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- The WYRMHOLE (June 1, 2025)
welcome!
What’s in the Hole?
Dear lovely Wyrms,
Hello again and welcome back to the HOLE! Forgive me if I’m a little bit nostalgic in this issue— we’ve got a lot to announce going forward, and this month marks a year since Wyrmhole was first conceived as just a teeny tiny idea in the holes of an unknown Discord server (how quickly time has passed.) It seems like just yesterday that the six of us smol writers got together and hatched the worst (read: best) newsletter to ever hit the shelves of science fiction and fantasy…
Memory lane is a slippery slope, dear wyrms! I fear that I fall further with each sentence— so without further ado, us Editors would like to make a few big announcements for the HOLE moving forward, including our changed Patreon, new gifts for our most beloved Patrons, and a new project we’re taking on!
Dear Wyrms, we are announcing the CONSOLIDATION of our Patreon tiers! From now on, we will only have ONE Patreon tier— a $2/month subscription that will grant you access to the Wyrmhole Discord server, where we host a lovely, eminently wyrmy community. As we have decided to phase out our Premium issues due to the Editors’ (regrettably) full-time jobs, we also agreed that it would be best to offer a Patreon structure that better reflected the services we could provide. We have an amazing Discord server! We hope you’ll join us!
That being said— there were many, many lovely Wyrms who chose to support us at the higher tiers even without Premium work! Lovely PREMIUM and SUPERIOR Patrons, the Editors will be sending you a personalized gift packet as thanks for your incredible support. WYRMHOLE would not exist without you! If you were a PREMIUM OR SUPERIOR Patron in the past, we would also like to extend our gratitude as well. Instructions for receipts of packets will be provided through DM on Discord. 🙂
Additionally, holey Wyrms, we have decided to begin a project of compiling all the recommendations we have made over the newsletter into a roster of recs on our website! This will make our recs much easier to find and contribute to the growing visibility of the SFF community (as opposed to, you know, our recs vanishing into the ether otherwise.)
And finally— stay tuned! Thanks to your generosity, we now have funds to begin hunting around for some unlucky interviewees to trap in the HOLE! Authors, editors, reporters, beware! We’ve got a space for you in the HOLE, and we are not afraid to ask you interesting questions in a respectful and curious manner…
Thank you again, Wyrms, for your continued support of what was first a meme, then a weird idea, and finally the incredibly cursed newsletter-community package that the WYRMHOLE has become today. I speak for all of us when I say that WYRMHOLE has brought me so many lovely new reads, so many more writing commiserations, and so many more laughs with all the new friends we’ve met across science fiction and fantasy.
We treasure your support and this community, and hope that we’ll see you in the newly renovated HOLE Discord server!
With love,
The Editors
Carolyn Zhao / June 2025 Editor in Chief / New York, NY
if I were a bee I'd fetishize the idea of a beekeeper clipping my tiny wings so I can't escape (remembers you're not supposed to say shit like that) I mean yesterday I ate two yogurts normally
Recs & Reviews
Tia recs…
Marie Brennan, Sunday Morning Transport. Jan 2024. 2.4k words.
If you love a good play on prophecy, this story’s for you! Told entirely as a monologue, this short piece manages a satisfying ending and pulls its own twist on a classic rebels vs evil dictator setting. This is the kind of story that builds as it goes along, to excellent effect :))
Iz recs…
Kelly Link, White Cat, Black Dog. July 2013.
I've been reading Kelly Link's White Cat, Black Dog recently, and this story isn't from it but it's a very Kelly Link Kelly Link story, and there are a couple of really delightful twists in it. It reads...kind of like Piranesi, like a story you’ve always known.
Pak recs…
Ann Leckie, Uncanny. Jan 2015. 8.5k words
A charming and completely satisfying microcosm of a second-world novel contained in a bite-sized story. Includes a take-no-shit protagonist, a mystical treasure hunt, a talking animal friend who is also a god, and a scathing commentary on generational toxic masculinity with a very punchable antagonist. Has all the ingredients for Satisfying Story Formula, plus gratifies my recent Ann Leckie fan craze.
