Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

The newest entry in my occasional blog series on homebrewing is live on the Small Beer Press site.

In this one, I go on a pine-needle eating spree, brew some beer with spruce tips in place of hops, and then proceed to party like an 1830s New England housewife.

And by the way, just in case anyone is actually syndicating these, the location of the Literary Beer RSS feed has changed to the following:

http://www.smallbeerpress.com/?tag=literary-beer&feed=rss2

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

So here we are. We know what we know. There are certain givens: time, matter, energy. We come out of them, we plod and stutter through them, we go back to them. There are also unknowns, and of these–their quantity, their breadth and scope–we haven’t got a clue. But we progress. We live. We add to the knowns. From within them, our discoveries seem vast. Yet our carvings away at the unknown, which ought to correspond in moment and consequence, after contemplation, after living, emerge as imperceptible. Death, God, Fate, Consciousness. We can be overwhelmed by these unknowns, we can proceed in spite of them, we can ignore them to our peril. We can fall back on what we know. Time, matter, energy. But more likely, more often, we fall back on what we are. Consciousness. Ephemeral, yes. Indeterminate, yes. But there. Present. A focal point of known and unknown, a pinhead upon which angels and mortals dance even though it can take them nowhere but where they are.

What is all this, exactly? I suppose it’s an argument against fear, and for striving. I look across the table, across the gulf from screen to screen, and there I find identities in the same situation, existing at the same summit of incomprehensible, familiar, unknowable, and inevitable. And sometimes I’m shocked at the far more tangible gulfs in ideology and apprehension that result from what is essentially the same. And other times I’m shocked any of us manage to communicate at all. But we’re all going to the same place: death. And we all came out of the same set of resources: matter, energy, life, the past. And we’re all trying to occupy the heads of our own pins with recourse only to those same resources. Trying to maintain equilibrium and to progress at the same time.

Sometimes I wish I could pull off my head, pull of my worldview, my set of both rational and irrational connections to life, matter, energy, the past and the unknowable, and plunk it on top of somebody else for a little while. On the other hand, the prospect of somebody, anybody, doing the same thing to me–no matter who it is, Ghandi or Dr. King or Einstein or Tesla or Marx or Erin or my father–frankly, terrifies me. I try to overcome that. I strive. Just like I take what I can get when it comes to the head-popping-off, head-hopping, etc. And I consider myself lucky, when it occurs to me to do so. And other times I hate myself, because it isn’t luck at all, it’s how you use what you’re given.

And that’s what striving is. We do what we can.

Forgive me. I realize I’ve been stating the obvious here, and just because I’m formulating it in these vague, mystical terms doesn’t make it any more meaningful. There are parts of this argument I’ve been having with myself that I can’t formulate except in my head, and occasionally, when the moment’s right, in person.

Ask me about it sometime.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Tonight at midnight, “Between Two Treasons”, the second in my hopefully never-ending series of short stories about those lovable, man-eating, gun-slinging, ten-gallon-hat-wearing, prick-devouring centaurs goes live in issue #23 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

It is not for the faint-at-heart. Or the underage.

But please go read it anyway.

And the first one too, if you like—which is here.

This is some gloriously beer-addled 17th-century monk’s copy of a copy of a long-lost ancient jewelry engraving depicting a cloven-hoofed centaur residing at the center of the labyrinth of Daedalus. Whoever that monk was, if I ever manage to hunt down his moldering skull, I will give it a fat, wet smooch.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

My near-future-apocalyptic magic realist short story “Starlings” is now live in Abyss & Apex #31. (Which issue also happens to feature a very cool poem by LCRW author Daniel A. Rabuzzi—lucky me!)

“Starlings” is a story about climate change, tech withdrawal, and memory—themes all very near to my heart. With the possible exception of “Construction-Paper Moon”, in no other story of mine have I laid my own emotional evolution so open on the page.

Please go read it, and enjoy!

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

For the stories in our second chapbook, each of us at The Homeless Moon chose as inspiration a fictional setting. Here’s the first scene of mine, “The Cannon and the Prophetess”:

One Kestrel pronounced the last phrase of the sonnet he had been reciting for the Duchess of Ennasin, and the crowd of loungers who made up her court erupted in applause. Acknowledging their flattery, he lowered himself to one knee.

“No, no,” said the Duchess, twiddling her manicured fingers to indicate he should arise. “You mustn’t prostrate yourself. Your primitive origins are of no consequence—you outrank me, Your Majesty!”

The assembled nobles tittered at their hostess’s kind condescension.

With an abruptness inappropriate to tact—but which he had come to know would be expected, secretly desired, of an educated savage such as himself—One Kestrel surged to his feet like a predator ready to strike. The bones and beads sewn in his robes of state rattled satisfactorily, the brilliant feathers of his royal headdress rippled, and he allowed his eyes to flash just so.

