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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Gender Balance Made Easy - Add an Apocalypse and Stir!

Thank you, Catherine, for inviting me to talk about my post-apocalyptic steampunk novel, A Circus of Brass and Bone (Amazon).

A Circus of Brass and Bone began life as a serial story that I wrote as a medical fundraiser. This led to several unique challenges. The one that I'm going to talk about today is how inconveniently generous women are.

Yes, you read that right. 

One of the rewards I offered for supporters was to have a character named after them. In the beginning, this was well and good. When a new character appeared, I would choose a name of the appropriate gender from the donor list and keep going. Because the book focuses on a circus traveling through the collapse of civilization and the challenges they must overcome in each new city, there were plenty of new characters. Then the female names from supporters began to pile up.

Now, for context, you need to know that I laugh and point every time I encounter a book or a TV show that falls prey to the Smurfette fallacy. My favorite movies usually pass the Bechdel test with flying colors (and flying kicks!). I'm a female science fiction writer. I thought I had this stuff down.

The circus members were fine. From the conjoined sisters to the skeleton man, the girl sharpshooter to the snake oil salesman, the gender balance came out about even. They were important characters, after all. I'd spent some thought on balancing their motivations, personality quirks, abilities, and, yes, genders.

Minor characters didn't matter as much, right? After all, they were spear carriers. If they did their job, whether they had girl bits or boy bits was irrelevant. It wouldn't really affect the story.

But now I had all these extra female names. I started having to stop and question why I'd assigned a particular gender to a bit character and if I could do it differently. A Circus of Brass and Bone is set in a slightly alternate version of the United States not long after the War Between the States, which complicated things. Restricted gender roles! Historical verisimilitude!

Fortunately, the book has an apocalypse. After an aetheric chain reaction wipes out a third of the population, many things change. All sorts of people step up to do what needs doing. The way they do it is of course strongly influenced by their previous roles in life. And that, gentlepersons, is why some of the most interesting stories happen during or after a disruptive event.

Some characters' genders were still locked in by their historical role, but not as many as I'd initially thought. Avoiding the default spear carrier minor characters changed the story more than I'd expected, and for the better. The scene excerpted below would not have existed without those changes.

From what I've described, you might be imagining a heavily female-weighted book. Not so. Even though it felt strange writing so many women in minor roles, the kicker is that I ended up with a cast of characters that was pretty much equally balanced. I have to wonder how many stories that feel "naturally" gender-balanced to their writers and readers are nothing of the kind.

What I learned is that gender balance requires active thought about even minor characters, especially in historical settings. And when in doubt, add an apocalypse!

Excerpt from A Circus of Brass and Bone (Amazon):

Mrs. Della Rocca opened her door wearing an apron lightly dusted with flour. The aroma of biscuits drifted out to greet them.

“Welcome!” she said. “You must be new to town!” She tossed a questioning glance in the storekeeper’s direction.

“This is Mr. Knall,” the storekeeper told her. “He’s a traveling salesman, selling ladies combs. I told him how good your biscuits were.”

“Marvelous. Come on in! Lunch is still cooking, but I’ll get you some biscuits and tea.”

As soon as they sat at the table, Christopher opened his salesman’s suitcase. “Let me show you—”

“Wait.” The storekeeper put up his hand. “First, let’s enjoy the biscuits.”

Mrs. Della Rocca came out of the kitchen with a plate in each hand, and a biscuit on each plate. She set the biscuits in front of the men and beamed. “Go on then!”

Obediently, Christopher picked up his biscuit and bit in. The biscuit was hot and fluffy on the inside, but he noticed a slight bitter aftertaste he didn’t like. Too much baking soda in the recipe, perhaps.

Not wanting to alienate his host, however, he finished the biscuit, smiled, took a sip of tea—and slid sideways as the world tilted and darkened around him. He barely felt the impact when he hit the floor.

Today.

Christopher Knall straightened from his labor in the chicory field, pressed his hand to the small of his back, and leaned into a stretch. Dried sweat made his shirt crackle under his hand. Mud coated his pants. He was hardly the fine sight he’d been when he walked into town with a suitcase full of ladies’ hair combs and men’s shaving sets to sell.

Something moved along the road in the distance. He squinted. Wagons, traveling their way. Poor bastards don’t know what they’re getting into. Can I warn them somehow?

When the caravan got closer, the thought vanished. He gaped.

It must be a hallucination. He’d finally cracked. The procession was led by a woman standing on top of her saddle as if that was a perfectly ordinary way to ride a horse. A freakishly thin and elongated man rode in one of the wagons behind her. A pair of miniature humans perched atop another. And the giant bone and brass thing that flanked them could only have ridden out of a nightmare.

Continued in A Circus of Brass and Bone.

Read more

Ebook available at major online retailers for $3.99: Kindle | Google Play | Smashwords | B&N | Apple | and many others
Trade paperback available from Amazon.com for $13.99: Amazon

Book website: http://www.circusofbrassandbone.com/

Author website: http://www.aswiebe.com/

Reviews

"Read if: You would love to read about circus freaks, espionage, war elephant golems, intrepid female ship captains, monkeys finding true love, and the authentic smells of large cities."

- Goodreads reviewer

"the world has a texture and a past that appeals even as it appalls ... The characters have a lot of bad stuff happening to them, but they retain both agency and their moral sense. The darker scenes never devolve into hopelessness or pointless gore."

- Marissa Lingen, Novel Gazing Redux

"'Circus' is a steampunk fantasy piece told in a period voice. It has a thick Dickensian accent and the affectations of Christie, Shelley and Austen. It's sparking conversations you'd expect at a dinner party where Katherine Dunn, Cormac McCarthy and Kurt Vonnegut had a little too much wine. It's imaginative modern literature."

