THE LASER LIFE: QUEER SF READING SERIES RETURNS

OUR CHURCH CONGREGATES AGAIN.

LASER LIFE. A queer sci-fi reading.

Everything examined is possible. Everything in the universe, from the widely posted to the under served, belongs here, in the forefront of consciousness and being. Every particle, every node, every ion that pulses and vibrates throughout the eternal void, it all has a voice, is real.

There are no mistakes in characterization; there are no budding accidents or effortless imaginations. All things scribed and etched in parchment are the divine edicts of their authors, influenced by the shifting winds of the zeitgeist of the world the scribe inhabits, and is informed by the pulse body-mind electric elective mandate.

Despite the insistence of the dominant paradigm that elects to leave us voiceless, facing the peripatetic void, there is still a way. We can still choose our own adventure, we can still choose our own narrative. We can live life on the narrowest edge of a beam of light. We can live in the crevices of the universe where dark matter subsists, arcing over singularities where exploding nebulae enmesh with wild-born comets, streaking through the opaque nothing/everywhere to burst as chroma on a graf tagged wall. We can live life like a laser.

So understand: All is real. The choices you make of the creatures you give life to, all wiry gnarl of angst, all bulbous and disheveled wad of messy coagulate, all sinewy stretched meat of universe stuff– they’re all also real and exist here with us in the “real world” forever. Will they strive for their own happiness? Will their own arcs be catapulted into an unfettered birth? Will their joy and pain serve as real, palpable, and conscientious? Or will they wither and die, lay flat on the page as husks, merely cannon fodder for the oppressing class, to die a death as a strangled trope loosed of the juiced of life?

The LASER LIFE series of readings is designed to expose the quantumly quantative, psycho-spiritual, panoramic truth of the speculative, to make real the shaman’s holler, the mystic’s clamour, the soothsayer’s griot-speak– all that was falsely remembered as unreal. Laser Life is a tour beyond the stilted cis-hetero-white-male gaze of normative “science fiction” that plagues the shelves of your local bookstore and Goodreads “to read” lists. It is hoped that Laser Life does not serve as tokenistic or anomalous within the ranks of science fiction, but that the inclusion of our marginalized voices be viewed as not only empowering, necessary or revolutionary, but as intrinsic.

Laser Life is everything, and everything in its place: the nook of all that is possible for us to view: the whole of the universe.

So now it is up to you to write this way.

your guides:
SHANE JENKINS

RAS MASHRAMANI

RASHEEDAH PHILLIPS

MAGGIE EIGHTEEN

your guests:
MAMI WATU
JOEL NICHOLS
AZEEM NPC

ya’ll know how we do