The Seers’ Table September 2026

You can see any of The Seers’ Table posts since inception (March 2016) by going to the HWA main page and selecting the menu item “HWA Publications / Blogs / Seers’ Table”.
Geneve Flynn recommends:

Lisa L. Hannett is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Flinders University. Originally from Canada, she is now based in Adelaide, South Australia. She has had over 80 short stories appear in speculative fiction venues including Clarkesworld, Fantasy, Weird Tales, Apex, The Dark and Year’s Best anthologies in Australia, Canada and the US. She has won five Aurealis Awards, an Australian National Science Fiction Award, an Australian Shadows Award, and has been nominated twice for a World Fantasy Award. Her latest collection of dark fantasy stories is The Fortunate Isles. Her most recent publication is Yet She Lives, in which she re-situates some of Norse mythology’s most formidable female characters, casting them not as sidenotes in famous men’s adventures but as protagonists in their own life stories.

Recommended Reading: Yet She Lives: Fierce and Fantastical Women of Norse Mythology, Thames & Hudson

Excerpt from Yet She Lives: 

Hel: Monstrous Child

Hel is miserable. Her hall, as always, is at capacity, but that doesn’t stem the flow of the dead streaming in through the arched entranceway. Swollen-bellied mothers with too much blood streaking their shifts. Frost-rimed families tinged with winter freeze. Heartbroken lovers with rope-burnt necks, slashed wrists, poison-blacked lips. Sea-soaked sailors. Sun-leathered farmers wizened by too many bad harvest. Rich women swathed in silks and fine wools, clattering with brooches and bangles and beads. Thralls in rags. Witches. Weaponless, armourless men. Old folk shuffling with heads bowed and backs bent. Children with broken necks, crushed skulls, boil-blistered skin, rattling coughs, axed limbs, famine-gaunt bodies, throats bulged around life-taking obstructions. Babies.

So many quiet blue babies.

They’re all welcome here. No matter how many minutes or days or decades they trod the world above, the overworn Hel-road that leads across Modgud’s bridge always rises to meet them. Even now, hunched on the high-seat at the head of her fullest feasting table, Hel feels the rumbling thrum of the guardian giantess’ voice outside. Never resting, great Modgud greets the newest realm-walkers, questioning and then needlessly pointing them to the sole gate in the sheer stone wall around Hel’s longhouse—a fathomless place that, somehow, silently and seamlessly expands to shelter them all. After nine nights’ travel by foot, horse or wagon, these dead are weary when they arrive. Their breath dragon-puffs in the ever-cold air. Their clothes jingle with ice. Hel unhinged the hall’s main doors eons ago, letting snowstorms and guests puddle in over the threshold. Her hound Garm nips at the slowest heels. Once inside, the travellers spread out like fog. Settle in. Wait for the black rooster chuffing scraps off the floor to crow them into action at Ragnarök.

For Hel, it’s the same old, same old.

Folk live and die and wend their way down to her.

Hundreds, thousands, millions of them.

But never the ones she yearns for most.

The kin she’s suffering every second to see.

Just for a moment.

Just once.

Review for Yet She Lives:

“An epic retelling of legendary Norse women by a virtuoso scholar and storyteller.”—Dr Danielle Cole

Follow LISA L. HANNETT at:

Website: https://lisahannett.com/

FB: https://www.facebook.com/lisa.l.hannett/

Instagram: @LisaLHannett

Author photo credit: Chad Habel

Kate Maruyama recommends:

Loren Maria Guay is a poet and speculative fiction writer. Their poems have appeared in beestung, ANMLY, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and other publications; their work has earned nominations for Best Microfictions, Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets (2026). They were a 2024 Periplus Fellow and a finalist for the 2022 Peseroff Prize. Their short fiction (as L.M. Guay) appears in Flash Fiction Online, khōréō, and Small Wonders, among others, and in the 2024 Best Small Fictions anthology. Their debut poetry chapbook Living Fossils was awarded the 2025 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize and is now published with Texas Review Press (2026). 

Loren is a PhD student in the University of Michigan’s Joint Program in English and Education, where they study 20th-century composition (writing studies) and 20th-century U.S. literature. They hold degrees in classical literature from the University of Michigan (BA) and Cambridge (MPhil), where they were a Gates Cambridge Scholar, as well as an MA in Classics with a certificate in writing pedagogy from UCLA. They have published a peer-reviewed article on rhetoric and contingent labor in university writing centers in the Writing Center Journal.

Born in Asunción, Paraguay and adopted to/raised in Brooklyn, NY, Loren now spends their time between Ann Arbor and Chicagoland with their spouse and two extremely spoiled cats.

Recommended Reading:

“Exquisite Corpses” from Three Lobed Burning Eye

Summer was endless taffy, the days stretched out and stuck to the back of your teeth. Counselors taught us to dab our lips after meals, to purse them around embroidery thread, to smack them after applying gloss. They led smiling practice before bed until our mouths ached and split. If we complained, they reminded us that we could go home only when our treatments were finished, when we were perfect.

But in the woods, nobody had to smile except the shadows, which made slow, rippling grins across the lake. We tore the guts out of marshmallows and licked smeared fingers clean. We traded dirty jokes until flashlights winked on in the distance, sending us scattering back to our cabins; back to the furious, sweltering confines of girlhood, or whatever it was in the dark.

• • •

When I was eleven, my parents caught me feeding my Easter dress to the neighbor’s alligator farm, each shred wrapped around a glistening chunk of raw chuck meat, the pale pink lace darkening steadily with gore. That’s not the day I died, but it might as well have been. I died four years later, en route to Jesus-approved therapy, when the bus driver hit a nail salon. I never knew whether Mom wept because of the funeral expenses or because she finally managed to see me in nail polish.

You can learn more about LM Guay at https://lmguay.com/

And:

Ananda Lima is the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books, 2024) and Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), winner of the Hudson Prize.  Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago. Lima was named in Newcity‘s 2025 Lit 50 list,  recognizing influential people and organizations shaping Chicago’s literary culture. She was a mentor at the NYFA Immigrant Artist Program and the inaugural Latinx-in-Publishing WIP Fellow, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers. She has an MA in Linguistics (UCLA) and an MFA in Creative Writing (Rutgers-Newark). Craft, her fiction debut, was longlisted for the Story Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal. The New York Times describes it as “a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent in speculative fiction.”  (photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan)

Recommended Reading:

Craft Stories I wrote for the Devil. (Tor Books, 2024)

You probably can’t tell by looking at me now, but once, back in my twenties, I slept with the Devil. We met at a Halloween party in a closed-down store space in Manhattan, Union by a makeshift red-and-blue-neon installation stuck to a crumbling brick wall. The devil was sitting alone on a beat up brown corduroy sofa. I was inauguration Nancy Reagan: a tighter version of the red Aldolfo dress, black gloves, a wig between chestnut brown and dirty blond, topped with a red pillbox hat. He wore an ill-fitting suit, a faded orange wig, and some bad foundation. I walked up to him and asked what he was, yelling over the music. He said he was the future. I told him his costume sucked. He smiled and said he was often misunderstood, scanning the room, as if hoping for a specific somebody else to show up. I began spinning the first thread of his story; a woman in a white dress, a cheap Halloween bride costume, would walk in holding a veil in her hand. I imagined him watching as the woman looked for someone too, but not him. As I thought this, the Devil nodded, almost imperceptibly, as if privately approving of something, but continued looking at the room with that slight sadness, that want. I recognized some of what I’d been carrying inside, mirrored on his face.

You can learn more about Ananda Lima at https://anandalima.com/

Or follow her on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/anandalima