Fellowship & Fairydust

Andy Dibble brings a unique perspective to discussions about speculative fiction and faith. A Harvard Divinity School graduate, one of his earliest publications was a piece on theodicy and ontology in the Bhagavata Purana.

After deciding not to pursue his initial plan to be an academic specializing in Asian religions, he became an IT healthcare consultant, but he has continued to explore theological questions in various avenues. His blog includes articles discussing how Wittgenstein’s language theories can be applied to Protestant theology of salvation, or whether someone has to belong to a religion to write good theology in that tradition. His poetry and short stories frequently feature religious imagery or consider the questions that religion brings up. These works have appeared in publications like Diabolical Plots, Sci Phi Journal, and Mysterion.

His short story “A Word That Means Everything,” won first place in the 2020 Writers of the Future Contest, and was released in Writers of the Future Volume 36. After connecting with other writers through the contest, Dibble became a part of Calendar of Fools, a small press started by writers who met at the event. Its first book, Inner Workings, edited by Zack Be, will include pieces by Dibble, as well as other Writers of the Future authors like Luke Wildman, Rebecca E. Treasure, and M. Elizabeth Ticknor.

Dibble has also edited the anthology Strange Religion, which features speculative short fiction exploring ideas across various religions.

He was kind enough to answer a few questions.

Interview Questions:

You mention in your “about the author” profile for Writers of the Future Volume 36 that you initially planned an academic career, then decided that “writing about abstruse Sanskrit texts for a living wasn’t for [you].” Had you already been writing speculative fiction at that point, or did it come later?

I wrote fiction, primarily with a speculative bent, when I was very young. There was a really awful horror piece called “The Secret Room.” I was probably ten when I wrote that. I had ideas for a fantasy novel knocking around when I was an undergrad, but I didn’t write that in earnest until a few years after I finished my master’s when I was on hiatus from my IT career in 2017. That was when I first started to write fiction that I wanted to sell.

You wrote in your introduction to Strange Religion about how speculative narratives sometimes teaches us things that other modes can’t: “some imagined possibilities don’t make sense to us until they are conveyed in the voice of vivid characters with turns of dialog and descriptions that make a setting real.” Given your academic background, was it challenging to realize that there are some things a fictional treatment handles better than nonfiction?

My interest in the cognitive value of literature—what literature can teach us that we can’t learn from other genres like nonfiction essays—came out of a class I had on philosophy and literature when I was an undergrad. On the whole, I’m fairly pessimistic about the cognitive value of literature. I think literature is more about entertainment than about instruction. For the most part, what we learn from literature, we could learn better from experts in different fields.  This stance has to do with my philosophical bent, but it might’ve had to do with my inclination toward genre writing. Genre writers tend to be more concerned with engaging the reader’s emotions and entertaining them, rather than conveying truths about the human condition.

But in my intro to Strange Religion, I argue that speculative fiction does have cognitive value in terms of helping us understand religion. I think my academic background in religion helped me reach this conclusion, particularly in terms of what goes into understanding a religion that isn’t your own. Religious studies, especially at an institution like Harvard Divinity School, isn’t about distilling a religious tradition down to a set of objective facts. It’s more concerned about trying to understand people who have worldviews and lifestyles very different from your own.

Who are some of the more unusual speculative fiction writers who have influenced you?

My favorite writer is Jorge Luis Borges. He’s not really unusual, at least in the sense of being little-known, but he’s more commonly seen as a literary writer rather than speculative. I think everyone should read Borges. He never wrote anything over perhaps 30 pages, and many of his best stories like “The Library of Babel” or my personal favorite, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” are just a handful of pages.

F.J. Bergmann—who won Writers of the Future the same quarter I did and also lives in Madison, Wisconsin—got me writing speculative poetry. I read her Elgin-award-winning A Catalogue of the Further Suns and realized that speculative poetry is a medium I can write about ideas without all the effort that goes into building characters and plot.

Other spec fiction writers that have influenced me: Mary Soon Lee—her The Sign of the Dragon is a series of poems that forms a cohesive epic, which shows how a master can move between points of view; Ted Chiang—he’d be better than Borges if he had a sense of humor; Harlan Ellison for showing me how delightful introductions to stories can be; Robert Jackson Bennett because he weaves religion and comp sci so well into fiction; Rich Larson for showing me how beautiful first-person present point of view can be. I’m not sure if all these names are unusual, but I don’t think many would object to being called such.

What was it like learning your short story had won a place in Writers of the Future?

Transcendental. I remember I wasn’t able to work the rest of the day and went hiking because I felt so giddy. I hadn’t published any fiction previously, at least aside from a local contest I won in grade school, so it was a pretty astonishing change in my writing career.

