Dwelling in Probabilities

Chloe:
Missing women are prevalent throughout pop culture and further back into our folklores and myths: women get stolen by gods, by the fair folk, by strangers travelling through their towns. We’ve built our stories around these losses. When I first started writing the poems for this chapbook I was thinking about missing women and the stories they never get to tell.

As I wrote the pieces, these narratives spiraled out into something larger: the way we deal with losses or don’t deal with them (as the case more often is). All of these poems are in some way about the things that vanish but don’t.

For me, loss has always been about the ways in which we tell stories to try to imagine a way out of it or to bring back the things and people we’ve lost. It also comes in so many ways: loss of the people we care about, but also loss of communication, loss of friendships and romances, loss of a dream or a place you once called home.

In one of the poems, “Missing Girl Found—,” I pushed past the versions of that headline we see all too often. In another, “Missing Girls Continued,” I looked at from the perspective of the friends left behind in that situation. How do you continue to exist in a world, once you know the damage it can do to you? Being a woman is a constant negotiation of your safety while still trying to exist as a person in the world.

Other poems, tackle loss through fabulist imaginings: demons, ghosts, the universe itself becomes a lover. If there is one thing loss teaches us it is that it takes away so much: including our ability to talk about it. There are excellent folklore studies on how stories like the Singing Bones motif might tie directly to early attempts at solving murders, just as stories of girls being stolen to the land of the fae might have served as explanations for the exploitation and murders of children at the time. Even our most magical stories are ways of us trying to speak about the dangers of the world. Wilfred Owen once wrote that all the poet can do today is warn. It’s a statement that becomes truer and truer with every passing moment.

Blurb for The Science of Unvanishing Objects

Missing girls, lost women, fortune tellers, ghosts, black holes, demons, magic—these are the “unvanishing objects” of Chloe Clark’s abiding affection.  From an overheard mundane bus conversation, to calm confrontations with the dead and missing, to an embrace of the vasty reaches of the universe, Clark explores the erotics of desire and fulfillment, the uncanny dazzlement of daily life.  These lovely and moving poems look the abyss unflinchingly in the face and find there succor and love.  The Science of Unvanishing Objects is truly a book of wonders, a wonder of a book.  –Ronald Wallace

Bio: Chloe N. Clark holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Environment. Her poetry and fiction appears in Apex, Booth, Hobart, Gamut, Midwestern Gothic, and more. She teaches at Iowa State University, writes for Nerds of a Feather, and can be found on Twitter @PintsNCupcakes.

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TRADING ROSEMARY BLOG POST

Writers are often told to write what we know. This can be difficult when what you want to write is science fiction and fantasy – no-one does know aliens, or vampires, or what it’s like to create a biosphere, to meet mythology at the coalface and know it for what it is. Those of us who write speculative fiction go ahead and do it anyway, on the grounds that imagination is there to be used and not stuffed into a teapot like the dormouse.

But imagination without knowledge is a very flat thing – there’s got to be something in it that the writer, that the reader, can recognise and hang on to. If not the alien, then the experience of being alien, of being outcast, of creating something out of yourself even if it’s only nightmares.

That’s where Trading Rosemary came in. I wanted to write something I knew, and see how far I could take it. I wanted to see what the world would be like if what I knew were all there was, and mutable. So there’s Rosemary, whose memories are mostly mine, and who lives in a world where memory can be transferred into coins and used as currency. And like any other coin – once you give it away, it’s not yours anymore. It’s not mine either.

This is something tangible for most of us, I think, something identifiable. We all know what it’s like to forget things, and how impossible some memories are to forget. How easy it is to forget the things we’d like to remember, and how each of these things change us, inform the person we are today, rather than the person who had our face but who lived five years ago. That person, that collection of memories, is different and they are gone.

