“Inspirations and Influences” is a series of articles in which we invite authors to write guest posts talking about their Inspirations and Influences. In this feature, we invite writers to talk about their new books, older titles, and their writing overall. Tomorrow, we publish the third short story in our Gods and Monsters season: A Question of Faith by Tonya Liburd. Today, we are thrilled to have her over to talk about her inspirations and influences behind the story. Please give it up for Tonya, folks! It all began in 2003 when I met Nalo Hopkinson at Torcon. We’d met previously at local Toronto cons. At Torcon, she invited me to contribute a story to an anthology she was co-editing with Uppinder Mehan that would be So Long Been Dreaming in 2004. I wasn’t an atheist yet; but I was experiencing some cognitive dissonance with Christian religious dogma, and how people were using it to justify pressuring me to talk to people who had abused me in the past. I picked up books detailing beliefs from various religions. looked for something that would make a fascinating piece of fiction, science fiction or otherwise, true or not. One book in the […]