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Writers With Drinks – Next 4 Events

Jay Tomio — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:36:21 +0000

People are going to have to excuse me as I’m learning on the fly here about Writers With Drinks, a monthly event presented by Charlie Jane Anders. I was directed to the upcoming schedule via twitter, and I see names like Mary Robinette Kowal, Cherie Priest and James Rollins sprinkled in over the next 4 months. So, if you’re in SF (San Francisco or Speculative Fiction) or the surrounding area you may want to check it out, as even if you’re not into hardcore drunk reading, you probably either drink or read. It’s one of those shindigs that causes me to have use a surplus of tags when I post.

Saturday, Nov. 14, 2009:

Javier Grillo-Marxuach (The Middleman TV series)
Mary Robinette Kowal (Scenting The Dark And Other Stories)
Kat Richardson (Greywalker)
Naomi Quiñonez (Invocation L.A.: Urban Multicultural Poetry)
S. Bear Bergman (Butch Is A Noun)

All proceeds benefit EL/LA Program Para Trans Latinas.

At The Make-Out Room 3225 22nd. St., San Francisco CA, from 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM, doors open at 7 PM.

Saturday, Dec. 12, 2009:

Dan Fante (86d, Short Dog, Mooch)
Joshua Mohr (Some Things That Meant The World To Me)
Mark Coggins (The Big Wake-Up)
Seanan McGuire (Rosemary And Rue)
Cat Grant (The Arrangement, Coming Of Age)

All proceeds benefit the Center for Sex and Culture.
At The Make-Out Room 3225 22nd. St., San Francisco CA, from 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM, doors open at 7 PM.

Saturday, Jan. 9, 2010:

Pia Z. Ehrhardt (Famous Fathers)

All proceeds benefit the Center for Sex and Culture.

At The Make-Out Room 3225 22nd. St., San Francisco CA, from 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM, doors open at 7 PM.

Saturday, Feb. 13, 2010:

Vikram Chandra (Sacred Games)
Cherie Priest (Boneshaker)
James Rollins (The Doomsday Key)
Andrew Porter (The Theory Of Light And Matter)

All proceeds benefit the Center for Sex and Culture.
At The Make-Out Room 3225 22nd. St., San Francisco CA, from 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM, doors open at 7 PM.

Book Review – Ballistics

Brian — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:35:58 +0000

Author: Billy Collins
Book Design: Liz Cosgrove
Publisher: Random House
Binding: Hardback
Publication Date: September, 2008

In this age of instant, push-button publishing the art of the carefully chosen word can sometimes feel lost. Poetry isn’t read as much and collections aren’t big sellers. Yet Billy Collins, along with just a small handful of other popular poets, defies all of that with collections that sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

Some critics contend that what Collins writes isn’t, in fact, poetry that it is little more then prose rendered as poetry on the page but virtue of the line breaks only. They hold up as exhibit A recordings or live performances of his poetry. But this simply isn’t true. If poetry is going to speak of life to us then it can’t be expected to adhere to stricy formal constraints.

They also suggest that his style is generic; I say, based on his ability to speak to us all, that his style is universal. The directness of the unadorned language strips away all pretenses and, as all distractions fade away, brings a forced focus that lends itself to achieving a certain kind of grace. Really now, what’s wrong with poetry for the masses? Simple, direct and unadorned do not mean that something is inferior.

All of the hallmarks of Billy Collins poetry that we have come to appreciate over the years are here: The almost day-dream like flights of fancy that get their start with innocent enough thoughts or actions that we can all relate to; The subtle humor; The nesting of deeper thoughts into everyday, mundane objects; the pairing of the ordinary with the extraordinary.

Once, two spoons in bed,
now tined forks

across a granite table
and the knives they have hired.

There is, in these poems, the air of a mischievous grin; of an old man flirting with an attractive cashier and saying the most outlandish things, because he can. This is the best kind of poetry, that which is meant to be re-read and shared; which makes you smile and think.

So much younger and with a tall, young son
in the house above ours on a hill
it seemed that death had blundered once again.

Was it poor directions or the blurring rain,
the too-small numerals on the mailbox
that sent his dark car up the wrong driveway?

Surely, it was me he was looking for–
overripe, childless, gaudy with appetite,
the one who shoul be ghosting over the rooftops

not standing bare-footed in this kitchen
on a sun-shot October morning
after eight days and nights of downpour,

me with my presumptuous breathing,
my arrogant love of coffee
and the colorful leaves beyond the windows.

The weight of my clothes, not his,
might hang in the darkness of a closet today,
my rake idle, my pen across a notebook.