The nobles gasped, recoiling; this time, the nervous laughter of the Duchess betrayed an underlying terror. “My dear Captain Saturno, you are to be commended on such a magnificent find! If only you would allow me to purchase him from you.”

Captain Saturno took a knee himself. Resplendent in his shining steel cuirass and waxed moustache, he made a flourish, and taking her offered hand, placed his lips to her ring. “Your praise is acknowledged most humbly—but I am afraid King Kestrel cannot linger, for he is called away on an engagement at another court—and I’m sure Your Eminence could not wish to sully His Majesty’s reputation by making him late.”

“At the very least,” the flush Duchess begged, “allow me to offer His Majesty a parting gift—a boon. Name anything! It shall be wrapped and placed in his flagship’s stateroom, where my court’s generous donations to his cause already await.”

One Kestrel drew back overeducated lips from filed teeth, and throwing a ravenous glance at his master and keeper, uttered that too-familiar entreaty with which he’d caused himself to be expunged from so many a court. “There is one small secret I dearly desire. I can only
further impose on Your Eminence’s hospitality in this: if you would, provide me with your military’s recipe for gunpowder.”

Amidst the ensuing uproar, Saturno clutched One Kestrel by the elbow and propelled him from the court. His face was bloodless, blank—but whether with rage or something else, One Kestrel didn’t know.

Once they were safe aboard the caravel Constança, Captain Saturno barked orders to throw off the moorings and get underway. He escorted His Primitive Majesty One Kestrel, King of America, to his sumptuous, gift-strewn lodgings in the brig, shoved him inside, and slammed the door.

And here are the relevant lines from Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, from which I took my inspiration:

Pantagruel then asked what sort of people dwelt in that damned island. They are, answered Xenomanes, all hypocrites, holy mountebanks, tumblers of beads, mumblers of ave-marias, spiritual comedians, sham saints, hermits, all of them poor rogues who, like the hermit of Lormont between Blaye and Bordeaux, live wholly on alms given them by passengers. Catch me there if you can, cried Panurge; may the devil’s head-cook conjure my bumgut into a pair of bellows if ever you find me among them! Hermits, sham saints, living forms of mortification, holy mountebanks, avaunt! in the name of your father Satan, get out of my sight! When the devil’s a hog, you shall eat bacon.

I’m not going to make any attempt to synthesize one with the other; chances are it would turn out a disaster, and anyway I’d much rather just encourage you to read the story and form your own opinions.

So instead, I’ll close with Gustave Doré’s utterly demented evil jester illustration to Rabelais’ prologue, which starts like this:

Most noble and illustrious drinkers, and you thrice precious pockified blades (for to you, and none else, do I dedicate my writings)….

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Particularly when they are twice as big! Last year’s Homeless Moon chapbook weighed in at 44 pages. This year’s: 80. The poor woman working the register at the printers nearly killed herself trying to get them up onto the counter.

Two weeks remain until Readercon and the “official” release. In the meantime, we will be sending out a few advance copies for review and/or to wedge under your chair legs so they don’t wobble. I am setting ten copies aside for ye F&SFesque blog promo. If you want one, and are willing to write a bit of a blog entry about what you thought of it, ask. If you are not the eleventh person to do so, you’ll get one.

Otherwise, you’ll just have to wait the two weeks and paypal me the two bucks for shipping. Less than that, even, if you’d prefer the electronic version. Not sure exactly when that’ll come off. But soon–in the next couple days. When it does, you’ll see it here.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Nancy Kress had an interesting blog post the other day about her actual moment-by-moment process of constructing a paragraph: hashing out a couple of sentences, then shoving off the ones that come out of chronological order, cutting the excess words, fixing the sentence structure so it feels natural/fresh, fixing the language so it feels appropriate to the character and setting. A lot of what she says is pretty universal—which I think is one of the things that makes her such a great teacher of writing. She can point out the nose on your face, and somehow it comes across as a revelation, because you’ve never looked at it in quite that way.

Another of Nancy Kress’s great strengths is her economy of language, how she can build a subtle, complex story out of so little.

Thinking about this as I go along with my own writing, it occurs to me there’s one element of this sort of in-the-trenches prose styling that she hasn’t touched upon—possibly because there just is no way to codify it. It can be a painful thing to think about for those of us aspiring writers reading every how-to book we can get our hands on, hoping to someday write as well as Nancy Kress, but there’s always going to be a part of the writing process that’s ineffable, that can’t be fully grasped by rational means. There are too many words and too many subjects, too many unplumbable depths for the mere mind to fathom. Call it the unconscious, the minor deity of inspiration, or pure, dumb randomization, but at some point, you’re going to be hammering away at a sentence, and out will come something astonishing. Call that thing “turn of phrase”.