- Rob Callahan, Vita.mn

GENDER EQUALITY AT MAGIC UNIVERSITY
by Cecilia Tan

When I was putting together the magical system used in my Magic University books I wanted it to be very different from the Harry Potter books. In my world, one can't use a wand like a gun. Wands exist because they exist in this, the real world, but they're mostly used in certain rituals, not carried around like a smart phone or Swiss army knife.

I wanted magic to be complex but with enough predictable parts that readers would feel they got a grasp of what was going on. I followed that idea that some elements of magic might be known outside the magical community, but the knowledge might be imperfect or incomplete. Like flying brooms on Halloween: how did non-magical people find out about that? I looked at various sacred traditions from around the world, from Native American ritual and Tibetan meditation to tantric practices and at other forms of sacred sexuality.

In the end, though, I didn't borrow much from tantra or other forms of sacred practice that were highly gendered. In my world sex magic can be practiced by people of any gender, with people of any gender, regardless of one's biological gender. The only "magic" that has to be performed by a biological male and a biological female is conception of human life. The way energy is channeled in my magic system is more important than the DNA in the person.

I felt this was important not just for my plot, but for my own feelings that I wanted equality for the genders in my fantasy world. Many real-life sacred and magical systems create special roles for women (i.e. "Earth mother") while fiction and literature as a whole tend to give male characters agency but not always female ones. While I made it that some things are easier if one is biologically equipped in certain ways, it's not a requirement--i.e. if your spell requires a phallus for ritual purposes, no one said it had to be a biological one. Our protagonist Kyle's main talent is considered a phallic one: he can easily call down or gather energy through his arousal and then channel it into a spell or even transfer it to another magic user. (They don't use the term "wizard." Too patriarchal.) This is useful for certain kinds of enchanters who require a lot of energy but who would otherwise take weeks to gather what they need for a given ritual.

Another thing I did to try to redress the imbalance between male and female characters in fiction is I put a lot of female characters in. Geena Davis founded a think tank in Hollywood to study representation of female characters and they found that in crowd scenes there would only be 17% women. Another study showed that in real-life groups of people if there were 17% women and you asked the men how many there were, they would say the group was 50/50. Whereas if you had 33% women, they would say there was a majority of women. They also found that 17% of cardiac surgeons and tenured professors were women. "Is it possible that 17 percent women has become so comfortable, and so normal, that that's just sort of unconsciously expected?" Davis on NPR. (http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=197390707) When I heard that I panicked. I had been striving for racial and ethnic diversity among the characters, but I couldn't remember what the gender balance was. Might I have unconsciously shorted the women's ranks?

I went and counted the named characters in the series and breathed a sigh of relief. I have 26 named female characters and 26 named male characters. And looking over book one in the series, The Siren and the Sword, many of the male names are only "spear carriers." They don't have speaking parts, whereas the women do. Whew.

Looking back on it now I can't determine if my subconscious was really working hard to keep things even, or if it's a coincidence that I hit 50/50. I wouldn't put it past my subconscious to have planned it that way, though. I hadn't realized it at the time, but ultimately the balance between the genders becomes an important theme in the overarching story. I can't tell you why without giving away the plot, though. No spoilers, I hope you will find the idea intriguing enough to go find out for yourself.

BOOK BLURB: Kyle Wadsworth arrives on the Harvard Campus only to discover, much to his surprise, he's magical. Thus begins his four-year journey to learn where he fits in the world, which ultimately becomes a quest for true love.

Upon arrival at Veritas, Kyle quickly joins a group of peers who become involved in solving the mystery of a seductive siren in the library, while they learn about the magic inside themselves and around them, as well as the secret history of magic and those who practice it.

Kyle's trials and tribulations range from his need to meet the bisexuality prerequisite before he can study sex magic to the fact that the ancient prophecy he translates for his thesis project seems to be about himself. If Kyle is right, he'll need to find his true love, or the world as we know it is doomed.

BIO: Cecilia Tan is the award-winning author of romance and fantasy whom Susie Bright calls “simply one of the most important writers, editors, and innovators in contemporary American erotic literature.” Her BDSM novel Slow Surrender won the RT Reviewers Choice Award and the Maggie Award for Excellence. She lives in the Boston area with her partner corwin and three cats.

Website: http://www.ceciliatan.com/
Twitter: @ceciliatan <https://twitter.com/ceciliatan>

•  Lesbian Fiction Appreciation Event, throughout the month of January. I'll be doing a guest post on host author K.T.Grant's blog on writing lesbian and bi characters in historical fiction, 1/12/13.
  
• Guest blog on author Cathy Pegau's blog on the topic of  "In Person Events for Writers."
  
• Author reading on Wednesday, January 23rd at 7PM at Subtext: A Bookstore in St. Paul
  

•  GCLS Conference Blog - guest blog on my experiences at the GCLS Conference. TBD

• Marscon -  March 1-3, Minneapolis. Attending professional.
  
• Portland Lesbian Book Salon - March 3. Q&A by phone, since I can't make it to Oregon, alas.
• Quatrefoil Library - March 16th, Minneapolis. Quatrefoil's new location - annual women's fiction reading with several other authors.
• Hour of the Wolf Radio Show, WBAI, NYC. Tentatively scheduled for March 19th. Reading and interview.
  

• WisCon, May 24-27th. Attending professional.
  

• 4th Street Fantasy, June 21-23. Attending professional.

• DreamHaven Books, Comics and Art - August 1. Diversicon Guest reading and signing by Jack McDevitt, Roy Booth and me 6:30-8:30PM
• Diversicon 21, Aug. 2-4. SPECIAL GUEST <g>