Tina recs…
Lilia Zhang, Nightmare Magazine. May 2025. 1.7k words.
This is a retelling of "Snow White," and I love how this story gives us more interiority into the mind of the stepmother. A fun take on this old fairytale!
Carolyn recs…
Carmen Maria Marchadao, Granta. 2014.
This is the kind of story that I sent in the Editors’ Discord server and made everyone go WHOA. (Apart from Tina, who had read it before and said, yeah, this story changed my life, so.) Read for some incredible (and incredibly literary) writing, and a grim, feminist-first take on a familiar fairy tale about a girl with a ribbon around her neck…
Kelly Link, website. 2004.
Okay, is this a fairy kind of issue? Maybe it is. I fucking love fairy stories (though Thumbelina kinda weirded me out as a kid,) but Kelly Link won a couple of Big Prizes with this one in 2004-2005: think a big, hairy, faery handbag with plenty of twisty storytelling in a classic Kelly Link style. This is for the hardcore urban fantasy lovers, where a girl who’s looking for her grandmother’s handbag comes to slow grip with the people who are missing in her life.
Terry Bisson, Omni. 1993.
A delightfully whimsical story told with a distinctly British irony, England Underway is a novelette where Mr. Fox (The Fantastic? Perhaps!) reassesses his life as the entire country of England slips free of its moorings, and, like an untethered ship, slips gently away through the waves. It’s a work of magical realism, but what pushes it over the edge to a true rec is because I went to a British school when I was a kid, and this just reminds me of like. The Wind in the Willows, but make it a modern fantasy story. Which is to say, I love this.
Daryl Gregory, Asimov’s Science Fiction. 2005.
In this incredible story, a teenage girl overdoses on an identity-altering drug and wakes up in Therese’s body— but without Therese herself. The parents insist she is Therese; but is she really? I am SUCH a sucker for memories, expectation, and control. This is probably the most “me” story I’ve recced in this list. Memory, I am beholden to you as always…
Natalia Theodoridou, Beneath Ceaseless Skies. 2024.
An astonishing fantasy story on tenderness, Kingship, and transgendering identities in a scifi-fantasy story that defies the traditional work of both. A Keeper must bring an Oracle to their beloved and dying King, who must make a decision that determines the fate of their world. Regular premise? Maybe. Beautiful, heartbreaking ending? Also maybe (read: YES!)
The Best of May Cover Art
Sick color scheme, Lightspeed!
WILDCARD
some of the horrible projects i have impulsively started (surprise @ the end)
by Carolyn Zhao
WYRMHOLE MAGAZINE
Of course, this is where we start.
To talk about how we got here, I have to talk about how I spent one year writing a [REDACTED] fanfiction in a fandom-that-shall-not-be-named, fell headfirst into professional SFF short stories, got published in the World of Clarke, immediately decided that I wanted more friends in the same space, cold-called 5 diff guys whose writing I liked (also published in World of Clarke), boom. WYRMHOLE.
All in all, this is not a bad project. This is the kind of project that I think 80-year old me would look back at and be proud of, you know? I went out there and made some friends, and now I’ve got a newsletter full of ~600 weird (read: cool) guys who just read about our antics and the horrible stories we like. WYRMHOLE has the kind of old internet energy that will make no sense in about 5 years from now, maybe, but will hold a place in my heart forever.
MY OWN NEWSLETTER
Why did I start my own newsletter? I mean, seriously, why. I effectively gave my self homework every single week, and objectively I’m a good writer and a people-pleaser, so I have to deliver. There is No Way Out.
The fact that people are paying me for my words is kinda great, though. Thank you, lovely paying subscribers who like the energy I bring!!
7.5/10
AMERICORPS NATIONAL SERVICE FOR A YEAR
This one’s complicated. Okay. So at the end of high school, I worked for a cancer lab for about six months and met a bunch of extremely sick patients. This made me, a teenager, feel pretty awful about only ever focusing on my grades and friends instead of like. Stuff like people dying in the world.