It’s hard to identify that thing in other people’s work, just because no matter how effortless and flawless a phrase or sentence seems, there’s no way to know the author didn’t agonize over it for hours, going through dozens of word choice options until they found the perfect one. The feeling I get when I come across such a phrasing, however, is unmistakable. And at that point, it doesn’t matter to me whether it came to the author in a flash of divine comprehension or not. Because even if I can’t pinpoint and identify the processes by which such a flash can occur (and if I could, I contend that the writing of fiction would cease to be art and become something soulless and mechanical), I can still train myself, by identifying that flash in the work of others, to recognize it when it comes forth from my own hands. And then, through everything I have managed to learn about the craft of fiction by studying the work and the teachings of masters, I can nudge and tweak and twist the rest of the sentence and paragraph and page to fit around it, carve away and slough off surplus until it stands out like it should.

This is why I keep seeking out great prose stylists in spite of the frustrating fact that whatever powers they possess may never be mine.

“A good strategist concentrates on what he can change,” says the divinely-touched sculptress to the brooding, crippled, chess-playing boy in Vandana Singh’s “The Room on the Roof”, which I happened to be reading over breakfast when this notion came upon me. That’s a wonderful line, and one of those truths of the human condition that are, for me, what writing is all about. But it’s not the line that stopped me in my tracks.

But sometimes a hopeless melancholy possessed her, and she thought the rain would never end, and that she and her brother and parents would never be happy or free, that beyond one wall there were others, an infinite concentricity of walls. Up in Aparna’s room every evening, she felt joy and yearning like a fever. and underneath it the fear that all she had gained was temporary, that one day the sculptress would leave them and the magic would go out of their lives. Sometimes she caught herself holding her breath, waiting for the change.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

I just stumbled onto possibly the best object lesson in showing, not telling in fiction I’ll ever get.

In 2005, I wrote a story called “Hope and Erosion”, about a kingdom living in a sandcastle threatened by the rising tide. It was the second story I’d ever sold, to a Christian fantasy e-zine called Dragons, Knights and Angels. I was very proud of it at the time. At the time, it was the best story I’d ever written.

In 2004, all unbenknownst to me at the time, Jeffrey Ford wrote a story called “The Annals of Eelin Ok”, which was published in Datlow and Windling’s The Faery Reel, and won the Fountain Award for that year (and on whose website it can still be read for free). It’s based on the exact same premise: a tiny, fantastical being living out his life in a sandcastle made by human hands. His story is way better. I just listened to it on a Podcastle show from a couple weeks back, read by Rajan Khanna, who may be my new favorite podcast reader—his voice is understated, quiet and calm and eminently listenable, but somehow capable of hitting just the right emotional notes with the strength of a clapper striking a cathedral bell. It almost made me cry.

Here’s the lesson: everything about a story is more powerful when you’re experiencing it right there with the character. “Hope and Erosion” is told like a parable. Hermit, the hero, is a hero in the classic fairytale sense, the way Sir Gawain is a hero, or the Red Cross Knight. Which is fine, but there’s no understanding that kind of hero as a person. He’s away up there on the pedestal of myth.

Eelin Ok is a fairy, but he’s a person. His whole life is there on the page, his heart is open, and you’re in it.

I suppose this lesson may work better on me than on you, gentle reader, since you may not have had the luck to have written the exact same story as Jeffrey Ford. But if you feel so inclined, you might could get a similar effect if you read the two stories side by side.

Read the Jeff Ford story, anyway, if you haven’t. It’s awesome.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

My newest Literary Beer article just went online over at the Small Beer Press blog, in which I suggest hops might not be all they’re cracked up to be, and consider some truly medieval alternatives. The story of how hops came to be used in beer is actually pretty cool—and a worthwhile thing to know for all you fantasists interested in medieval settings.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

I’m having one of those afternoons where everything I’m made of seems to come apart and lie there spread out on the carpet for me to rummage through like plastic pieces from three dozen different building block sets I’ve been accumulating since I was three. And the turning world rolls a sunbeam across the whole angular mess and up the wall and then gone, and I sit here trying to get back to what I was doing—writing, trying to get the legos back up into their towers and buttresses and balustrades—but all I can do is keep pulling them down, turning them over, thinking This is what I am.

So I’ve been reading Little, Big. Probably not the safest thing to be doing in this kind of mood.

Some books are so good they drive me back to the blank page with sticks and lashes, shouting, “You can do this, you have to do this, do it!” Other books, better books even than that, make me stare at the page and feel the world rusting, shouting, “You’ll never do that.” This afternoon, Little, Big seems to have made its way into a third, still more rarefied and elite subcategory, whose members, if I really wanted to depress myself, I could probably count on two hands: books that are a distillation of existence—of everybody’s existence, but of mine in particular—books that maybe happen to come at the right time and be about exactly the thing that occupies me at that moment in my life, or else maybe they’re always like that for everybody, because they are what life is about. Books that seem to know me better than I do.

