Dominic Loise
The Saint of Second Chances 

This past baseball season has not been the best for fans of either of Chicago’s two major league teams. The new documentary The Saint of Second Chances reminded me of another White Sox season, which did not end well: 1979. That season saw the end of era for both owner and fan’s connection to the team and was the last one played in the classic Comiskey Park before it was torn down. For a while now, the concept of ego death is something that I have been working on in therapy and I feel the topic is portrayed rather well in this baseball documentary. The documentary deals with the legacy of the Veeck family, their relationship to the sport and most importantly their connection to the fans and each other.

The hook for most viewers will be the seventies Chicago White Sox era, when Michael Veeck worked for his father Bill Veeck. Bill was the last of an old breed of owners, who could operate a team without their own financial independence. It also meant that Bill  had to think outside of the box and make every dollar stretch to run the team. He could not compete with free agency salaries for big money players so the White Sox had to fill the stadium with promotions. One promotion which filled the seats but turned out to be a historic blight on baseball was Disco Demolition Night.

Many people have reflected back on the night when Steve Dahl, a local stock jock blew up a crate of disco albums and his young, mainly male fans stormed the field and destroyed both a double header and the stadium. The people who packed the stands this night were not baseball fans but listeners of a rock station. When you hear the announcer Harry Caray say “This is a sad day for baseball”, that statement is underscored by owner Bill Veeck on the field pleading with thousands of young adults and kids running past him in disorderly conduct.

Recently, that night has been looked through the lens of a book burning that had white youths destroying and the words & work of black, latin & queer artists of the time and demanding that this music not be played on radio station airwaves. Dahl is not in the documentary except for archival footage but would go on to talk about the event for decades throughout his long standing radio career and write a book about it. Mike Veeck does reflect back on that night, as he was head of promotions for the team. He also reflects on how it affected his father’s career in baseball, how his father sold the team afterwards and how the stadium was torn down to then be rebuilt.

The remainder of the documentary is about Mike Veeck being lost, facing his demons, finding new opportunities with a newly formed baseball league. The documentary focuses on the clarity he finds by focusing on his family, creating a fan community & the love of the game before his preconceived career goals.

Maribel Leddy
The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang

I recently read The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang, the first of an epic grimdark fantasy series that follows main character Rin. I picked up and finished the book in one day. The world that Kuang created, the characters, and the way its plot draws on real life events from twentieth century China made it an undeniable page-turner for me. Kuang is a Marshall Scholar, Chinese-English translator and an award-winning author. Outside of the Poppy War Trilogy, she’s also written Babel and Yellowface, both of which made the New York Times bestseller list.

In The Poppy War, we follow war-orphan Rin who is desperate to escape a fate of being married off by her relatives. To do so, she focuses on acing the Keju—the Empire-wide test to find the most talented youth to learn at the Academies. She does so, and is expectant for her new life, but finds herself facing many more challenges than she anticipated at Sinegard, the most elite military school in Nikan. This book explores things like colorism, class, and war in nuanced ways that made me think and learn a lot. Rin herself is an extremely intriguing main character who brings nuance to the idea of a “hero” in literature and whose thirst for power may be her downfall—or the thing that saves everyone she cares about. 

Valerie San Filippo
The Hurricane Book

I’ve waited so long for Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones’ debut, The Hurricane Book! Part history, part lyric memoir, it tells of the history of Puerto Rico and the lives on one family through six hurricanes. It is INTENSE. Acevedo-Quiñones echoes the stark reality of Puerto Rico’s struggles under colonial oppression with the ebb and flow of her own family history. On every page her family seems to grow in scale and importance, their personal stories and small quirks overriding cold facts to form a new kind of living, breathing history.

This book is not for the feint of heart. You’ll probably weep— I certainly did. It’s full of pain, betrayal, and pinprick moments of hope. The language is stunning. It’s a personal and political history seared with a loving anger that stays with you long after you’ve put the book down.

Sara Santistevan
Loteria

I discovered Cynthia Pelayo’s horror collection Lotería just in time for spooky season, but I’ll enjoy re-reading this book year round! 

Each chapter features a short story, poem, or flash fiction piece based on a card from the Mexican game lotería. As someone who plays lotería with my family every year on Christmas Eve, I was so excited to see how Pelayo would connect each iconic card to her retelling of Latine folklore.

The connections between card and myth ranged from clear to subtle, with some taking me completely by surprise. For instance, the flash piece “La Dama” (“The Lady”) is a retelling of the tale of La Llorona, a wailing woman whose spirit wanders the earth at night in search of children to replace her children she drowned. On the other hand, there is no umbrella in the short story “El Paraguas” (“The Umbrella”); the connection between narrative and card may only be evident to Spanish speakers who can pick up on Pelayo’s clever wordplay. As for the wildly creative retellings, consider “La Luna” (“The Moon”), which blends Guaraní creation legends with imagining the President of Argentina as an employer of werewolf bodyguards. 

With a total of fifty-four chapters, Lotería is an impressive feat, showcasing Pelayo’s dedication to crafting a mosaic of unnerving tales that pay homage to the rich tradition of horror retellings within folklore.

Chloe, what inspired you to write this book?

Immortal Longings is my adult debut. So there were a lot of big thoughts I was having about what is it that makes an adult concept different to a young adult concept. I had to make a conscious decision to make the switch. My instinct growing up and writing books was always to go for young adult, because it was what I was reading. It was the type of genre categorization that I knew best. Whereas when the idea for Immortal Longings first struck, it was the first concept I worked with that I knew that didn’t really fit into that coming-of-age story arc. There was nothing about it that felt like a teenage story anymore. I think that was because I came up with the idea when I was in my senior year of college. It was still the midst of Covid. So, I had come back on campus because doing zoom school was horrifying and bland. And the time zone was terrible; I didn’t go to class. My professors let me skip class because my professors were like “oh you’re in New Zealand.” And it also meant I was not learning a single thing. So, I came back for senior year and during winter break I was alone in my school housing apartment because everyone went home for the holidays. It gave me the idea of working with a very dense city setting, I guess because I was so isolated. Thinking about what it means to live with people literally breathing down your neck, that presence of breathing down your neck at any point. It was that feeling that first came to me as a story idea.

I had always been very inspired by the Kowloon Walled City that was torn down in Hong Kong in the 1990s. I had always wanted to work with some sort of fantastical story to do with that. I had originally been playing with a portal fantasy that didn’t work and then some other fantasy in YA that didn’t work, and I threw them out. Finally, for this I was thinking what if I made an adult setting because I am exploring a dense city setting and the bad aspects that come with it if there is a system ruling over it and the very human things that come with trying to survive in a place. That just kind of erupted into the world and then that joined up with the fact that I had debuted into YA with Romeo and Juliet and I had taken a Shakespeare class sophomore year, where I really, really loved studying Antony and Cleopatra. I thought there’s something very meta about using the two star-crossed lovers of Shakespeare tragedy cannon, but Antony and Cleopatra are so firmly adult. They are about power and obsession and grappling with the sort of the tug and pull of love. So, there was a lot of like, “ooh, I am going to make this so that the books are in conversation with each other just like how Shakespeare’s plays are in conversation with each other.” 

Very early on in the book when you’re describing the setting it’s as if the setting is its own character. I found it fascinating that you built the city where it is so tight and there’s suffering, but there’s no relief because there’s not enough oxygen to create relief.

Given that San-Er was kind of based on the Kowloon Walled City, it is the exact same kind of thing, because there is no space for civil unrest, it is another arm of an oppressive system that just kind of goes “well, that’s too bad.” 

What was it like to grapple with an inspiration that is so unruly that critics can’t even decide what it is about.

I think I decided I wanted to pluck out the character study between Antony and Cleopatra first and foremost. People can’t even agree if it is a tragedy. Is it historical? There are so many aspects about it. Shakespeare is doing so much in the play. It’s not like Romeo and Juliet where the themes are blatant. I was fascinated by comparison essays I was reading about Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra. That led to an idea of meta type engagement as well, because I was reading an essay about how Antony and Cleopatra are essentially the adult versions of Romeo and Juliet but, as what happens when you reach adulthood, things suddenly become so much more complicated, right? Not that children’s lives aren’t complicated, but in a way, your coming of age is very much funneled down into one simple sort of self-discovery type goal. Whereas you reach adulthood and it’s suddenly about nation, it’s about interpersonal relationships, it’s about everyone around you. So, it was the characters of the play that fascinated me the most. 

Not to say I don’t love the intertwining of history as well. Like I really love the rise of the Roman Empire, which is why there are kind of bits and pieces that find their way into the world building of Immortal Longings. Whenever I pitch it, it’s the 90s of Hong Kong meets the rise of the Roman Empire. People are like, “what does that look like?” Well, we’ll see! You know so history made its way in through those aspects, but as far as the inspiration of Antony and Cleopatra is concerned, it gravitates towards the interpersonal relationship between Antony and Cleopatra or how the other characters, it’s not in the play so much, but Octavia the wife he left behind and his relationship with Augustus and then Octavian and Cleopatra’s serving woman and all those little character interactions are my favorite parts of the play. When I wanted to adapt it, it was like “how do I make those little characters feel like the source material but plucked in a completely new environment?” to kind explore, like, what would they become if you completely merged that around.

