HZ: What would make you happier: if nobody solves it or if lots of people solve it?
JOHN FINNEMORE: Oh, lots of people, without question. I hope it's not trivial, but any puzzle has failed if nobody solves it.
Read moreAllusionist 161 Sentiment transcript
SANDHYA DIRKS: When we talk about empathy: the idea that you can get outside of yourself, that we can imagine someone else's experience is so audacious, because human beings are not that freaking imaginative. I mean, like a unicorn is just a horse with a horn! We did not go that far to get to our most magical creature. We just like grafted two things on top of each other.
Read moreAllusionist 155 The Tiffany Problem transcript
JO WALTON: What we the readers know about the name Tiffany is incorrect. Nevertheless, as a writer, you cannot use the name Tiffany.
Read moreAllusionist 118 Survival: Bequest transcript
ELIZABETH KEREKERE: I'm so convinced that transphobia, biphobia, homophobia are such an integral part of colonisation, I reject that as a colonial construct, I reject it as racist.
As they took our land - tried to take all of our land, tried to take all of our language and suppress our culture, they also took our expressions of sexuality and gender. And that is important to us in a core part of our culture, especially because the way that the institutional racism, the intergenerational trauma that is the legacy of colonisation has impacted on us and the levels of discrimination against people with diverse genders, sexualities and sex characteristics, that we see that all of this, all of this was a massive attempt to cover up what was already there and pretend it never happened.
Allusionist 85. Skin Story - transcript
HZ: Thirteen or so years ago, I met a friend at a pub, and she had someone with her who had a tattoo on her elbow of the word ‘cuticles,’. An unusual word to see as a tattoo - unlikely to be the name of a loved one or a birthplace or something. And also it wasn’t just the word ‘cuticles’, it was ‘cuticles’ followed by a comma.
SHELLEY JACKSON: With a piece of punctuation attached, you can really tell that it must be part of something else.
HZ: She was part of something else: The Skin Project, a story, 2095 words long, and each word tattooed on a person.
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