by Jean Roberta
Perennial: A Garden Romance by Mary Anne Mohanraj includes a sweet romance between a lonely divorced man (half-Scottish and half-South Asian) who runs a flower shop, and a lonely woman (apparently White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) who is diagnosed with breast cancer in a leafy town where she moved from New York City because her late uncle left her an older house which she decided not to sell.
The chapters of the romance are interspersed with simple, almost childish drawings, and free-verse poems. Here is one:
“Friends rush in for overdue mammograms, even the ones who were resisting going at all, afraid of what they’d find.
Husbands are kinder to their wives, hold them tight at night, seeing a future without them.
It can make you cranky; this should be about you, but now it’s also about them.
You let it go.
May something good come of this— more check-ups and kisses. We should all be kinder to each other, to ourselves.”
This little book seems to have been inspired by the author’s own bout with breast cancer in 2016 as well as her interest in gardening. (Both the progress of her cancer treatment and the development of her garden have been extensively posted about on Facebook.) This book would make an appropriate gift for a convalescent who needs reading-matter with a happy ending.
Read by Strangers, a story collection by Philip Dean Walker, is much more unsettling, and I wouldn’t recommend giving it to anyone who has already received bad news.
Confession: I haven’t finished reading the whole book, so my generalizations should be taken with caution. So far, I haven’t found any supernatural elements in the stories, but real life in middle-and working-class American families is shown to be sufficiently uncanny.
In the first story, “Unicorn,” a group of kids explore an abandoned farmhouse their parents have warned them to stay away from. One bedroom is still incongruously decorated with images of unicorns. The barn (now burned to the ground) was the site of a tragedy: the teenage daughter tried to ride a horse which she had been forbidden to ride, and since the horse didn’t know her, it kicked her in the head, killing her and leaving the imprint of a hoof on her forehead. There is evidence in the house that she had been trying to escape from something unspeakable.
In “Revolution,” Anna is in a long-term marriage with Hank when she suddenly discovers a sister she never knew about before: her mother’s first, unplanned child, who was raised by an adoptive family. The intrusion of the sister, Billie, changes the dynamics in Anna’s own family.
In the wittily-titled “Hester Prynne Got an A,” the mother of a teenage daughter seduces the male English teacher on whom the daughter has a crush, discovers that her son (the daughter’s twin brother) is gay, and shows that the welfare of her youngest child (a daughter who seems eerily calm and cheerful and therefore abnormal) is more important to her than trying to recapture her reckless youth.
Another wittily-titled story, “Brad’s Head Revisited, ’94,” shows the long-term effects of homophobic bullying in high school on one of the bullies (or a sidekick of the ringleader) rather than on the victim. Here the narrator seems disarmingly direct:
“I fuck for money and I like it. The studio tells me how good I am, how much money I bring in, how I look even hotter on film, like a god. Just like a fucking Adonis.”
Do you detect a note of defensiveness? This story is discomforting, especially considering the allusion to Brideshead Revisited, a novel of privileged English life in the 1920s, in which an envious outsider shows the lifestyle of a titled family from which the gay son is exiled.
The narrative voice in Walker’s stories is clear and unadorned, and much of the explication takes the form of dialogue. Most of the characters seem to be trapped in unsatisfying situations, and they can’t find a way out. Even in the first-person stories, an omniscient, well-read narrator seems to be hovering above the characters, unable or unwilling to give them enough perspective on their lives to provide them with any relief.
The stories are well-crafted, but if read in bed, they lead to depressing dreams.
------------------
Showing posts with label Lethe Press. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lethe Press. Show all posts
Saturday, July 21, 2018
Friday, July 20, 2018
Hot Off the Press, Part 1
by Jean Roberta
For the past few weeks, I’ve done more reading than writing. I’ve plowed through six recent books, and started reading a seventh.
Steve Berman of Lethe Press often sends me gifts through the mail: uncorrected advance proofs of Lethe books that aren’t available to the public yet. He doesn’t ask me to review them, but the request seems to be implied.
The latest batch consists of:
1) Forget the Sleepless Shores, a collection of stories by classics scholar and poet Sonya Taaffe (from New England).
2) Does It Show? A novel in the “Phoenix Court” series by Paul Magrs from northern England.
3) Perennial: A Garden Romance, a slim volume by fiction-writer and cancer-survivor Mary Anne Mohanraj of Chicago.
4) Read by Strangers, a collection of stories by Philip Dean Walker (who lives in Washington, D.C.)
All these books are scheduled to be released in August.
Forget the Sleepless Shores is the one I read first. The title put me off because I thought it looked pretentious, and it has no clear relevance to any of the stories. Another aspect that both charmed and irritated me was the author’s poetic style in fiction. She clearly prefers to “show, not tell,” and is unwilling to “murder her darlings” (clever turns of phrase that don’t advance a plot). There is so much description of water in this collection that I felt as if I had to dry out between stories.
To sum up, I found Sonya Taaffe to be an acquired taste. However, her work rewards perseverance.
Here is the opening paragraph of “Chez Vous Soon,” the story of a doomed sexual relationship:
“The rain was full of leaves, like hands on her hair as she hurried home. Grey as a whale’s back, the last cold light before evening: the clouds as heavy as handsful of slate, pebble-dash and mortar; the pavement under Vetiver’s feet where blown leaves stuck in scraps to her sneakers, brown as old paper, tissue-torn. There were few trees on her street, but the wind hurled through them as hungrily as for a forest.”
The viewpoint character, “Vetiver” (who prefers her middle name to her first name, Julia) is going to visit her artist lover in the run-down apartment where he is obsessively trying to capture the look, sound, smell and feel of Autumn on canvas. The word-pictures in the story illustrate his efforts to express what seems inexpressible, at least to him. Asked if he has taken his medication for mental illness, he responds that he doesn’t want to blunt the power of his mind when he is working. The distance between the lovers seems unbridgeable, and the tragic outcome seems inevitable.
Most of the stories in this collection were previously-published in various anthologies and journals of speculative fiction (the on-line journal Not One of Us ran five of them), and therefore they are inconsistent in length, theme, and impact.
The author’s literary style is excellent for creating atmosphere, and the stories about the spirit world are effectively spine-tingling, even though most aren’t clearly identifiable as horror stories. (Or at least they have little in common with the work of Stephen King.)
Several of these stories seem to channel the voices of immigrant ancestors, translated from Yiddish and various other European languages. In “The Dybbuk in Love,” a contemporary woman is the love-object of a man who is long-dead but is capable of temporarily possessing the bodies of the men in her life.
The most brilliant of the stories that invoke Jewish folklore is “The Trinitite Golem,” in which an animated bomb confronts J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who created it. Here is the clinical description of its making:
“It is easy to destroy a life. Take thirteen and a half pounds of 8-phase plutonium-239, stabilized by alloying with gallium at three percent molar weight and hot-pressed into solid hemispheres of slightly more than nine centimeters in diameter, electroplate with galvanic silver to reduce chemical reactivity and encase within seven-centimeter tamper of neutron-reflecting uranium-238.”
The recipe for the “golem” continues in detail, and is then followed by a recipe for the ruined creator, a kind of twentieth-century Victor Frankenstein:
“It is easy to destroy a life. Take one theoretical physicist who has not published a paper in four years, who a dozen years ago made himself over into a director and administrator as thoroughly and ruthlessly as he once metamorphosed a misfit rock collector from Riverside Drive into a mesmerizing polymath with quotations in nine languages at his Chesterfield-callused fingertips, the benefit being the A-bomb, the cost being the rest of his concentration, and then in open court and the public eye strip him of all authority and trust.”
All this accurately reflects the life-story of Oppenheimer and the “Red Scare” of the 1950s. (I looked him up.)
Space doesn’t allow me to discuss all the stories in the collection, but several others are also brilliant and haunting.
Did I mention water? I was intrigued by “All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts,” a story based on “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” by H.P. Lovecraft. Taaffe’s story was originally published in Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (Dark Regions Press, 2016).
Two of us here at the Grip have written very different versions of that same Lovecraft piece. Lisabet posted a spoof, “The Shadow Over Des Moines,” here quite awhile ago.
My version of the story, “Innsmouth Blues” (narrated by an African-American schoolteacher of the 1920s) appeared in Equal Opportunity Madness: A Mythos Anthology (Otter Libris Press, 2017). This anthology was intended to overturn Lovecraft’s prejudices.
Taaffe’s more serious version focuses on the process of transformation, in which a contemporary woman who is at least “half-deep” (descended from “the people of the sea”) comes of age by desperately trying to return to her true home in the Atlantic. The references to an incomplete genocide, from which the scattered survivors reconstruct a group identity over several generations, echo several historical atrocities.
When the book becomes publicly available next month, I recommend buying a copy.
Stay tuned for my descriptions of the rest of my recent reading-matter. I’ll try to be more concise!
For the past few weeks, I’ve done more reading than writing. I’ve plowed through six recent books, and started reading a seventh.
Steve Berman of Lethe Press often sends me gifts through the mail: uncorrected advance proofs of Lethe books that aren’t available to the public yet. He doesn’t ask me to review them, but the request seems to be implied.
The latest batch consists of:
1) Forget the Sleepless Shores, a collection of stories by classics scholar and poet Sonya Taaffe (from New England).
2) Does It Show? A novel in the “Phoenix Court” series by Paul Magrs from northern England.
3) Perennial: A Garden Romance, a slim volume by fiction-writer and cancer-survivor Mary Anne Mohanraj of Chicago.
4) Read by Strangers, a collection of stories by Philip Dean Walker (who lives in Washington, D.C.)
All these books are scheduled to be released in August.
Forget the Sleepless Shores is the one I read first. The title put me off because I thought it looked pretentious, and it has no clear relevance to any of the stories. Another aspect that both charmed and irritated me was the author’s poetic style in fiction. She clearly prefers to “show, not tell,” and is unwilling to “murder her darlings” (clever turns of phrase that don’t advance a plot). There is so much description of water in this collection that I felt as if I had to dry out between stories.
To sum up, I found Sonya Taaffe to be an acquired taste. However, her work rewards perseverance.
Here is the opening paragraph of “Chez Vous Soon,” the story of a doomed sexual relationship:
“The rain was full of leaves, like hands on her hair as she hurried home. Grey as a whale’s back, the last cold light before evening: the clouds as heavy as handsful of slate, pebble-dash and mortar; the pavement under Vetiver’s feet where blown leaves stuck in scraps to her sneakers, brown as old paper, tissue-torn. There were few trees on her street, but the wind hurled through them as hungrily as for a forest.”
The viewpoint character, “Vetiver” (who prefers her middle name to her first name, Julia) is going to visit her artist lover in the run-down apartment where he is obsessively trying to capture the look, sound, smell and feel of Autumn on canvas. The word-pictures in the story illustrate his efforts to express what seems inexpressible, at least to him. Asked if he has taken his medication for mental illness, he responds that he doesn’t want to blunt the power of his mind when he is working. The distance between the lovers seems unbridgeable, and the tragic outcome seems inevitable.
Most of the stories in this collection were previously-published in various anthologies and journals of speculative fiction (the on-line journal Not One of Us ran five of them), and therefore they are inconsistent in length, theme, and impact.
The author’s literary style is excellent for creating atmosphere, and the stories about the spirit world are effectively spine-tingling, even though most aren’t clearly identifiable as horror stories. (Or at least they have little in common with the work of Stephen King.)
Several of these stories seem to channel the voices of immigrant ancestors, translated from Yiddish and various other European languages. In “The Dybbuk in Love,” a contemporary woman is the love-object of a man who is long-dead but is capable of temporarily possessing the bodies of the men in her life.
The most brilliant of the stories that invoke Jewish folklore is “The Trinitite Golem,” in which an animated bomb confronts J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who created it. Here is the clinical description of its making:
“It is easy to destroy a life. Take thirteen and a half pounds of 8-phase plutonium-239, stabilized by alloying with gallium at three percent molar weight and hot-pressed into solid hemispheres of slightly more than nine centimeters in diameter, electroplate with galvanic silver to reduce chemical reactivity and encase within seven-centimeter tamper of neutron-reflecting uranium-238.”