Talk to me about your writing process. Are you the kind of writer who is like “okay, I’ve gone through the entire play, I’ve outlined exactly how it’s going to line up with my new plot and then I sit down.” Do you sit down and let the characters come to you? 

A bit of both, I think. I’m a very chaotic writer, but I’m also very orderly. By that I mean, before I get into a first draft, I have everything very organized. My planning document for Immortal Longings is 20 pages long, because it’s the outline of the play, outline of my story, outline of every inspirational subtext that I’ve got going on, and then it’s basically the outline of everything I want to have happen in the further series. But then I’ll write the book, I’ll get everything into its base shape, and then I throw it all out. I need to do it first just to see what works and what doesn’t. Because when I visualize it as an outline, sure it works, it kind of makes sense to lay it all out, but the magic I love about writing is that sometimes things just work and sometimes they don’t. You don’t know what that will be until you do it.  I don’t really discover what the story is trying to say until I’ve done it once, and I see that things are not corresponding as they need to. And I kind of rip it up and do a second draft. And that second draft tends to be what I’m trying to say, and then the further drafts I’ll clean it up, and so on and so forth. But I need that chaotic tearing a book apart stage most times, sometimes there’s a structured book, and I don’t tear it apart that much, but I find that’s rarer than not.

How much of that first draft do you actually end up keeping?

I tend to start fresh. I open a new document, but I’ll put the old one next to it. So, I will pull lines and paragraphs. Because the writing is still there. But I need the new document, so I don’t feel married to the old structure. Because I found that if I keep that old document in and edit within it, I will kind of wimp out sometimes and just let the things sit in their old structure. But if I open a new document, I can be like well these chapter orders don’t work at all. So, I’ll tear it apart and start again.

Your word-by-word writing is extraordinary, it’s lucious, it pulls you in. Is that something that comes through in the first draft and you know your voice immediately?

I do think my word by word tends to mostly come in the first draft. I think partially because I have been writing for so long now that it is a bit easier to get what I want to say out there into the sentence level form. When I was first setting out when I was much, much younger there was kind of a discrepancy between what I saw in my head and what eventually I put on the paper because I just wasn’t as practiced yet in describing the things that I saw in my head. But now that I’ve been doing it for so long, I think, the first go at it gets a bit close. There will be bits where there are just pieces missing, where I’m like “that doesn’t sound quite right but let me just put it down first.” So, when I do the second draft migration I tend to go back, I’ve got a fresh pair of eyes, because of the first draft. I’ll never go back and edit the first draft, I’ll either do it all again and I’ll go back. So, by the time it’s the second draft it’s probably been a few months since I’ve seen it and I can see what I was saying there now and I can kind of adjust the words slightly. But I would say that most of my wording, if I am keeping it, probably remains as is. 

You mesh so many genres in this story, you have historical geo-politics to fantasy to monarchy systems to sci-fi. Did all of those ideas come together in outlining? 

I’m a cross genre writer. Even with my young adult books I have always been doing that. So, with These Violent Delights I originally pitched that as just a historical and it was later on that I was talking to my agent and she was like “no, we can cross this as fantasy, you have a monster rampaging the city.” And I was like, “yeah, yeah, you’re right.”  These Violent Delights is historical sci-fi, and then Foul Lady Fortune, even more so, is a historical sci-fi thriller, which, I found that when you throw too many genres at people, their eyes kind of glaze over. So, we were like “yes, this is YA fantasy” to kind of tidy things up. It is kind of the same with Immortal Longings. It is pitched as my kind of official adult fantasy debut, but there is so much about it that is, it feels different than what you expect when you say, “I’m picking up a fantasy novel.” I knew from the get-go that I wanted the world to feel like something 90s inspired, there was technology, but there is not technology that we recognize for our modern day. There is a magic system of sorts, but it’s not magic, it’s genetic. It’s something just that is part of their world. So fantasy is kind of just the little slot that it falls into because it has the sort of archetypes.

So much of your work is deeply tied to what makes someone them. How does identity exist in this world? And what was it like to explore identity when you can literally discard your body? 

To me it was this investigation into how different people value their identity as it ties to personhood. It’s a reflection of our world where people don’t jump around, you just have one body, but I still think that sort of spectrum exists and is reflective of how people perceive themselves. Some people think of their mind as who they are, and they don’t care about outer perception. Other people are very very sensitive to external perception.

What do you think you would do if you could jump bodies?

I don’t know if I would. I might be a Calla. I might be somebody who is really stuck to myself. If I had to, would jump into any random man in the street, I just want to see what it was like.

Do you think you would choose a stranger over someone you knew?

If it’s someone I knew, I’d be controlling them, and that’s weird. A stranger, they never have to know.

How did the transition to adult feel for you as a writer, versus your preliminary work? Did it feel easier? Was it harder? Was it unexpected? 

On a craft level, I wrote the book in my usual voice. So, I don’t think it was particularly harder than any of the other manuscripts that came before it. But on an emotional level, it was hard, because I had a lot of self-doubt. Because I switched to adult and since I was still writing it at 21, it gave me a huge, crippling sense of imposter syndrome. But I was just really, really going through on a personal level, like, am I enough of an adult? Do I know how to do my taxes?  Which led to this new step in my career, where I was like “oh god, am I going to be able to do the adult genre?” So, I just had to do it; I just had to take the dive. I knew the story couldn’t be young adult, it just wouldn’t work, that kind of atmosphere is not something that feels like a teenager would care about it. I think it’s something very many adults care about more. So, I need my audience to be adult. Otherwise, it was a lot of fun getting that freedom to write for adults. I love writing for young adults, but there’s always a little box that I kind of refuse to step out of, because there are certain things that I don’t think are as interesting to teenagers. When you write for an adult sphere, and you can get a bit more morbid. The same way that growing up kind of unlocks a box for you to think of the world a different way. It was a lot of fun but also very scary.

Want to read what we thought of Immortal Longings? Check out Marizel Malan’s review.

*SPOILER ALERT* The following review contains plot details about Immortal Longings.

Once a year, the streets in the kingdom of Talin are bathed in blood and flashing lights as eighty-eight of its citizens fight for glory, riches, and a chance to appear before the king. While King Kasa lives lavishly, never leaving his castle, those living in the kingdom’s capital twin cities, San-Er, have to make do with the dismal conditions around them. For those outside the cities, life is not much better. And so, for many, the annual bloodbath is their only chance at a better life. 

Chloe Gong’s makes her adult fantasy debut with Immortal Longings, in which we see the start of a love story inspired by Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra blooming in this everyone-for-themselves environment. The first book in a trilogy, Immortal Longings builds an incredible world in which readers squeeze among clustered buildings, run from opponents, and jump from body to body alongside the characters. Gong’s Antony takes the form of exiled aristocrat Anton Makusa, who strikes up a contentious yet compelling relationship with treacherous princess Calla Tuoleimi, herself an evocation of the Ancient Egyptian queen. Though worlds apart in motivation, the two must come together and do all they can to ensure their own survival, a goal further complicated by the presence of Calla’s cousin, August Shenzi. While neither Anton nor Calla truly trust August—or one another—the three of them form a tentative alliance. Their victory is dependent on their fighting skills and the power of their qi, which allows their consciousness to jump from their own body to another’s, roaming around with a different face while keeping their mind as their own. As one might expect, it’s not long before their team falls apart. 

What I admired so much about the Immortal Longings universe, and the interactions between these three characters, was how the author created a narrative in which the readers could easily insert themselves. Chloe Gong describes each environment so well it felt as though I was sitting next to the characters: jumping with Anton between bodies, scheming to overthrow the King alongside August, and trying to keep my identity a secret just as much as Calla. I could clearly imagine the bustling market stalls, the close-pressed apartment buildings, the overcrowded, clinical yet uncaring atmosphere of the hospital Anton visits, and Calla’s sparse apartment that serves as a reminder she is still on the run. As the omniscient narrator shifts their focus from one character to another, Gong highlights that even the best-laid plans can fall apart when you encounter something that matters to you as much, if not more, than your initial cause. 

Alongside this, the novel also beautifully focuses on the disconnect people can often feel with their own bodies. In Talin, jumping from one body to another is not uncommon; even though the practice is technically illegal, those with a powerful qi will always take advantage of its possibilities. Some, like Anton, abandon their birth bodies forever, while others never jump, like Calla, even though she does not feel like herself in the body she’s inhabited her entire life. As readers learn more about the process of jumping, the power one needs to either possess or lack, and how easy it is to be invaded, we see how physical bodies are meaningless to some and vital to others, and how a spiritual body can hold far more value. The novel demonstrates that a birth body can be just as foreign as a stranger’s body, and that many people prefer to choose the body they live in rather than keep what they were assigned. Calla herself thinks about people who were born in bodies of a sex or gender that is not truly their own. The act of jumping can relieve them of the pain—both emotional and physical—they experience in their birth bodies. Though brief, Calla’s thoughts remind us how many people in the world outside the book are stuck in bodies that do not truly feel like their own.