“Kill the fatted calf,” Momdy said, the only one there to whom the phrase would have occurred. “And fricassee it.”

Every few pages, something like this leaps right up off the page and stabs me with a white-hot knitting needle. Then there’s a lull, a chance for me to catch my breath and quiet my bawling. Then it happens again.

They stared at each other wildly, all questions, no answers; and at the same moment saw that. Smoky clapped his hand to his brow. “But how could you have thought I… that I… I mean wasn’t it obvious I didn’t know…”

“Well, I wondered,” Auberon said. “I thought maybe you were pretending. But I couldn’t be sure. How could I be sure? I couldn’t take a chance.”

“Then why didn’t you…”

“Don’t say it,” Auberon said. “Don’t say, Why didn’t you ask. Just don’t.”

“Oh, God,” Smoky said, laughing. “Oh, dear.”

Auberon sat back on the floor, shaking his head. “All that work,” he said. “All that effort.”

This stuff is taken out of context, obviously, which probably deprives it of the power to do whatever it’s doing to me. Consider yourself lucky. But I suppose the force of the impact comes from that it’s archetypal and it’s real at once. It’s saying something universal, using ancient forms, but doing it simply and intimately, without barely even having to draw on the ancient or the universal at all, because it’s been building up a mountainous reserve of all it could ever need for the past four hundred pages.

This is why novels win over short stories in the end. On most any other day, I never would admit that. There are many, many short stories I’ve read that fit into tier one and tier two: they drive me to write, they drive me away from writing, they drive me back. But in tier three—I don’t want to have to count what’s there on my two hands, and I hate to admit it—but none of them are short stories.

I guess I just thought I’d gotten past the point where this kind of thing could bite me. Thought I’d taken enough classes in psychoanalytic theory and read more than enough fantasy and metaphysics and aged enough to make me immune.

Not so.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

At 12:00 AM (now), “Of Thinking Being and Beast” goes online at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, alongside a story called “Dragon’s-Eyes” by the significantly-better-than-me Margaret Ronald. Yah! It is a high day to be me.

A disclaimer: the centaur stories—of which there are many more, though this is the first I’ve sold—are bleak, vicious, and include not a little of the old ultra-violence in the Anthony Burgess sense. Kid friendly they are not.

This is Botticelli’s Pallas and the Centaur. Doesn’t he look innocent and retiring. Don’t be fooled.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

I just got my contributor copy of Shroud magazine Issue #4, which includes, in addition to my Mayan temple story “Sketch of a Ruin”, fiction by Tim Waggoner and fellow Odyssey grad Sara King. This issue was a bit delayed in production, but looks by all appearance to have been worth the wait. It’s 100+ pages, perfect-bound, magazine-sized, with a glossy color cover—very satisfying to behold. Copies are available from Shroud Publishing and Amazon.

“Sketch of a Ruin” was born sometime in early 2007, not long after the visit to the Yucatan Peninsula which yielded so many of the photographs I used to decorate The Mossy Skull (and which I blogged a fair bit about, if you care). The story features the intrepid Great White Explorers John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, and was inspired in part by Stephens’ fantastic 1841 travelogue, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan.

I shall resist nerding you people to death with the ramblings of my pre-Colombian obsession and restrict myself to transcribing here the excerpt from Edgar Allan Poe’s review of Incidents with which I open the story.

“No one can deny his personal merits as a traveller, his enthusiasm, boldness, acuteness, courage in danger, and perseverance under difficulty. … Of Central America and her antiquities Mr. Stephens may know, and no doubt does know, as much as the most learned antiquarian. Here all is darkness.”

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

This is coming a bit late–most everybody has their power back by now. But I have a free moment to breathe, and I really have been hurting for something to scroll down the freakish zoot-suit-boogieing android post immediately below.

I live in the Connecticut valley, so the ice storm passed right over our heads without breaking a branch. There was a visible line on the sides of all the hills, at maybe six or seven hundred feet—a stark division between bare brown oak and black hemlock woods and a crystalline otherworld of steely, sparkling ice. Over the first couple days there was a rash of paranoid tree-felling along the street I live on, beautiful, perfectly healthy, centuries-old maples chainsawed into towering heaps of lumber for fear the next storm might bring them down and kill us all. I felt guiltily fortunate, hearing news reports about what had happened to people barely more than five miles away.

Then I had to drive up into the hills to the farm where I work.

It was unbelievable. There were miles-long sections of road where the top of every single tree on both shoulders had been sheared off fifteen feet up. Entire houses and yards were buried under fallen timber. National guard humvees rolled past with coal-gray chunks of slush clinging in their wheel-wells, utterly surreal against the frozen landscape. Dozens of electric company cranes moved in long, slow lines, surrounded by dead-eyed, frost-covered dudes in grey and orange.

