Michael Hessel-Mial

I’d love to follow up on this (and freak myself out) any recommended resources?

One thing I think about a lot is how speculative fiction representations of academics are pure exposition, or doddering parodies. I’m really interested in scholars as complex historical actors with a specific vantage on the world, also bound up in exploitation or resistance in their own ways.

I am possessed by this current poem, which is far-future literary theory in verse. It’s really really doing something for me, and also is promising to be too long and too dry to be publishable. Oh well. Gotta proceed. At least there’s an oblique reference to The Terminator as ancient folklore

I hate the phrase so much. One other thing about it is that the use of the phrase is rhetorically dishonest at its core: it attributes a belief to another person in terms they have never used, a species of strawmanning but somehow worse

Frankly other countries don't hate the U.S. enough.

They attacked the burn treatment center in Tehran before unleashing the fires of hell on the city. They are truly the epitome of all evil in this world x.com/UnboundedVoi...

It’s not super convenient for regular sandwiches but it’s perfect for knocking through five or six slices with butter!

Loaf of homemade bread on a plate. The bread has the shape of a Bundt cake

Sandwich style sourdough bread —slightly more complex because of the added butter and sugar, requiring more involved kneading — but of course the standout thing is I baked it in a Bundt pan because I didn’t have a bread pan

EXPERIENCE THE ULTIMATE
ULTIMATE SALON AND SPA

A peanut butter and jelly sandwich crudely carved into a cat face

My daughter refuses to eat PBJs unless I make them in the shape of a kitty face

Current poem in the works: a far-future communist folklorist tries to arrive at the definitive structural model for robot folktales, and in the process accidentally rediscovers intersectionality

7. Alchemised, SenYinLu.

Speculative poet here so “form” is kind of how I frame it for myself but I’m also interested in this. For me narrative prose style, or poetic form, is also an extension of the cultures of the secondary world. Form and style are world building

Jump scare at seeing that byline

I wish a very happy “additional week delay on poetry submissions because all the editors are schmoozing in Baltimore” to all who celebrate

Now that I’m reading a famous fanfic-to-traditional-published novel, I’m super fascinated by the influence of fanfic on mass market fiction, especially the spread of romance plots/tropes/techniques to other genres. It’s a big evolution in audience tastes that I want to understand better.

I was thinking about the people insider betting on the Iran war, and I believe they are the most depraved evil fucking freaks ever. Consequence of a society that soothes the wealthy, stokes their resentful assurance that it’s nobody’s business how they get rich, but everyone must praise them. Filthy

My thing is that no matter what I write I never wink at the audience. I always take it incredibly seriously, put a lot of thought into the world building and poetic form, and believe every word the speaker says/sings. So if I’m going to write a flash-in-the-pan dance song, I’m going to go all in.

“What if the Wobblies parodied Take Me Out to the Ballgame, but again, in space” just narrowly broke out of ‘this is stupid’ containment and actually got published in a cool venue. “Haddaway in space” doesn’t have the juice yet

Most of the time the sci fi poetry prompts I give myself are really generative (“put Baudelaire in space to think about voyeurism and gender”), but this current one (“Haddaway or La Bouche, but in a microgravity disco”) is so far yielding results that are incredibly stupid

B2B wholesale sales manager (the cool Jewish socialist inventor one) and insurance salesman (the one who was racist)

One of my favorite parts of teaching business writing is “union week,” where we go over students’ rights as workers under the NLRA, and learn the basics of organizing conversations and workplace mapping. Some students are totally bewildered and some are totally fired up by it

Reading Alchemised but making rapidly shifting obscure facial expressions so people know I’m reading it as a cultural artifact and not out of support for Harry Potter fandom, J.K. Rowling or the book’s fraught sexual politics

Please do whatever you can for Odai, please tinyurl.com/odai-care

I grew up on this game, absolute treasure

I expect to return to my Behind the Poem substack essays this month, but two form tidbits for now:

1. I was really interested in long verse lines plus multi-part compound words.

2. The poem is secretly a knapsack!

March 2026 Issue | UtopiaScienceFiction March 2026, Vol. 7 Issue 3 Content EditorialLetter from the Editor by Raima Larter InterviewsS. T. Joshi Short StoriesThe Blue Horse by Mackenzie RobinThe Love Story of Bex Kyle... by Catherine Tavare...

I’m officially a weird fiction author! (Whether my writing is “weird” vs just weird is a bigger question). See my human-alien separation lament in @utopiascifi.bsky.social weird fiction special issue. So honored to be included!

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March 2026 Issue | UtopiaScienceFiction March 2026, Vol. 7 Issue 3 Content EditorialLetter from the Editor by Raima Larter InterviewsS. T. Joshi Short StoriesThe Blue Horse by Mackenzie RobinThe Love Story of Bex Kyle... by Catherine Tavare...

It's here! The Weird Science Fiction Issue. Visit our website to get yours today! #Weird #sciencefiction

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Hands off Iran, death to American imperialism, may our swords be bent to ploughs and the land freed to the dispossessed

I’ve got work in this!!! Get very excited to feel grief over extinct human-alien xenoathletics