Though I was slightly disappointed that Calla was willing to compromise what she fought for in order to keep Anton in her life, I admired how determined she was to stay true to her herself while allowing her guilt and isolation to recede enough for love to become an option. Calla truly falls in love with Anton but knows that if she doesn’t kill the King, nothing will change. While their love distracts her from her task a bit, she remains steadfast in her belief that she is the only one who can truly bring change to the twin cities. And even as we root for her and Anton’s love story to end in anything but blood and flames, Chloe Gong has made us long for a better life for the citizens of Talin, the same life many long for in the real world too.

With elements of historical fiction, an incredibly strong and independent female main character, and supernatural abilities linked to the origin of the universe, this is the perfect read for those who adore their fantasy and historical fiction told from the perspective of the underdogs. While the romantic relationship takes a backseat in this story—even if it does influence Calla’s choices somewhat—I found it incredible how the novel focused on the strength of individuals, their reliance on their identity and physical body, and the difference an unexpected friendship can make. There is no doubt that I will be gifting myself multiple copies of this book, recommending it to anyone who will listen, and anxiously awaiting the second and third books while re-reading the first. In my opinion, Chloe Gong has achieved something often missing when writing a series: the creation of a world and characters so awe inspiring, you never want to leave the pages.

For more on Chloe Gong’s work, read Dani Hedlund’s interview with the author.

As If She Had a Say is your second published short story collection. I’m curious to know if you always saw yourself as a short story writer or whether this is something you ended up falling into?

As a kid I used to make maps. I would tape together these massive maps across our family living room. I would name the streets, place the schools, and write up little information pieces. They ended up being very elaborate. Fast forward a few decades, people ask me did you always write stories and I say no, but I realize now that I was always world building. I also had a pretty rough childhood—my father was very abusive and there was a lot of neglect—so when I was in my 20’s, I processed that through writing. I lived in New York City and would write on the subway. I was writing things that weren’t meant to be seen by anybody else. That morphed into a short story based on my life because it was the only way I could talk about it. I enjoyed the process so I kept writing short stories and here I am, still writing those stories and I love it!

I started publishing in 2014 and short stories immediately worked for me. When I start writing a story, it usually comes—more or less—in one burst, so short form seems to be a natural fit for me. I have tried novel writing, and I enjoy it, but short stories are always where I’m going to land and come back to.

You mentioned getting the stories out in one burst. In general, do you know in advance how long a story is going to be when you start? Does it change massively in the edits or does the length remain stable?

Generally, it stays the same. I wish I could point to some craft piece in my brain that tells me how long it should be, but the stories come to their own conclusions. A few years ago, I wrote a short story that I knew wasn’t working. It either had to be cut really short or expanded. I ended up turning it into a novel. That’s the only time where it didn’t come out as it was. Really the stories dictate themselves. 

I also like to play with concepts, form, gimmicks. My stories take on a little fabulism. I think those types of things work much better in short form. 

Do you think short story form is a fit for you because you’re more interested in the fragments or do you have an attention span that likes to jump from idea to idea quite quickly?

The latter. I don’t think it’s super intentional. When I sit down and write the stories just come out and I do love generating new ideas. I’m like the dog in the movie Up when he sees a squirrel—so short stories work really well for me. Revision is particularly difficult. I don’t like to do it, though I understand I need to, which is why novel writing is particularly hard. So much revision has to happen there and if you pull out one piece it’s like a Jenga tower. You pull out one block and everything could fall. The short stuff is easier for me. 

Before we get into the specifics of this collection, I’d be interested to hear about the process of selecting the pieces. What guides you making those decisions?

I actually put this collection together before my first published collection, Predatory Animal Ball. All the stories from both collections were written over the past nine years, and I feel that As If She Had A Say is my stronger work. Even though I wasn’t intentional when I wrote those stories, I realized later how much I talked about women not having a say and the roles women have been stuck in. I return to this theme subconsciously because of my childhood, and so I picked these pieces that thematically went together. Simply put, I put together the stories that could wrap around this theme and what I felt were my stronger pieces.

When you say “strength” what does that mean to you? What kinds of things define if a story has worth?  

I like a good upmarket book, but you know how sometimes there’s a formula or a “they lived happily ever after” ending—if my work is like that, I feel I have been lazy. I think a story is strong if at the end I feel very satisfied. In general, my stories are maybe not always happy endings, but they are hopeful. 

Sometimes we’re blind to our stories too, so people’s responses help me know if it’s resonating with others. I also like to read it out loud because I enjoy cadence. I like language. I like to feel if it’s like a song to see if it works. That there’s not repetition of words without being intentional. That’s what makes a piece strong for me.

How did the title, As If She Had A Say, come to you? 

It used to be As If You Had A Say and my editor thought that changing it to “she” would make more sense and I agree. It takes it out of the second person and takes it out of talking to the reader.

I didn’t have a say as a child. It wasn’t until I graduated and went to college and was more independent that I had a say in how I wanted my life to be directed. I think about choice in my life a lot and I’m grateful for where I am now based on my childhood where I didn’t have a say in what was happening. I divide my life into these two parts: the part where I didn’t have a say in my direction and now the part where I do.

Like I was saying before, these stories end in hope. My characters can have a say in their life, in their directions.

A lot of the stories also have characters with a deceased parent or partner. Is this a thematic interest or a useful plot device?

I’m really happy in my life. I have a partner. I have a child. We have a very good relationship. And I get scared that I’m going to lose that. Like I said, my childhood was pretty terrible, and now that I’m making choices, I feel lucky to have this life. I’m always a little worried about that being snatched away.

I also think grief is really interesting. Obviously, it looks different for everyone but the thing about grief, at least in my writing, are the small things. Thinking about their toothbrush still being wet because it’s only been a few days, and then having to throw it out. What a painful experience that no one really talks about. 

I know I’m not alone here, but I still have my grandmother’s number in my phone. She died in 2015 and we were very close. I feel weird about deleting it. Same with a friend who passed away last year. Do I delete their phone number? They’re obviously not going to be calling me again, but it feels like another final thing. Grief can manifest in so many ways and I’m fascinated with those micro moments of grief.

Water is also a common motif throughout your stories. Whether it’s in the form of rain, a flood wrecked home, or a woman literally turning into water. Where does this come from?

That’s so funny because I haven’t noticed that, but you’re so right! I’m not Christian, but I do remember reading in English classes about water being purifying and baptism, and all that must have lodged in my head because I still remember it.

Our bodies are mostly made of water, our planet is mostly made of water, it’s the thing we need to live. It’s really the most important, tangible, thing. I find it interesting to take a subject and explore all the different ways we use, see, or experience it.

I have two pieces in progress, one about doors and one about windows. I find it fascinating how different buildings have different doors and windows and how they evoke diverse feelings in us. How they’re both a place of escape and entrance. I love the idea of taking one thing and examining the various meanings it can have.

So I think the water motif was unintentional, but maybe it was subconscious in the same way I like to explore other themes too.

Short fiction can allow you to examine a topic or object from every angle. Your stories do this through a mix of realism and fantastical elements. What inspires you too combine realism with surrealism?

Franz Kafka has always kind of stuck out to me since reading The Metamorphosis. The character wakes up and is a cockroach, which is crazy, but in the scheme of the book no one thinks it’s all that weird. They’re concerned with how he’ll have a hard time sitting at his office desk instead of asking what the hell, you’re a bug!? That really stayed with me and was the first time I experienced that kind of magical realism typically associated with Latin American literature.

As a story telling device, fiction is my wheelhouse. The fact that you can do anything is incredible without having to waste space in the story explaining it. Then you can proceed down some really interesting avenues. I like to read work like this, so many Japanese writers, in particular Yōko Ogawa, do this really well. And Gabriel García Márquez is obviously the king of it.

It’s a fun exercise to open up your mind to what a story could be. In my collection there is a story with a lady living in a fridge sleeping on butter, I don’t know where that came from but I do come up with a lot of weird things in my dreams. The brain is doing such weird stuff at night and many of those ideas come from your brain without you thinking about it.

Sometimes it’s easier to use metaphor and surrealism to discuss the real world. I’ll take horrible events happening and come up with some ridiculous version of them. Understanding political, economic, or social issues is easier when you stretch them to be their most absurd, wonky off the wall metaphor, and I think that’s part of it as well. 

Can you talk a bit about how you explored the relationships between the sexes in this collection?

You know, I didn’t step out to write a feminist collection, but by nature being a woman, that is my life experience. Harkening back to my childhood, my father was doing terrible things but then talking about how much he loved me—which is bonkers—but I think there was part of him that really did. He just had no idea how to do that and how his actions countered what he was claiming.