In hindsight, focusing on grades and friends is a perfectly normal thing for a teenager to do. However, I was also in a Special state of mind back then and somehow (??) arrived at the conclusion that I could not continue as I was, and had to actually make up for being, you know, a regular guy. There were other reasons to do AmeriCorps, of course. Seeing the country, getting some payment down on college, building character… but frankly, I was concerned with Becoming a Better Person, mostly, and just had to atone for being focused on myself for all eighteen (18) years of my life.
There are complicated psychological factors here that I will not pick apart in front of 600 people, so have a nice photo from my time in AmeriCorps instead.
this looks a lot more fun than it really was
We did a lot. They had a nice little education program that taught us to condense our experiences down into a resume pitch, (“graduated from 10 month national service program with 14-person team, completing over 1,700 hrs of service in disaster relief, education, urban and rural development, and environmental preservation, etc.”) but the reality was more like, doing a census for unhoused populations in Las Vegas, hacking down trees in brutal winter (12-hr days, frostbite,) finding scorpions on a toilet seat in a campsite that is regularly raided by rats and raccoons, also drinking sulfur from a contaminated well and bathing in it, because like. That’s all the water we had.
Man. What a time. I got to college kind of traumatized (even more traumatized?) but wow. Two hours of discussing Plato, versus ten-hour workdays in the Las Vegas desert, digging out old pipes to make sure that tortoises at a nature conservation could get their daily shower? With BEDBUGS in our housing?
Give me the reading right now, I’ll read the entire book and cry hot tears of joy.
3/10
FREESTYLE DANCE????
So you know how I said that I was in a [special state of mind] back in the last section? Well, that State of Mind was called Crippling Anxiety.
I know! We’re getting personal here. Bear with me.
I had bad panic attacks for the entire last year of high school. Lots of reasons for this– we won’t go into them here– but I had them throughout AmeriCorps and up until the first few months of college. You know what having a panic attack is like? It sucks enormous elephant balls. Your face gets all light and numb and you can’t stop breathing, and it’s like every single breath doesn’t quite fill you up– you’re getting these lapping, heaving, shallow-ish things that feel like breaths, but there’s no air. At least, it feels like there’s no air.
In med school, I learned that there was air when you hyperventilated. The body just couldn’t take it in properly, due to an imbalance of chemicals in the blood. The levels were all off.
Most of the things in the body are like that. You kick one thing out of gear and another thing tries to fix it, maybe falls apart when you’re not looking. The body is a product of a series of tricks that cells have kept pulling on evolution, this kind of whirly-gig DIY claptrap machine of a human container. Why do we breathe too light when we’re anxious? Why can we choke on food when other animals can’t? Why does the heart grow larger the more you run, so large that it outguns efficiency, so large that it might collapse?
Who knows. What I knew back then, before medical school, was that I didn’t want to feel this way anymore. So I wrote down all the times when I had panic attacks and grouped them up by source/reason/location, then made a hypothesis.
I had panic attacks because I was scared of people. Scared of myself. Scared of being seen making mistakes. So the obvious answer, then, was to expose myself to all three things at the same time, and take up freestyle street dance. Jump in a circle, dance around in front of strangers to music I didn’t know, in front of people I didn’t want to see.
And it worked. After a few months of dance, and a few more panic attacks in between, I slowly stopped losing it whenever too many people looked at me weird. Is that strange to say? That I made a project of pulling myself together?
Maybe. All I care now, as my future self, is knowing that it worked. It was a project with a start and a hypothesis that I wanted to test, with results that I wanted badly enough that I was willing to throw myself into the pit, over and over again. I decided, in a few horrible moments, that I was going to change my own perception of reality, no matter how many times I’d lie down in my room and hyperventilate, or hide from dance practice (dragged out by friends,) or overanalyze what I looked like on camera, how bad it felt to be seen, how bad it felt to move.
