Month of Joy: Connection and Collaboration by Julia Rios

I love it when people connect with each other to spread joy and love, to create new things that couldn’t exist with one person’s efforts alone, and to generally be awesome to each other. Here are a few examples that give me great joy:

Star Wars

Okay, so the world loves Star Wars. Many of us grew up with it. It’s a giant part of our global culture at this point. What I especially love in recent years is how much the creators are also the fans. Talking with Ken Liu about what Star Wars means to him when we interviewed him about The Legends of Luke Skywalker was excellent, but I think maybe the best example of this is Kelly Marie Tran, who played Rose in The Last Jedi. She’s a giant Star Wars fan who was super excited to be in the movie, and she’s done all kinds of awesome things like introducing herself to fans in a pub because she overheard them talking about her character. I love that so many people are excited about Star Wars. I love that this brings happiness to millions of people, and I especially love that it’s bringing people together.

Also, can we all take a moment to appreciate this bit of ridiculousness from my local theatre?

Despacito

This song is so good! So good! And it could not exist without collaboration. Daddy Yankee and Luis Fonsi bring their A game to this, and each of them influences it with their very different styles, but together, somehow it is marvelously transcendent. I want them to collaborate more, please!

The Time Anna Saved Olaf’s Family from a Hurricane

It’s so nice when people who have worked together on things are also friends who care about each other in real life. This is one of the great things in my personal experience of working with magazines and podcasts (shoutout to my Skiffy and Fanty crew!), but it’s also delightful to see evidence of it elsewhere. One of my favorite examples from 2017 was when Hurricane Irma came through Florida, and Kristen Bell (who voiced Anna in Frozen) helped Josh Gad (who voiced Olaf the snowman in Frozen) get his Florida relatives to a safe place.

And while we are on the subject of snowpeople, here are some snowpeople someone in my town made for everyone else to enjoy. They made me happy.

connections, fandom

Julia Rios

Julia Rios is a writer, editor, podcaster, and narrator. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, and Goblin Fruit. Currently the Fiction Editor for Fireside Magazine, she won the Hugo award in 2017 as Poetry and Reprint editor for Uncanny Magazine, and was a Hugo finalist as a Senior Fiction Editor for Strange Horizons. She is a co-host of Walkthrough, a discussion of exercise and geekery with Amal El-Mohtar and Layla Al-Bedawi. She has narrated stories for Podcastle, Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders. She’s @omgjulia on Twitter and @zomgjulia on Instagram.