reading Road Trip...Illinois

You could probably read one Illinois-related book a day and go for years. for poetry, you've got Carl Sandburg and next to his line about "the fog coming in on little cat feet," the poem every school kid in America had to learn was "Chicago." Who could ever forget the first lines?

    Hog Butcher for the World,

   Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

   Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;

   Stormy, husky, brawling,

   City of the Big Shoulders.

"City of Big Shoulders."   That's such an elegant line. And then there's Chicago-born John Dos Pasos, whose monumental USA Trilogy really is "the great American novel" times three. (And he also infuenced E. L. Doctorow, whose books I devoured in high school.)

Illinois is a complicated state and the three books I most associate with it are Richard Wright's Native Son, Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street, and Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine. It is also the setting for Erik Larson's brilliant book about H.H. Holmes, America's answer to Jack the Ripper--The Devil in the White City. Anyone who has trouble wrapping his/her head around #BlackLivesMatter needs to read Wright's novel, which is a searing character portrait and a time capsule of life in Chicago in the 1930s. "Bigger Thomas " is one of the most compelling characters ever created.

Cisneros' novel is a coming-of-age story that should be as widely read as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. (Am I the only person who never really liked that book? Maybe I read it when I was too old.) The heroine and narrator of The House on Mango Street is Esperanza Cordero, and she is a sympathetic and believable girl.

Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury's semi-autobiographical novel, is an idyllic portrait of the same sort of America that painter Norman Rockwell chronicled. It's a book that evokes a childhood so (mostly) happy that it almost seems like a fairy tale.

I read The Devil in the White City for a client and loved Erik Larson's writing. What really entranced me about the story was not the true crime it detailed, though. I fell in love with the idea of the Chicago World's Fair that was its backdrop. The World Columbian Exposition of 1893 was well-documented in photographs and drawings and I was fascinated by the temporary buildings and wonders put up for the occasion. I so wish some of them had been left behind, the way the Seattle Space Needle is a permanent reminder of the 1962 World's Fair.)  If time travel were possible, that's a place I would have loved to go.

Now more than ever...read!

The Time Traveler's Almanac

I am a fan of short stories. I'm a fan of time travel stories. So this collection of short stories (edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer) sounds like it's right up my alley. And I would never have known about it if I hadn't stumbled across the cover in a review. I love this cover. I love that the butterfly is a call out to one of my all-time favorite short stories, Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder." I remember reading that story for the first time and just being stunned by it. It was my introduction to Ray Bradbury and, most likely, the beginning of my life-long love of the short story form.

This is not the first cover this book has. When I went searching for it on Amazon--because to see it is to buy it--an older cover came up. And for me, the older cover was not as inviting. Maybe it's the background color. I used to work in print magazines and one of the things we were always doing is gathering data on which covers sold the best. (Covers with white backgrounds were not that popular.) For me this alternate cover looks like it might be a work of popular history or popular science. It doesn't say "fiction" to me the way the butterfly cover does. But either way, this book is on its way to me and I can't wait.

What is it?

There are times when I can't buy a creative idea and there are times when I honestly can't turn it off. (Mostly when I'm on deadline for some chore I find tedious.) But there's been something going on in my backyard for a while that is just fascinating to me.

The house we rent was built in the seventies, but we live in one of the oldest neighborhoods on this side of the city. So who knows what was here before we were. (Pretty sure it's not a graveyard but hear me out.)

About a week after we moved in, we found a single rusted razor blade lying in the grass. So ... was someone out here shaving one day, letting the rain wash off the lather? About a month after that we found a small, olive green "plastic soldier" of the sort made memorable in the W.D. County short story "Plastic Soldiers." (If you haven't read "Plastic Soldiers," you need to spend 99 cents right now and go buy Speedloader, an anthology that also contains stories by Nigel Bird and Matthew C. Funk, whose writing is also always worth reading. But "Plastic Soldiers?" It's a one-of-a-kind story. Brutal to read and absolutely unforgettable. I've read a LOT of short stories, and it's probably in my top five, right up there with Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" and Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and "the Rockinghorse Winner" by D.H. Lawrence, and Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder." "Plastic Soldiers" should be taught in high school English classes.) But I digress.

