About

What’s all this?

I’m Gord Sellar, though I guess you probably already know that: after all, you probably arrived here after reading something I’ve written. This website used to be my little corner of the web, though it’s grown into more of an wide-ranging digital commonplace book.

But what’s this website about?

My site’s archives range pretty broadly, since over the years I’ve written about a vast variety of subjects, but these days, I mainly post about media, books, writing, and music, along with other snippets from other fields.

Here’s a taste of some of the things you can find here:

But I’ve also written about everything from Korean history, to advanced saxophone techniques, to cutting-edge science and technology, and much more. Have a look around!

Who’s Gord Sellar?

I’m a Canadian writer who’s spent almost half his life abroad. I received an M.A. in Creative Writing (at Montréal’s Concordia University) back in 2001, and then I set out to see the world. At the moment, I’m back in South Korea, after a few years spent in Vietnam.

Along the way, I’ve worked as a professor at a few South Korea universities, where I’ve taught Canadian Literature, Creative and Journalistic Writing, American Culture, and survey courses in Stage Drama and Poetry. These days I work at Korea University and mostly teach academic composition and public speaking courses, though I also teach a popular Science Fiction course. 

Where has your work appeared?

Most recently, my old-school RPG adventure book Isle of Joy was published by Knight Owl Publishing. Previous to that, I self-published my Brindlewood Bay hack Something Tookish! at itch.io, and Lamentations of the Flame Princess published my adventure Fermentum Nigrum Dei Sepulti. I’ve had a few small RPG things appear here and there as well, and as a freelancer I wrote the OSR conversion guide for the Koryo Hall of Adventures. 

My speculative fiction stories and nonfiction have appeared in a wide range of literary magazines and journals across the English-speaking world, from the UK and the USA to Australia and Singapore, including Analog, Clarkesworld, Lontar, Black Static, Interzone, Cosmos, Nature, and Asimov’s Science Fiction as well as in numerous original anthologies and collections. My short stories have appeared in translation in Chinese, Czech, Korean, and Italian, in the latter case as a collection of short stories published in 2016.

My fiction has also been podcast numerous times (see my publications list for links), and appeared in a number of retrospective and year’s best anthologies since 2009, when I was on the shortlist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. When I attended the Clarion West Workshop in 2006, I was also the recipient for the Susan C. Petrey Memorial Scholarship. In addition, several of my screenplays have been made into award-winning short films.

My academic and critical writings have appeared in Acta Koreana, Arena Journal, and Arena Magazine, and I’ve published nonfiction in Matrix, Munhwa Journal, Clarkesworld, Apex, and Arc. I was for a time a regular book reviewer for Kyoto Journal since 2013. I also cowrote a series of English textbook for elementary schoolkids. 

What are you working on now?

Since the start of the pandemic I’ve been mostly working on RPG writing. I’ve published two RPG books and some small things here and there. I’m currently reworking on an RPG book I’ve written on spec for a publisher, and gearing up to write a zine for next year’s Zinequest. 

I still have one novel on the go and another waiting to be sent out to publishers, but they’ve been languishing while I’ve struggled to balance parenthood and (more than) full-time work with the cotranslation projects I do with my wife as well, which makes it tough trying to get anything else done on the side.  

Where can I contact you?

There are social media links in the sidebar, but if you’d like to contact me directly, I’m at .