Hemidemisemiferal

I’ve got a Publications page, but some of the books there are out of print, and I don’t expect people to shell out for single issues of a magazine just because I’ve got a story in it. But the holiday shopping season has started disturbingly early this year, so here’s me getting in on it. Here’s where to get books that I have stories in, including the just-released Shakespeare Adjacent anthology:

Shakespeare Adjacent, an anthology of Shakespeare homages from 2 Jokers Publishing. My story, “Bitter Waters; or, the Villain’s Appointment” (that link goes to an opening excerpt) sets Much Ado About Nothing in a future Columbia Gorge (further) altered by climate change.

Two Hour Transport 2, an anthology of short fiction by writers associated with the SFF reading series of the same name–including me, as well as Nisi Shawl, Karen Joy Fowler, Eileen Gunn, and many other writers I’m delighted to share a TOC with. My story, “Song of the Water People,” is told from the point of view of a pod of Southern Resident Killer Whales who live in the Salish Sea.

From Bayou to Abyss: Examining John Constantine, Hellblazer is a collection of articles about everyone’s favorite morally gray magician. I had great fun researching real-world occult antecedents for the stuff we see John (and others) do in the comic, though real-world occultists would (justifiably) say that I just scratched the surface. Hey, I had a word count. Lots of other fun essays in here too.

Retellings of the Inland Seas, an anthology of short fiction placing Ancient Greek stories, myths, and legends in speculative settings. My story, “The Sea of Stars,” examines how sailors of the 5th century BCE might deal with a communication that seems to come from the gods.

Future Games, an anthology of short fiction on the themes of gaming and sport. My story “Kip, Running,” which originally appeared in the webzine Strange Horizons, is included, along with stories by Cory Doctorow, George R.R. Martin, and Kate Wilhelm.

Share and enjoy!

I was going to get this up yesterday, hence the category, but didn’t finish it until today. Yesterday wound up being super busy, including onboarding for one of those contractor gigs where you have to set up accounts on several different platforms in order to work. It’s a setup that both makes me feel old, and reminds me of my library days when we had four different systems crosswalking just to accurately convey our journal holdings to patrons.

I was also finishing up reading Robert Moor’s new book In Trees, in order to review it for Library Journal. Like a lot of nature-oriented books I’ve read recently, Moor comes in heavy on themes of relationality and reciprocity. These aren’t novel, exactly, but I’ve noticed them getting more emphasis ever since Robin Wall Kimmerer’s excellent and affecting Braiding Sweetgrass, which many of these books (Moor’s included) cite as an influence.

It influenced me as well, both when I first read it and during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, when I managed to escape the stuck-at-home-staring-at-screens phenomenon by taking off for nine months to Wilderness Awareness School. Constant masking and daily temperature checks notwithstanding, it was still a better way to spend those nine months than just about anything else I could imagine. I got to be with people. And trees.

It was an immense privilege, and it shouldn’t be. As people in the Immersion program itself pointed out, having to actively seek nature connection, as though we aren’t all connected to nature all of the time whether or not we’re aware of it, is indicative of a problem, one that has deeply pragmatic and material effects. I do happen to believe that sitting under a tree once in awhile or just noticing the birds outside the window are Good for us as humans, but as I’ve written before, not doing these things makes it so much easier not to notice that we’re driving the world off a cliff. The planet has survived mass extinctions before, but there’s a reason why some writers describe our current situation as the Sixth Extinction. And if we keep going like we have been, we’re going to kill off the species that make our own existences possible. Humans are the most adaptable creatures to ever live on Earth—I feel pretty confident saying that, despite the length of time life has existed on this planet. But whether we can adapt to the circumstances we ourselves are now creating is an open question.

And even if we could, the situation still sucks. I think people know it, too; it’s one reason fake AI stories about wild animals doing charming things are so popular on social media, to my everlasting consternation. My theory goes something like this: so many of us humans are so disconnected from the world in which we live that we view it as fundamentally unknowable outside the narrow slice that we understand. This makes us uncomfortable, so we gravitate toward relatable stories that present realities we find intuitively comprehensible. (This is also why fake news is both so seductive and so prevalent.) But precisely because of that disconnection, we aren’t equipped to recognize the unreality when we encounter it, and the people spreading it have a vested interest in not describing it as fiction.

Kimmerer talks a lot about reciprocity in Braiding Sweetgrass and in her more recent book, The Serviceberry. In its most fundamental and accessible form, this is the simple act of recognition of the necessary give and take within which each of us exists. We live, so we gotta eat. Sooner or later, other things will eat us. From this everything else flows. We exist and participate in a web of relationships whether we know it or not; this is as observable as the raccoons raiding our trash cans. Taking the time to make those observations begins for many of us as a conscious act, but the more you do it, the more habitual it becomes, the more you notice, and the more those connections become a thing that you’re aware of.

It’s a simple, small thing, but it changes so much. Among other things, it rejects the framing of human and planetary survival as a matter of completely abandoning modern ways of life. (Good luck getting people to do that, anyway.) Even people living in places so remote that calling them off grid is to understate the case have cell phones.

The hard part is getting this to happen on a big enough scale to make an actual difference, and creating space for people to do the things that will effect change. One of the first things you notice once you start seeing existence this way is how much capitalism in its current form makes everything into a state of emergency. What better way to ensure that no one has time to even notice what’s wrong, never mind do anything about it? Back in the late 1990s a book came out called Simple Things Won’t Save the Earth. That title was a response to the idea that individual consumer choices would make even the smallest dent in responding to the actual emergency then and now in progress.

So why would such a simple, small thing as a change in perception be any different?

I don’t really know, to be honest. It’s something I’ve been mulling over for at least five years, now, and probably longer.

But I do think it’s necessary, and inevitable. I’m just hoping it happens at a significant enough scale, before it really is too late.

Like a lot of people I suspect, I read E.B. White's children's novels as a kid--Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, Trumpet of the Swan--and never quite made the transition to his other writing. When the current administration has the immense bad taste to name one of its immigration crackdowns "Operation Charlotte's Web," it's worth highlighting that White was a staunch antifascist.

I worked as an academic librarian for 18 years; I've long known that libraries are always being asked to do more with less, while having their remits so far stretched that it regularly stuns me when I meet someone who still thinks that all they do is lend books. Public libraries in particular have increasingly been expected to serve as the final catch in an ever-fraying social safety net. But Sharon Mattern's Extralibrary Loan demonstrates the many creative and forward-thinking ways that libraries are hewing to their original purpose. Not just a safety net but, as she puts it, civic infrastructure. It almost makes me want to work in the field again.

Earlier this week I was moved to listen to "Cult of Personality," the breakout hit that put the band Living Colour on the map way back in 1988. It's still a banger of a song, full of everything I loved about rock & roll back then and still do: crunchy guitar, killer bass line, a rolling thunder of drums. If anything, the lyrics are even more incisive and observant today. In 2018, Ringer writer Alan Siegel dug into the genesis of the song, Living Colour's formation and career, and why "Cult of Personality" still resonates.

Christopher Brown, author of A Natural History of Empty Lots, writes in “An Ofrenda for the Killdeer” about the wildness in edge places, a theme he often explores and which I am beginning to in my own writing. Where I live in Seattle—have lived for 25 years without really noticing, until the art of tracking opened up new ways of seeing—there are all sorts of edge places like this. I’m hoping to explore a few in the coming months.

Pope Leo XIV didn't actually throw a rave, but this is almost as good:

As a cradle Catholic who fell away in my teens, my feelings toward the Church are...complex, to say the least. But I've got to say, as devotional music goes, this knocks CCM right out of the park.