Push that as far as it goes, and what kind of world do you get? What are its priorities? What are the really expensive memories, and what’s the loose change you pass over for a piece of fruit, for a bread roll? And what happens when you trade away part of yourself and regret it – what compromises are you willing to make?

That’s the position in which Rosemary finds herself. She’s got a library of memory, a good one, as much museum as library, a place of preservation, a public good. To improve it, she trades away the sole remaining memory of her grandmother’s final composition in exchange for a rarer coin, a better coin. And it seems like a good deal. But Rosemary’s got a daughter, Ruth, who’s a bit of a brat if ever there was one and Ruth wants it back. Well, these are things we do for children and for heritage.

Trading Rosemary is a fractured little novella. Rosemary’s memories are contrasted with fragments of world-building, with what such a social and economic environment does to artists and environmentalists, to explorers and to parents. At its base, it’s a question of identity, and what we can do to lose it – and to keep it. And these are questions that we know. Questions that everybody knows.

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I’d like to thank Catherine for letting me ramble on here. Thank-you very much!

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Trading Rosemary is out now from Masque Books.

http://masque-books.com/titles/trading-rosemary/

I've been reading and enjoying Jill Braden's work for many years under her various pseudonyms (she wrote a wonderful story for my anthology Haunted Hearths and Sapphic Shades: Lesbian Ghost Stories too). When she asked me to blurb her latest novel, The Devil Incarnate, I was immediately intrigued. She deals with the themes of imperialism and resistance in a rich brew of magic and sexuality and I look forward to reading more of these books.

"The Devil of Ponong series"

Thank you, Catherine, for letting me chat about my SFF political thriller series, Devil of Ponong.

In the first book in the series, The Devil’s Concubine, the titular character QuiTai* is blackmailed into helping her enemy Kyam find a secret bioweapon plantation. (That sounds terribly high tech. It’s a low tech world on the verge of massive technological and political change.) Devil Incarnate is more political thriller than action adventure. QuiTai’s people are pushed to the brink of revolt. She has to stop them before blood runs in the street, but first she has to figure out who is behind it.

While I’m a big supporter of diversity in SFF, I didn’t set out to write a story set on a tropical island with non-white characters. All I planned to do was write the kind of book I like to read. Then I had a vision. No, not a vision. That sounds too woo-woo artsy writer-ish. How about I call it a quick little mental movie instead? What I saw was the scene where QuiTai and Kyam meet, and even though the Devil of Ponong series is set on a different planet, the people I saw in that vision were strikingly similar to a Pacific Islander (QuiTai) and a southeast Asian (Kyam).

My first reaction to that scene was “Who was that woman?” because QuiTai was so vibrant, compelling and mysterious that I knew I had to find out more about her. My second thought was, “Huh. I guess she’s similar to a Pacific Islander. ” The more I reflected on what I’d seen of her, the more convinced I was that keeping her ethnicity intact brought a wealth of history that would enrich the entire story. Keeping her true to the vision gave me a tropical island setting that was a character in its own right, and economic, racial, and political conflict that intertwined like a parasitic vine slowly strangling its host tree. That’s like asking for a slice of bread but getting a banquet instead. How could I not go with a gift like that?

I’m white, so when I began to write QuiTai, I kept in mind Orientalism-- the fetishizing of a stereotype of Asian women-- and the Dragon Lady stereotype. It turned out it wasn’t that hard to steer clear of those depictions. QuiTai is a person, not a type. But that’s also true of her enemies, the Thampurians, who colonized her island. Once a character gets to act independently of the mold they’re poured into, they take on a unique personality. That’s what I enjoy the most about writing in this world. It’s interesting to see how racism manifests itself in individual characters, how it manifests collectively, and how people negotiate the difference between those. It’s interesting to see how similar QuiTai is to her enemies and how different she is from her people, although she’d never admit to such a thing. And on a larger scale, I’m fascinated by dynamics of the lush, fertile, almost feminine land of Ponong dealing with the invasion of hyper-masculine sea dragons who forcibly subjugate it.

