Thanks for the advice. I intend to focus on the planeswalkers a bit first, so I can use more familiar nouns to make people feel at home?

Sounds like a plan.

This may be of interest, Helio: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/ It is a piece of xenofiction written from the perspective of the alien from John Carpenter's The Thing.

A suggestion on xenofiction.

You'll recall that short of mine about the efreet? I used this particular creature as my POV character to emphasize my belief that individuals like him, whose emotions drive them to embrace extremes, have traded in their humanity. The elements surrounding the efreet--fire, skin of stone, pure passion--are metaphors for a fever (infection), a deadening of feeling and the destruction of logic (an embracing of ignorance). In the particular story, the efreet is meant to represent the anti-vaxxer that buys into what they're told and bases their stance entirely on emotion. The Tzhel in that story, and the race as a whole, is representative of the need for clinical detachment in order to achieve a necessary end (as opposed to the self-indulgent ends of the story's efreet).

You can use your nonhuman races to similar effect: writing from their perspective to turn them into metaphors for whatever you feel strongly about.

I feel that xenofiction doesn't necessarily need to become a metaphor to be enjoyable, though it certainly helps on some contexts.