On the dirt road that leads to the farm, a huge tree-trunk had snapped almost completely in half, fell across the road and got caught in branches on other side, so that I had to drive underneath its horizontal trunk, swerving to avoid the low-hanging brush and praying that the whole thing wouldn’t choose that moment to fall and crush me.

At work, they had been without power for six days. We operated on a little gas generator, switching off every few hours between powering the refrigerator and oven to the computers and fax machine. I learned how to work the generator: a horrible roaring gremlin, like a lawnmower engine off its wheels, loud and awful-smelling. It gave me a new appreciation for electric power—and a potent sensibility of its limitations. Running a small hair-dryer (for shrink-wrapping herbal tinctures) at its lowest possible setting was enough to blow out the generator in three seconds flat.

We had our christmas party by candlelight, huddled close to the wood stove in hats and coats. At four, when it got too dark to see, everybody packed up and went home.

The local home-supply megastore, which had only opened the week before after overcoming vehement community resistance (and which I’ve been angrily boycotting in the vain hope it will go away and the marshes and pasture it replaced will magically reappear) sold out its supply of generators in two days.

“This is what it’s going to be like from now on,” my boss said. “People can’t rely on the power company anymore.”

I felt sick. The implication is there—the cause of all this. And gas-powered generators aren’t going to be the answer.

So I went home and tried to make myself feel better by filling out my christmas shopping list with LED and CFL light bulbs and solar-powered cellphone chargers and worm-powered home composting kits. It hasn’t quite worked. Maybe it’ll help to blog about it.

Here’s some other stuff I would have bought for people if I could budget it:

• OLPC Laptop
• Tesla Roadster
• Home hydroelectric
• Wood stove with catalytic converter
• Residential wind turbine
• Vegetable oil conversion for diesel cars
• Bicycle

I’ll shut up now.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

is the title of a Peter Rowan song I’ve been kicking around in my head for awhile. Like most of Peter Rowan’s stuff, it has a certain ageless quality that makes me feel like I’ve known it all my life. When I first heard it, I sort of assumed it must belong to the same storied vernacular as songs like Whiskey in the Jar, Stagger Lee, Jack-A-Roe, Man of Constant Sorrow, songs that have existed for so long in so many different versions nobody knows who wrote them anymore, and it feels perfectly possible nobody wrote them at all, they just appeared, fully formed, out of the fabric of the universe just in time for the invention of the fiddle. Archetypal. Like the figure of a Michelangelo slave inside living granite waiting for the chisel.

There are stories like that too.

When I hear something like that for the first time, I have a tendency to go digging for its history, trying to feel out the shapes of the ideas that formed its roots. I figure for an element of story to hang on so long, to endure so many changes and keep going, is a sign that there’s some fundamental truth at its core, some lesson to be learned. The study of the horned god I undertook for last year’s solstice is an example of this; I’ve done it with King Lear, Baba Yaga, the myth of the Flood.

I tried to do this with “Fetch Wood, Carry Water”, and found out I was wrong. Rowan wrote it in 2001; that’s as far back as the song’s history goes.

Or so I believed until the other day, when I came across the following Buddhist proverb in some insane occult/new age literature, while researching the concept of spiritual ascension:

Before enlightenment, fetch wood, carry water. After enlightenment, fetch wood, carry water.

Turns out Peter Rowan, bluegrass balladeer, pulled those lyrics out of Eastern philosophy and used them to write a reggae song. That is exactly the kind of universal wisdom I’m looking for.

Now those words keep coming back to me, whatever I’m doing.

I’m pretty sure the point of these koan thingies is not to try to explicate all the wisdom out of them, but to contemplate in silence, glean from them what lessons you can without having to put it into words.

But words are kind of the point for me—both means and end, if you know what I mean.

Suffice it to say I think there’s a powerful message here for the struggling writer. It’s about perseverance, about knowing what’s essential, and about the importance of returning often to the fundamentals no matter how far one may stray. There’s no such thing as too much enlightenment. In fact, you can never have enough. But you’ll always need water and wood.

Here’s a version of the Peter Rowan song I’m pretty sure it is legal for me to share:
“Fetch Wood, Carry Water” - Peter Rowan & Donna the Buffalo, 5-2-2001 (13.5 mb)

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Once, when I was eleven, I was attempting to get air off a graded curb at the bottom of a steep hill on my wee department store BMX bike when I lost control and took a header into a fire hydrant. At least, that’s the event I’ve reconstructed from the fragments I actually remember from that afternoon, which include sitting covered in blood on the side of the road wondering what the hell I was doing there, getting asked a barrage of worried questions by my father, sitting in the backseat of his car wondering how I had got there, then the same barrage of questions from a doctor.