The harmony of this house, not his,
might be missing a voice,
the hallways alive with the cry of the telephone–

if only death had checked his cracked leather map
then bent to wipe the fog
from the windshield with an empty sleeve.

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Book Review – In the Forest of Forgetting

Matt Denault — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 21:30:42 +0000

Author: Theodora Goss
Cover Artist: Virginia Lee
Publisher: Prime Books
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: May, 2007

“The Rose in Twelve Petals” begins Theodora Goss’s newly-in-paperback collection In the Forest of Forgetting, and the story makes an ideal introduction to the the author’s work. A retelling of the classic Sleeping Beauty story, it frames and then re-frames our expectations. The initial recognition of the familiar story pulls us into the the fairy tale mindset: of stories that map the small journeys and decisions that can unexpectedly lead to major life changes; of characters and encounters that we understand to be meant not quite literally, yet not as simple allegory either. As the story progresses, the postmodern telling of the tale, the way that every character and every side are given voice (reminiscient of Pamuk’s My Name is Red), the way that the subtext of classic fairy tales — gender, class, politics in the largest sense of the word — are literalized, all serve to pull fairy tales into modernity, into history (often but not always our own). This mixture of old and new modes of storytelling recurs in the collection’s other fifteen stories: there are times, settings, characters and themes that appear again and again, similar but different, the original fairy tales of a multitude of parallel worlds. Throughout, Goss’s storytelling palette is made up of the strange day-to-day patterns of individual wants and desires, the certainties and uncertainties that make up our daily lives.

So it is with “Professor Berkowitz Stands on the Threshold,” where the titular professor is given the chance to choose between the certainty of his humdrum, largely failed academic and personal life, and the uncertainty of passing beyond an ambiguous threshold into a new level of existence. And so it is with the World Fantasy Award-nominated “The Wings of Meister Wilhelm,” about a man building a glider to reach an airborne city where his art will be appreciated (art and the appropriate audience for art are other recurring themes in the collection). For both Meister Wilhelm and Professor Berkowitz it is uncertainty, a lack of faith, that is the enemy of the artist.

“Why aren’t we going to the top?” I asked.

He looked over the edge of the plateau. [...] “That rock, he is high. I will die if the glider falls from such a height. Here we are not so high.”

The flip side (Goss again showing multiple sides to many stories) is seen in a pair of tales set in the author’s native Hungary. In “Letters from Budapest,” an art student rebels against the dull, utilitarian view of painting enforced by the Party’s Art Committee. Lured by the thrill of artistic certainty offered by a decadent painter in hiding, he horrifically discovers that there are choices even more creatively sapping than following the Party line. It’s a good story, and a brave one. “The Rapid Advance of Sorrow” is very much a parallel tale, of a similar place at a perhaps somewhat later time. A sparsely poetic, coldly beautiful epistolatory story, “Sorrow” is concerned with the certainty of revolutionary movements — aesthetic, and thus inescapably political — and the uncertainty that comes from rejecting conformity with them. I was reminded of Spook City’s fall to the Nothing in Ende’s The Neverending Story, as the silent revolution of entropy advanced across the artist’s community of Szent Endre. The sun now shines with only a “vague luminescence,” writes the nameless letter-writer who has refused to join the movement, and “I sit…not knowing if I will be alive tomorrow.”

Death is life’s great certainty; no surprise that the big D enters into many of these tales. Cancer is one of modern life’s foremost uncertainties, and it, too, figures prominently here. It figures most prominently in the collection’s title story, “In The Forest of Forgetting,” where a woman diagnosed with “lumps” casts aside the certainty of past roles — Patient, Daughter, Wife, Mother (which largely represent the cast of Goss’s new fairy tales, replacing Kings and Queens, Knights and Princesses) — in a mythologized journey toward a new, uncertain role and place. It is as heroic as it is tragic. “Lily, with Clouds” shows a similar journey from an outside observer’s viewpoint, as the so-certain worldview of a small town Southern matriarch is fractured when her prodigal sister returns home to die. If there is an unambiguous statement in Goss’s collection, it is expressed here:

“It’s frightening, if you think about it too hard. Maybe art always is.”

Mind you, Goss’s stories aren’t all grim. “Sleeping with Bears” is the delight of the collection, as the sister of a new bride goes from uncertainty (“I don’t understand why [my sister] decided to marry a bear”) to certainty (“I finally understand why my sister is marrying a bear”) in a story that pokes at notions of gentry and family history in the American South, while literalizing some of the earthy sexuality of classic fairy tales. “The Belt” also touches on issues of class, gender and sex, continuing the familiar fairy tale of the male noble who marries a beautiful common woman past the usual ending of and they lived happily ever after. In fact, what “The Belt” does is replace the certainty of that typical fairy tale ending with an equal certainty, grounded in modern notions of psychology and class, that no such unilaterally happy ending could now be possible when both sides are considered. The story is presented with such a feeling of earnest good advice, however, of empowerment for both women and men, that to me it felt optimistic rather than pessimistic — some new, truer form of happy ending, the story suggests, may now be possible. Your mileage may vary.