But man, you gotta live a little bit, don’t you? That’s how I felt at the time. I was driven by the idea that I actually, truly had to change myself or the world to move forward. And the world wasn’t changing. So this project had to do the awful work of changing myself.
5/10
STARTED AN OBJECT MANIPULATION CLUB (8 YR HORIZON)
When I was fifteen, I started attending a boarding school in the US. It was the fall in Boston, on the eve of what our school called the “Fall Carnival,” and I hadn’t made any friends yet. But it was a nice evening. The air was sweet and cool, and one of the departments had trotted out a popcorn machine, and a food truck had pulled up and was selling tacos or corndogs or some other kind of generic fairground food– I didn’t know, partially because I didn’t know what tacos or corndogs were at the time (Chinese childhood, meet culture shock,) and partially because I’d drifted over to a corner where someone was spinning lights.
As I got closer, I saw that the spinning lights were just some glowsticks on a string. But the guy was making some nice patterns with them, with movements that looked like some of the martial arts moves I’d picked up in middle school (in China we had martial arts as an extracurricular, of course.) So I asked for a set of glowsticks and strings, and he gave them to me. I started swinging them around.
After a little while of this, another guy came over and waved at us wordlessly, or maybe he nodded. He was very tall and cute. I could have said something, but I didn’t, because I was a weird fifteen-year-old, and a weird twenty-year-old, and I’m still weird now, so what I’m saying was that I developed the world’s biggest crush on this second guy from afar, and only ended up talking to him because some girls from my dorm were already friends with said Guy.
Guy and I started hanging out a lot because we both spent a lot of time messing with the glowsticks, him because he liked the glowsticks a lot, and me because I liked him a lot. In fact, we both liked our respective objects so much that we decided to start a juggling club together, called Photon.
We performed at plenty of shows as Photon. We spun glowsticks on strings to make pretty lights in the dark, choreography set to EDM, and our high school audience loved us. We weren’t ever the cool kids, obviously– I got my strings tangled in my braces, once– but we had fun together, and since we both started Photon, and we were in the same friend group, and we studied a lot together (Alone! My teenage brain howled, Alone!) I eventually decided to confess that I liked him.
School cafeteria. Lone table. Study break. I asked him, in a very roundabout way, if he’d ever thought of me in a romantic way. He shook his head slowly.
Heartbreak. Weeping into friends’ shoulders. Outraged exclamations– “I was sure he liked you! Of all people, it had to be you!” And so on. Any teenage girl knows how this goes. But in any case, I closed up my heart pretty tight and the Guy and I stayed friends for years and years– through high school, through AmeriCorps, through college, through COVID, until one day he asks me out on a hiking trip in Colorado, and confesses that after eight years of friendship, he wonders if I’ll consider dating him.
A lot of not-great stuff has happened in my life. Which is okay. I think everyone is dealt their own shake of cards. But I’m pretty happy about how that spinning lights club turned out (Photon is still performing today,) and I’m pretty happy that I managed to keep an eight-year friendship going after getting my teenage heart stomped on, too. The Guy and I are sitting in the shitty Airbnb we’ve rented as I tell him I’ll think about it, and then I go home and think about it, and I think about it some more, and I think about this Guy and how I’ve loved him for the better part of a decade, and how starting horrible new projects means throwing away the old stuff, the good parts and the bad, and how I’m never sick of starting new projects. I’m always doing them.
I call up my friends (same friends from eight years ago: “It’s me, of all people it’s me,”-- “Girl we know–”) and I sob a lot on the way to the airport, and my lady Uber driver gives me a pep talk, and I call up the Guy and say Let’s Not Rush, but also like, Hell Yeah.
Anyways I just made him read this WILDCARD after he saw me crying and shit, and also he proposed yesterday, so this project is not Illegal and Horrible and Impulsive.
I said yes.
10/10
THE ROCK IS LAB GROWN I REPEAT IT’S LAB GROWN
A parting song from the Editors…
