By Kae Bara Kratcha

Is it possible to access narrators’ knowledge about liberatory futures using deep oral history listening and game mechanics concepts lifted from RPGs (role playing games) like Dungeons & Dragons? Kae Bara Kratcha endeavors to find out after being inspired by Taylor Thompson’s Brodsky Prize Lecture based on her award-winning thesis, “‘Tell Me About That World’: Speculative Archives and Black Feminist Listening Practices.”

In her pre-public event talk with the OHMA workshop class, Taylor Thompson told us that connecting with a narrator about the future world they envision and work towards can feel like entering a "pocket dimension." In creating space together in the oral history interview, Taylor and her narrators experienced alternate realities, new worlds, distant or not-so-distant possibilities, if only for a few moments. After hearing Taylor talk about pocket dimensions opening up in the space of an interview, I started to wonder whether it would be possible to practice an oral history method that explicitly opens up a space to create spontaneous speculative fiction.

This idea comes from a few places. First, I spent last year using oral histories as jumping-off points for writing speculative fiction. While I enjoyed this process, I have had a nagging anxiety that writing fiction based on a narrator's recording leaves the narrator out of a crucial step in realizing speculative worlds. As an oral historian, I think that the oral-history based fiction I produce would be much richer with narrators' direct involvement.

Second, OHMA faculty Nyssa Chow teaches an oral history method that strives to create "spontaneous literature." In my understanding, this means that the oral historian encourages the narrator to act as an author in the space of an oral history. The narrator does not simply tell events as they remember them at the prompting of the oral historian. Instead, the oral historian and the narrator set out to articulate and record the narrator's own narrative logic and their interpretations of events.

Next, my proposed method comes from the idea of fractals, as presented by adrienne maree brown in her book Emergent Strategy. For brown, fractals represent the aspect of emergent strategy that allows for repetition at every scale. Fractals are repeating patterns. They are made by doing the same process over and over. Thus, practicing the principle of fractals means living out the world you want to see at the tiniest, everyday scale because that world will become large through repetition. My idea for creating spontaneous speculative fiction is rooted in this idea of fractals because it asks narrators first to tell me about little ways that they experience joy, community, and thriving, then to repeat those ways in new contexts, thus creating new speculative worlds. I am thinking of the result of this method as “entering fractal worlds,” after this concept.

Finally, this method comes from a conversation with my friend Tim Livingston, who suggested that role playing games (RPGs) might be a good way to collaborate with narrators on speculative fiction. H Kapp-Klote proposed a similar idea in 2020 when we were collaborating on the Working 2050 podcast, but I was skeptical. Tim talked me into trying it.

So what does this look like in practice?

Step 1: Reach out to narrators. Set up a pre-interview to discuss the method. Talk about how we are creating a record of today with a focus on what the narrator thinks should be carried into tomorrow. Discuss what it feels important to document for future generations of queer and trans people.

Step 2: Conduct an oral history encounter. Linger in moments in which the narrator is talking about joy, tactics for thriving, and families and communities of trans people.

Step 3: Index or transcribe the interview. (This is a note to future me: seriously, just do it now! You will be so much happier in the long run if you don’t put this off.) Make note of any initial potential fractals. In this project, a potential fractal is any moment in which the narrator expresses a practice that is working to produce trans joy, thriving, or community on a small or everyday scale.

Step 4: Wait at least three months. Let the oral history conversation settle, like a chili getting better as leftovers in the refrigerator. In Taylor’s Black Feminist Listening Practices, she asks us to listen, breath, and hold many possible futures in our minds at once. That is what this time is for. Hopefully our brains and our breath will quietly make connections to worlds we couldn’t have otherwise imagined.

Step 5: Select and prepare clips from the initial conversation to use as fractals and arrange a time for the narrator to listen to these clips with you.

Step 6: Create a new context for the fractals through character, time, and setting creation. Have the narrator invent a speculative version of themself, including appearance, skills, and relationships. Have the narrator select a time (tomorrow, in 10 years, in 100 years, etc.) and a place to speculate about.

Step 7: Record the narrator role playing as this speculative self using the fractal clips as jumping off points. How would the idea contained in the fractal clip transfer to this speculative world and character? What does it tell us about the world we’re creating? The oral historian should ask questions as usual, but the questions should focus on the speculative world, not the “real” world of the narrator’s day to day life. For example, the narrator might ask, “Where do you (the fictionalized version of the narrator) live?” Or, “Who do you interact with on a day-to-day basis?”

This method is meant to layer the narrator’s own interpretation of their ideas and to engage listeners in the work of imagining the alternate realities that we have access to. It holds what we imagine as just as important as what we experience. I hope to record and transmit speculative joy, thriving, and community playfully enough that it can be spread, enjoyed, and learned from.

Kae Bara Kratcha (they/them) is a nonbinary librarian and oral historian on the unceded Lenape land known as Queens, NY. You can follow them on Twitter @kaeklib, where they will try to remember to post updates about their thesis work.