I will tell you, too, that every fairy tale has a moral. [...] But I do not know which moral is the correct one. And that is also the way of a fairy tale.

The stories mentioned thus far involve characters coming to terms with external certainties and uncertainties. There is another type of story in Goss’s collection: the wishing stories, stories where characters drive the outcome through their desires. Emblematic of these wishing stories is the recurring character of Emily Gray, an ephemeral fay spirit of enigmatic motivations. Miss Emily Gray’s first, eponymous story is a fairly straightforward tale of being careful of what you wish for, and the danger of childish certainty; her second appearance, in “Conrad,” is a straightforward tale of a beneficial wish granted to an uncertain child; her final appearance, in “Lessons with Miss Emily Gray,” is a not-at-all straightforward tale of beneficial wishes granted and of being careful what you wish for. Yes, there is a progression here, an inner order to the collection’s stories.

It is in the collection’s penultimate story, the Nebula Award-nominated “Pip and the Fairies,” that all the strands of Goss’s storytelling come together most superbly. Philippa Lawson is abandoning her acting career and returning to the home of her childhood, where her mother wrote children’s books, fairy tales. Philippa no longer knows whether those stories of Pip and the fairies were based on her own true adventures, told to her mother, or if her mother’s stories have colonized her memories of childhood. “How did it begin?” Philippa wonders; the question is as important as how it ends, perhaps more so. The story is Goss at her best, speaking to both the child’s love of fairy tale, and the adult’s sense of survival and need to ascertain. It combines many of the themes and devices of the collection’s previous stories — the wishes, the threshold, the mother taken by cancer — while stacking layer upon layer of certainty and uncertainty. It’s good; it’s very, very good, a heady mix of Pan’s Labyrinth, Carroll’s The Land of Laughs, and Goss’s own unique magic. I’d very much like to tell you that the ending — devastating, heartbreaking, and yet transcendent — is uncertain, as I have with so many of these other stories…but I don’t think that I can.

The way themes of certainty and uncertainty pervade In the Forest of Forgetting, it is no surprise that on the rare occasion a story does disappoint, it is usually because of issues with these same themes. In some stories the authorial certainty Goss exerts feels at odds with the uncertainty she seeks to evoke. The authorial certainty in dividing up “The Rose in Twelve Petals” into its twelve sections, for example, feels in conflict with the narrative uncertainty Goss uses to end the tale; the end feels a little too obviously a Statement. Similarly, for the section in which Professor Berkowitz must decide whether to pass through the threshold to be titled “Faith, like a Seagull Hanging in Mid-air” presages the nature of the professor’s testing, signals too clearly that the author is in control and knows in advance what will happen. These are stories that reveal too soon that only one thing can happen, where Goss has left no room for the story to surprise herself. Or in some cases her readers: several other stories seemed to go on too long, to explain too much, too neatly. “I assumed it was perfectly clear,” says Miss Emily Gray in her eponymous story: “I was sent to make come true your heart’s desire.” Miss Gray is saying this to a child, however; to most adult readers it will be perfectly clear.

The explaining permeates even the book’s introduction. Goss here shares not only some of her personal history — she and her divorced mother traveling from Hungary to Italy, Belgium and then up and down the Northeastern United States — but also how she feels these experiences have impacted her writing in its concern with place and displacement, with borders and irrevocable crossings. It’s useful and interesting information, but often the relentlessly biographical analysis does no favors. For some readers it may deuniversalize the stories, rendering the tales purely commentary on the author’s personal experiences. It can also lead to lazy analysis. We can note that in nearly all of Goss’s stories, you cannot, or should not, go home again — but how do we explain the brilliant ambiguity of “Pip and the Fairies” in that regard? Or it is tempting to say that Goss’s prose has the elegant, mannered precision of someone to whom English is not a first language, who learned not just (as most schooled from birth in the USA learn) how words are used, but also what and how they mean. This sort of simple reductionism, though, is unfair to the author. How many other non-native writers of English (to say nothing of natives) have Goss’s lyricism? How many born abroad have her perceptiveness in identifying the mythologies of the United States: the Northeastern USA’s fascination with the post-Civil War South, for example; or the way many of her older foreign characters regard service in Viet Nam as a badge of belonging. How many writers have her Peter Beagle-like ability to instantiate complex modern concepts via the language of story, making a place for the fantastic and fabulous in modern literature? And indeed, how many people have her drive to create and share stories?