In real life, no one thinks of themselves as a villain. That’s how my characters act. From the viewpoint of the Thampurians, QuiTai is the villain. Ruthless and brilliant, she runs the Devil’s criminal network of smugglers, blackmailers, drug peddlers, and informers.

Her people split on how they feel about her. Some, who witnessed or took part in mob justice (Oh yeah, forgot to mention that my indigenous people aren’t placid virgins waiting in a tower. They sometimes do terrible things. They can also be wonderful. In other words, they’re people. ) hate QuiTai because she encouraged them to act in a way that later shamed them. They generally don’t accept responsibility for their actions that day because it was so horrible. Instead, they blame her. This is how people are. It’s not how we want them to be, but it’s truth and showing that is more important to me than enforcing a simple vision of noble savages (an annoying racist meme in its own right) versus evil invaders. Those people who weren’t involved in the mob justice seem to feel QuiTai was a hero that day but are ambivalent or negative about her ties to the Devil. The rest of the population has no idea who she is and have no opinion one way or another. This isn’t hive mind. Everyone in this culture is an individual.

As far as QuiTai is concerned, the Thampurians who colonized her island, stole the land, and enforce injustice are the bad guys. She makes a slight exception for Kyam, but she’s more than willing to blame him personally for everything his government and people do, individually and collectively. The animosity is so intense that even when faced with a common enemy, she won’t willingly work with him.

Kyam thinks of himself as a hero. He’s from a privileged background and a culture that constantly reinforces his sense of superiority. QuiTai challenges every aspect of that. I’ll give this to him, no matter how uncomfortable it makes him, he’s willing to examine his privilege. That’s what makes him heroic, although I’ll never allow him to be the one to save Ponong, because I am so tired of the narrative that says the appointed savior for indigenous people is always the privileged guy who decides to play out his daddy issues by rebelling against his own culture. (Not that I’m pointing fingers at Avatar or The Blind Side or any of the other thousands of Hollywood versions of that same old trope.)

While the common belief is that science fiction starts with the question, “What if?” my favorite stories seem to ask, “What does it mean to be human?” Some people think science fiction only means space ships. Anthropology is a science too, and just as fascinating. I’m not only exploring racism and feminism, but also gender identity and sexuality as I search for the answer to what it means to be human. But feel free to call my stories fantasies. I’m more interested in dialog than labels.

Thank you, Catherine, for the chance to talk about the ideas behind my series.  

The Devil’s Concubine and The Devil Incarnate are available as ebooks and in print at your favorite online bookseller.  

Find me at JillBradenWriter.Blogspot.Com - http://jillbradenwriter.blogspot.com/

·     * I’ll admit to picking her name because I liked the sound of it. That’s one tiny step from picking random kanji for a tattoo. I’m waiting for someone to send me an email asking, “Did you really mean to name her ‘No Parking Between 12AM and 5PM?’”   

Purchase The Devil’s Concubine and The Devil Incarnate in print or ebook:
Wayzgoose Press
The Devil’s Concubine at Amazon   http://goo.gl/5xXoa3
The Devil Incarnate at Amazon http://goo.gl/ZgrVoT
And at Barnes & Noble http://goo.gl/fp7r4e

To be fair, that’s how he was written over one hundred years ago, by someone who was also a white guy. White guys, as one might expect, have a long and glorious history in Western literature as both writer and subject. They’re everywhere. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that (hey, some of my best friends are white guys!) but I don’t think I’m alone in thirsting for a deeper taste of the glorious rainbow that is human existence.

Does Sherlock Holmes always have to be a white guy?

Consider another hallowed canon of Western: all of the great Shakespearean heroes were white guys (with the sole exception of Othello, who was normally until modern times played by a white guy in makeup) as well. But that’s beginning to change. In Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing, Don Pedro was played by Denzel Washington. In the recent BBC production of Richard II, the Bishop of Carlisle was played by Lucian Msamati (who has played Pericles on stage, by the way). Roles traditionally played by white actors have been played just fine by those of other races, and the world hasn't ended.

