History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Writing Monsters While Avoiding Ableism

| March 8, 2021

There are a lot of tropes associated with monsters, and a huge number of these tropes are racist and ableist caricatures used as shorthand to suggest that non-white people and people with disabilities are inherently inferior, if not downright evil. This article from Mythcreants, “Ridding Your Monsters of Ableism,” gives examples of how monster tropes […]

Review of Unnatural Order

| January 27, 2021

Unnatural Order, edited by Lyss Wickramasinghe and Alis Franklin (CSFG Publishing, 2021), is an anthology of stories of monstrous beings produced by the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild. The stories range widely under the speculative umbrella, with fantasy, science fiction, and horror all represented in the anthology’s pages. In a themed anthology, each author’s ideas on a […]

Magical Menagerie

| August 21, 2018

One of the panels I was on at SpoCon was called “The Magical Menagerie,” which I described as the panel on monsters. I introduced myself as an author who loves vampires and also “things that live underwater that want to kill you.” I shared the panel with Dorian Graves and Sanan Kolva. Our conversation was […]