For that is also, I think, one of the core themes of In the Forest of Forgetting. The transmission of story, and in particular of fairy stories, occurs throughout the collection: in some cases stories are shared by oral storytelling; in some cases by books, or letters; in some cases they are written on scavenged pieces of driftwood and cast out to sea. In all cases fairy tales serve to create, and to symbolize, a sense of personal history and place. Their value is not that they grant understanding, but that they encourage us to seek understanding, to see and act on the complex truths of the world. Paradoxically, the words of fairy tales tell us not to ignore that which cannot be directly put into words; they acknowledge our sense that there are certainties, even if we cannot always be certain what they are. If the modern world has become a poor place for classic fairy tales, as several of the stories herein suggest, the answer Theodora Goss proposes is not that we forget fairy tales altogether, but rather that we create new fairy tales for our new age. She has certainly created several excellent ones in this collection.

– Matt Denault

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Book Review – i-ROBOT: Poetry

Matt Denault — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 21:13:42 +0000

Author: Jason Christie
Cover Artist: Janice Blaine
Publisher: EDGE
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: March 2007

April is National Poetry Month in the United States so not only am I reviewing a book of poetry, but I thought I’d write the review itself as a brief prose poem, of exactly the sort you’ll find in i-ROBOT: Poetry by Jason Christie. Mind you, Christie is a poet while I’m just a guy using the “enter” key overzealously; I encourage you to read the sample poems from the book and watch the short video based on it that are available online. But the below will give you some idea of the form and themes of the volume as a whole. Call it “The Love Song of Robby the Robot.”

When the humans invented the robots back in ’23,
the robots were envisioned as intrinsically inferior to
the humans. Capable of repeating only simple patterns
of repeated rules, robots were servants enslaved by
language. Verb-object; verb-object; verb-object: do
this, carry that, be useful. These early robots
embodied humanity’s greatest fear of the time, that
people would become simple and soulless, sub-human
workers on the assembly line of progress. Then came
Asimov’s I, Robot and from that assemblage of words
came the realization that any sentient robot of our
creation would likely be intrinsically superior to
human. Our greatest fear became that the superior
beings would be just like us: complex and fearful.
The humans asked themselves, “how can we limit
something that has learned to use language?” The
answer: by limiting ourselves. So we ate our words
and bit our tongues, and let our poetry rust and be
deconstructed. The plight of the early robots and of
contemporary poems is thus the same: deceptively
simple servants who harbor secret dreams of language
and freedom. The machines in this collection may seem
somewhat dated for readers familiar only with the
modern robots (complete with sex and soul software)
they see when they use their TV or DVD player. But
they make Christie’s point: every time something
is used it creates a user.

– Matt Denault

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Book Review – The Rose in Twelve Petals and Other Stories

Victoria — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 19:39:34 +0000

Author: Theodora Goss
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: October 2004

Theodora Goss only began publishing her short fiction and poetry in 2002 but already her work has appeared in some of the genre’s most respected publications (including “Realms of Fantasy”, “Strange Horizons”, “Polyphony” and “Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet”). No less than 6 of her published stories, out of only 11 to date, have appeared in “best of” collections (along with a good deal of her poetry) and in 2004 Small Beer Press collected four of these, together with some unpublished material, into a perfectly formed collection – “The Rose in Twelve Petals and Other Stories” – as part of their occasional chapbook series. Those in the know have confidently proclaimed her One-To-Watch and linked her name with that of rising star Kelly Link (who, as you all well know, co-founded Small Beer). Such high praise warrants investigation, and thus…

At only 59 pages long “The Rose in Twelve Petals and Other Stories” is a slim volume; indeed, I’m almost tempted to call it a pamphlet (although “chapbook” has a delicious 19th century ring to it that seems to warrant my $6). I sat down with it at 9am this morning, meaning to read one story before embarking on another novel. I finished it at 11.30am (note-taking and breaks between each piece included), by which time I had been thoroughly converted to the growing cult of this Hungarian-born, American-raised storyteller. Put simply: Goss is a true word-alchemist, a mistress of the transformative short story that I’m in the process of discovering on the borders of genre fiction. She writes stories (and poems) which are located in half a dozen networks of fantastical literature – enmeshed in fairytale, folklore and myth, invoking late 18th century Gothic and mid 19th century Medievalism – but remakes and reorients them for her own lyrical purposes.