What about male roles played by women? Well, in Joss Whedon's new Much Ado About Nothing, Conrade was played by Riki Lindhome. It can be done, and I hope more and more major roles will see that willingness to bend gender. It's not Shakespeare's fault he lived in a time where they thought only white guys had adventures and stories worth telling. Perhaps theater has the advantage because every production is unique; every time a play is staged, it’s a new opportunity to tell the story from a different perspective, in a different tone, and let it be born anew.

Which brings us back to Sherlock Holmes. It’s beloved literature, but not so hallowed as Shakespeare. If Shakespeare can bend into something fresh and new without breaking, why not this as well? And the proof: the television series Elementary, with John Watson turned to Joan Watson and played wonderfully by Lucy Liu. (And Moriarty is a woman as well!) While in some quarters of the internet you'd think the world was about to come to an end, the series is clever, interesting, and has been renewed for a second season.

What about Sherlock Holmes, the Great Detective himself? Why can't it be, 'the Great Detective herself?'

In less enlightened times (or, sadly, in modern day in some dark, terrifying recesses of the internet) perhaps people would have argued that the qualities that made Holmes great as a detective were the purview of white men--intellect, logic, cool rationality. But we know that's not the case. I think what keeps Sherlock Holmes a white guy is the same thing that made some people complain when the Bishop of Carlisle was black--the sheer weight of tradition. But art is supposed to be a living, changing thing. We can appreciate the historical context, but it should also reflect something about who we are today.

And we're finally at a today where Don Pedro can be black, where Conrade can be a woman, and where John Watson can be an Asian-American woman. Some people might not like it, but we're doing it anyway and giving beloved stories new life. So why not? Why not reimagine Sherlock Holmes a woman?

I’ve never been the sort to stop just as that though, and I ran wild with the idea. Captain Ramos isn’t a faithful copy of Holmes, but rather a reimagining of the Great Detective written from my own more modern frame of reference and placed in a steampunk universe full of adventure and intrigue. Captain Ramos is first and foremost, a creature of intellect and logic, fueled by observation, quite similar (I hope) to Sherlock Holmes. I was tired of female investigators (successful as they are) being so often set up with intuition as their primary weapon, as if logic is something only men can do.

I’d recently become fascinated by the punk bit of steampunk; a pirate captain is in a good position to be anti-authoritarian and non-conformist. Perhaps in my own small moment of punk, I wrote the Captain to challenge the established stereotypes from movies and books that I've come to loathe.

The decision to make her Latina (as far as such an identity goes in the strange, alternate America in which she lives) was a subconscious one, I think a contrarian reaction to Latinas being so often stereotyped as "fiery." While there's a lot of life to the good Captain, a lot of humor and even passion, beneath it all she's cool and calculating ice.

I gave her a male sidekick that she would never in a million years have any sort of romantic or sexual interest in because I was so tired of hearing that men and women "can't be friends" and similar nonsense. And I made her part of the LGBTQ family because, well, damnit I'm a bisexual woman and I want to see more bisexual characters.

It’s the 21^st century; high time for a glorious rainbow of Great Detectives.

There are currently three ebook novellas out about Captain Ramos: Murder on the Titania, The Ugly Tin Orrery, and The Curious Case of Miss Clementine Nimowitz (and Her Exceedingly Tiny Dog), with two more set to come out this year from Musa Publishing. I hope you'll have even more fun reading them than I had writing them!

Order links:

All of these books can be found nearly wherever ebooks are sold, but here are the links for direct purchase from Musa!