The recipe for the “golem” continues in detail, and is then followed by a recipe for the ruined creator, a kind of twentieth-century Victor Frankenstein:
“It is easy to destroy a life. Take one theoretical physicist who has not published a paper in four years, who a dozen years ago made himself over into a director and administrator as thoroughly and ruthlessly as he once metamorphosed a misfit rock collector from Riverside Drive into a mesmerizing polymath with quotations in nine languages at his Chesterfield-callused fingertips, the benefit being the A-bomb, the cost being the rest of his concentration, and then in open court and the public eye strip him of all authority and trust.”
All this accurately reflects the life-story of Oppenheimer and the “Red Scare” of the 1950s. (I looked him up.)
Space doesn’t allow me to discuss all the stories in the collection, but several others are also brilliant and haunting.
Did I mention water? I was intrigued by “All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts,” a story based on “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” by H.P. Lovecraft. Taaffe’s story was originally published in Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (Dark Regions Press, 2016).
Two of us here at the Grip have written very different versions of that same Lovecraft piece. Lisabet posted a spoof, “The Shadow Over Des Moines,” here quite awhile ago.
My version of the story, “Innsmouth Blues” (narrated by an African-American schoolteacher of the 1920s) appeared in Equal Opportunity Madness: A Mythos Anthology (Otter Libris Press, 2017). This anthology was intended to overturn Lovecraft’s prejudices.
Taaffe’s more serious version focuses on the process of transformation, in which a contemporary woman who is at least “half-deep” (descended from “the people of the sea”) comes of age by desperately trying to return to her true home in the Atlantic. The references to an incomplete genocide, from which the scattered survivors reconstruct a group identity over several generations, echo several historical atrocities.
When the book becomes publicly available next month, I recommend buying a copy.
Stay tuned for my descriptions of the rest of my recent reading-matter. I’ll try to be more concise!
Saturday, June 10, 2017
Pre-Millennial and Space-Age Reading
by Jean Roberta
For the past few weeks, I’ve been spending whole days revising my old erotic novel, Prairie Gothic, which was available as a download from a British publisher, Amatory Ink, from 2002 to 2006, when the publisher folded. I wrote the novel in 1998, when I had more enthusiasm than skill, and I had a paid two-month break from my teaching job, which in those days didn’t offer many other perks. (No expense account, no job security.)
After rereading this saga, most of which I had forgotten, I decided to keep the period flavour as well as the local colour. However, the head-hopping now makes me groan. It demonstrates my concept of “omniscient viewpoint” at the time.
What to do? There are two central characters, and several secondary ones who have valuable insights into the comedy-of-errors relationship between the two stars. I don’t want to lose all the snark from the sidelines.
The original novel was divided into nine rambling chapters of uneven length. I’ve been breaking them up into chapters of 2-4K. I think this makes the narrative more digestible, and also allows me to stay in one head per chapter, even though it seems necessary to head-hop between chapters. (For example, chapters 1-4 focus on Kelly, a young woman who goes to the local gay bar for the first time, and meets several regulars. Chapter 5 has to show the viewpoint of Kelly’s new girlfriend Vivienne, because she is visited by her bad-news ex while Kelly is in self-exile on the family farm. Chapter 11 must show the viewpoint of Rae, who has an uncanny experience with a ghost.)
This format allows me to flesh out a few details that were simply mentioned in passing in the original version. The original is only 56,000 words long, which is short for a novel. I expect the new version to be considerably longer, which will make it more of a standard size.
Once the shiny new version is ready, I plan to offer it to a certain publisher. If the novel isn’t accepted there, I plan to post it on Excessica.com. I’m excited to know that one of my early efforts can be recycled, and not left to waste space in my “Documents,” too good to delete but not good enough to resell.
Lethe Press recently sent me two books for review. I wrote a review of the anthology, His Seed: An Arboretum of Erotica, edited by Steve Berman, published under the new Lethe erotic imprint, Unzipped, and posted it on Facebook.
Here is a brief overview:
It’s hard to believe there is a theme in erotica which has not been overdone and yet seems visceral, organic and succulent. Here it is: sex between men, in which plants play various roles. This is not a joke. Several of the stories in this collection have horrifying endings, based on the undeniable fact that plants need nutrients, some of which are found in human bodies. Of course, this fact can also lead to interdependence, or mutual cultivation.
The stories cover a wide range of genres and tones, from stories that are basically sex scenes to fantasies about the Green Man or the Woodwose, the spirit of the forest in the form of a virile man. (One of these is a moving tale by our own Connie Wilkins about a man who has lost his lover in the first world war, but he discovers the Green Man living eternally in his native England.)
Among the sex-scene stories is “The Greenhouse” by Spencer Krell, in which a semi-sentient (genetically-modified) pumpkin vine makes advances to its cultivator, Aaron:
“He’d been about to get back to work once more when he felt a slight tickle against his ankle.” This is not random contact; this is seduction.
Even for readers who are not gay men, these stories are entertaining and unsettling. Plants are the ultimate alien lovers, beings who are clearly alive in some sense, yet who are profoundly different from human beings.
According to the editor’s introduction, this anthology was compiled on a dare. I would say the experiment works so well that it wouldn’t surprise me to see more plant-themed erotic fiction some time, but I doubt if a copycat collection could outdo this one.
The other Lethe Press book is a single-author collection of speculative fiction by A. Merc Rustad, who is identified as “a queer trans-masculine non-binary writer and filmmaker who likes dinosaurs, robots, monsters, and cookies.” The collection is titled So You Want to Be a Robot, and consists of 21 stories. I haven’t written a review of this book yet, but it is fabulous, especially for a reader who has seen individual stories by this author in various places, but not all together.
Picking a favourite story in this collection is hard, because each one pulls the reader into an alternative world that is both completely unreal and completely believable on an emotional level.
For those of us who wonder if there is any hope for democracy or justice, “The Gentleman of Chaos” is grimly satisfying. Here is the opening passage:
“People call him the Gentleman of Chaos, but he is not gentle.
By popular count, he’s assassinated thirteen kings, seventy-two princes, one thousand nobles, and five queens.
By popular legend, he’s immortal, a god of commoners, a death-demon summoned to feed on corruption, a shadow that devours the unjust. He never unmakes the innocent, it is said.
He is not gentle; I have seen what he does.
But I tell you this: part of his title is true. He is a man. And men can die.”
The rest of the first-person narrative shows how ironic this description is. For one thing, the “gentle” in the term “gentleman” originally indicated high social class; it is more closely related to “genteel” than to the modifier in “gentle touch.” For another thing, the being who eventually takes on the title in the story is mortal, but not exactly male.
This shadowy executioner is a kind of personification of karma or logical consequences. Even if there is no benevolent Deity, a ruler who slaughters everyone who might threaten his power tends to create more and more opposition. Sooner or later, the dictator's paranoia bears fruit.
One theme in this collection is that apparently inanimate objects have wills of their own, whether they are human-made robots/androids, engines, or natural phenomena such as mountains. In this sense, this book of non-erotic fantasy and sci-fi goes well with the “arboretum” of plant stories. I highly recommend them both.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been spending whole days revising my old erotic novel, Prairie Gothic, which was available as a download from a British publisher, Amatory Ink, from 2002 to 2006, when the publisher folded. I wrote the novel in 1998, when I had more enthusiasm than skill, and I had a paid two-month break from my teaching job, which in those days didn’t offer many other perks. (No expense account, no job security.)
After rereading this saga, most of which I had forgotten, I decided to keep the period flavour as well as the local colour. However, the head-hopping now makes me groan. It demonstrates my concept of “omniscient viewpoint” at the time.
What to do? There are two central characters, and several secondary ones who have valuable insights into the comedy-of-errors relationship between the two stars. I don’t want to lose all the snark from the sidelines.
The original novel was divided into nine rambling chapters of uneven length. I’ve been breaking them up into chapters of 2-4K. I think this makes the narrative more digestible, and also allows me to stay in one head per chapter, even though it seems necessary to head-hop between chapters. (For example, chapters 1-4 focus on Kelly, a young woman who goes to the local gay bar for the first time, and meets several regulars. Chapter 5 has to show the viewpoint of Kelly’s new girlfriend Vivienne, because she is visited by her bad-news ex while Kelly is in self-exile on the family farm. Chapter 11 must show the viewpoint of Rae, who has an uncanny experience with a ghost.)
This format allows me to flesh out a few details that were simply mentioned in passing in the original version. The original is only 56,000 words long, which is short for a novel. I expect the new version to be considerably longer, which will make it more of a standard size.
Once the shiny new version is ready, I plan to offer it to a certain publisher. If the novel isn’t accepted there, I plan to post it on Excessica.com. I’m excited to know that one of my early efforts can be recycled, and not left to waste space in my “Documents,” too good to delete but not good enough to resell.
Lethe Press recently sent me two books for review. I wrote a review of the anthology, His Seed: An Arboretum of Erotica, edited by Steve Berman, published under the new Lethe erotic imprint, Unzipped, and posted it on Facebook.
Here is a brief overview:
It’s hard to believe there is a theme in erotica which has not been overdone and yet seems visceral, organic and succulent. Here it is: sex between men, in which plants play various roles. This is not a joke. Several of the stories in this collection have horrifying endings, based on the undeniable fact that plants need nutrients, some of which are found in human bodies. Of course, this fact can also lead to interdependence, or mutual cultivation.
The stories cover a wide range of genres and tones, from stories that are basically sex scenes to fantasies about the Green Man or the Woodwose, the spirit of the forest in the form of a virile man. (One of these is a moving tale by our own Connie Wilkins about a man who has lost his lover in the first world war, but he discovers the Green Man living eternally in his native England.)
Among the sex-scene stories is “The Greenhouse” by Spencer Krell, in which a semi-sentient (genetically-modified) pumpkin vine makes advances to its cultivator, Aaron:
“He’d been about to get back to work once more when he felt a slight tickle against his ankle.” This is not random contact; this is seduction.
Even for readers who are not gay men, these stories are entertaining and unsettling. Plants are the ultimate alien lovers, beings who are clearly alive in some sense, yet who are profoundly different from human beings.
According to the editor’s introduction, this anthology was compiled on a dare. I would say the experiment works so well that it wouldn’t surprise me to see more plant-themed erotic fiction some time, but I doubt if a copycat collection could outdo this one.
The other Lethe Press book is a single-author collection of speculative fiction by A. Merc Rustad, who is identified as “a queer trans-masculine non-binary writer and filmmaker who likes dinosaurs, robots, monsters, and cookies.” The collection is titled So You Want to Be a Robot, and consists of 21 stories. I haven’t written a review of this book yet, but it is fabulous, especially for a reader who has seen individual stories by this author in various places, but not all together.
Picking a favourite story in this collection is hard, because each one pulls the reader into an alternative world that is both completely unreal and completely believable on an emotional level.
For those of us who wonder if there is any hope for democracy or justice, “The Gentleman of Chaos” is grimly satisfying. Here is the opening passage:
“People call him the Gentleman of Chaos, but he is not gentle.
By popular count, he’s assassinated thirteen kings, seventy-two princes, one thousand nobles, and five queens.
By popular legend, he’s immortal, a god of commoners, a death-demon summoned to feed on corruption, a shadow that devours the unjust. He never unmakes the innocent, it is said.
He is not gentle; I have seen what he does.
But I tell you this: part of his title is true. He is a man. And men can die.”
The rest of the first-person narrative shows how ironic this description is. For one thing, the “gentle” in the term “gentleman” originally indicated high social class; it is more closely related to “genteel” than to the modifier in “gentle touch.” For another thing, the being who eventually takes on the title in the story is mortal, but not exactly male.
This shadowy executioner is a kind of personification of karma or logical consequences. Even if there is no benevolent Deity, a ruler who slaughters everyone who might threaten his power tends to create more and more opposition. Sooner or later, the dictator's paranoia bears fruit.
One theme in this collection is that apparently inanimate objects have wills of their own, whether they are human-made robots/androids, engines, or natural phenomena such as mountains. In this sense, this book of non-erotic fantasy and sci-fi goes well with the “arboretum” of plant stories. I highly recommend them both.