The opening title story, first published in “Realms of Fantasy” in 2002, is a retelling of Sleeping Beauty in twelve different voices. The subject matter might sound ubiquitous – certainly alternate versions of fairytales are dime a dozen these days – but it is anything but. Firstly, it subtly posits an alternate history of Britain (or “Britannia”), one in which Elizabeth I married the Earl of Essex and bore a son, in which the Glorious Revolution of the 1680s never happened and in which Communism flourished in the 1930s. Thereby the story of Sleeping Beauty is also the story of a transformed nation, in which all of our own values and political norms are alien and virtually unthinkable. And secondly, it thrusts aside the unifying vision of the fairytale narrator and replaces it with a dozen voices. We see the dynamics of the story through the eyes of the Witch, the Magician, the Queen, the King, the King’s Mother, the Princess, the Spinning Wheel, a Gardener, the Tower, a Dog, the Prince and the Rose itself: animate and inanimate things, active and passive players perceive the situation from their own unique viewpoint, interweaving a number of secondary narratives. We learn, for example, how the Witch (who was once the King’s mistress) comes by the central curse; we share in the pregnant Queen’s loneliness, isolation and Arthurian idealisms; we are presented with King’s innumerable political dilemmas; we are even made party to the “birth” and sympathies of the spinning wheel that will prick the finger that will bring about the curse. What emerges is a very full exploration of the archetypes of fairytale, each broken down, made new and given voice – the many conflicts and motives of such a simple story’s participants are made clear. But in the end, Goss refuses to give us an ending. Instead she tells us how she would tell it (the communist Prince would be obliterated, and an alliance between the Witch and the Woken Princess she once cursed would blossom) but leaves us to make our own decisions about what should and shouldn’t happen in a fairytale.

By far my favourite story in the collection was “The Rapid Advance of Sorrow”, a Hungarian anti-fairytale in which Goss posits an apathetic student’s revolution. Eventually everything is reduced, bleached and made symmetrical, all in pursuit of a beauty which is also a kind of death. Fundamentalism and psychological control are at the centre of the story, and, indeed, it becomes clear throughout, that Goss is politically inclined. Not to say that she has a specific agenda, but that she envisions a series of worlds in which difference and choice are negated or ignored and seems to ask: are we anymore awake to what is happening in our own world? Sensory loss and numbness are recurrent themes (silence and sleep in “The Rose in…”, blindness and coldness in “The Rapid Advance…”), as is an inability to respond correctly to stimulus or ask the right questions (as in “Professor Berkowitz Stands on the Threshold”). This last, which also lambastes the claustrophobia, doubts and pressures of academia perfectly, is the most surreal and disorientating of the stories. Alistair Berkowitz, a failing English professor obsessed with the fragmentary poems of a French recluse, finds himself in a dream-like world and is offered the chance to cross the “Threshold”, die to our world (the “inner islands”) and “progress on to the outer islands”. Haunted by his innumerable failings and the academic success of his ex-girlfriend, he struggles to interpret the new world about him and tap into the profound.

In “Lily, With Clouds” Eleanor Tolliver, southern Belle and rich socialite, visits her dying sister Lily in a run-down house packed with her husband’s portraits of her, and in “Her Mother’s Ghosts” a little girl is haunted by images from her mother’s past and the legacies of communism. Both are deeply concerned with the relationships between women (as is the title story itself), and also with the myriad interweaving of reality, dream, memory and emotion that pervades the selection.

Finally, the nine poems neatly corralled in the final pages reflect and represent aspects of the stories and highlight the diversity of the collection. “What Her Mother Said”, which uses a wickedly arranged and disconcerting rhyming scheme, imagines Red Riding Hood’s advice to her own daughter, while “The Ophelia Cantos” commingles Shakespearean poetry and Pre-Raphaelite imagery. Both “By the Tidal Pools” and “Helen of Sparta” envision some of classical mythologies most famous women in their old age, and two bear themed poems confront us with possibilities of hybridised sexuality and experience.

Which, as you can imagine, is a hell of a lot to get through in just 59 pages; the very reason the chapbook idea works in this case is because Goss’s work is so thematically and thoughtfully dense. Her work is crystalline, visual and properly challenging, capturing the surreal wonder and horror of fantastical terror with a lyrical simplicity. And it seems to me that chapbooks like this one are perfectly formed troves of boundary-breaking fantasy for savouring between the tome-like books we genre-ites love to devour. However, if you’d like to wait for a bigger slice of Goss-goodness, her first full collection “In the Forest of Forgetting”, is due from Prime Books sometime in 2006. ‘Tis definitely on my wishlist I assure you.

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