The whole experience was dreamlike and actually kind of wonderful. I was pretty damn frightened of death when I was eleven—I had a cousin who died in a motorcycle accident around then—and was generally a scrawny wuss terrified of pain. But neither pain nor fear comes into the memory at all. I was just sort of awed, wondering where my mind had been, where I had been, in those black spaces I couldn’t remember. It was like I had traveled through time.

I was probably reading Madeline L’Engle and CS Lewis and Jules Verne in those days, watching Back to the Future over and over on VHS like it was my job.

The other night, under dubious circumstances which shall not be discussed, I slammed my head quite forcefully against against a telephone pole and collapsed in the street. Or at least so I have been told, by bystanders who actually witnessed the event. All I remember is sitting up from the street mumbling, “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

Didn’t go to the doctor this time. Should have, maybe. Stubborn.

It’s a fascinating thing, though, the fragility of consciousness. Being a sheltered, coddled, writerly recluse like I am, I probably don’t get enough reminders of it. I’ve been reading up on shamanism lately—on the magical origins of culture. Back then, it was exactly this sort of experience that might have been interpreted as a call to the shamanic vocation: a death or seeming death, followed by a return to life.

Not that I experienced any spirit visions while I was under. At least, not that I can remember. But that’s the point: I don’t know what happened during those blank spaces. Maybe I dreamed. Maybe I saw god. Apparently, during some of the time following my encounter with the fire hydrant, I actually appeared awake and alert, answering questions, moving under my own power. Was that really me? Or was it just my body, walking and talking without me in it?

Fun to think about.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

I was walking around the grounds of my apartment complex today (yes, it has real estate holdings sufficient, I think, to be referred to as “grounds”…not maybe in the pastoral landed class sense, but substantial, with lawns and communal gardens and all) when I came across a possum. An o-possum. Like a big gray rat with a white face and pink lips. I believe they are marsupials, and I am pretty sure they’re supposed to be nocturnal. This one was out in the middle of the day in plain sight on the lawn. Even weirder, it wasn’t doing anything—just standing there, all four paws on the ground, staring at, well, nothing.

I stopped and watched it for awhile, trying to figure out what its deal was. Had my camera with me, and I thought about taking a picture—but in the end, possums just aren’t very photogenic. Especially this one.

I wasn’t any more than ten feet away from it, and it didn’t even acknowledge me. I had a stick with me, as I usually do, and I banged it against a tree to make some noise. I shouted at it. No reaction from the possum. It just stood there, staring at whatever it was staring at it. And twitching. And there were flies. A whole bunch of flies.

It was at this point that I started to get the sick feeling I had experienced this moment before: in zombie films, where the soon-to-be-dead idiot approaches his girlfriend who has been hunched over in front of the sink since he got home, puts a hand on her shoulder asking what’s wrong, turns her around, and….

Yeah.

I left the undead possum to go about its business of communing with the ancestor god or the hive mind or whatever, and went to report the incident to the ladies at the leasing office.

I think they called animal control. I haven’t heard anything since. I did see some people standing around outside waiting for the bus. They didn’t look like zombies. I dunno. The wife isn’t home yet.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

This is going to be one of those long, rambly posts that touches everything. So you might as well go get a cup of tea. And maybe not come back. I leave that to you.

My first encounter with the myth of Johnny Appleseed was a big white hardcover picturebook which I swear was called The Joy of Giving, but which I can’t find anywhere on the eeenternets, so maybe I imagined the whole thing. It told the life of Johnny Appleseed in the simplest, most sanguine terms, with cuted-up illustrations and a talking inanimate object sidekick (a shovel, I think). He wore a pot for a hat, dressed in muddy overalls, and hiked barefoot, with a big walking stick and two cloth bags slung over his shoulder: apple seeds and oatmeal. He walked until he was tired, ate supper out of his hat, built an orchard, then started walking again. And now we have apples everywhere, in pies and cider and the American dream.

It doesn’t get simpler than that. And when I turned six or seven and graduated from Mac and Tab Are Friends to that, believe me, I was sold. If I could figure out what the heck that story was actually called it would go on my Jay Ridler Top 100 books lickety split. Along with all the rest of the sappy picture book biographies in that series (each one of which had its own unique variety of inanimate object sidekick).

Sappy and cheeseball though it is, it occurs to me that the talking inanimate sidekick thing–at least as used in that series–is actually a magic realist trope. Everything else about the story dealt in a more or less accurate—albeit syrupy-sweet—manner with the real life of some inspiring historical figure. Madam Curie talked to X-Rays, as I recall, and Louis Pasteur talked to germs. It was awesome. And Will Rogers talked to his lariat. No, really. It’s just taking one element of a story and blowing it up to magical stature via hyperbole in order to grab the fancy of a reader who might otherwise be less than interested. This is why magic realists get accused of pandering and their readers of exoticism. But why the hell else would I have cared what happened to the boring old whitebeard Louis Pasteur if he hadn’t been fighting these big germs that looked like Napoleonic soldiers with bayonets?