Friday, January 27, 2017
Women and Magic, Part 2
by Jean Roberta
Heiresses of Russ 2016 is a best-of compilation of lesbian-flavoured speculative fiction stories which were published in 2015. The guest editor of this edition is “Alyx” (named for a character in the late Joanna Russ’ fiction) Dellamonica, who teaches writing at the University of Toronto in Canada and has won several awards for her own spec-fic. She is married to another award-winning female writer, Kelly Robson. It’s hard to imagine a writer who would be better-suited to co-edit this annual anthology with publisher Steve Berman.
As I suspected before I opened my review copy, several of the seventeen stories in this book originally appeared in the Lethe Press anthology Daughters of Frankenstein: Mad Lesbian Scientists, which I reviewed earlier. This book contains introductory material about the history of science fiction by women AND of actual female scientists, some of whom were theorizing about the universe much earlier than you would probably guess, unless you have studied the subject in depth.
(At this point, I could go into a long riff about the erasure of women from history, but that’s been done, and I’d like to reserve some steam for another issue that I’ll bring up later on.)
One of the stories from Daughters of Frankenstein (“Doubt the Sun” by Faith Mudge) is about an advanced robot or artificial intelligence, which is one of the themes in that collection. Another of these stories (“Love in the Time of Markov Processes” by Megan Arkenberg) is about a kind of hermit-scientist who studies the ocean from an underwater lab, somewhat like Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The third story from Daughters of Frankenstein (“Eldritch Brown Houses” by Claire Humphrey) is set in the witchy New England of H.P. Lovecraft.
Like the previous ones, this edition of Heiresses of Russ is a spellbinding read, but it is more eclectic than Daughters of Frankenstein and other themed collections of speculative fiction. “The Wollart Nymphs” by Melissa Scott (a writer of well-constructed plots) starts out suggesting that the “nymphs” (actually three ships) have supernatural capabilities, but the historical mystery surrounding them is resolved by a factual explanation.
At the opposite extreme of mystery and sci-fi stories are those that use characters from fairy and folk tales (monsters, talking animals, evil monarchs who control kingdoms by magic) in symbolic ways. In “Where Monsters Dance” by A. Merc Rustad, a young lesbian who is terrorized by her stepfather is taught to dance by a protective monster from a parallel realm where dancing destroys hatred.
Speculative fiction by women often deals with alternative (imaginary) ways of creating new humans, or humanoid beings, but surprisingly few of the ones I’ve read really tackle the political implications of the fact that humans who were born female (including some transmen) can get pregnant, while those who were born male cannot. The term “patriarchy” points to time-honoured attempts to keep reproduction in the hands of men by controlling women, especially those capable of breeding.
“The New Mother” by Eugene Fischer is a sci-fi story in Heiresses of Russ 2016 about that very thing. The science part is based on the fact that conception in several species, including humans, is actually triggered by the pricking of the mother’s egg rather than by the addition of a father’s DNA per se. (Presumably the mixing of two sets of genes to produce a new individual is an evolutionary development.) In this story, a virus which is transmitted by males to females causes women to conceive during ovulation (the release of an egg from an ovary), and the results are baby girls who are genetically identical to their mothers. Virus-infected women can no longer be impregnated by men.
Giving birth to girl after girl, all looking exactly like oneself, does not seem empowering to the unfortunate women infected by the virus, as it wouldn’t in real life. However, this phenomenon seems very threatening to men who don’t want their whole gender to become a genetic dead-end, as it would in real life. In the story, a lesbian journalist follows the trail of the virus. To add to her anxiety, she is pregnant by an anonymous sperm donor. Like a sexually-active gay man in the early 1980s, the protagonist in this story can’t be sure she is virus-free.
Although this story is definitely speculative rather than strictly realistic, it undercuts a currently-fashionable kind of queer theory that gender (however defined) is either a strictly personal choice, or at least a socially-determined set of characteristics with no real connection to biology. In biographical descriptions, various individuals now define themselves as “non-binary” and “gender-queer.” Since speculative fiction plays with imaginary spinoffs from reality as we know it, it provides a welcoming setting for androgynous characters who have floated free from binary classifications of all kinds.
As exhilarating as it can be to imagine that we are all living in a post-binary world, it just ain’t so. Young women are still afraid of the possibilities that scared me when I was young and fertile: I could be impregnated without my consent (possibly through rape), and I might not be able to get a safe, legal abortion--or I might not want to destroy the strange, tadpole-like being inside me. After giving birth, I might have trouble earning enough money to support myself and my child and to ensure that the baby would be cared for if I had to work outside the home.
I knew that I couldn’t rely on any man, including the biological father of my child, to help us survive. As I found out, none of the legal mechanisms of Western society (including marriage) really force fathers to accept responsibility for “their” children.
As far as I can tell, young women (including non-heterosexuals) still have reason to worry about these possibilities, and young men of all sexual orientations do not. Although I could say that menopause brought me “beyond” the reproductive binary so that I can be as sexually carefree as a male, the binary hasn’t been wished out of existence.
Now that Donald Trump is President of the U.S., and he is in touch with other right-wing politicians all over the world, reproductive rights for women are being threatened, as they always are when patriarchy objects to freedom of choice. At such times, speculative fiction can enable us to escape momentarily from grim reality and give us hope, but we can’t really live in another dimension or in perfectly invulnerable bodies just yet.
--------
Heiresses of Russ 2016 is a best-of compilation of lesbian-flavoured speculative fiction stories which were published in 2015. The guest editor of this edition is “Alyx” (named for a character in the late Joanna Russ’ fiction) Dellamonica, who teaches writing at the University of Toronto in Canada and has won several awards for her own spec-fic. She is married to another award-winning female writer, Kelly Robson. It’s hard to imagine a writer who would be better-suited to co-edit this annual anthology with publisher Steve Berman.
As I suspected before I opened my review copy, several of the seventeen stories in this book originally appeared in the Lethe Press anthology Daughters of Frankenstein: Mad Lesbian Scientists, which I reviewed earlier. This book contains introductory material about the history of science fiction by women AND of actual female scientists, some of whom were theorizing about the universe much earlier than you would probably guess, unless you have studied the subject in depth.
(At this point, I could go into a long riff about the erasure of women from history, but that’s been done, and I’d like to reserve some steam for another issue that I’ll bring up later on.)
One of the stories from Daughters of Frankenstein (“Doubt the Sun” by Faith Mudge) is about an advanced robot or artificial intelligence, which is one of the themes in that collection. Another of these stories (“Love in the Time of Markov Processes” by Megan Arkenberg) is about a kind of hermit-scientist who studies the ocean from an underwater lab, somewhat like Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The third story from Daughters of Frankenstein (“Eldritch Brown Houses” by Claire Humphrey) is set in the witchy New England of H.P. Lovecraft.
Like the previous ones, this edition of Heiresses of Russ is a spellbinding read, but it is more eclectic than Daughters of Frankenstein and other themed collections of speculative fiction. “The Wollart Nymphs” by Melissa Scott (a writer of well-constructed plots) starts out suggesting that the “nymphs” (actually three ships) have supernatural capabilities, but the historical mystery surrounding them is resolved by a factual explanation.
At the opposite extreme of mystery and sci-fi stories are those that use characters from fairy and folk tales (monsters, talking animals, evil monarchs who control kingdoms by magic) in symbolic ways. In “Where Monsters Dance” by A. Merc Rustad, a young lesbian who is terrorized by her stepfather is taught to dance by a protective monster from a parallel realm where dancing destroys hatred.
Speculative fiction by women often deals with alternative (imaginary) ways of creating new humans, or humanoid beings, but surprisingly few of the ones I’ve read really tackle the political implications of the fact that humans who were born female (including some transmen) can get pregnant, while those who were born male cannot. The term “patriarchy” points to time-honoured attempts to keep reproduction in the hands of men by controlling women, especially those capable of breeding.
“The New Mother” by Eugene Fischer is a sci-fi story in Heiresses of Russ 2016 about that very thing. The science part is based on the fact that conception in several species, including humans, is actually triggered by the pricking of the mother’s egg rather than by the addition of a father’s DNA per se. (Presumably the mixing of two sets of genes to produce a new individual is an evolutionary development.) In this story, a virus which is transmitted by males to females causes women to conceive during ovulation (the release of an egg from an ovary), and the results are baby girls who are genetically identical to their mothers. Virus-infected women can no longer be impregnated by men.
Giving birth to girl after girl, all looking exactly like oneself, does not seem empowering to the unfortunate women infected by the virus, as it wouldn’t in real life. However, this phenomenon seems very threatening to men who don’t want their whole gender to become a genetic dead-end, as it would in real life. In the story, a lesbian journalist follows the trail of the virus. To add to her anxiety, she is pregnant by an anonymous sperm donor. Like a sexually-active gay man in the early 1980s, the protagonist in this story can’t be sure she is virus-free.
Although this story is definitely speculative rather than strictly realistic, it undercuts a currently-fashionable kind of queer theory that gender (however defined) is either a strictly personal choice, or at least a socially-determined set of characteristics with no real connection to biology. In biographical descriptions, various individuals now define themselves as “non-binary” and “gender-queer.” Since speculative fiction plays with imaginary spinoffs from reality as we know it, it provides a welcoming setting for androgynous characters who have floated free from binary classifications of all kinds.
As exhilarating as it can be to imagine that we are all living in a post-binary world, it just ain’t so. Young women are still afraid of the possibilities that scared me when I was young and fertile: I could be impregnated without my consent (possibly through rape), and I might not be able to get a safe, legal abortion--or I might not want to destroy the strange, tadpole-like being inside me. After giving birth, I might have trouble earning enough money to support myself and my child and to ensure that the baby would be cared for if I had to work outside the home.
I knew that I couldn’t rely on any man, including the biological father of my child, to help us survive. As I found out, none of the legal mechanisms of Western society (including marriage) really force fathers to accept responsibility for “their” children.
As far as I can tell, young women (including non-heterosexuals) still have reason to worry about these possibilities, and young men of all sexual orientations do not. Although I could say that menopause brought me “beyond” the reproductive binary so that I can be as sexually carefree as a male, the binary hasn’t been wished out of existence.
Now that Donald Trump is President of the U.S., and he is in touch with other right-wing politicians all over the world, reproductive rights for women are being threatened, as they always are when patriarchy objects to freedom of choice. At such times, speculative fiction can enable us to escape momentarily from grim reality and give us hope, but we can’t really live in another dimension or in perfectly invulnerable bodies just yet.
--------
Women and Magic, Part 1
by Jean Roberta
Hellebore and Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magic, edited by Catherine Lundoff and JoSelle Vanderhooft (Lethe 2011) is an anthology of a dozen stories. A review copy was sent to me years ago, but I didn’t find time to read it until lately. The two herbs named in the title are either healing or poisonous, depending on how they are used: in poultices, remedies, or spells.
Two of the stories in this collection were reprinted in the 2012 edition of Heiresses of Russ (co-edited by Sacchi Green and publisher Steve Berman), an annual best-of collection of published lesbian spec-fic. Several years later, I was invited to co-edit Heiresses of Russ 2015. Several weeks ago, I received a gift copy (for review?) of Heiresses of Russ 2016.
So I’ve learned that in the 21st century, there is no shortage of fantasy and sci-fi stories in which the protagonists are women-loving women. The genres of the stories range from “high fantasy” or sword-and-sorcery to steampunk, slipstream, projections into the future of current technology (science-fiction), parody, and horror.
The lesbian relationships in these stories range from casual hookups among adventurous young women to long-term nesting to working/romantic partnerships between women with complementary skills. However, none of the sex in these stories is explicitly described.
To add to my pile of stories by/about women, I recently received the first five chapters of an upcoming novel, The Lost Art of Letter-Writing by Menna van Praag, to be released on February 16, 2017. This writer is a young woman in Cambridge, England, who writes fantasy romances set in her city. So far, they are: Men, Money and Chocolate (novella), Happier Than She’s Ever Been (sequel), The House at the End of Hope Street, The Dress Shop of Dreams, and The Witches of Cambridge. Over a year ago, I picked up a reduced-to-clear copy of The House at the End of Hope Street in a bin in my local Safeway store, and I was charmed. I signed up for the Menna van Praag (MVP) newsletter on-line. This is how I know that she and her husband now have two children, and that she struggles to find writing time.