That Man versus Woman got right into my head early. Though I do still harbor some anger towards her, my mother was a victim in the whole experience too. My early experiences were a woman cowering in the corner and a man being threatening. I think that the power play between genders is not that black and white. Obviously, there are plenty of great guys out there, but they are also part of that system. I think the collection reflects what we’re experiencing. One thing I’d like to learn more is that grey area. I think some stories do that, but I think they’re kind of a bit more simplistic to people than what the message really is. I love when I read things where it’s not clear and that’s really what life is more like.

Was it your intention to have the male character in the story Sounds of Nouns become more dependent on those around him, making him more empathetic and less egotistical?

I kind of love that take, but it certainly wasn’t conscious. We all grow up in certain silos, and have a hard time truly understanding what an outside perspective is. I can read and talk to people about different experiences, but that will be a surface level understanding. If we were to experience what someone else is experiencing then we have a moment like Oh! I get it! It’s unfortunate that we’re not a more empathetic animal.

What is next for you?

Well, I’m always writing short stories and little non-fiction pieces. I have alluded to a novel a few times and I need to go back and revisit that. But because I’m me, I’m going to work on a new novel idea! It takes place at a sleep away camp. I find this such an interesting microcosm setting. I’ll be going to Montana for a week this fall where I’ll work on the novel. In the meantime, I’m percolating ideas.

If you could give one piece of writing advice, what would it be?

There’s no one way to do it and you don’t need to write every day. You don’t need an MFA or to live in a big city. Resources are lovely, but you don’t need any of those things to be a writer. Remember, there’s not one way to do it.

Curious about our thoughts on As If She Had a Say? Read Sam Burt’s review.

*SPOILER ALERT* The following review contains details about As If She Had a Say, published July 2023 by Curbstone Books.

There are at least two ways to interpret the title of Jennifer Fliss’s second story collection. “As if” can connote both denial and imagined possibility, an acknowledgement that her female characters’ lives were far from freely chosen and the hope that that might change in future. Hope, in fact,characterizes the closing note of many of these pieces, which favor ambiguity over neat endings and easy answers–and are all the stronger for it. 

The stories vary by genre, combining the fabulous (women turning into water, tiny women who inhabit fridges, a shop where you can buy new hands) with realistic pieces, and some experimental formats (one story is written in the passive-aggressive voice of an eviction notice). However, as with writers like Carmen Maria Machado, with whom Fliss has been compared, reality is not being twisted here for its own sake, but in order to show its many facets more clearly. For all its formal diversity, the collection is bound by clear, recurring themes. Many characters have lost a partner or a parent, and Fliss’s fascination with how grief manifests differently for all of us is evident. In “Pieces of Her,” for example, we see a recently widowed man find a lock of his wife’s hair in the shower and tape it to the bathroom wall, while in “The Cresting Water,” an older woman refuses to abandon her home in the face of flood warnings, believing a reunion with her late husband is imminent. In Fliss’s hands, the private, taboo-like nature of grief and loss proves to be rich material, with fiction providing a space to say the unsayable. 

Parental bonds also feature heavily, with parents trying and often failing (or not even trying at all) to connect with their children. In “Losing the House in D Minor,” a child is reunited with her mother but realizes that, “…it wasn’t me that my mother cared about. It was baby-me…the me she’d held onto when I cried as a toddler. […] the living-and-breathing me, she wanted nothing to do with.” In another story, “Winter Rebirth,” we see something similar from the perspective of a mother who is breastfeeding her newborn and wondering if its father will ever return: “The mother, in that moment, feels like a mother, but then she looks away and doesn’t.” The world of these stories is one in which parents are not always reliable caregivers. The worst of these fathers embody a type of abusive male who uses caregiving to mask the exercise of coercion and neglect, as in “Splintered,” where a woman recalls her father seeming to relish the mutilation of her young body in order to save her from a splinter: “You might have to get amputated, he’d said. Cut it off completely or it will become infected. He had come at her with a sharp object, its tip and his eyes glinting.” Throughout, Fliss is attentive to the more subtle, everyday sleights of hand by which men make women feel objectified. 

Still, even in the stories which should be the most depressing, she finds a way to gesture towards hope, however small and tentative. In one piece, a rape victim showers in her clothes after the event because “you cannot imagine looking at your body as you once did. As your own.” Through this act, however, she comes to realize “there are corners and crevices of your body that are inaccessible, for you alone to reach.” This is a fairly typical ending for Fliss, which manages to avoid cheerful, lazy optimism while grounding hope in uncertainty and counter-narrative. Elsewhere, we find men capable of reflecting on their blind spots vis-a-vis women and adopting a more inclusive, less male-centric worldview. On finding a tiny woman living in the fridge of his now ex-wife, Amos asks: “Were there always women in the corners and crevices in the world that directed life? Was their purpose to go unnoticed? But he had noticed her.” A male writer loses most of his hearing and finds the usual ties between specific words/concepts and sexes/genders has dissolved: “you’ve decided that it’s not a bad world to live in: a world where men and women don’t always do what you expect them to.” Selective hearing abounds in how these men deal with the women in their lives, but it need not be so.

Inevitably, not all of the stories are as satisfying as the best among them. There were times when I sensed the author holding back from explaining things or drawing connections, perhaps for fear of making a story seem too neat or formulaic. Sometimes, as alluded to earlier in this review, this openness worked brilliantly, but on other occasions I would have appreciated just a little more hand-holding. “The Cresting Water,” one of the longer pieces in the collection, ends with a last-minute twist that seems to upend what the reader has been led to believe, but the minimal justification given for this left me feeling confused. At other times, the balance seems tilted a little too far in favor of neatness. The ending of “The Potluck”– a story clearly indebted to Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” – suggests small-town life continuing as normal after a horrific event, which its participants know will have to be repeated, but there is something too convenient about the way this is summarized, especially given that the story is narrated by one of the participants who admits to having “devised plans to escape.“ Yet writing fiction of this length–some are flash, some a little longer, though none of them very long–always involves making fine judgments about “completeness” within tight constraints, so it must be to this author’s credit that so few pieces here felt incomplete. 

This is an engaging, sharply observed collection dealing with womanhood and masculinity, grief and recovery, voice and silence. If you are looking for smartly written, inventive stories that find time to be playful and serious, then I heartily recommend.

Want to learn more about Jennifer Fliss’s work? Check out our interview with her.

Montanna Harling

I have been loving the advanced reader copy of Cassandra Clare’s Sword Catcher, a novel that will be released on October 10^th, 2023. Clare, author of the bestselling young adult Shadowhunters series, has entered into the adult fantasy genre with a stunning first installment of a forthcoming epic fantasy series.  

Though I’m still in the process of reading Sword Catcher, I have been thoroughly and wonderfully consumed by the story. Sword Catcher draws the reader into the city-state Castellane, a world that is both vividly beautiful and quietly dangerous. In Castellane, readers meet Kel, a boy who serves as the body double for the royal heir, and Lin, a physician who belongs to the small community of people who can still access magic. As Kel and Lin both find themselves entangled with the criminal underworld of Castellane, secrets begin to unravel around them. I love how immersive the world of Sword Catcher feels; one of Clare’s greatest strengths as a writer has always been her vivid yet accessible fantasy worldbuilding. Combining expertly paced plot and Clare’s almost otherworldly ability to make every setting feel as real as your own city, Clare has written a novel that is sure to enchant readers for many years to come. I highly recommend checking out Sword Catcher here.

Inanna Carter 

Astarion with a side of Baldur’s Gate 3, anyone? I’m a romance lover through and through, so any video game with romance options is for me. That being said, when BG3 came out and I saw the buckets full of beautiful options of course I knew I was going to get it. But it was Astarion in particular who caught my eye. His snark and beauty mixed with my I-Can-Fix-Him mentality clearly made us a perfect match. But I fell in love with his character more than I thought I would, in ways I hadn’t ever imagined. 

He may start off as what seems like an emotionless, uncaring, sex-crazed lunatic, but under all of that is a tortured soul who’s just trying to find out how to start living for himself. What does that even mean? He doesn’t know, but with your help he can find out. And it’s that part of him that doesn’t get enough appreciation, because how terrifying is that? Imagine being subjected to living a certain, torturous way for hundreds of years and then suddenly getting a chance to become your own person? I’ll stop there because I think his story is one that should be experienced first-hand. His character soothes the part of me that believes games and stories will always be unforgettable when they give you someone so raw and so real to care about. 

Zara Garcia

Lately, I’ve been deeply immersed in the dystopian wasteland that Ashnikko has built through their new album, Weedkiller. It’s got a genre-blurring sound with songs about queer love, environmental destruction, self-empowerment, and reclaiming autonomy. The inspiration for the album came to Ashnikko in an unreleased short story they wrote about a fairy utopia being destroyed by robots called Weedkillers.  