It’s apple-picking season. In a couple weeks I will drop off several five-gallon glass carboys at my local orchard to be filled with fresh-pressed, unpasteurized cider. The big Mac tree behind my apartment has been producing apace since August; I’ve been eating at least one a day since then and am now physically invincible. As my affair with the cliff the other day clearly demonstrates. Today, I ate three different varieties of wild apple: a kind of Golden Delicious/Macoun hybrid from the tree outside my work at lunchtime, a hard, mild Spy variety from the edge of a field in Graves Farm Sanctuary at the beginning of my evening hike, and a spicy Macintosh variety from the same field at the end.

Mulling over the last one as I meandered back to the car, I thought of Appleseed. His position in the American myth is unique, closest perhaps to Thoreau (at least among its real, breathing representatives, as opposed say to Longfellow’s Hiawatha) in terms both of pacifism and unabashed love and appreciation for nature. Appleseed has a magnanimity towards the human race that, to my mind at least, the other great naturalists lack. On the the other hand, he is completely un-unique as an unconcerned, if well-intentioned, spreader of colonialism.

Still, I don’t think I can deny being deeply influenced by that spirit–and by Appleseed as a hero–even if there is a bit of hypocrisy involved. Little kids are impressionable, I know. As a six year old I was probably equally enthralled with the story of Helen Keller and her talking water pump or whatever. But not nearly to the degree that her legend can rear up out of a country breeze and hijack my head for a couple of hours.

This is where the dangling spider-threads of my newly adopted fake religion, pseudopagan pantheism, make themselves felt. I am irrevocably a creature of New England. If I ever leave here, I’ll still be that. Which means, because of the legacy of Appleseed and those like him in the oblivious colonialist sense, that as deep as my druidy roots ever reach, they will always have been founded upon a tamed and friendly Nature. I can wander around like an idiot falling off cliffs and getting lost in thickets in the dark without a lot of fear of retribution. No wolves, only the occasional wee black bear to go “aww cute” and scare off, and no place to get lost or horribly crippled where a mere half-mile of excruciating crawling won’t get me to a friendly human dwelling with phones and hot running water. Whenever I meet a serious wilderness enthusiast from west of the Mississippi, I seem to end up getting the same gentle ribbing about being so irrevocably enamored of the nurturing-yet-pansy green hills of my home, even to the point of disregard for real wild things like the Rockies, Yosemite, Olympia. And they’re not wrong. But I can’t help it.

I can’t stand new development. I get very angry when trees get cut down and old farmland gets paved to make way for giant box stores I will never enter and couldn’t even dent with a shoulder-fired missile. And yet at the same time I feel, a bit guiltily, that I owe a lot to Johnny Appleseed. He (or his myth) made what remains of the Western Massachusetts wilderness into the Eden that it is, where I can wander around ignoring trail signs and topography, picking apples and taking meticulous photographs of mushrooms with no regard for life or limb. I could probably live for weeks in the woods this time of year just on apples. Presuming I didn’t get gunned down by hunters. Without him, or the spirit of agricultural imperialism he exemplified, that wouldn’t be possible. My whole philosophy of existence pretty much wouldn’t be possible.

If only I were Erin Hoffman, I could distill all this verbosity down into a heartwrenching 20-line poem that cuts to the quick, sell it, and maybe put it out of my head.

Instead I’ll spend the next year or so mulling over the tragic extinction of the American tall tale, how the sterilization of popular culture into malls and box stores and wax-coated, nasty, gas-chamber megamart apples has utterly exterminated any earnest belief in the old kinds of myths, and the only way to resurrect them is in clinical laboratory examinations such as this. And maybe, If I’m really lucky, six months after that, I’ll have written a story that touches on these sad notions briefly in passing and ultimately fails to do them justice.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

(Save vs. magic for half damage?)

This hiking staff was handmade for me as a gift more than ten years ago by my friend Michael Purpura. It was sturdy, springy and surprisingly lightweight. There was a half-inch bolt screwed onto the business end to prevent it from splitting, which over time and heavy use buried itself deeper and deeper into the wood. Near the head was an etching of dragon taken from the frontispiece of one of the books in Weis and Hickman’s Death Gate Cycle. (Can’t remember which—Dragon Wing? Hand of Chaos? And yes, I was indeed a big ole serial fantasy junkie once upon a time. You were surprised?).

This staff has traveled with me over countless country miles. It has gotten me many weird looks from passersby. As related in the Nov/Dec 2007 issue of Weird Tales, it once helped me scare the scare the living bejeezus out of a little old lady. Yesterday, it saved my life.

Or at least it saved me some broken bones.