To start with Hellebore and Rue, since this is the oldest book in the pile, I was impressed for several reasons: the stories are really varied, they are by authors I’m fairly familiar with, as well as ones I’d like to know better, and they include some Canadian content.
One of the authors, Rrain Prior, comes from the prairies (Manitoba, just east of where I live), and the protagonist of her story is a bounty hunter named “Key” who was hired to trap a rogue Salamander (elemental spirit) that starts wildfires. This story seems to foreshadow several actual fires that occurred later, particularly the one that largely destroyed Fort McMurray, Alberta, to the west of me, in spring 2016, and forced the evacuation of thousands of people, including a writer I know. (To this date, it is the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history.) Where is Key when she’s needed?
Another story in this collection, “Counterbalance” by Ruth Sorrell, is set in Toronto, although it was written by a writer from Birmingham, England. This story, like several others, deals with kitchen magic (e.g. an ability to make a cake from raw ingredients on a hot summer day without turning on the oven) which requires an exchange of energy in the world. A supernatural villainess tries to seize too much power, only to find that the kitchen witch has allies.
Space doesn’t allow me to describe all the stories in this book, but the theme of undercover witches runs through several of them. “Witches Have Cats” by Juliet Kemp is probably the funniest; in this story, a woman with latent psychic power but no knowledge of how to use it effectively has a cute but clueless puppy rather than a cat as familiar. The process of learning how to wield one’s power is shown as parallel to the process of “coming out” as queer.
In “D is for Delicious” by Steve Berman, a school nurse facing retirement is introduced to the witchy tradition of feasting on children in order to prolong her life. Of course, she resists at first, but she has resisted so much of her appetite for pleasure that at last, she decides to give in to it, having been seduced by a tempting sister-witch.
The female police officer who returns to a small English town from the city in Rachel Green’s “A State of Panic” is probably the most complicated kitchen witch of the bunch. This story is a self-contained murder mystery, but it is better-understood as one of this author’s “Laverstone” tales (including a novel, An Ungodly Child), set in a town with an unusual number of supernatural beings due to a portal which was never properly closed. In this story, local landmarks include Moot Point and Hobbs’ Wood (as in “hobgoblin”).
The stories that are not set in the world as we know it feature women with professions that don’t exist here. In “The Windskimmer” by Connie Wilkins, the greenmistress who can control plant life has a history with the wind pilot who sails airships. Although their specialties seem to have nothing in common, it turns out that they were once sent on a joint mission that threatened the earth for the sake of victory in war. Their agreement to right an old wrong also reignites their love for each other. This story is one of the more satisfying of the other-worldly stories because the reader is not left wondering WTF?
If I have any complaint about anything in this collection, it is that some of the writers rely too much on the formula: Show, don’t tell. Characters suddenly appear with a clap of thunder, and exude attitudes of various kinds, without much explanation of where they came from or what they want. Fantasy writers of the past (who are still read, I might add) didn’t seem to dread world-building in the form of long introductions or info-dumps which could inform readers about the culture and history of the setting. In some cases, info was dumped into a Book of Lore which was left someplace where the protagonist (and reader) could find it. Some of the stories in Hellebore and Rue left me wishing I could find a book of spells, a long footnote, an appendix, or a concordance.
------------
Hellebore and Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magic, edited by Catherine Lundoff and JoSelle Vanderhooft (Lethe 2011) is an anthology of a dozen stories. A review copy was sent to me years ago, but I didn’t find time to read it until lately. The two herbs named in the title are either healing or poisonous, depending on how they are used: in poultices, remedies, or spells.
Two of the stories in this collection were reprinted in the 2012 edition of Heiresses of Russ (co-edited by Sacchi Green and publisher Steve Berman), an annual best-of collection of published lesbian spec-fic. Several years later, I was invited to co-edit Heiresses of Russ 2015. Several weeks ago, I received a gift copy (for review?) of Heiresses of Russ 2016.
So I’ve learned that in the 21st century, there is no shortage of fantasy and sci-fi stories in which the protagonists are women-loving women. The genres of the stories range from “high fantasy” or sword-and-sorcery to steampunk, slipstream, projections into the future of current technology (science-fiction), parody, and horror.
The lesbian relationships in these stories range from casual hookups among adventurous young women to long-term nesting to working/romantic partnerships between women with complementary skills. However, none of the sex in these stories is explicitly described.
To add to my pile of stories by/about women, I recently received the first five chapters of an upcoming novel, The Lost Art of Letter-Writing by Menna van Praag, to be released on February 16, 2017. This writer is a young woman in Cambridge, England, who writes fantasy romances set in her city. So far, they are: Men, Money and Chocolate (novella), Happier Than She’s Ever Been (sequel), The House at the End of Hope Street, The Dress Shop of Dreams, and The Witches of Cambridge. Over a year ago, I picked up a reduced-to-clear copy of The House at the End of Hope Street in a bin in my local Safeway store, and I was charmed. I signed up for the Menna van Praag (MVP) newsletter on-line. This is how I know that she and her husband now have two children, and that she struggles to find writing time.
To start with Hellebore and Rue, since this is the oldest book in the pile, I was impressed for several reasons: the stories are really varied, they are by authors I’m fairly familiar with, as well as ones I’d like to know better, and they include some Canadian content.
One of the authors, Rrain Prior, comes from the prairies (Manitoba, just east of where I live), and the protagonist of her story is a bounty hunter named “Key” who was hired to trap a rogue Salamander (elemental spirit) that starts wildfires. This story seems to foreshadow several actual fires that occurred later, particularly the one that largely destroyed Fort McMurray, Alberta, to the west of me, in spring 2016, and forced the evacuation of thousands of people, including a writer I know. (To this date, it is the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history.) Where is Key when she’s needed?
Another story in this collection, “Counterbalance” by Ruth Sorrell, is set in Toronto, although it was written by a writer from Birmingham, England. This story, like several others, deals with kitchen magic (e.g. an ability to make a cake from raw ingredients on a hot summer day without turning on the oven) which requires an exchange of energy in the world. A supernatural villainess tries to seize too much power, only to find that the kitchen witch has allies.
Space doesn’t allow me to describe all the stories in this book, but the theme of undercover witches runs through several of them. “Witches Have Cats” by Juliet Kemp is probably the funniest; in this story, a woman with latent psychic power but no knowledge of how to use it effectively has a cute but clueless puppy rather than a cat as familiar. The process of learning how to wield one’s power is shown as parallel to the process of “coming out” as queer.
In “D is for Delicious” by Steve Berman, a school nurse facing retirement is introduced to the witchy tradition of feasting on children in order to prolong her life. Of course, she resists at first, but she has resisted so much of her appetite for pleasure that at last, she decides to give in to it, having been seduced by a tempting sister-witch.
The female police officer who returns to a small English town from the city in Rachel Green’s “A State of Panic” is probably the most complicated kitchen witch of the bunch. This story is a self-contained murder mystery, but it is better-understood as one of this author’s “Laverstone” tales (including a novel, An Ungodly Child), set in a town with an unusual number of supernatural beings due to a portal which was never properly closed. In this story, local landmarks include Moot Point and Hobbs’ Wood (as in “hobgoblin”).
The stories that are not set in the world as we know it feature women with professions that don’t exist here. In “The Windskimmer” by Connie Wilkins, the greenmistress who can control plant life has a history with the wind pilot who sails airships. Although their specialties seem to have nothing in common, it turns out that they were once sent on a joint mission that threatened the earth for the sake of victory in war. Their agreement to right an old wrong also reignites their love for each other. This story is one of the more satisfying of the other-worldly stories because the reader is not left wondering WTF?
If I have any complaint about anything in this collection, it is that some of the writers rely too much on the formula: Show, don’t tell. Characters suddenly appear with a clap of thunder, and exude attitudes of various kinds, without much explanation of where they came from or what they want. Fantasy writers of the past (who are still read, I might add) didn’t seem to dread world-building in the form of long introductions or info-dumps which could inform readers about the culture and history of the setting. In some cases, info was dumped into a Book of Lore which was left someplace where the protagonist (and reader) could find it. Some of the stories in Hellebore and Rue left me wishing I could find a book of spells, a long footnote, an appendix, or a concordance.
------------
Friday, April 24, 2015
Illusions by Candlelight
By Jean Roberta
There is so much to say on this topic that I hardly know where to start.
At one time, I didn’t think it was possible to write explicit sex scenes in the style of some past era. I probably believed that sex hadn’t been discovered before the time of my parents’ courtship (WW2, hubba-hubba). Then I read The Mammoth Book of Historical Erotica, edited by Maxim Yakubowski (circa 1999). Those stories were both hot and realistic, and some were set in times and places before the Christian Era.
I wanted to write that stuff, but I wasn’t sure I could.
A lot of popular historical art that has been produced since 1980, approximately, manages to produce the flavor of a past era, but with full use of current technology and the relative freedom of a culture that isn’t dominated by a Church or an all-powerful Emperor. Historical movies that fit that description include the painterly films The French Lieutenant’s Woman (with a kind of Victorian palette) and Goya in Bourdeaux (which looks like the kind of film the Spanish painter Francisco Goya would have produced if video cameras had existed in the 1700s). Then there is Schindler’s List, set in the 1940s and shot in black-and-white, but with a crisper, clearer chiaroscuro than you can see in any movie actually made in that time.
The literary version of that kind of thing avoids the kind of euphemisms that were generally used in “literary fiction” (as distinct from “porn”) right up to recent times. (Try reading Hemingway’s famous line that “the earth moved,” or the intense abstractions in D.H. Lawrence’s sex scenes, or Radclyffe Hall’s version of lesbian sex: “And that night, they were not divided.” See if you can keep a straight face.)
Like Lisabet, I love the Victorian era (1830s-1900), though the Enlightenment and Romantic eras seem fun too (mid-1700s-1830s). I like the combination of a culture that is now far enough in the past to seem exotic, yet close enough to our time that the literature actually written in those days is still comprehensible. The language doesn’t need to be translated.
Shakespeare’s era (approximately 1590-1616) is a little more remote, but as Sacchi demonstrated, it’s still possible to write a story with a Shakespearean feel that doesn’t require pages of footnotes to be understood. (And on that note, William Shakespeare was born AND died on April 23. We can still drink to his memory a day late.)
Then there is the Renaissance and before that, the Middle Ages. Linguistically, 1100-1450 (more or less) was the era of Middle English, which definitely does not look or sound like modern English. Here is a famous passage (part of the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, circa 1380s), which I can still recite from memory:
WHAN that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open ye,
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages):
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.
(There are many more lines, but these are the ones I remember.)
Anyone who wants to set a plot in an English-speaking environment before the mid-fifteenth century, and lure a non-scholarly 21st-century audience to read it, has to improvise a lot.
In order to write a story set in the universe of King Arthur (though technically, it’s about his conception), I reread my old copy of The Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory (mid-1400s).
Here is the beginning of my story:
My lord, the Duke of Cornwall, has accepted Christ Jesus as his savior for a score of years. As his lady, I have a duty to pray as he does before our people, whatever I believe in my heart. My lord’s honor deserves no less.
How different things were when the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone commanded us to follow our hearts. No man took offense if his lady held a paramour in her arms before the Beltane fires, nor would a good woman try to keep her wedded lord on a short tether throughout life. I remember a time when love was not confined, but I was a little maid who barely understood it. I was simply Igraine then, and I was too merry to be wise.
Now I wait alone behind the thick stone walls of Castle Tintagel for news of my lord Cornwall, and of the King that I love beyond measure. They plan each other’s destruction, and I fear for them both.
I’ve written elsewhere about the challenges of writing this story. The editor to whom I sent it liked the style, but didn’t find the story sexy enough, even after I had revised it to give Igraine more, shall I say, physical ecstasy. Her emotional ambivalence (the King and the Duke are threatening to tear the kingdom apart over her – oh, for the love of all the saints!) seemed inherent in the original story. Whether this story will ever find a home remains to be seen. I might have to rewrite it as straight historical fiction, with much of the sex kept out of sight.