Ashnikko plays the main protagonist throughout the album, transmitting a story of rage, revenge, battle, and defeat. With official visualizers for each song and five music videos, the album is also aesthetically stunning. It gives off an industrial, apocalyptic vibe that is simultaneously dark and fun. Think of Mad Max but with witchy forest fairies. The climax of the story is beautifully represented in the title track, “Weedkiller,” where Ashnikko engages in an epic final battle with the Weedkiller. They also offer social commentary on more serious topics throughout the album. “Miss Nectarine” touches on homophobia, and “Possession of a Weapon” speaks on reproductive rights. It’s refreshing to see an artist handle these topics in such a boldly unapologetic way. The album finishes on a hopeful note with “Dying Star,” featuring the otherworldly vocals of Ethel Cain. The song is about maintaining hope for peace and softness in a violent world. I have tickets to Ashnikko’s show on October 6th, and I am so excited to see how the energy and message of the album translate into a stage performance. 

Sara Santistevan

In high school, I was obsessed with Toby Fox’s hit indie video game, Undertale. Visiting any corner of the internet without encountering memes, fan art, or famous YouTubers broadcasting their playthroughs seemed impossible. So, imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered my boyfriend had never heard of Undertale, and I got to watch him play it for the first time.  

In Undertale, you play as a child who has fallen into The Underground, where monsters have lived since humanity banished them from the surface. To make your way back to the surface, you must carefully consider your choices: spare and befriend the monsters…or destroy their lives.   

Undertale is a standout game due to its experimental gameplay mechanics, breathtaking plot twists, infectious soundtrack (which Fox composed entirely by himself), unique humor, and memorable characters. It was also refreshingly progressive, especially for its time—the playable character is non-binary, and multiple main characters are explicitly or implicitly LGBTQ+!  

However, the true magic in Undertale is Fox’s talent to subvert all expectations a seasoned gamer has nurtured over a lifetime. For example, the decisions you make in a previous playthrough can haunt you even after you reset the game entirely; don’t be surprised if certain characters respond to you with déjà vu.  

If you’re still unconvinced, consider Undertale is one of the few games to achieve a 10/10 rating on Steam and a 97% rating on Google—and yes, that’s the current rating eight years after its release.  

Aubrey Unemori

With Halloween right on the horizon (it’s September, which is basically Halloween), I’ve been preparing for the spooky Superbowl by playing a lot of Dead by Daylight (DBD).  

If you’re not familiar with the game, DBD is like hide and seek but with murder. There are two ways to play the game: The first way is to play as the killer. DBD has their own killers, but the game also features characters from well-known horror media, such as Michael Myers, Pinhead, and Pyramid Head. Your objective as the killer is to hook survivors and sacrifice them to the Entity, which is a fun guy that has spider arms and whispers in your ear every so often.  

The second way to play is as a survivor, which is my favorite way play—especially if you’re new to the game. In this mode, you can play with up to four friends, and you can play as characters like Leon Kennedy, Ellen Ripley, and…Nicolas Cage?! As survivors your objective is to complete generators, power the escape gates, and, well, survive. This mode is all about teamwork, communication, and cursing out the killer when you are inevitably hooked. 

If you’re looking for a way to scream your lungs out this October (or any month, really), I highly recommend rounding up a few of your friends and giving DBD a try! Like writing, I believe that games are most enjoyable when you can play without the expectation of needing to be good. So remember: Good luck, have fun!  

Dominic Loise

As a treat for the Fall, we re-signed up for MAX at our home. Some favorite shows now have new episodes. I am going to say up front that my Staff Pick of Harley Quinn is raunchy and violent. It is also one of the smarter shows out now for addressing relationships and mental health on streaming.

This animated series is a good companion to the Harley Quinn comic book written by Stephanie Phillips, where Harley was helping people heal from their trauma from The Joker War. In the MAX series, Harley (Kaley Cuoco) grows and learns to be together with Poison Ivy (Lake Bell). The couple of Harley & Ivy develops from villainous cohorts into two people in a healthy and supportive relationship. This streaming series honors, brings representation and builds dimensions to one of the more iconic queer couples in comics. The third season was about two people in a relationship learning to listen to each other’s needs—and how they can still be a “power couple” even if their personal goals differ beyond “partners in crime”—as we see throughout Season 3 into Season 4, which dropped this Summer.

The series also takes a huge step forward in regards to mental health awareness and two other DC characters. The Season 3 episode Batman Begins Forever has Harley helping Bruce Wayne (Diedrich Bader) literally face the trauma of his parent’s death and focusing not on one moment in Crime Alley. Bruce, not BatMan, then starts to do the work to be present in his current life and bring his best self to assist those around him. Another iconic character, The Joker (Alan Tudyk) challenges himself and changes in this series by growing past the narcissist who created a toxic relationship with Harley and imprinted his identity onto her. In the Season 3 episode Joker: The Killing Vote, this change is shown by his run for Mayor of Gotham not as part of a criminal scheme but to improve the public schools. This episode ties into the multiple season storyline where The Joker becomes a supportive partner to a single working mother and a stepfather to two kids. As a stay at home dad, he puts the spotlight on his wife’s career and nurtures his two stepchildren not by molding them in his image but mentoring them as unique individuals. He is putting in the work, with struggles, to put others needs first, by working on homework, quality family time and being involved in their school to break the pattern of being a narcissist.

For fans of the baseball bat bashing version of the main character, the show still has a lot of capers, bawdy humor and explosive action in every episode of Harley Quinn and all changes to DC’s long-standing heroes and villains are organic and character based. Harley Quinn is a show with strong female characters, heart and a perspective shift on some eighty year old characters from in the DC Universe.

Setting and self are at the center of David van den Berg’s poetry collection Love Letters from an Arsonist. Van den Berg’s poems are rooted in a southern gothic tone borrowed from generations of people who have been contained by their environment, just like the fantasy creatures he describes lurking in the dark shadows. The metaphysical and mystical are both misfigured by the surroundings of the Florida outskirts as van den Berg tries to process the environments around him: natural, unnatural, and familial. 

The collection is divided into three parts. The first two sections examine the anger in feeling powerless and the immobility found in the South. The third section travels past the self-righteousness of places rooted in traditional values when resisting the benefits of modernization, and moves on to confront the act of self-loathing. Each section excavates and explores loneliness until the only option is to rise above our environment and change the story, rather than continue the same narrative of previous generations.

Salt River Blues is the first section of poems and takes a closer look at the underbelly of what haunts us when reflecting on our monstrous selves. Among immobile people wishing for less enlightened times, it gives a sense that America has moved past the ancient deities—but some immortal legends such as European mythical creatures, voodoo spells, and Lovecraft tales still wander these backroads. There are allusions to this in the title poem of this section, “mudcats sing ‘bout mermaids what grow whiskers and choose tobacco over princes.” Van den Berg’s poems also give the sense of growing up around people pushed to the fringes of commercial society. The men are portrayed as sons of Argonauts, landlocked in trailers, narrating dated folklore around campfires. The women, on the other hand, appear as daughters of Circe who know the unspoken ways of dealing with problems. 

Mythical creatures are pickled and morphed while God drinks moonshine from empty mason jars as we transition into the second section, The Midnight Gospel, which has a more biblical approach with the poet as seeker. Here he is confronting the mystical head on—instead of it being an unknown entity—to explain the surroundings outside mainstream society. As the poet is a seeker on the way to understanding the self, he is no longer looking into the deep pools and caves of myth. Instead, he finds God and ends up disappointed that the almighty is like him, searching for reprieve in shallow liquor glasses. This leads to the realization that we need to face our own flaws. If God is man, then God is fallible. In the poems in this section, God is questioned in bars or whichever dirty dive the deity is found in and the answers received come short and direct like shot glass wisdom. In “Prayer For Peace,”the deity’s response to the question of peace is, “he asked if we had tried killin’ other peoples’ kid”, and“he said maybe if we kept it up we’d figure things out”, while walking off with his drink.

The third section, Pinecone Son, is about learning to lean on ourselves to make the changes we are looking for in life. The title of this section comes from the poem the book is named after. It borrows from Love Letters from an Arsonist’s opening line, “daddy was a wildfire burned hisself inside out / spat out pinecone sons what can only grow in flames’,which define how this section deals with the poet working to replant himself in a nontoxic environment and rise above the smoke screen of others to see the world clearly with his own vision. The poems hereare about breaking the cycle of parental expectations, overcoming the limitations of where we grew up, learning to set expectations for ourselves, and being open to help from strangers. The poem “Fly United”  appreciates a man from the Ivory Coast experiencing and expressing joy on an airplane with his plea, “and if you have that light in you, i ask you now share it just a little more often for those like me who live in darkness and spend our lives without”. “Mithras Rising” is about an unseen stranger helping someone after a night of drinking as “he stumbled out the door at 2 am,” and wakes up on the beach afterwards, discovering“next to the pants he found a full bottle of water and an unopened pack of crackers and on the bottle were three words, written in sharpie: ‘love yourself more’.”It gives the reader a sense that the poet has found a way out of the trap of generational patterns and that he can close the door on the past to start finding peace in the present.