I was hiking part of the Robert Frost trail south through Mt. Toby Reservation just before sunset. I wanted to get back to the road before dark, so with my usual disregard for rationality, I detoured west down the face of a steep cliff. I made it about halfway before an earthy ledge I was standing on gave out underneath me. I fell fifteen feet and landed in a thorn bush. If it weren’t for the staff, which I shoved into the fork of a tree as I fell past it in an attempt to break my fall, I would probably have plowed right through the thorn bush and kept on going. As it was, I survived with only a bunch of stinging red cuts and scratches all over my knees, back and forearms.

Thank you, stick. You served me well. Now go on to a better place.

Once I saw off the splintered parts, I’ll turn the rest into stakes for the garden.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

“Oh, no, I write,” he answered; “it’s now, only now that I write, since I have been watching her. I do nothing but follow the reading of that woman, seen from here, day by day, hour by hour. I read in her face what she desires to read, and I write it faithfully.”

“Too faithfully,” Marana interrupts him, icily. “As translator and representative of the interests of Bertrand Vandervelde, author of the novel that woman is reading, Looks down in the gathering shadow, I warn you to stop plagiarizing it!”

Flannery turns pale; a single concern seems to occupy his mind: “Then, according to you, that reader . . . the books she is devouring with such passion are novels by Vandervelde? I can’t bear it. . . .”

Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller is a collection of broken-off novel openings threaded together by a narrative about a frustrated, second-person Reader making his way deeper and deeper into an absurdist conspiracy whose goal seems to be to reduce all works of fiction to broken-off openings, for the purposes of fostering a state of perpetual political upheaval. It’s at the same time the most blatant and the most guileful work of metafiction I’ve ever read, and the fact that I didn’t just give up reading after the third aborted cliffhanger in a row is a testament to the power of Calvino’s stylistic virtuosity. Every time, my annoyance at having vested myself in a set of characters and then been yanked out of their narrative is outweighed by my desire to get drawn into the next set of characters—I’d rather read another broken-off Calvino opening than a complete one by anybody else. Especially since every new story is written in a slightly different style from the last, though they move in what almost seems a logical progression, and all treat with similar themes centered around the problem of attempting to immerse oneself in the life and story of a stranger.

Every one of these novel openings includes some kind of love triangle—sometimes several—with varying degrees of metaphorical and literal desire. The framing narrative has at least four. We get a variety of settings and situations: academia, war, revolution, political intrigue, idleness, religion, crime. And the really enlightening thing, the lesson I take away in terms of how to go about accomplishing this sort of thing in my own writing, is the opportunity to observe what changes and what stays the same between openings, how much variety he can pull off when in fact altering relatively little.

“Alex Zinnober,” I introduce myself. “I don’t know if I can be called a lieutenant. In our regiment, ranks have been abolished, but orders change all the time. For the moment, I’m a soldier with two stripes on his sleeves, that’s all.”

“I’m Irina Piperin, as I was also before the revolution. For the future, I don’t know. I used to design fabrics, and as long as there’s a shortage of cloth, I’ll make designs for the air.”

“With the revolution, there are people who change so much they become unrecognizable, and other people who feel they are the same selves as before. It must be a sign that they were prepared in advance for the new times. Is that the case?”

She makes no reply. I add, “Unless it’s their total rejection that preserves them from changes. Is that your situation?”

“I . . . You tell me first: how much do you think you have changed?”

“Not much. I realize I have retained certain points of honor from before: catch a woman about to fall, for example, even if nowadays nobody says thank you.”

“We all have moments of weakness, women and men, and it isn’t impossible, Lieutenant, that I may have an opportunity to return your kindness of a moment ago.”

How does the dialogue contribute to all this? Aside from the fact that it is uniquely occupied with the question of understanding and the perpetual incompleteness of understanding, desire and the impossibility of completely achieving of desire, Calvino’s dialogue does what good dialogue does in other strongly-themed, character-driven stories that do have endings and middles. Which is to say, at least two things at once: develops character; shows us facets of the central idea, interpretations, to which we would otherwise not have been exposed; illustrates desire and the obstacles, both internal and external, to achieving that desire. At times it provides or withholds information for purposes of building suspense or furthering plot—and there is a surprising level of suspense throughout, considering every plot is aborted in its infancy.

“Cimmerian books are all unfinished,” Uzzi-Tuzii sighs, “because they continue beyond . . in the other language, in the silent language to which all the words we believe we read refer. . . .”

“Believe . . . Why believe? I like to read, really to read.” It is Ludmilla who is speaking like this, with conviction and warmth. She is seated opposite the professor, dressed in a simple, elegant fashion, in light colors. Her way of living in the world, filled with interest in what the world can give her, dismisses the egocentric abyss of the suicide’s novel that ends by sinking into itself. In her voice you seek the confirmation of your need to cling to the things, to read what is written and nothing else, dispelling the ghosts that escape your grasp. (Even if your embrace—confess it—occurred only in your imagination, it is still an embrace that can happen at any moment. . . .)