Since Annabeth was so flattering about The Flight of the Black Swan (set during the American Civil War, 1861-1865, and slightly beyond), I’ll introduce the narrator, Emily (represented in the audio version by a British actor, Catherine Carter). Here are her opening lines:
Almost the worst thing that can happen to a young lady is to be loved by her parents.
Consider it: attentive mothers and fathers do all in their power to protect their daughters from risk and notoriety—in short, from every experience which gives savor to life. Fortunately, I approached the age of majority with my most exciting memories of childhood intact.
The book is available in several formats from Amazon and from the publisher, Lethe.
I would love to read a sexually-explicit version of the gothic novel Wuthering Heights (written in the 1840s, but with much backstory set in the late 1700s). Since a certain British publisher has been soliciting raunchy versions of the “classics” for several years, I suspect that someone more qualified than I will write it before I could finish the necessary research. But then, there are quite a few intense female-female relationships in the fiction of that era that would benefit from a clearly lesbian interpretation. :)
There is so much to say on this topic that I hardly know where to start.
At one time, I didn’t think it was possible to write explicit sex scenes in the style of some past era. I probably believed that sex hadn’t been discovered before the time of my parents’ courtship (WW2, hubba-hubba). Then I read The Mammoth Book of Historical Erotica, edited by Maxim Yakubowski (circa 1999). Those stories were both hot and realistic, and some were set in times and places before the Christian Era.
I wanted to write that stuff, but I wasn’t sure I could.
A lot of popular historical art that has been produced since 1980, approximately, manages to produce the flavor of a past era, but with full use of current technology and the relative freedom of a culture that isn’t dominated by a Church or an all-powerful Emperor. Historical movies that fit that description include the painterly films The French Lieutenant’s Woman (with a kind of Victorian palette) and Goya in Bourdeaux (which looks like the kind of film the Spanish painter Francisco Goya would have produced if video cameras had existed in the 1700s). Then there is Schindler’s List, set in the 1940s and shot in black-and-white, but with a crisper, clearer chiaroscuro than you can see in any movie actually made in that time.
The literary version of that kind of thing avoids the kind of euphemisms that were generally used in “literary fiction” (as distinct from “porn”) right up to recent times. (Try reading Hemingway’s famous line that “the earth moved,” or the intense abstractions in D.H. Lawrence’s sex scenes, or Radclyffe Hall’s version of lesbian sex: “And that night, they were not divided.” See if you can keep a straight face.)
Like Lisabet, I love the Victorian era (1830s-1900), though the Enlightenment and Romantic eras seem fun too (mid-1700s-1830s). I like the combination of a culture that is now far enough in the past to seem exotic, yet close enough to our time that the literature actually written in those days is still comprehensible. The language doesn’t need to be translated.
Shakespeare’s era (approximately 1590-1616) is a little more remote, but as Sacchi demonstrated, it’s still possible to write a story with a Shakespearean feel that doesn’t require pages of footnotes to be understood. (And on that note, William Shakespeare was born AND died on April 23. We can still drink to his memory a day late.)
Then there is the Renaissance and before that, the Middle Ages. Linguistically, 1100-1450 (more or less) was the era of Middle English, which definitely does not look or sound like modern English. Here is a famous passage (part of the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, circa 1380s), which I can still recite from memory:
WHAN that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open ye,
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages):
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.
(There are many more lines, but these are the ones I remember.)
Anyone who wants to set a plot in an English-speaking environment before the mid-fifteenth century, and lure a non-scholarly 21st-century audience to read it, has to improvise a lot.
In order to write a story set in the universe of King Arthur (though technically, it’s about his conception), I reread my old copy of The Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory (mid-1400s).
Here is the beginning of my story:
My lord, the Duke of Cornwall, has accepted Christ Jesus as his savior for a score of years. As his lady, I have a duty to pray as he does before our people, whatever I believe in my heart. My lord’s honor deserves no less.
How different things were when the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone commanded us to follow our hearts. No man took offense if his lady held a paramour in her arms before the Beltane fires, nor would a good woman try to keep her wedded lord on a short tether throughout life. I remember a time when love was not confined, but I was a little maid who barely understood it. I was simply Igraine then, and I was too merry to be wise.
Now I wait alone behind the thick stone walls of Castle Tintagel for news of my lord Cornwall, and of the King that I love beyond measure. They plan each other’s destruction, and I fear for them both.
I’ve written elsewhere about the challenges of writing this story. The editor to whom I sent it liked the style, but didn’t find the story sexy enough, even after I had revised it to give Igraine more, shall I say, physical ecstasy. Her emotional ambivalence (the King and the Duke are threatening to tear the kingdom apart over her – oh, for the love of all the saints!) seemed inherent in the original story. Whether this story will ever find a home remains to be seen. I might have to rewrite it as straight historical fiction, with much of the sex kept out of sight.
Since Annabeth was so flattering about The Flight of the Black Swan (set during the American Civil War, 1861-1865, and slightly beyond), I’ll introduce the narrator, Emily (represented in the audio version by a British actor, Catherine Carter). Here are her opening lines:
Almost the worst thing that can happen to a young lady is to be loved by her parents.
Consider it: attentive mothers and fathers do all in their power to protect their daughters from risk and notoriety—in short, from every experience which gives savor to life. Fortunately, I approached the age of majority with my most exciting memories of childhood intact.
The book is available in several formats from Amazon and from the publisher, Lethe.
I would love to read a sexually-explicit version of the gothic novel Wuthering Heights (written in the 1840s, but with much backstory set in the late 1700s). Since a certain British publisher has been soliciting raunchy versions of the “classics” for several years, I suspect that someone more qualified than I will write it before I could finish the necessary research. But then, there are quite a few intense female-female relationships in the fiction of that era that would benefit from a clearly lesbian interpretation. :)
Friday, November 21, 2014
Craving Escape
by Jean Roberta
Cravings, by definition, are generally assumed to be intense but momentary and not completely rational. A desire for fame and wealth is not usually thought of as a “craving,” compared with a sudden appetite for dill pickles, heroin, or the feeling of a warm mouth on one’s most ticklish parts.
At the moment, my most pressing physical craving is even more basic than a desire for sex. In the early depths of a Canadian winter in a dry climate, I crave warmth and an absence of itchiness on my skin. I could enjoy being an olive in a delicatessen, soaking in oil.
Despite slathering myself with moisturizer after every shower, I need to slather more goop on myself before going to bed; otherwise, the feeling of army ants biting every inch of my body prevents me from falling asleep. You might assume all the slathering would make me greasy enough to slide right off the sheets, but no. In the morning, my skin is dry again.
My physical craving to be somewhere else, where sunshine and moisture in the air would enable me to feel comfortable, feels like a metaphor for my fear of being useless.
University instructors, especially those of us who teach mandatory first-year English classes, have to motivate ourselves to keep going. Responses from students tend to be inconsistent at best.
Yesterday I met a class that has thirty students registered. There were about fifteen in the room, and most had 1) not done the reading assignment, and 2) not brought their textbooks. I only had one copy of this book to lend out while I gave the class twenty minutes to read the damn short story and jot down answers to my questions about it. Two students on one side of the room had no books, so they occupied themselves sending text messages on their cell phones. I didn’t interrupt them, since I wasn’t sure what I could tell them to do instead: stare into space? I could have told them to leave, but I was afraid this would trigger a general exodus.
Meanwhile, I have several piles of student essays to finish marking. Grammatical correctness seems to be a thing unknown.
Dry skin, dry and ineffective writing.
I fantasize about having the power to intimidate students into paying attention and doing the work, regardless of whether they care about their grade point averages. Thus was born my alter ego, Dr. Athena Chalkdust, a small but scary academic domme.* In a fantasy world, she breaks all the rules and gets away with it because many students secretly crave being forced to do things that will benefit them in the long run.
I doubt whether this is true in real life. I remember being a nineteen-year-old first-year university student, and realizing that I needed to motivate myself to do whatever I thought needed to be done. How little has changed.
In my first year of university, I was raped by a man (not a student) who haunted the campus. This was predictable, and so was the aftermath: I was told to think long and hard about how I had brought this on myself, and how to avoid attracting such negative attention in the future.
In the wake of recent celebrity sexual-assault scandals (Jian Ghomeshi, formerly popular program host with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, comedian Bill Cosby), I am reminded of how little has changed in the culture of North America (or of the world) in the many years since I was young. Some of the allegations against celebrities are from a previous era because the alleged victims were afraid of the consequences of becoming publicly known at the time. They still have cause to worry.
By now, I seem to be too old to be a rape magnet. I probably seem useless to predators. Does this mean I’ve reached a safe state of invisibility? This could be a good thing in some contexts, but there are no guarantees.
My female spouse is usually a great source of comfort and validation, for lack of a clearer word (we assure each other that we are both worthwhile members of the human race), but lately, she has been going through worse upheavals in her job than I have in mine. My situation is nothing new, so I really have no right to make my usual complaints to someone who might as well be living in a court of the Italian Renaissance. (Plots, cabals, scapegoats, smear campaigns and poisonings seem to be part of the culture.)
And before long, I will be expected to summon up some holiday cheer. That’s hard to do when one feels like an itchy Grinch.
I would like to be a hibernating bear in a warm, cozy cave. That’s what I crave now. I might not be meeting anyone else’s needs that way, but I could afford not to care.
--------------------
*My published stories by/about Dr. Athena can be found in these anthologies:
- She Who Must Be Obeyed, edited by D.L. King (Lethe Press, 2014)
- Slave to Love, edited by Alison Tyler (Cleis Press, 2006)
- Best Lesbian Erotica 2009 (Cleis)
- Best of the Best Lesbian Erotica 2 (2005, reprinted from Best Lesbian Erotica 2001) (Cleis)
- Best Lesbian Erotica 2005 (Cleis).
Cravings, by definition, are generally assumed to be intense but momentary and not completely rational. A desire for fame and wealth is not usually thought of as a “craving,” compared with a sudden appetite for dill pickles, heroin, or the feeling of a warm mouth on one’s most ticklish parts.
At the moment, my most pressing physical craving is even more basic than a desire for sex. In the early depths of a Canadian winter in a dry climate, I crave warmth and an absence of itchiness on my skin. I could enjoy being an olive in a delicatessen, soaking in oil.
Despite slathering myself with moisturizer after every shower, I need to slather more goop on myself before going to bed; otherwise, the feeling of army ants biting every inch of my body prevents me from falling asleep. You might assume all the slathering would make me greasy enough to slide right off the sheets, but no. In the morning, my skin is dry again.
My physical craving to be somewhere else, where sunshine and moisture in the air would enable me to feel comfortable, feels like a metaphor for my fear of being useless.
University instructors, especially those of us who teach mandatory first-year English classes, have to motivate ourselves to keep going. Responses from students tend to be inconsistent at best.
Yesterday I met a class that has thirty students registered. There were about fifteen in the room, and most had 1) not done the reading assignment, and 2) not brought their textbooks. I only had one copy of this book to lend out while I gave the class twenty minutes to read the damn short story and jot down answers to my questions about it. Two students on one side of the room had no books, so they occupied themselves sending text messages on their cell phones. I didn’t interrupt them, since I wasn’t sure what I could tell them to do instead: stare into space? I could have told them to leave, but I was afraid this would trigger a general exodus.
Meanwhile, I have several piles of student essays to finish marking. Grammatical correctness seems to be a thing unknown.
Dry skin, dry and ineffective writing.
I fantasize about having the power to intimidate students into paying attention and doing the work, regardless of whether they care about their grade point averages. Thus was born my alter ego, Dr. Athena Chalkdust, a small but scary academic domme.* In a fantasy world, she breaks all the rules and gets away with it because many students secretly crave being forced to do things that will benefit them in the long run.
I doubt whether this is true in real life. I remember being a nineteen-year-old first-year university student, and realizing that I needed to motivate myself to do whatever I thought needed to be done. How little has changed.