Love Letters from an Arsonist is a poetry collection that can be read multiple times. David van den Berg has put much thought into how these pieces connect, and how they flow together not only as we read them in succession, but even when they are divided across three sections. Each part also portrays stories about where we come from, where we are going, or the consequences of staying immobile at the crossroads of indecision yet circumventing ‘The Fates’ of becoming immortal through passed-down stories. This last part the poet accomplishes by writing about breaking the cycle of family stories to tell our own, and how to cut off from the bad branch of the ancestral tree and not become another infamous character in local lore. 

I would recommend this collection for anyone haunted by their past and in search of their current self. In its whole, Love Letters from an Arsonist is a poetry collection that puts on paper a roadmap of growth for both a poet and a person.

Love Letters from an Arsonist is available now from April Gloaming.

Black Candle Women is a magical debut by Diane Marie Brown. Over 50 years ago, Augusta, affectionately called Nanagusta by her descendants, is cursed by her angry mentor, Bela Nova. Why? Well, that would be telling, but suffice to say the woman was angry enough to ensure anyone Augusta and her descendants fall in love with dies. Told from the perspectives of all the Montrose women, Augusta (the great grandma), her grandchildren Victoria and Willow, and Victoria’s daughter Nickie, the story switches between modern-day California and flashbacks to Nanagusta’s youth in New Orleans. When Nickie brings home a boy, blissfully unaware of the curse, she sets in motion a chain of events that reveals the secrets and lies cloaking the Montrose women. 

Secrets play a key role in the story, as the thing that the Montrose women believe will protect them. Although Nickie is 17, Victoria never warns her about the curse or fully explains the place of hoodoo in the women’s lives. Willow practices hoodoo behind Victoria’s (“the chosen one”) back, slipping remedies to her sister’s clients to more directly fix their problems. She also brings their estranged mother, Madaleyn, to California, hoping to repair their relationship. Nanagusta perhaps holds the biggest secret of them all—one that, if revealed, would alter her family’s estimation, and perhaps love, for her. Although they are under a literal curse, secrecy and lies become another generational curse as the things that they keep from each other become another means of isolation. 

There is a lot going on in this novel, which I found to be both a strength and a weakness. I loved the elements of family history and betrayal—each woman had their own story, which reveals them to be both different, yet similar in ways they would never guess. All long for companionship, but in doing so, become victims of the curse. This sets a pattern of inheritance that plays along nicely with the idea of curses and family history.

However, the use of multiple perspectives is also a weakness at some points of the story. In alternating so much between characters, it sometimes felt like pieces of each woman’s story were undeveloped. For example, Nickie’s boyfriend, Felix, still feels a little distant to me as a reader. While their relationship plays a prominent role in the book’s events, I did not feel like I saw Felix consistently enough to care too much about him by the point in the story where Nickie fears for his safety. Additionally, much of the past and present events are told in summary, especially Nanagusta’s point of view. As a result, some of her past does not create the impact that it could, especially in the earlier half of the story. Since Nanagusta in the past is vastly different from the great grandmother of the present, it would have been nice to see her more under those terms, especially as her character in the past is key to the curse being cast in the first place. 

Overall, though, this was an imaginative, emotional story in which the love of family triumphs. All the women have their own issues, but together they are able to leave a new legacy: one in which isolation, both physical and metaphorical, is no longer allowed.

First off tell us about your new book How To Play The Necromancer’s Theremin and its character psychedelic sci-fi writer Rocco Atleby

Griffin: How To Play A Necromancer’s Theremin is about a cult classic author named Rocco Atleby and his literary world called the Patasphere. Rocco is this archetypal mid-century wise old sci-fi author sage and the whole world, that he may or may not have created, is obsessed with him. There are Rocco-themed bars, Rocco pilgrimages you can purchase, and much more. The world is littered with his face and words. 

The book is about the cult of personality, our clout-obsessed showbiz culture, and the search for authenticity and spiritually-meaningful living in our techno-infused carnival of political horrors called late capitalism. 

Quay: Rocco Atleby was born in the middle of the pandemic when Chase and I were both laid off from our jobs. We went on a lot of walks together to pass the isolated time, especially late at night when we were restless and didn’t have any jobs to get up for in the morning. 

I don’t remember exactly when Chase started talking about Rocco and his admirers, it was like he had always been there, like someone we were remembering together. He is definitely Chase’s brain child.I feel so lucky that we have the kind of relationship where Chase always wants me to word play with him and live and interact within his imagination with him. 

What was it like writing a character from back in the days of fringe drug culture when we now see that psychedelics have fallen more into the mainstream for mental health treatment?

Griffin: Writing Rocco was like having a kooky old uncle move in with us. It was a bit of a sitcom episode. But instead of dividing the house in half with duct tape, the Griffin-Quays on one side and Rocco on the other, we sequestered Rocco to a mother-in-law suite located above the detached garage. And he was only allowed into our home when we gave him permission. So, I guess it was like a sitcom about a friendly, kooky vampire uncle. Man, I gotta pitch that to someone. We could call it Vuncle.

We’d ask Vuncle questions about the old days and his excessive toxic creative behavior and then when Vuncle came to be too much and we politely asked him to go back into the suite he politely went back into the suite.

Quay: As someone who decided to begin the journey of total sobriety when the pandemic started (no alcohol and no cannabis, and coffee has been my only vice for 3 years now) it was very therapeutic for me to write about these wild characters who totally distorted and bastardized the magic of words and used them for drug-like purposes. It almost made me feel even more sure in my decision to live life sober and uninhibited by mind altering substances. And saying all this isn’t to knock anyone’s lifestyle by any means, but it was a good way for me to find perspective personally. 

It was really fun to write about a character from back in the days of fringe psychedelia because I have always been fascinated by the stories of Carlos Castaneda, Philip K. Dick, and Terrence McKenna to name a few. I have always been drawn to tales of the otherworldly and breaking through our reality into shared realities. The way Chase used [these] books as that vehicle in our novel was just so creative to me, I’m literally astounded continuously by his unmatched imagination.

How is it like looking at the work of those sixties and seventies psychedelic sci-fi authors, whose ideas were celebrated by readers for being avant-garde and then one sees video of Philip K. Dick speaking at the 1977 Metz SciFi Convention and he presented the VALIS trilogy as possibly real? How does your work deal with the Borgesian conundrum questioning “whether the writer writes the book or it writes them”?

Griffin: Whenever people ask Alan Moore where his ideas come from he says, “I have no idea. A voice just shows up and does the work.” When I sit down at the old desk and write, not much happens for the first hour or so. Some verbs and nouns tumble onto the page and dance like a herky jerky robot. Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes the herky jerky robot can be a fun spectacle for both myself and the reader, but that robot dance along with all the various types of fiction dances must be on our terms and on purpose. 

I think this Muse, VALIS, is what PKD was hearing (and seeing sometimes) and because the notion of positive “support system” didn’t quite exist back then and because the psychology world was in the midst of rapid transition and constant change back then and because of whatever the underlying mental health issues he suffered from his whole life and because of the amphetamine use, he sometimes took his Muse experiences to be very real.

I guess when I watch that video of PKD at the Metz, I feel lucky. I feel lucky to have a modern perspective. I feel lucky to not take myself so seriously (whether it’s on purpose or not). I can for sure understand PKD’s Metz exuberance. Sometimes when I have a creative breakthrough I feel like I want to hold a press conference too. I won’t lol but sometimes I want to. 

Quay: Chase and I definitely don’t take ourselves so seriously as to think anything we write has any basis in this tangible shared reality. Do artists create realities? Absolutely. But do we think in some multiversal plane Rocco Atleby is hurtling through time in a fat tornado clock? Not likely. I have always been tickled by the juxtaposition of the writer and their intentions versus how their work is received. Intention versus reception and interpretation is an animal all of its own.

And when it comes to the psychedelics and admiring their groundbreaking strides, we can love and revere their work without considering it as a religion of truth. 

As far as the Borgesian conundrum, it’s a paradox that Chase inserted I think quite intentionally into our book in a few different ways. My favorite example is the character Holger, because while we wrote the book, I asked him, “So did Rocco write Holger into existence, or is it more of a Stranger than Fiction situation where Rocco is omnisciently narrating and guiding the fates with his pen?” And Chase has still remained mysterious, even with me, in his answers, because I think maybe it’s a little bit of both. 

What is it like for you two writing a book together as a couple with a family together? What is your process?

