Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Spotlight: Cecil Washington



Cecil Washington is the editor and Publisher of Creative Brother , a magazine that publishes and explores speculative fiction about the black culture. I recently interviewed both Cecil and Frank Creed. See my post on marginalized scifi below.

Creative Brother is a zine that contains fiction, opinion essays, poetry, and sometimes analysis of issues at the juncture of speculative fiction and Black culture.

Authors included in Issue #10, which I believe is the latest issue, include Paul Blakeford and Malon Edwards.

Creative Brother doesn't shy away from controversial issues, two of which are included in this issue.

The first is: The Sophia Stewart plagiarism lawsuit against the Brothers Wachowski asserting they stole the Matrix idea from her. (I've heard a lot about this lawsuit and honestly I don't know what to think about it. It's possible they used her short story as a seed for the movie but where does influence begin and plagiarism end?) Mr Washington seems to have taken up her cause. I'll stand mute. If you wish to read more about the lawsuit, you can check out Sophia's website. www.sophiaoracle.com She's pretty angry...and if she is indeed right about being plagiarized, she has every right to be angry. If, if, if. Whatever the outcome of the courtcase, it certainly should make writers pause about sending their unpublished novels off to folks in Hollywood.


Another controversial topic mentioned in Creative Brother is the philosophy of Dr Frances Cress-Welsing and Neely Fuller, Jr. In fact it takes up much of this issue. If you don't know what the United Independent Compensatory Code/System/Concept is, you can either count yourself unlucky (according to Felix) or lucky (in that you just don't get into such far reaches of racial flakiness.) Sorry, Felix, but honestly! I consider you a great writer and I'm not particularly wimpy about racism...but I seriously wonder how anyone could believe in that entire Cress-Welsing concept.

The ezine also contains a great segment on black scifi resources on the web and in print. If you want to read some race-based scifi...or if you want to get an somewhat biased analysis on the Sophia Stewart case or the Cress-Welsing/Fuller philosophy, check out the zine:

Creative Brother Website



Other bloggers taking part in the tour are:


Interview with Cecil Washington

Check out the spotlight of Cecil on:
Spotlight on moondancerdrake's livejournal

Gregory Banks' website

Rachel Lindley

Plus I did an earlier interview with Cecil and Frank Creed, another writer of marginalized speculative fiction.


Cecil's websites are:
http://www.cecilwashington.com/

Creative Brother Website


-Carole

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