What was your contribution to the anthology Inner Workings?

“Pro-Vote.” It’s a novelette based in the near future when most jobs are automated away in the United States—that is except voting. A large segment of the population, including the protagonist, is paid by political parties to vote in particular electoral districts for strategic reasons.

I also have an essay on Brandon Sanderson’s promises, progress, and payoff storytelling rubric as it applies to Luke Wildman’s “Knight’s Blood,” a comedic fantasy story also in Inner Workings.

Others in the 2020 Writers of the Future year—a few called it “the plague year”—have talked about the surprising community that sprung from the 2020 and 2021 winners celebrating their work together. What was it like being part of this unusual, twice-the-normal-size writers’ community?

As I think most winners of Writers of the Future will tell you, the most significant and enduring benefit of winning is the connections you build. Once you realize that, it’s a good thing that I was part of a two-year crowd. There are 12 winners, including a published finalist, in Calendars of Fools. A group that large wouldn’t really be possible from one year of winners because it would take participation from basically everyone.

Your writing about religion is clearly informed by the fact you’ve studied more than one religion. What are of the biggest lessons you’ve learned from looking at how different religions see the world?

Religion, insofar as it’s about one thing, is more about what people do than what they believe. I roll my eyes whenever I hear people talk about religion as a “belief system” because that notion of religion is only common in Christianity and theological traditions in many other religions. Most people are concerned with using their religions to solve problems in their lives, communities, after-lives, etc.

A second lesson is that religion is incredibly complex and typically integrated with the rest of life. This isn’t obvious when you live in a secular culture. But only about half of languages even have a word for religion because a great many cultures don’t think of religion as what you do on Sunday mornings. If it’s a distinct idea at all, it’s jumbled up with everything else people do: law, art, trade, family life, etc. Similarly many cultures—including those that produced the Bible—don’t a have a distinction between nature and the supernatural. It can make it difficult to define what fantasy and speculative fiction are without imposing our modern ideas on other cultures.

What were some challenges and joys of editing the anthology Strange Religion?

Layout was a bore. Finding and maintaining guest editors to write discussion questions took work (academics are busy people and not always responsive to email). I learned along the way that I had to include a diversity of religious traditions, especially major world religions. Even though our open call drew wide interest—especially from writers like me who want to publish more speculative fiction about real religious traditions—your typical slush pile of English-language stories isn’t so great for that goal. This is why I included my story “Deep Play,” which follows a Cambodian college student reconnecting with his Theravada Buddhist roots.

As for joys, building connections with other writers and with academics was a plus. It was cool to have my name on the cover of a book for the first time, and as far as I know, a kind of book concept that hasn’t been done before. Biggest joy was probably writing the introduction. My mind definitely thinks better in terms of arguments than stories, and I haven’t had many opportunities to publish my nonfiction, especially work focused on so many of my own ideas.

You’ve sometimes used stories to play humorously with religious questions. For example, you published a sci-fi story with Mysterion about Catholic priests determining whether a mass sprinkler deluge qualified as baptism. How do you balance the desire to respect others’ theological positions with the desire to be a little irreverent and get people thinking?

Probably the strangest thing about my stance toward religion is that I think religion is weird and fun and also a human phenomenon that we should strive to understand seriously and sympathetically. Speculative fiction writers going way back have a penchant for making fun of Catholics or for casting religion in general as just variations on Catholicism and then bashing a wide swath of traditions. I don’t have much patience with that, and I’m quite willing to correct misconceptions when I find them. I tend to move fairly freely between my “having fun” hat and “being serious” hat.

I’m not sure if this counts as balancing but I don’t think practitioners deserve respect in the sense of avoiding offending them, especially when it comes to Christianity because it’s so dominant in my society. Practitioners do deserve our respect in terms of sincerely trying to understand their tradition and how they engage with it. If you do that well—and often it is very difficult to do—I think you can write just about anything, even about traditions you don’t identify with personally. Of course, going close reading and striving to understand can bring you to realize you aren’t able to write certain stories well.

My short story “The Baptismal Status of Persons Wetted by the Sprinkler Deluge” was largely based a Vatican publication on the salvation of unbaptized infants, although I also read parts of the Catholic Catechism and Aquinas’s Summa. I corresponded with two scholars of Catholicism. I couldn’t have written that story without doing the research.

You’ve written about the desire to have fun when writing theology, to look for new ways to configure others’ ideas. How does that compare with writing fiction that explores theological ideas in new ways?

For me theology is fun, both when it involves serious and attentive readings of authoritative texts and when it comes to reinterpreting them to accommodate closely-held views. It really only stops being fun when believers repeat the same old doctrines and arguments for those doctrines without trying to break new ground, especially when they aren’t attending to the texts they revere.