In my first year of university, I was raped by a man (not a student) who haunted the campus. This was predictable, and so was the aftermath: I was told to think long and hard about how I had brought this on myself, and how to avoid attracting such negative attention in the future.
In the wake of recent celebrity sexual-assault scandals (Jian Ghomeshi, formerly popular program host with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, comedian Bill Cosby), I am reminded of how little has changed in the culture of North America (or of the world) in the many years since I was young. Some of the allegations against celebrities are from a previous era because the alleged victims were afraid of the consequences of becoming publicly known at the time. They still have cause to worry.
By now, I seem to be too old to be a rape magnet. I probably seem useless to predators. Does this mean I’ve reached a safe state of invisibility? This could be a good thing in some contexts, but there are no guarantees.
My female spouse is usually a great source of comfort and validation, for lack of a clearer word (we assure each other that we are both worthwhile members of the human race), but lately, she has been going through worse upheavals in her job than I have in mine. My situation is nothing new, so I really have no right to make my usual complaints to someone who might as well be living in a court of the Italian Renaissance. (Plots, cabals, scapegoats, smear campaigns and poisonings seem to be part of the culture.)
And before long, I will be expected to summon up some holiday cheer. That’s hard to do when one feels like an itchy Grinch.
I would like to be a hibernating bear in a warm, cozy cave. That’s what I crave now. I might not be meeting anyone else’s needs that way, but I could afford not to care.
--------------------
*My published stories by/about Dr. Athena can be found in these anthologies:
- She Who Must Be Obeyed, edited by D.L. King (Lethe Press, 2014)
- Slave to Love, edited by Alison Tyler (Cleis Press, 2006)
- Best Lesbian Erotica 2009 (Cleis)
- Best of the Best Lesbian Erotica 2 (2005, reprinted from Best Lesbian Erotica 2001) (Cleis)
- Best Lesbian Erotica 2005 (Cleis).
Saturday, March 1, 2014
Fairy Tales
by Jean Roberta
The most recent book I've read is Red Caps: New Fairy Tales for Out of the Ordinary Readers by Steve Berman, newly released by his publishing company, Lethe Press. The version I received weeks ago was a PDF of the pre-publication, unedited manuscript, with some illustrations, and some spaces where illustrations would be placed later.
I’m still not sure whether I think the illustrations by various artists are a good idea. The sketches of teenage boys and fanciful imaginary beings capture a certain high-school ambience, but there is a delicate enchantment in the words themselves that lends itself better to imagination alone.
After Steve Berman’s young-adult fantasy novel, Vintage (about an openly-gay high-school boy in New Jersey who has a kind of romance with the ghost of a popular boy who died in the 1950s) received rave reviews in 2008, the author himself complained that he couldn’t repeat his success. This is a common fear among writers, since no one can rewrite the same book and still produce something new.
The current collection of stories is obviously not a repeat of Vintage. Berman doesn’t use formulas. What it shows, however, is his amazing ability to channel his inner teenager: to write with the skill of an adult writer in his prime about the larger-than life hopes, fears, giddy excitement and suicidal desperation of a person in that grey area between childhood and adulthood.
Very few writers seem able to do this well, possibly because (to draw on my own memories), adolescence combines intense emotions with a limited ability to express them. And spending most of each weekday in high school combines the experience of being institutionalized with opportunities to find a soul-mate.
The Red Caps in the title are an elusive band that are always off-stage, but the narrators of the stories collect souvenirs of them, such as red caps. The name also suggests a euphemistic term for pills which could cause hallucinations.
In “Most Likely,” the young, gay-male narrator discovers a magical high school yearbook in which school photos are accompanied by captions that express the real thoughts of students who would never write them down for others to see. This is a kind of hyper-realism which is both perfectly logical and literally unbelievable. In this story, the narrator is rescued from pouring rain by the object of his crush, who feels the same way about him. Without the magically intimate words, they probably wouldn’t have connected.
There is a droll humour in most of these stories that reaches a peak in “Gomorrahs of the Deep, a Musical Coming Someday to Off-Broadway.” Greg, the narrator, is lucky enough to have a boyfriend in school, and their relationship is tolerated by their classmates and teachers. However, Greg doesn’t want to push his luck. He is alarmed when his boyfriend announces his plan for a presentation in English class:
“’I’m going to do a whole presentation—not some sixth-grader’s book report—on the homoeroticism in Moby Dick.’
Greg recklessly tells him: 'You might as well sing it.'
Later, when Greg is walking home alone, "I soon heard my boyfriend’s car whining behind me. When he rolled down the window, music from the radio filled the air. Then he sang:
Get in the car. It’s cold. Don’t be so angry all the time.
I kept walking, but more slowly.
Get in the car. Don’t make me beg. Don’t make me rhyme.
I stopped and turned.
Don’t call me Ishmael.
‘I won’t.” he said. “Your name is Greg.’
I took a step forward, resting my hands on the open car window.
Tell me you won’t go through with this. Tell me that tomorrow will be sane.
He shook his head.
I can’t. I won’t. Don’t you see? That would go against my grain.
They’ll laugh at you and, if I stand by you, me as well.
What else does English class do than make our lives a hell?
It’s only Melville.”
This probably wouldn’t seem laugh-out-loud funny to every reader, but as an English instructor, I was charmed.
Two stories that are fantasy from beginning to end, and not necessarily about teenagers in a modern sense, are “Thimbleriggery and Fledglings” (a lesbian retelling of the Swan Lake story) and “Steeped in Debt to the Chimney Pots” (an ambitious, atmospheric tale about a hard-luck young man who falls in with bad company—the fairy folk—in Victorian London). These two stories are well worth reading, but they seem only marginally related to the stories about magic that arises from the ordeals of contemporary teenage life.
Altogether, this collection is greater than the sum of its parts. It will suck you in like a phantom lover or a dream that seems more real than your waking life. The storyteller’s magic still works.
The most recent book I've read is Red Caps: New Fairy Tales for Out of the Ordinary Readers by Steve Berman, newly released by his publishing company, Lethe Press. The version I received weeks ago was a PDF of the pre-publication, unedited manuscript, with some illustrations, and some spaces where illustrations would be placed later.
I’m still not sure whether I think the illustrations by various artists are a good idea. The sketches of teenage boys and fanciful imaginary beings capture a certain high-school ambience, but there is a delicate enchantment in the words themselves that lends itself better to imagination alone.
After Steve Berman’s young-adult fantasy novel, Vintage (about an openly-gay high-school boy in New Jersey who has a kind of romance with the ghost of a popular boy who died in the 1950s) received rave reviews in 2008, the author himself complained that he couldn’t repeat his success. This is a common fear among writers, since no one can rewrite the same book and still produce something new.
The current collection of stories is obviously not a repeat of Vintage. Berman doesn’t use formulas. What it shows, however, is his amazing ability to channel his inner teenager: to write with the skill of an adult writer in his prime about the larger-than life hopes, fears, giddy excitement and suicidal desperation of a person in that grey area between childhood and adulthood.
Very few writers seem able to do this well, possibly because (to draw on my own memories), adolescence combines intense emotions with a limited ability to express them. And spending most of each weekday in high school combines the experience of being institutionalized with opportunities to find a soul-mate.
The Red Caps in the title are an elusive band that are always off-stage, but the narrators of the stories collect souvenirs of them, such as red caps. The name also suggests a euphemistic term for pills which could cause hallucinations.
In “Most Likely,” the young, gay-male narrator discovers a magical high school yearbook in which school photos are accompanied by captions that express the real thoughts of students who would never write them down for others to see. This is a kind of hyper-realism which is both perfectly logical and literally unbelievable. In this story, the narrator is rescued from pouring rain by the object of his crush, who feels the same way about him. Without the magically intimate words, they probably wouldn’t have connected.
There is a droll humour in most of these stories that reaches a peak in “Gomorrahs of the Deep, a Musical Coming Someday to Off-Broadway.” Greg, the narrator, is lucky enough to have a boyfriend in school, and their relationship is tolerated by their classmates and teachers. However, Greg doesn’t want to push his luck. He is alarmed when his boyfriend announces his plan for a presentation in English class:
“’I’m going to do a whole presentation—not some sixth-grader’s book report—on the homoeroticism in Moby Dick.’
Greg recklessly tells him: 'You might as well sing it.'
Later, when Greg is walking home alone, "I soon heard my boyfriend’s car whining behind me. When he rolled down the window, music from the radio filled the air. Then he sang:
Get in the car. It’s cold. Don’t be so angry all the time.
I kept walking, but more slowly.
Get in the car. Don’t make me beg. Don’t make me rhyme.
I stopped and turned.
Don’t call me Ishmael.
‘I won’t.” he said. “Your name is Greg.’
I took a step forward, resting my hands on the open car window.
Tell me you won’t go through with this. Tell me that tomorrow will be sane.
He shook his head.
I can’t. I won’t. Don’t you see? That would go against my grain.
They’ll laugh at you and, if I stand by you, me as well.
What else does English class do than make our lives a hell?
It’s only Melville.”
This probably wouldn’t seem laugh-out-loud funny to every reader, but as an English instructor, I was charmed.
Two stories that are fantasy from beginning to end, and not necessarily about teenagers in a modern sense, are “Thimbleriggery and Fledglings” (a lesbian retelling of the Swan Lake story) and “Steeped in Debt to the Chimney Pots” (an ambitious, atmospheric tale about a hard-luck young man who falls in with bad company—the fairy folk—in Victorian London). These two stories are well worth reading, but they seem only marginally related to the stories about magic that arises from the ordeals of contemporary teenage life.
Altogether, this collection is greater than the sum of its parts. It will suck you in like a phantom lover or a dream that seems more real than your waking life. The storyteller’s magic still works.
Friday, July 19, 2013
Reading in the Shade
by Jean Roberta
Lately, I’ve been immersed in two books: The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez (Firebrand Books, 1991) and Where Thy Dark Eye Glances: Queering Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Steve Berman (Lethe Press, 2013).
I actually read The Gilda Stories when it was hot off the press and I was running a little one-person book-ordering service as a spinoff of the collectively-run alternative bookstore where I worked for awhile on a government grant. Jewelle Gomez’ vampire novel attracted a lot of attention in certain circles because it is about lesbian vampires “of color” who are not treated as freaks. Au contraire. The novel begins during the American Civil War, and Gomez’ vampires are appalled by the cruelty of the world. They make a point of taking only as much blood as they need while reading their victims’ minds, then giving the foolish mortals what they need in exchange for a little of their life-force. The vintage photo on the book-cover shows a gentle-looking African-American woman who is identified as the author’s great-aunt in Boston, circa 1900. At a conference in 2001, I met Jewelle Gomez and asked her if she thought her ancestor would mind being associated with vampires. Gomez said no, and I think she was right. Her vampires aren’t sparkly, but neither are they offensive.
The reason I am rereading this book is because I got an exciting email addressed to “Dear vampire scholar.” (I’m actually mortal, though easily sunburned.) Apparently I am now a “vampire scholar” because of my essay in a forthcoming book, now titled The Vampire Goes to College, an anthology of articles on teaching vampire literature at a post-secondary level.
The new email invited me to submit something for a new vampire anthology which will be interdisciplinary and focused on vampires “of color,” or vampires in a context of racial politics. I plan to send in a proposal for an essay on three vampire novels that deal with slavery and resistance to it: Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice (in which the narrator feels overwhelmed with guilt for becoming a supernatural predator in Louisiana in 1791, but not for enjoying the wealth produced by the slaves who work his plantation), Every Dark Desire by Fiona Zedde (an erotic novel in which the oldest and strongest of a “clan” of Jamaican lesbian vampires was “turned” in the 1600s while living in the hills as a refugee from slavery) and The Gilda Stories, in which the best resistance to oppression is shown to be superhuman strength and benevolent mind-rape (greedy, dishonest, racist and sexist mortals are given some new ideas). If my proposal is accepted, I will have until January 2014 to write the essay.
