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Month of Joy: Music by Mike Brooks

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There are, actually, many things that give me joy, despite the rather unfortunate state the world is in at the moment. My wife, my friends, my cats, reading and writing science fiction and fantasy… the list just goes on and on. However, another of the most prominent and important ones is music. As a child, I learned to play the recorder (because that was what one did in primary school), the piano (briefly, badly) and the cornet (allowing me to claim with technical accuracy that I am a “classically-trained musician”, which is mildly hilarious). However, I never had much time for music on the radio. It wasn’t until I was about thirteen and heard The Offspring’s “Self Esteem” when Jamie Dreher snuck a battery-operated tape player along to Scouts summer camp that I realised that songs could actually have a point to them. I didn’t look back.

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Month of Joy: The Holiday Party by Mary Anne Mohanraj

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Every year, we have a colonial Christmas tea, where I cook a combination of Sri Lankan traditional party food (rolls, chicken patties, mackerel cutlets, ribbon sandwiches, milk toffee, marshmallows, love cake, and arrack sours) with British traditional tea party / Christmas food (cucumber sandwiches, roast beef and horseradish sandwiches, mushroom sandwiches, scones with clotted cream and jam, berry trifle, fruitcake, mulled mead and mulled cider). Plus some extra sweets. I feel that I should get something good out of colonialism, after all, and traditional British holiday fare is delicious. Cooking a feast is an opportunity to put my day job as a professor aside, and even the SF novel I’m writing, and sink deep into food and domesticity, some of my own enduring sources of joy. Especially when I get to share the cooking (and then the eating) with my partner, children, and friends!

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Month of Joy: Falling Snow and Rising Spirits by Phoebe Barton

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Every December, a holiday-themed zone opens up in Star Trek Online: Q’s Winter Wonderland, a place where players can forget about spatial anomalies and chroniton fluxes and enjoy themselves in a place where no one ever dies, where the only enemies are made of snow and candy, and where it’s always winter. I found myself spending a lot of time there in 2017, even if I no longer have any real in-game reason to, and not just because it was 2017. I wondered why until it clicked — winter, a proper northern winter, is one of my sources of joy.

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Month of Joy: The Smell of Masa in the Morning by Sabrina Vourvoulias

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There is a particular smell to corn that has been soaked in wood ash lye, then washed and hulled and ground into a fine meal. It is the aroma of freshly made tortillas, of tamales as they steam, of my mother’s huipiles. Really. No matter how freshly laundered, no matter how many cedar balls or lavender sachets have been thrown in the drawer to keep the moths away, the distinctive hand-woven Guatemalan blouses my mother wore retain the smell of a grain turned more aromatic, more flavorful, more nutritious by the nixtamalation process.

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Month of Joy: Sharing Pop Culture by Tansy Rayner Roberts

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Something that has brought me a great deal of joy over the years — but particularly in 2017, a year that has us grasping for crumbs of joy among the embers and the schrapnel — is sharing pop culture with my kids. My eldest turned 12 last January. It hit me that I remembered exactly what I was reading at 12 — Stephen King’s IT, for one, along with a whole bunch of other adult texts. So… my policy on reading matter, always fairly casual, meant that I removed all filters and left R to it. My policy on other media shifted a bit too, especially when I realised that 12 is an awesome age to experience teen media that didn’t come along until I was… well. Older than 12.

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Month of Joy: Podcasts by Adam Callaway

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I’d like to talk about one of the main things that got me through 2017. Beyond all of the horrible real world shit that was going on in the real world, I was diagnosed as bipolar in March of 2017. It wasn’t a huge surprise; I had been dealing with depression and anxiety for years up to that point. It was nice to have a firm diagnosis though. It helped narrow down the possible medications I could take to help me. And, after maybe six months, I finally hit on a combo of meds that have significantly improved my life. But before that, and still to this day, I’ve used art both to  escape my own mind, as well as to help control my moods. Of all the art forms that I consume, that one that provided the most consistent relief was: podcasts.

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