which ostensibly occupies the physical space where Greenville, South Carolina actually sits. (I spent a lot of my youth in Greenville, but know almost nothing about it! This choice, at the time, felt incidental. We’ll get into this at some point, I’m sure.) Brittle is a slippery place. On its face, reality appears to be eroding in its streets, in the forests and valleys surrounding it. Light is shy, the people living in Brittle say, meaning that it does not behave the way you and I understand it to. Wildfires occur frequently and have a kind of interior life. They have bodies, too, sometimes. Human bodies, some of them, have borrowed structure and flesh from their surroundings—buildings, forests. The cityfolk have speculated plenty on this erosion and its reasons—climate change, a decline in traditional values, generational conflict, the war on the moon, the divine. Classic stuff, very much of our moment—by which I mean, ha-ha, joke’s on me, by the time I publish any of it, I will be old hat.

I had an intense aversion to worldbuilding when I started Brittle. That might come as a surprise, given what I just laid out! At the time, I was thinking of my work as literary, which in my mind meant that I ought to leave the types of storytelling that I loved as a kid—sci-fi cartoons, roleplaying video games, anime—in the trash bin. This attitude caused me a lot of grief. I wrote a lot of what I can only describe as frustrated work. A generous read on my approach is that I wanted to fuse what I once loved with an adult sensibility. A read that is closer to the truth, I think, is that I was avoiding the world—seeing it, touching it, inhabiting it. If I conjured something “adult,” I could continue to splash around in a make-believe world quarantined from reality.

In grad school, I changed my tune. Hard to imagine why: I started my MFA a month after George Floyd was murdered, to say nothing of the pandemic. And even before that, during a time when all of that frustrated output had stopped my writing in its tracks, I spent years emotionally and physically brutalizing myself in veterinary medicine, struggling to pay rent, maintain even surface level relationships, and stay alive.

As the structural reality in which we live came into clearer focus, my stomach turned at the thought of Brittle and its world. I had on my hands a half-built castle of air. The light, the wildfires, the shifting bodies—none of Brittle’s elements felt coherent. Some of the stories had impact, but the world in which they occurred—this strange, eroding facsimile of the place I’d grown up—rejected interpretation or understanding, and rarely in fruitful ways.

I came to understand, finally, that I’d been writing a handbook. For living here, now. For reaching out to my friends, encountering my enemies. For loving. For imagining. For surviving the ways in which our imaginations are, yeah, frustrated. I think I needed a handbook like that, anyhow.

Enter Brittle Almanac! Fiction is absolutely one of my favorite tools for learning about the world and imagining futures, and I cherish it. But I’d like to dig into things a little more openly.

My hope is that this blog/newsletter thing can become the handbook I needed back then. I’ll turn my eye to the books, TV, film, music, and games I’m engaged with, the meals I’m learning to cook, whatever, and try to see them through the lens of Brittle. What’s slippery here? How do I describe this texture? How does it make me feel? What do you do? What do I?

I wanna think about worlds, right? How they’re made. Who makes them and why. I hope you’ll join me as I do!

Catch you later,

brandon