Murder on the Titania: http://musapublishing.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=6&products_id=567

The Ugly Tin Orrery: http://musapublishing.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=6&products_id=590

The Curious Case of Miss Clementine Nimowitz (and Her Exceedingly Tiny Dog): http://musapublishing.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=6&products_id=598

This month's guest blog is by author Warren Rochelle. Warren is a Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington and the author of several novels which have been published by Golden Gryphon Press, including The Called (cover below) and a number of published short stories. He shares my fascination with werewolves (yay!) and has stopped by to blog about his current work in progress. Follow the link to Warren's website to see what else he's up to and where he can be found and check out his posts on the Great Traveling Roundtable Fantasy Blog Tour which he does with authors Deborah J.  Ross, Carole McDonnell, Sylvia Kelso, Theresa Crater and others.




First, thank you to Catherine Lundoff for this opportunity to talk about my novel-in-progress, The Werewolf and His Boy, and to share some of my thoughts on werewolves and why I am writing about them.

Werewolves and Godlings

The Werewolf and His Boy (yes, the title is a homage to C.S. Lewis’s 5^th Narnian novel, The Horse and His Boy) grew out of a short story, “Lowe’s Wolf” (published in Icarus 4, Spring 2010). That story was inspired by a dream my partner had, of a monster hiding at Lowe’s, a store he has frequented for various home improvement projects. This monster became Henry Thorn, a 19-year-old who initially doesn’t know he is a werewolf—just that he is having some very odd dreams. He finds himself falling in love with another boy at the same Lowe’s (in Short Pump, just outside Richmond, Virginia), Jamey Currey. Jamey has his own problems. His dad caught him kissing a boy and threw him out of the house and cut off his financial support, forcing him to drop out of Virginia Commonwealth University. Jamey is also having odd dreams: of flying, of walking through walls, of seeing supernatural beings. Henry learns he is a werewolf; Jamey learns he is a godling, a descendant of the old ones, who once walked the Earth as gods—Loki, Vulcan, Apollo, Hera, and the rest. These powerful beings made the werewolves and other Pets, such as selkies, centaurs, and mers, and various monsters. Their hybrid descendants, the godlings, have powers. These old ones also made the Watchers, devil-like monsters who were given one task: protect the Pets and the monsters at all costs. Keep them secret; keep magic a secret. Witches, who have always been a variation of humans, have, as a result, lived lives in hiding and secrecy, helping out Pets who get in trouble.

When Jamey and Henry fall in love their powers wake up. This gets the attention of the Watchers. The two boys are in serious trouble, even with the well-meaning help of local witches. The Watchers want them dead, as a warning to any other Pet or godling who dares risk disclosure. To stop them, Jamey and Henry must find an ancient key and solve a riddle Loki left behind—which could set the Pets free and end centuries of secrecy. To make things more complicated, they also have to learn how to love each other. So their quests begin. Complications ensue.

Why werewolves? I find shapeshifters—werewolves in particular---fascinating. They are creatures who live in liminal space, between human and animal, neither one nor the other, and yet both. As someone who often feels he lives in the in-between areas, I find this territory to be creative and powerful, a generative place, sometimes chaotic, but always rich in meaning, in myth, in metaphor. This is territory where many gay people find themselves. Wolves, are capable of violence, and yet, can be gentle and kind. They are, in many ways, metaphors for being human.

Fantasies often are set in a secondary reality, some of the most famous including Oz, Prydain, Narnia and Middle-earth. I set The Werewolf and His Boy in Richmond because it is a place I know, where the magical and the mundane can and do intersect, a human place. I find such intersections rich in story and I believe we all live in such intersections whether we know it or not.

The Werewolf and His Boy is a love story and it is a story about family—the ones we are born into, and the ones we make ourselves. It is a story about being gay in a homophobic world and in a world where being gay is like having red hair or blue eyes. It is about being living between worlds, and being between worlds. It is a story about identity and self and how we must find and love ourselves and thus be able to love another.  Ultimately, for my reluctant heroes, Jamey and Henry, it is a story about what it means to be human.