Where Thy Dark Eye Glances was a free gift from Lethe Press. It is a marvelous re-imagining of Poe’s gothic poems and stories, in which same-sex attraction is combined with Poe’s themes: the uncanny appearance of a doppelganger, the dire warning of a raven who croaks “Nevermore!” to a heartbroken lover, the grisly revenge of a dwarf jester on his aristocratic tormenters, the perception of a murderer, presumed “mad,” that his victim’s heart is still beating. The book is divided into three sections: “Poe the Man” (in which the known facts of Poe’s life are the framework for “what-if” stories), “Poe’s Writing” (the longest section) and “Reading Poe” (contemporary stories in which Poe’s work is a major influence on lonely, socially-marginalized characters).
This is a surprisingly varied group of stories that are so well-written and atmospheric that they are all likely to haunt the reader (groan – I couldn’t resist). Several of these stories provide satisfying explanations for elements that are obscure or mysterious in Poe. (“Telltale,” Clare London’s take on “The Tell-Tale Heart,” is a good example; in this version, the murder makes perfect sense and so does the murderer’s fruitless remorse.) “A Portrait in India Ink by Harry Clarke” by Alex Jeffers is actually based on a visual illustration of Poe’s story “Morella,” and the illustration is reproduced with Jeffers’ story, which takes place in Ireland in 1968.
I almost wish I had asked whether I could submit my own lesbian Poe-inspired story, “Down Below” (based on “The Cask of Amontillado,” but in my story, the “victim” is temporarily bound in a cellar, not permanently walled into a crypt) even though it was published twice. In any case, my story is probably too obvious a sex fantasy to fit in with the stories in this book, which are respectful, multi-faceted explorations of Poe’s life and work.
As in other good anthologies, every story deserves to be mentioned, but few readers seem likely to read a review that is almost as long as the work under discussion. I’ll have to ponder this dilemma before writing a more thoughtful review of the Poe anthology.
Maybe a veiled, mysterious Muse will appear in my dreams to give me advice on my two writing projects. I can imagine her leading me down a dark corridor with only a smoking candle for light. Inspiration so often comes from the shadows.
----------
Lately, I’ve been immersed in two books: The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez (Firebrand Books, 1991) and Where Thy Dark Eye Glances: Queering Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Steve Berman (Lethe Press, 2013).
I actually read The Gilda Stories when it was hot off the press and I was running a little one-person book-ordering service as a spinoff of the collectively-run alternative bookstore where I worked for awhile on a government grant. Jewelle Gomez’ vampire novel attracted a lot of attention in certain circles because it is about lesbian vampires “of color” who are not treated as freaks. Au contraire. The novel begins during the American Civil War, and Gomez’ vampires are appalled by the cruelty of the world. They make a point of taking only as much blood as they need while reading their victims’ minds, then giving the foolish mortals what they need in exchange for a little of their life-force. The vintage photo on the book-cover shows a gentle-looking African-American woman who is identified as the author’s great-aunt in Boston, circa 1900. At a conference in 2001, I met Jewelle Gomez and asked her if she thought her ancestor would mind being associated with vampires. Gomez said no, and I think she was right. Her vampires aren’t sparkly, but neither are they offensive.
The reason I am rereading this book is because I got an exciting email addressed to “Dear vampire scholar.” (I’m actually mortal, though easily sunburned.) Apparently I am now a “vampire scholar” because of my essay in a forthcoming book, now titled The Vampire Goes to College, an anthology of articles on teaching vampire literature at a post-secondary level.
The new email invited me to submit something for a new vampire anthology which will be interdisciplinary and focused on vampires “of color,” or vampires in a context of racial politics. I plan to send in a proposal for an essay on three vampire novels that deal with slavery and resistance to it: Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice (in which the narrator feels overwhelmed with guilt for becoming a supernatural predator in Louisiana in 1791, but not for enjoying the wealth produced by the slaves who work his plantation), Every Dark Desire by Fiona Zedde (an erotic novel in which the oldest and strongest of a “clan” of Jamaican lesbian vampires was “turned” in the 1600s while living in the hills as a refugee from slavery) and The Gilda Stories, in which the best resistance to oppression is shown to be superhuman strength and benevolent mind-rape (greedy, dishonest, racist and sexist mortals are given some new ideas). If my proposal is accepted, I will have until January 2014 to write the essay.
Where Thy Dark Eye Glances was a free gift from Lethe Press. It is a marvelous re-imagining of Poe’s gothic poems and stories, in which same-sex attraction is combined with Poe’s themes: the uncanny appearance of a doppelganger, the dire warning of a raven who croaks “Nevermore!” to a heartbroken lover, the grisly revenge of a dwarf jester on his aristocratic tormenters, the perception of a murderer, presumed “mad,” that his victim’s heart is still beating. The book is divided into three sections: “Poe the Man” (in which the known facts of Poe’s life are the framework for “what-if” stories), “Poe’s Writing” (the longest section) and “Reading Poe” (contemporary stories in which Poe’s work is a major influence on lonely, socially-marginalized characters).
This is a surprisingly varied group of stories that are so well-written and atmospheric that they are all likely to haunt the reader (groan – I couldn’t resist). Several of these stories provide satisfying explanations for elements that are obscure or mysterious in Poe. (“Telltale,” Clare London’s take on “The Tell-Tale Heart,” is a good example; in this version, the murder makes perfect sense and so does the murderer’s fruitless remorse.) “A Portrait in India Ink by Harry Clarke” by Alex Jeffers is actually based on a visual illustration of Poe’s story “Morella,” and the illustration is reproduced with Jeffers’ story, which takes place in Ireland in 1968.
I almost wish I had asked whether I could submit my own lesbian Poe-inspired story, “Down Below” (based on “The Cask of Amontillado,” but in my story, the “victim” is temporarily bound in a cellar, not permanently walled into a crypt) even though it was published twice. In any case, my story is probably too obvious a sex fantasy to fit in with the stories in this book, which are respectful, multi-faceted explorations of Poe’s life and work.
As in other good anthologies, every story deserves to be mentioned, but few readers seem likely to read a review that is almost as long as the work under discussion. I’ll have to ponder this dilemma before writing a more thoughtful review of the Poe anthology.
Maybe a veiled, mysterious Muse will appear in my dreams to give me advice on my two writing projects. I can imagine her leading me down a dark corridor with only a smoking candle for light. Inspiration so often comes from the shadows.
----------
Friday, March 29, 2013
Tanith Lee by Any Name
Re Disturbed by Her Song by Tanith Lee, writing as and with Esther Garber and Judas Garbah (Lethe Press, 2011) and Fatal Women: The Esther Garber Novellas by Tanith Lee (Lethe Press, 2013)
by Jean Roberta
***************************
Lethe Press, which often sends me free books for review, has now released two reprinted collections of short fiction with a subtly erotic and queer flavour, written by Tanith Lee in the guise of several alter egos. I had read her fantasies before, but her earlier work was never like this.
(While carrying on a doomed, long-distance relationship with a woman in another town in the mid-1980s, I spent three hours on a bus reading Sung in Shadow, Tanith Lee’s version of Romeo and Juliet. I was completely pulled in. I realized that I couldn’t discuss this book with my girlfriend in any depth because she wasn’t much of a reader, and that was exactly why a story about doomed love seemed so appropriate to keep me occupied while I was in limbo between her home and my home. But that is another post, or review.)
Tanith Lee is a legend among fantasy writers and the author of over ninety novels. Her work has been attracting a cult following since the 1970s, when she sold her first book to DAW Press. Her tales are elaborate, and her words are as carefully chosen as precious jewels.
Recently she has been writing stories and novellas under the names of a whole family of alter egos. In “Meeting the Garbers” in Disturbed by Her Song, Lee claims:
“I first met the Garbers in the 1990s; that is, I met Esther [who then ‘wrote’ two books], and her brother, Judas. Anna didn’t turn up, though she subsequently sent me a polite and kindly note.”
Why Anna chose to send the author a note instead of “turning up” is a mystery. None of the Garbers (two Jewish sisters and their half-Arabian half-brother, who spells the family name differently) is real, but apparently they “exist” for a reason.
In an afterword at the end of Fatal Women, a collection of novellas written by “Esther Garber,” Mavis Haut (a scholar who has studied Lee’s work) explains:
“When Tanith Lee writes as Esther Garber, we hear a voice that belongs to a well-defined personality. . . This new writer-in-residence sets Lee free from her better known writing past and opens the way to new directions.”
Actually, the writer “Esther Garber” seems to me to be more of a chameleon than a “well-defined personality,” but she usually writes in the first-person, and her stories seem more intimate, realistic and low-keyed than the more operatic novel series by Tanith Lee as herself.
All the stories in Disturbed by Her Song and Fatal Women include same-sex relationships, so the use of several writing personae (including that of a gay man) serves the illusion that these stories are based on the direct experience of characters other than the author.
In "Alexandrians," a story in Disturbed by Her Song, Judas Garbah remembers his neglected childhood in Egypt, and the male friend of his mother who noticed him and explained something:
"I'll teach you two new words. A woman who loves another woman is called for an island, Lesbos, a Lesbian. But a man who loves another man is called for Alexander, who was the son of a god, and loved men, and for his city by the sea, Alexandria. . . . Will you be an Alexandrian, Judas?"
Judas was unable to answer that question at the time, but as an adult, he remembers this conversation and the tingling touch of the man who paid attention to him.
There is very little explicit description of sex in these stories, but they are drenched in eroticism and mystery, which seem closely related. “Esther Garber” is a mistress of the “what-if” story, in which a central character’s yearning for another person, for a mutual relationship, and for the freedom to love in public is repeatedly disappointed, but which becomes a long-term obsession.
The title story of the earlier book, Disturbed by Her Song, is about a one-sided lesbian crush, a kind of non-relationship which takes over the life of the central character.
Georgina, a minor singer/actress, first meets fellow-actress Sula Dale when both are in their twenties. Georgina is impressed with Sula's performance in a classical Greek play. Georgina tries to cultivate a friendship with her, but Sula doesn't respond. Over decades, Georgina dreams about Sula and wishes she could sing for her. After several unsuccessful relationships with other women, Georgina writes a play for Sula to star in. Sula is grateful for the work, but doesn't seem to remember meeting Georgina before.
So does Sula ever recognize the devotion of her greatest fan? Never. At the end of the story, Georgina walks out of a restaurant where Sula has failed to recognize or acknowledge her.
Considering that both characters earn a living as performers by using their voices, there is a kind of resounding silence at the heart of the story. The key to it is provided by an older man in the theatre world, someone Georgina respects. He tells a story within the story:
"'Once upon a time,' Marc said to them. . . 'there was a princess, outside whose high bedroom window a nightingale sang every night from a tree, a pomegranate, or perhaps a blossoming plum.
'While the nightingale sang, the princess slept deeply and well. . . However there came a night when the nightingale, for reasons of its own, did not sing but flew far away. In the morning the princess summoned a gardener and commanded that the tree be cut down. He protested, saying the tree was young, healthy and fruitful. But the princess would have none of that. She told him that all that one previous night a nightingale had perched in the tree, and her sleep had been very much disturbed by its song.'"
The group of friends who hear this story in a restaurant discuss its meaning, but no one has a brilliant epiphany, and each friend seems to learn something different from it.
A story in the newer collection, Fatal Women, explores the theme of a one-sided lesbian crush with less tragic intensity. In “The Umbrella,” Sarah, the central character, notices a young woman who often crosses paths with her. Sarah becomes curious about “The Sugar Girl” (who buys grocery items, including sugar). One rainy day, Sarah is able to offer the shelter of her umbrella to “The Sugar Girl,” who accepts. This incident, which would have been the opening scene in a lesbian romance, turns out to be bittersweet, since Sarah never sees the object of her crush again. The memory of what might have been haunts Sarah far longer than she might have been haunted by a past friendship or love affair.
As the narrator explains in the earlier story, “Disturbed by Her Song,” a love affair that never really begins also never really ends. The possibilities seem to shimmer in the air, suggesting another dimension in which dreams can come true.