My Writers of the Future story “A Word That Means Everything” is a good example of fun and serious theological investigation coming together. The story opens with a missionary trying to convert an alien that doesn’t even believe he exists. Another character encourages the missionary to translate the Bible so that Jesus has tentacles. But the idea in the title of the story and its expansive inter-species theology comes out of reading deeply into the Word (logos) in the opening verses of the Gospel of John.

Another example is “The Devil is a Shape in the Brain,” by Joachim Glage, a story I picked for Strange Religion. I hadn’t intended to include a story that long, but I liked it so much that I made an exception. But I gather the religious studies scholar who wrote discussion questions in response to the story had a less favorable opinion of it. He thought the theology described in the story was based on proof-texting—cherry-picking a small number of excerpts in scripture and other sources to arrive at a desired conclusion. I might have a similar view of Glage’s story, if I didn’t like playing around with ideas without much regard for whether they’re true or not. Good speculative fiction is more about seeing how ideas resonate with one another than about trying to change readers’ minds.

You’ve written about the theological ideas in of C.S. Lewis’ lesser-known stories, The Great Divorce. What drew you to that particular work?

I read The Great Divorce first because I listened to a podcast that discussed it and found the premise interesting—angels trying to convince souls on reprieve from hell to enter into heaven. What grew into my essay about The Great Divorce in my introduction to Strange Religion is the problem that Lewis takes on: How is it that certain people genuinely want to be in hell?  I argue that the narrative and literary features of the work—dialog, character psychology, and the like—contribute to his argument. It’s only when we can imagine hell-bound souls as characters that we really understand.

I also like his conception of human freedom. Americans especially tend to view freedom as a lack of restraint or having lots of options. I disagree. Like Lewis, I think freedom consists in having a will that’s oriented toward proper ends. For him, God is the proper end of humans—and people are in hell because their wills are bent far from God. For me, freedom more to do with rationality. But he and I agree that a truly free person is so aware of what’s best for them and their capabilities, that doing anything but the best seems ridiculous. A truly free person has very few options, perhaps only one.

Have you encountered any of the other Inklings’ writing—for example, Charles Williams or Owen Barfield’s writings about spirituality?

No, but I might give them a try.

You’ve suggested that when we look at different religions, we must remember the doctrine is only part of the story: “When we think of religion, we can’t lose sight of what people are doing on the ground… Beyond and behind their texts, a religion is people, and however strange their worldviews seem to us, they almost invariably have needs and goals we can identify with.” Has that insight helped you dialogue with people from different religions?

I think it’s helped me be friends with people of other traditions. Or perhaps it’s the other way around, that having friends of different religious identities helped me realize that, for the most part, people are people first and Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, etc. second. I don’t think that only applies in secular societies. I mean that just by being people we have much more in common than what goes into the worldviews that divide us, even when those worldviews are very different.

I think I was an undergraduate when I first read the Qur’an. It’s a great text. I encourage everyone to read it. There are however portions of it that turned me off, as I expect it would turn off many left-leaning folk living in the developed world. There’s plenty of hellfire. Even though the Qur’an is a progressive text on the standards of seventh-century ethical standards, it’s hard for me to think hewing to it closely would make for a society I want to live in.

But just because the Qur’an says such-and-such doesn’t mean that any given Muslim today does or believes such-and-such. Part of this is because most Muslims view of religious authority is broader than the Qur’an. They also rely upon accounts of the Prophet’s life (hadith), Islamic legal opinions, and other authorities. But just as important, if not more important, is the fact that most Muslims find a certain degree or kind of religious observance that works for them, and beyond that they go about living their lives. There’s only so much you can learn about the practice of a religion from reading authoritative texts, even texts revered as highly as the Qur’an.

Any future projects you can share with us?

My “Render unto Jesus” is coming out in Sci Phi Journal later this year or next year. It’s a humorous piece that considers Jesus as a legal entity, kind of like gods in India have legal rights (There was a court case in which “Shiva, Lord of the Universe” was plaintiff).

I just did a “one-shot anthology” exercise with the Toronto Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers group. We do it roughly once a year. All the stories are written and edited in a day. My story this year “Do Not Break What Has Brought You Together” about a heretic in the Greek Pythagorean tradition turned out well. That will be on Amazon once cover art and layout are done.

Working on another couple short stories in the same universe as “A Word That Means Everything.” After that, we’ll see.

Andy Dibble’s writings can be found on Amazon, as well as on his website. More information about Inner Workings can be found on its Kickstarter page.

Storm Humbert speaks about his experience co-founding Calendar of Fools in this Fellowship & Fairydust interview.