Griffin: Christina and I Yes-Anded this book during the pandemic as a way to pass the time, jokingly muse about the nature of things, flirt with each other, and try our dang hardest to make each laugh so hard we piss ourselves

Quay: Writing a book with Chase was a purely magical experience. It was like he invited me to live in his head for a while, because Chase deserves full credit for the birth of the Roccoverse. Writing this book with him was like being invited on a road trip. And he handed me this wild map that only I could interpret and we hopped in a flying clown car and I played navigator on this wild ride to another dimension where occasionally I would completely take the wheel. It really says a lot about Chase’s ego, he genuinely wanted my voice to be present in his work, and it became ours. It started off as me just “editing” and “taking a look” but I started asking if I could tweak things or add sentences and then scenes, and before I knew it I had written so much that I said “Chase, I don’t feel comfortable not having my name on this, what if this gets published and someone quotes my words and the by line says Chase Griffin? And he said, “Scroll up to the top of the document,” and he had already put my name under his. He’s quite devilish really. 

We wrote the book like a conversation in a Google document. That way we could both work on it at the same time and even see where the other person was in the document while we wrote. We heavily got into writing when I found out I was pregnant with our first child in 2021. My stepson was 7 at the time, so I would go to work, come home, cook dinner for us while Chase was at work, put our son to bed, and I wouldn’t start writing until 9 o’clock at night some nights. It was really hard work, and especially since I was pregnant writing this felt like a happy fever dream. 

Kelvin Matheus writes that your book is “some type of esoteric improv that explores Borges’ theory on causality as the main problem of the literary arts”. We discussed Borges and psychedelics, fringe sci-fi but improv have more connections than people know when you look at the biography, tall tales and teachings of improv guru Del Close. How familiar are you both with Close’ work, bio, and this teaches of “yes and”, truth in comedy” & “working at the top of your intelligence”?

Griffin: Del Close is another one of the great psychonautzzzz. He’s almost never credited as one, but he is. He was even a Merry Prankster and the SNL crew’s house metaphysician. Del Close was from that long line of, from High Weirdness, “subcultures…united in their desire to affect a complete discontinuity with the conventional reality.”  

Improv comedy is one of the big themes, concepts, and engines of our book. Christina and I were constantly playing Del Close’s game, The Harold. And Wasteland has been a big inspiration on my creative life. The Harold and Yes And are like spells. Improv comedy has always fascinated me. It is like the creation of brief anarchic pocket universes. Improv comedy, in my opinion, is a modern day esoteric magickal ritual. 

Quay: I am extremely well read, but Chase is the comedy manual, philosophy nut so this question is admittedly a better target for Chase. I’m more of a historical fiction, fantasy reader. But I think that’s what makes our novel so fascinating. If you’re an avid reader of philosophy and improv comedy, you’ll see so much behind the lines that Chase put there on purpose, but if you aren’t, like me, you can still totally understand and interact with the book. 

What sci-fi writers of this time period do you wish more readers would rediscover? What draws you to their work?

Griffin: Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, and Michael Moorcock. Borges isn’t sci-fi in the traditional sense and he’s older than the new wave sci-fi we’ve been discussing but I think he kind of counts because he had a renaissance towards the end of his life in the 60’s and 70’s when he was discovered in the US by this generation of writers and readers. 

I always recommend Borges (Borges and Mary Shelley are probably my all-time favorite writers) and his trippy brain-wrinkling reality warping tales like The Library of Babel, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Funes, His Memory, The Immortal, The Aleph, and so many others. And yes, if anyone was wondering, more than anything else, How To Play A Necromancer’s Theremin is our attempt to write a full length Jorge Luis Borges novel.

Where can readers find you online and check out your work?

Griffin: How to Play a Necromancer’s Theremin will be published by Maudlin House on September 28th. Long Day Press published my debut novel, What’s On the Menu?. That book is about sunbaked restaurateuring and tainted water supplies. My Instagram @sleepcook_ is where one can find all the updates and extra nuggets.

Quay: My paintings and drawings can be found on my Instagram @qualien_. 

*SPOILER ALERT* The following review contains plot details about The Deep Sky.

The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei is everything you’d want from a whodunnit murder mystery set on a space station hurtling towards Planet X. Think Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li mixed with Dune by Frank Herbert. The world-building, the mechanics, and cultural nuance, all come together in The Deep Sky.

Asuka has woken up from a decade-long hibernation. Now, deep in space and 11-months into their mission, the monotony of the ship’s routines is setting in. The A, B, and C shifts of sleep, work, and study are starting to wear her thin. Add the complication that Asuka is supposed to be pregnant—very pregnant—by now in order to give birth before arriving on Planet X and this means she’s more than a little stressed. Her shipmates are pregnant, the captain included, but not Asuka. Not yet, and she doesn’t know why.

Asuka spent her early life on Earth training to be one of the chosen members of the Phoenix. Flashbacks throughout the novel give us glimpses of Asuka’s strained relationship with her mother and brother and the trauma that still lingers there. Her mother is a constant in the present narrative because of the letters that the DAR AI is constantly prompting Asuka to read. The novel explores themes and feelings of diaspora because Asuka is Japanese-American yet was chosen to represent Japan, despite not being fluent in the language. The trials and schooling to become one of the elite members of the Phoenix were grueling, and we see the political intrigue and investment of countries such as the US, China, and Japan when preparing the space station’s mission.

With her estranged familial relations, Asuka has sacrificed everything to be part of Phoenix. Readers are plunged into life on the ship by experiencing DAR, Digitally Augmented Reality. When Asuka’s DAR becomes buggy, we see the canvas beneath the virtual reality. White walls, endless sterile halls—the ship is colossal, but without the DAR Asuka starts to notice things, such as damaged dispenser hatches in the medical unit, and she starts to see into other people’s DARs. In a strangely intimate moment, Asuka can see what her shipmates choose to live in, day after day.

Alpha, the ship’s omnipresent AI, is part parental, part therapist, part organizational unit. Alpha is a constant voice in Asuka’s ear, programmed to be entirely confidential, and so Asuka trusts them. She confides in them and would rather speak to Alpha than her weekly therapy sessions.

When a mysterious object is detected on the outside of the ship, Asuka and her shipmate Kat are tasked with a spacewalk, so they go out into the dark. First, they are racing and making the best of life in space. Then, there is an explosion, followed by static, followed by running out of oxygen. Asuka barely makes it back to the ship alive. Others are not so lucky. Now, the Phoenix is damaged and pushed off course, Planet X is drifting further out of reach, and the question of who bombed the ship threatens the success of the mission and the survival of humankind. Asuka is thrust into action to find the bomber before they strike again.

It’s these stakes and the mysteries behind them that kept me reading late into the night. The pacing in this novel builds steadily as relationship tensions unfold and past traumas are triggered. I was keen to follow Asuka in both her past and present timelines in order to discover what was going to happen next. Readers who enjoy the heavy worldbuilding of science-fiction and the fast-paced thrust of a thriller, will not want to miss The Deep Sky.

Amber Sullivan

In August 2021, Esther recommended Link Click. Listen to them; watch it. I need people to join me as I slip back into a fan-crazed madness because season two is here!

But I’m not recommending the show. I’m here for the soundtrack that’s releasing alongside season two. I don’t care if you don’t watch the show (that’s a LIE) but don’t skip the full versions of the music.

白鲨JAWS and 饭卡 return for the ED in “The TIDES.” It’s eerie, it’s melodic; the discordic blend of guitar and lofi beats hits so right, and it escalates to a very different place than where it began. Why start with the ending song? Because we’re time travelling!

And because the ending of “The TIDES” blends pretty seamlessly into the beggining of the OP, “VORTEX,” where 白鲨JAWS not only created a desperate and impassioned melody but one that’s just as emotive when it plays in reverse, which it does–because we’re time travelling.

“Flash” by Gorilla Attack continues the trend of mathmatic tracks with strong narrative structures playing with time. I can’t get enough of the way the hectic beat messes with the time signature throughout the song.

Even though we’re time travelling, I don’t know what’s next for this soundtrack. It could be good, it could be amazing, it could only be these three songs, but I’ll still be listening for the rest of the summer.

Dominic Loise

I am excited for Si Spurrier’s upcoming take on The Flash (DC Comics) in September, but before the writing torch is passed, I would like to celebrate Jeremy Adams’ run on the book. Adams reestablished Wally West, former sidekick Kid Flash, as the title character of the book and reminded readers that the classic Mark Waid Flash in the nineties helped draw comics out of the grim and gritty era of the eighties.

There is a difference between a superhero grinning with superiority and smiling with the joy of living their dream and Wally West was the first sidekick to take the mantle of the hero after Barry Allen sacrificed himself to save the universe in Crisis of Infinite Earths (1985). Wally West was The Flash in comics from The Flash #1 (1987) until Barry Allen returned in The Flash: Rebirth (2009-2010). It felt like DC was treating Wally as a duplicate to the original when Barry returned, instead of red ribbon racing around the DC Universe in a blur that tied everything and everyone together.

Adams got Wally West ties to the DC Universe from his Teen Titans family, to the pantheon of the Justice League and how the Speed Force connected a multiverse of multiple characters to Earth Prime. The Adams’ Flash comic also understood that the character of Wally West was his most powerful when he stopped running and talked to other people.