The novellas by “Esther Garber,” collected under the title "Fatal Women," take place in various historical eras. They all seem influenced by the nineteenth-century concept of a “femme fatale,” the French term for a “fatal woman.” Wikipedia claims that this character:
“is a mysterious and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers in bonds of irresistible desire, often leading them into compromising, dangerous, and deadly situations. She is an archetype of literature and art. Her ability to entrance and hypnotise her victim with a spell was in the earliest stories seen as being literally supernatural; hence, the femme fatale today is still often described as having a power akin to [that of] an enchantress, seductress, vampire, witch, or demon, having some power over men.”
Femmes fatale abound in the art and literature of the nineteenth century, when most real women had no economic or political power. A general suspicion that women could wield supernatural power actually seems to date from the witch-mania of the Christian Inquisition (approximately 1480-1700). Yet the theme of the fatal enchantress seems immortal, whether it comes from a fear of women or from women’s own dreams of power.
The “fatal women” in this collection are different from the nineteenth-century cliché in several ways: they are all sexually attracted to other women (although they must be discreet), and their stories span a period from the mid-nineteenth century to the aftermath of the Second World War, suggesting that “Esther Garber” is remarkably long-lived and possibly immortal.
None of these novellas deals with the supernatural in an obvious way, but there is a certain uncanniness in all of them. In the novella “Femme Fatale,” an Englishwoman has simply disappeared while travelling in France with her female lover, who is distraught. Did the absent woman ever really exist? If so, why do none of the locals claim to have seen her? The narrator, travelling with her own controlling female companion, is attracted to Iren, the one who is frantic to find out what happened to hers.
As in a horror movie, the landscape seems to be littered with subtle clues, and even objects (as in a Stephen King plot) have wills of their own. “Esther” explains:
“My companion, whom I shall call Munne for want of anything better, also had a little car. And in this being we had been driving—or the car had, it possessed a dark soul of its own—across the swooping plains of the region, littered with enormous rocks, and flayed by unsparing sunlight the color of bleached Sauterne.”
The mystery of the missing woman and the intentions of the demon car are never really resolved, but Esther has an epiphany about her own “disappearance” into a submissive role which is never openly discussed and is not exactly consensual. The casually insensitive Munne is a snob on several levels, and she equates the annoying passivity she sees in Esther with her Jewishness. In the time-frame of the story, the Second World War and the Holocaust are still in the future, and Munne’s attitude seems to foreshadow the real-life horrors to come.
“Le Jardin,” a story with a clearly supernatural component, is possibly the most moving. A French woman painter has become famous after her death, and a persistent male art-collector has tracked down Rachel, a woman who met the painter through her parents and who is rumoured to own one of her drawings. Unexplained smells and bird songs float through Rachel’s apartment while she tells the collector that unfortunately, she no longer has the sketch.
Avrilenne, the artist, was a generation older than Rachel and was married to a man. Rachel seems to be honest when she claims that she and Avrilenne were never lovers. They had a moment of connection which never blossomed into a full relationship, but Rachel seems to have become the keeper of Avrilenne’s spirit.
The sketch depicts an actual garden on the grounds of a French chateau in which atrocities were committed during the Nazi occupation of France, and which was then destroyed by the French Resistance. Like innocence in the Garden of Eden, the beauty of the real garden at its best lives on in the sketch, which Rachel would never sell for any price. And the love affair which was never born can also never die.
Tanith Lee is good as herself, but as any one of the “Garbers,” she is heartbreaking.
-----------------
by Jean Roberta
***************************
Lethe Press, which often sends me free books for review, has now released two reprinted collections of short fiction with a subtly erotic and queer flavour, written by Tanith Lee in the guise of several alter egos. I had read her fantasies before, but her earlier work was never like this.
(While carrying on a doomed, long-distance relationship with a woman in another town in the mid-1980s, I spent three hours on a bus reading Sung in Shadow, Tanith Lee’s version of Romeo and Juliet. I was completely pulled in. I realized that I couldn’t discuss this book with my girlfriend in any depth because she wasn’t much of a reader, and that was exactly why a story about doomed love seemed so appropriate to keep me occupied while I was in limbo between her home and my home. But that is another post, or review.)
Tanith Lee is a legend among fantasy writers and the author of over ninety novels. Her work has been attracting a cult following since the 1970s, when she sold her first book to DAW Press. Her tales are elaborate, and her words are as carefully chosen as precious jewels.
Recently she has been writing stories and novellas under the names of a whole family of alter egos. In “Meeting the Garbers” in Disturbed by Her Song, Lee claims:
“I first met the Garbers in the 1990s; that is, I met Esther [who then ‘wrote’ two books], and her brother, Judas. Anna didn’t turn up, though she subsequently sent me a polite and kindly note.”
Why Anna chose to send the author a note instead of “turning up” is a mystery. None of the Garbers (two Jewish sisters and their half-Arabian half-brother, who spells the family name differently) is real, but apparently they “exist” for a reason.
In an afterword at the end of Fatal Women, a collection of novellas written by “Esther Garber,” Mavis Haut (a scholar who has studied Lee’s work) explains:
“When Tanith Lee writes as Esther Garber, we hear a voice that belongs to a well-defined personality. . . This new writer-in-residence sets Lee free from her better known writing past and opens the way to new directions.”
Actually, the writer “Esther Garber” seems to me to be more of a chameleon than a “well-defined personality,” but she usually writes in the first-person, and her stories seem more intimate, realistic and low-keyed than the more operatic novel series by Tanith Lee as herself.
All the stories in Disturbed by Her Song and Fatal Women include same-sex relationships, so the use of several writing personae (including that of a gay man) serves the illusion that these stories are based on the direct experience of characters other than the author.
In "Alexandrians," a story in Disturbed by Her Song, Judas Garbah remembers his neglected childhood in Egypt, and the male friend of his mother who noticed him and explained something:
"I'll teach you two new words. A woman who loves another woman is called for an island, Lesbos, a Lesbian. But a man who loves another man is called for Alexander, who was the son of a god, and loved men, and for his city by the sea, Alexandria. . . . Will you be an Alexandrian, Judas?"
Judas was unable to answer that question at the time, but as an adult, he remembers this conversation and the tingling touch of the man who paid attention to him.
There is very little explicit description of sex in these stories, but they are drenched in eroticism and mystery, which seem closely related. “Esther Garber” is a mistress of the “what-if” story, in which a central character’s yearning for another person, for a mutual relationship, and for the freedom to love in public is repeatedly disappointed, but which becomes a long-term obsession.
The title story of the earlier book, Disturbed by Her Song, is about a one-sided lesbian crush, a kind of non-relationship which takes over the life of the central character.
Georgina, a minor singer/actress, first meets fellow-actress Sula Dale when both are in their twenties. Georgina is impressed with Sula's performance in a classical Greek play. Georgina tries to cultivate a friendship with her, but Sula doesn't respond. Over decades, Georgina dreams about Sula and wishes she could sing for her. After several unsuccessful relationships with other women, Georgina writes a play for Sula to star in. Sula is grateful for the work, but doesn't seem to remember meeting Georgina before.
So does Sula ever recognize the devotion of her greatest fan? Never. At the end of the story, Georgina walks out of a restaurant where Sula has failed to recognize or acknowledge her.
Considering that both characters earn a living as performers by using their voices, there is a kind of resounding silence at the heart of the story. The key to it is provided by an older man in the theatre world, someone Georgina respects. He tells a story within the story:
"'Once upon a time,' Marc said to them. . . 'there was a princess, outside whose high bedroom window a nightingale sang every night from a tree, a pomegranate, or perhaps a blossoming plum.
'While the nightingale sang, the princess slept deeply and well. . . However there came a night when the nightingale, for reasons of its own, did not sing but flew far away. In the morning the princess summoned a gardener and commanded that the tree be cut down. He protested, saying the tree was young, healthy and fruitful. But the princess would have none of that. She told him that all that one previous night a nightingale had perched in the tree, and her sleep had been very much disturbed by its song.'"
The group of friends who hear this story in a restaurant discuss its meaning, but no one has a brilliant epiphany, and each friend seems to learn something different from it.
A story in the newer collection, Fatal Women, explores the theme of a one-sided lesbian crush with less tragic intensity. In “The Umbrella,” Sarah, the central character, notices a young woman who often crosses paths with her. Sarah becomes curious about “The Sugar Girl” (who buys grocery items, including sugar). One rainy day, Sarah is able to offer the shelter of her umbrella to “The Sugar Girl,” who accepts. This incident, which would have been the opening scene in a lesbian romance, turns out to be bittersweet, since Sarah never sees the object of her crush again. The memory of what might have been haunts Sarah far longer than she might have been haunted by a past friendship or love affair.
As the narrator explains in the earlier story, “Disturbed by Her Song,” a love affair that never really begins also never really ends. The possibilities seem to shimmer in the air, suggesting another dimension in which dreams can come true.
The novellas by “Esther Garber,” collected under the title "Fatal Women," take place in various historical eras. They all seem influenced by the nineteenth-century concept of a “femme fatale,” the French term for a “fatal woman.” Wikipedia claims that this character:
“is a mysterious and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers in bonds of irresistible desire, often leading them into compromising, dangerous, and deadly situations. She is an archetype of literature and art. Her ability to entrance and hypnotise her victim with a spell was in the earliest stories seen as being literally supernatural; hence, the femme fatale today is still often described as having a power akin to [that of] an enchantress, seductress, vampire, witch, or demon, having some power over men.”
Femmes fatale abound in the art and literature of the nineteenth century, when most real women had no economic or political power. A general suspicion that women could wield supernatural power actually seems to date from the witch-mania of the Christian Inquisition (approximately 1480-1700). Yet the theme of the fatal enchantress seems immortal, whether it comes from a fear of women or from women’s own dreams of power.
The “fatal women” in this collection are different from the nineteenth-century cliché in several ways: they are all sexually attracted to other women (although they must be discreet), and their stories span a period from the mid-nineteenth century to the aftermath of the Second World War, suggesting that “Esther Garber” is remarkably long-lived and possibly immortal.
None of these novellas deals with the supernatural in an obvious way, but there is a certain uncanniness in all of them. In the novella “Femme Fatale,” an Englishwoman has simply disappeared while travelling in France with her female lover, who is distraught. Did the absent woman ever really exist? If so, why do none of the locals claim to have seen her? The narrator, travelling with her own controlling female companion, is attracted to Iren, the one who is frantic to find out what happened to hers.
As in a horror movie, the landscape seems to be littered with subtle clues, and even objects (as in a Stephen King plot) have wills of their own. “Esther” explains:
“My companion, whom I shall call Munne for want of anything better, also had a little car. And in this being we had been driving—or the car had, it possessed a dark soul of its own—across the swooping plains of the region, littered with enormous rocks, and flayed by unsparing sunlight the color of bleached Sauterne.”
The mystery of the missing woman and the intentions of the demon car are never really resolved, but Esther has an epiphany about her own “disappearance” into a submissive role which is never openly discussed and is not exactly consensual. The casually insensitive Munne is a snob on several levels, and she equates the annoying passivity she sees in Esther with her Jewishness. In the time-frame of the story, the Second World War and the Holocaust are still in the future, and Munne’s attitude seems to foreshadow the real-life horrors to come.
“Le Jardin,” a story with a clearly supernatural component, is possibly the most moving. A French woman painter has become famous after her death, and a persistent male art-collector has tracked down Rachel, a woman who met the painter through her parents and who is rumoured to own one of her drawings. Unexplained smells and bird songs float through Rachel’s apartment while she tells the collector that unfortunately, she no longer has the sketch.
Avrilenne, the artist, was a generation older than Rachel and was married to a man. Rachel seems to be honest when she claims that she and Avrilenne were never lovers. They had a moment of connection which never blossomed into a full relationship, but Rachel seems to have become the keeper of Avrilenne’s spirit.
The sketch depicts an actual garden on the grounds of a French chateau in which atrocities were committed during the Nazi occupation of France, and which was then destroyed by the French Resistance. Like innocence in the Garden of Eden, the beauty of the real garden at its best lives on in the sketch, which Rachel would never sell for any price. And the love affair which was never born can also never die.
Tanith Lee is good as herself, but as any one of the “Garbers,” she is heartbreaking.
-----------------
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