Over the year we've lived here, various things have shown up in our lawn, sort of like dinosaur skeletons uncovered by scouring winds in the western states. Today this thing showed up.  It's made of wood and about the size of a gobstopper candy. It's made of wood and the spikes unscrew.  It's hard to tell how old it is but the scientist in the house thinks it could be many decades old. Wood decays at different rates. It'll take a downed pine tree 200-300 years to decompose, a spruce tree (what you find a lot of in the Pacific Northwest) will only last 50-100 years. So--what was this thing? A child's toy? Nowadays, we'd keep something like this out of a kids' hands for fear of choking hazards. But it doesn't seem strong enough for any industrial application.
But what it DOES seem good for is a story prompt.
"The Yard of Lost Things."
What would you do if things suddenly started appearing in your yard, dug up by your dog, or revealed by a hard rain? Would some of those items be valuable? Would some of those items be dangerous? Would some hold clues to murder? Or a wedding ring lost by a woman gardening 100 years ago?  I find the possibilities endlessly seductive. I want to write that story. But as it happens ... I'm on deadline. So it's going to have to go into the file for now.

Not everything is online.

Every day of last year, I went looking for a new short story to post on the 365 Short Story a Day challenge. I had decided that I would only post one story per writer and that I would not post a story that another participant had posted. Two of us posted Evan Hunter's "The Last Spin" and I think there was an overlap on one of Thomas Pluck's stories, but the only time I broke my self-imposed rule on purpose was the day Ray Bradbury died. I had already posted his "Small Assassin" story but on that day I posted "A Sound of Thunder," which is one of my all-time favorite time travel stories. Jimmy Callaway's "Night Train to Mondo Fine," is probably second on the list, with Brian Trent's "Down Memory Line" third.
But I digress.
One of the stories that was posted early on was Lord Dunsany's "Two Bottles of Relish" and visitors to the 365 site were consistently lured there by the story post. I've been looking at those posts for a year and saying to myself, "I must read that story."

Feminist Fiction Friday--Interview with Jennifer Parsons of Luna Station Quarterly

This week I have a very special Feminist Fiction Friday, an interview with Jennifer Parsons, the founding editor of Luna Station Quarterly.

Here's how she describes herself:  A highly-skilled pixel slinger and code monkey by trade, Jennifer writes speculative fiction and fairy tales because she loves stories, reads books as part of the Geek Girls Book Club, devours comic books because she's loved Batman her entire life, writes essays and reviews for The Loser’s Table, and edits the literary magazine Luna Station Quarterly because she believes women write awesome stories. When not doing those things, she makes things from yarn, cuddles her kitties, and goes on sporadic bouts of television watching and gourmet cooking. She's been known to swing a Wii controller like a Jedi. Sometimes, she sleeps.


This is what she had to say:

Kattomic: I love the look of the Luna Station Quarterly site, especially the colors.  Who designed it?  (I know you did, because I read the fine print, but I’m in awe of people who can do their own sites and/or book covers or whatever.)

JP: This is where being a professional web designer comes in handy. I do all of my own design and development work (LSQ is built on Drupal), so thank you, I’ll take all credit. LOL. The color scheme came about because the last thing I wanted on a women-authored fiction site is any hint of cliched pink. I wanted something that invoked a retro feel, a reminder of the wonder Sci-Fi authors of the past had for the future. Some call it Retro-futurism, that nostalgia for the future that has yet to come about. I didn’t want it to feel too masculine either, so the little stars and planets reflect that bit of whimsy that I often find in female-written spec-fic.

Kattomic: This is the third year of publication for LSQ, right?  Any plans for expansion—more issues per year? Print publication?

JP:  Oh, the plans that are in my brain! I want to expand LSQ, though what form that will take is up in the air. I want to keep the quarterly magazine as a quarterly, but I’ve had ideas since LSQ’s inception for ways to increase our output. As submission numbers grow, I’m asking myself this question more and more often, with a print anthology foremost in that thought process. Would you like me to be more vague? LOL.

Actually, my first priority before adding other editions or offshoots, is to find a way to pay my authors. Right now, web hosting costs come out of my own pocket and my personal finances don’t allow for much more than that. I’m incredibly hesitant to put ads on the site as I feel that it would be a distraction and possibly make it appear that I’m looking to monetize the site, which I’m not. I’m considering a donation button, but I have yet to make a firm decision. LSQ has never been about money for me. In fact, it’s never been about me at all, which is why I never publish any of my own stories.