The Flash wasn’t a comic about urban crime fighting but community engagement even to the point of Wally knowing the Rogues and talking with them.The communities of the twin cities of Keystone and Central City, the people Wally knew and his family have always been at the heart of the books. Wally knew his strength was honest dialogue about his limitations, asking others for help when he needed it and learning to be yourself- not just the hero.

Jeremy Adams wrote all this in his Flash comic which had open conversations about mental health awareness, thrilling action stories and hit the core notes of each character Wally West ran into.

Asmaani Kumar

Revenant (2023)

TW: Suicide, Child Abuse, Death.

I’ve been the biggest fangirl of Kim Taeri and Oh Jungse, and have been amazed by Hong Kyung in Weak Hero Class 1 early this year. So when I heard that all of these brilliant actors are going to lead a drama which cuts across horror, folklore and the vices of mankind, I was gripping the edges of my seat. I could not wait!

With only 4 more episodes to go, this series has been a rollercoaster ride. The attention to detail when building characters, the incredible pacing of the story, it’s stunning cinematography and the twists and turns taken so far has been grounded solidly by this one myth of the Juvenile Ghost. It has been fascinating to watch our leading characters slowly discover the origins of this ghost across decades as they work together to not only free Kim Taeri of her possession, stop her vengeful deaths but to also understand her traumatic past. It isn’t our usual story of exorcising a possession, because there are so many layers to it that slowly get unfolded at times in dangerous ways. There is also a very intelligent insertion of class dynamics done along with a sensitive exploration of disturbing emotions.

Deeply painful at times to watch, but also a very real portrayal of the deep and dark desires people tend to carry, this is a riveting story that leaves you shaken to the core and impresses on your mind for days. You cannot stop thinking about Revenant once you start!

Simon Kerr

Outer Wilds from Annapurna Interactive

Micro-planets you can circle in a matter of minutes, each with its own aesthetic, tricks, and gravitational pull. Quiet yet expansive storytelling, told through ancient spirals of alien writing.A story in fragments for you to discover. This is what the video game Outer Wilds can promise—breathtaking views and a singular experience.

Outer Wilds is best explored contextless, so if you need no more convincing to check it out, spare yourself the following details and go launch.

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You live on a planet spotted with geysers, in a solar system so small the surface of other planets is visible to the naked eye. You’re also adorable, and an astronaut. Everywhere are signs of the Nomai, an enigmatic race of visitors that crash-landed in your home system long ago in search of a great mystery. Surrounded by these relics, your people have developed a space program long before the materials to do so. You’re about to launch into space in a wooden rocket.

On your first day, stay in orbit and visit your planet’s moon, with its drifting spiral of campfire smoke. Or investigate the strange image you awaken to by risking the dense cloud cover of your neighboring planet. Or approach the sun to see two planets intertwined in each other’s orbit, trading a column of sand back and forth. Or watch a brittle geode planet collapse in on itself. Or stay well away from that creepy gnarled tree planet, for now.

Then comes your second first day. And your third first day. And your fourth first day. And the supernova that ends them all.

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The complete joy of solving the mysteries of Outer Wilds is second to none. Annapurna Interactive is home to other stunning and atmospheric games, stories that grip you the same way the teleportative novels of your childhood did: Stray (yes, the cat one!), What Remains of Edith Finch, Journey, and the upcoming Cocoon.

If your interests include space, archaeology, and the bittersweet awe of feeling like one small speck in the universe, Outer Wilds is yours. (Specifically, on Nintendo Switch, Playstation, Xbox, or PC.)

Nate Ragolia

Blank Check with Griffin & David

As an avid and ceaseless consumer of podcasts, and a lover of movies, my feed overflows with mic’d cinephiles sharing their takes (of various temperatures) about movies new and old. Somehow, only recently, I took a dip in the warm waters of #theTwoFriends, with Blank Check. The podcast is hosted by actor Griffin Newman (Draft Day, The Tick) and film critic and writer David Sims (The Atlantic). The theme of the show revolves around directors and their oeuvres, and the title refers to how auteurs early successes afford them the rare ‘blank check’ from Hollywood to produce passion projects.

To kick things off, the podcast is all about George Lucas’ Star Wars prequel trilogy, and Griffin and David (and producer Ben Hosley) devote multiple episodes to each of those films. The early eps are replete with bits, including our hosts pretending to not know about the existence of the original Star Wars trilogy. Following that series, they pivot toward the aforementioned director-focused course, tackling films by M. Night Shyamalan, The Wachowskis, Cameron Crowe, James Cameron, Christopher Nolan, and more.

Griffin and David are clearly passionate filmgoers who provide thoughtfully hilarious breakdowns of each and every film, and deliver wildly interesting facts and figures along the way. I have been binging this show for two weeks straight and loving every minute of it, and if you love movies, goofy hosts, silly bits, and inside stories… this one might be for you.

Dominic Loise

Paul Giamatti’s Chinwag with Stephen Asma

As a child of the seventies, I was exposed to more of the unexplained than I could wrap my head around. Every year for a while, the same house on our block would be up for sale with each owner having the same ghost story. My older brother once pointed out John Wayne Gacey’s house as our family drove past the street during weekend errands. Saturday afternoons were spent watching Rich Koz (then just Son of Svengoolie) and monster movies on local UHF. And the drive-in where my parents took me to see ET was buzzed by the odd lights from the local naval training base.

With this upbringing, it is a rickety dam against a raging river to see things as a skeptic. It is still a daily struggle especially for someone who works on their mental health. One day that metaphorical dam came down and I went inpatient. Since then, it is best to avoid material on the topic of the paranormal, which can be triggering. But through talk therapy, I also have been doing exposures, which is about watching or listening to anxiety inducing media in a safe environment (like during the daytime on a day off) and processing the thoughts and feelings.

Paul Giamatti’s Chinwag with Stephen Asma is a podcast that has been currently helping me. The podcast is hosted by one of the top actors working today, Paul Giamatti and Stephen T. Asma, author of On Monsters: An Unnatural History of our Worst Fears and a Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago. The podcast deals with a wide range of topics and takes many divergences and looks at  different perspectives on the topics like aliens. ghosts and cryptozoology. Guests are either researchers in those fields or writers & actors with an interest in the topic.

I like that people are bringing their own research and reading to The Chinwag. The speakers try to cite materials if listeners wish to check them out for themselves. But mainly, I like that, when possible, that people are telling their own stories and accounts of what happened. The Chinwag has an organic conversation style that unfolds as this podcast continues the talk about the topic. And this style of talking about what comes to mind totally works for me.

The hosts and guests will step off the original path of conversation as a new topic comes up but bring it back with a deeper perspective and appreciation for the main themes of each podcast. They know that if you are walking in the woods, you have to stop to see a deer that comes along instead plowing through on the man made forest pathway. The natural conversation is what makes The Chinwag a deep experience, which I find different and comforting each time I listen.

Check out Paul Giamatti’s Chinwag with Stephen Asma on Apple Podcasts or where you listen to podcasts.

The following piece is the flash fiction winner of F(r)iction’s Fall 2022 literary contest

As it is the duty of every rational creature to attend to its offspring, and … it is necessary to be prepared to conquer nature’s brute instinct. The first thing you must attend to … is her exterior accomplishments…

-Loosely borrowed from Thoughts on the Education of Daughters with Reflections on Female Conduct, Mary Wollstonecraft, Grandma of Frankenstein’s Monster

Take your sweet brown girl. To the field. Grease her pate like she’s a fine filly. You’ve been telling her so. Let her laze in her favorite spots. Only greens she can eat until she’s almost sick. Wrap a braided choker round her throat and guide her now swollen body to the house.

Shield her eyes from the cool metal, the easy leads of flesh. Button her ears against the sounds of production. She’s meant for better things. Take her to her own little sweet space to rest. Nuzzle her nose. Pet her crown. Don’t look into her eyes.

Now comes the messy part.

Line her up with the others. She blends in except to you. You see the Cameroon-shaped birthmark above her gut and know it’s her. Guide her through the line. Shock her if you need to. It’s nothing compared to the gun. Look away when the bolt of lightning hits her skull.

Collect her. Hook her. You may see yourself in her brown eyes but don’t worry it’s just a reflection. She’s dead. Blood-let her for good measure. Keep the blood away from your shoes otherwise you’ll leave a trace. Cover your nose when her foulness slips out.

Start your work. Dissect her into sections.

Fuck the Chuck and round. They’re both for poor people.

Locate her tender parts. Be gentle here. It sells for your whole month pay, making it worth 1/12th your life.

Finish with the plate, flank and shank.

Take her parts to be weighed. Notice how her insides look like all the others but argue for more because she’s been fed. Wash her blood off.

Take the cast-offs of her you’ve been allowed to take home. Grill her. Notice how her ends now curl up into a tough bowl. Put her on a white plate. Ignore how bland she tastes. How she sticks between your teeth, tweeks your jaws. Swallow her whole if needed.

Shit her out re-born brown.